Sun’s Turning, Lunasa, The Feast of Fallen Warriors and so on – until they merged in my head into one long barely-pronouncable incantation.
About each god, he would give only one or two details – Odin’s single eye and frequent treachery to those who worshipped him; Thor’s red hair, his stubborn loyalty and fearsome temper; war-god Tyr’s one hand; Heimdall standing guard upon the rainbow bridge which spanned the gapsbeween the worlds. But any more than this, it seemed, was left to the mind of each one who prayed to them. In that way, the gods took on the faces of people who passed through our lives, broken down and reassembled in the workshops of our brains.
As well as different prayers, particular substances were used for invoking the various gods. For summoning Odin, Halfdan needed a gold coin, to be set inside a drawing of a raven, which he traced in the ground with a stick made from yew. For Thor, a piece of iron would be placed on the symbol of a double-headed axe, drawn with a sliver of oak. For Frey, it was the symbol of a boar marked out with a pine branch and fastened to the earth by a knuckle of brass.
It was expected, and seemed natural, that each person would pick a god in whom they confided the most.
For Halfdan, that was Tyr, a god not only of war but of seafaring and of the persecuted. For prayers to Tyr, he used a hawthorn twig to draw the outline of a sword, in which he laid a lump of bronze.
It made sense for Halfdan to have chosen Tyr as his patron god, since although Halfdan had not been persecuted by anyone I ever saw, his mind was filled with notions of conspiracies against him. The fact that no one could be bothered to oblige him by actually persecuting Halfdan meant that he had, in the end, to persecute himself.
When ordered to choose, I picked Thor, who stood for order, strength in conflict and trust of instinct. This last quality spoke to me most clearly of all. Halfdan did not mind that my choice was different than his own. He saw it as correct that I would choose the Thunder God, especially after what he had witnessed in the storm and the hammer he had found around my neck.
As our journey toward Miklagard progressed, Halfdan sometimes asked me to choose the places where we wouldpray. At first, I had no idea how to go about this, and would just point to the nearest patch of flat, dry ground. Halfdan would move us on until we found a different place, and I could not deny that these locations did have a kind of balance absent from the spaces I had chosen. It was only when he explained to me that there was a gift to ground-choosing – a gift which he felt I possessed – that I began to understand.
Our world, he said, was made of layers, more than most people could perceive. Beyond the reach of untrained senses, the world of the gods swirled all around us, unchecked by the boundaries of space and time which fenced our tiny fraction of the earth.
Halfdan told me that each thing contained a kind of life beyond what anchored it inside its visible form. This life belonged not only to people and animals but to every tree and rock, to every cloud that drifted by. Even possessions which had seen many years of service took on a kind of life, burnished into them by the sweat of their owners. You could feel the faint vibration of it; in a sword or a shield, a set of carpenter’s tools or even an old pair of shoes. It was everywhere, like the rumble of a river running deep beneath the ground. You could learn to sense the places where it was strongest, often around a particular tree, suspended in its leaves as raindrops are after a storm. Or it spread like a veil of fog across certain fields. It could be found near springs which bubbled from the soil. Halfdan said these marked the places where the veil between the worlds was thinnest, where the crossing could be made as easily as walking through a doorway, if only you knew how.
This ground-choosing was the first time the other world appeared
About each god, he would give only one or two details – Odin’s single eye and frequent treachery to those who worshipped him; Thor’s red hair, his stubborn loyalty and fearsome temper; war-god Tyr’s one hand; Heimdall standing guard upon the rainbow bridge which spanned the gapsbeween the worlds. But any more than this, it seemed, was left to the mind of each one who prayed to them. In that way, the gods took on the faces of people who passed through our lives, broken down and reassembled in the workshops of our brains.
As well as different prayers, particular substances were used for invoking the various gods. For summoning Odin, Halfdan needed a gold coin, to be set inside a drawing of a raven, which he traced in the ground with a stick made from yew. For Thor, a piece of iron would be placed on the symbol of a double-headed axe, drawn with a sliver of oak. For Frey, it was the symbol of a boar marked out with a pine branch and fastened to the earth by a knuckle of brass.
It was expected, and seemed natural, that each person would pick a god in whom they confided the most.
For Halfdan, that was Tyr, a god not only of war but of seafaring and of the persecuted. For prayers to Tyr, he used a hawthorn twig to draw the outline of a sword, in which he laid a lump of bronze.
It made sense for Halfdan to have chosen Tyr as his patron god, since although Halfdan had not been persecuted by anyone I ever saw, his mind was filled with notions of conspiracies against him. The fact that no one could be bothered to oblige him by actually persecuting Halfdan meant that he had, in the end, to persecute himself.
When ordered to choose, I picked Thor, who stood for order, strength in conflict and trust of instinct. This last quality spoke to me most clearly of all. Halfdan did not mind that my choice was different than his own. He saw it as correct that I would choose the Thunder God, especially after what he had witnessed in the storm and the hammer he had found around my neck.
As our journey toward Miklagard progressed, Halfdan sometimes asked me to choose the places where we wouldpray. At first, I had no idea how to go about this, and would just point to the nearest patch of flat, dry ground. Halfdan would move us on until we found a different place, and I could not deny that these locations did have a kind of balance absent from the spaces I had chosen. It was only when he explained to me that there was a gift to ground-choosing – a gift which he felt I possessed – that I began to understand.
Our world, he said, was made of layers, more than most people could perceive. Beyond the reach of untrained senses, the world of the gods swirled all around us, unchecked by the boundaries of space and time which fenced our tiny fraction of the earth.
Halfdan told me that each thing contained a kind of life beyond what anchored it inside its visible form. This life belonged not only to people and animals but to every tree and rock, to every cloud that drifted by. Even possessions which had seen many years of service took on a kind of life, burnished into them by the sweat of their owners. You could feel the faint vibration of it; in a sword or a shield, a set of carpenter’s tools or even an old pair of shoes. It was everywhere, like the rumble of a river running deep beneath the ground. You could learn to sense the places where it was strongest, often around a particular tree, suspended in its leaves as raindrops are after a storm. Or it spread like a veil of fog across certain fields. It could be found near springs which bubbled from the soil. Halfdan said these marked the places where the veil between the worlds was thinnest, where the crossing could be made as easily as walking through a doorway, if only you knew how.
This ground-choosing was the first time the other world appeared
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