Is Freyr the same person as Odin? I know that's a hot topic everywhere.

The reason I ask is that Man, Myth & Magic, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Mythology, Religion and The Unknown says on page 965 "Freyr had his own ship, Skipbladnir, said to be large enough to hold all the gods, but small enough to fold away in a pouch when not in use." Yet, I read that Odin has the same set up. The ship could travel at incredible, one might even say warp, speed.

This may not sound logical unless the gods are tiny, "quantumly" small, and space is folded in some way.

Skipbladnir was a longboat. Long things were venerated: longhouses, long beards, longboats, etc.

These days people tend to travel in ships of the air (am I kenning ?) to airports with names like Schiphol, which name is said to mean "ship hell".

The Orchard


The orchard is a leftover from other times.

The trees are bent, gnarled and twisted from years and weather,
Disgraced, deformed,
More like fossils of doubled-up skeletons in high chalk walls,
Than the thralls of spring's capture.

They are empty faces in late winter's dim sun.


We have come to picnic
Beneath the branches,
Calculating the odds, the chances,
That our arrival will disturb the peace of this boneyard backyard.

The orchard can be reached only by the path
That runs through the cemetery.

We have brought blanket and basket, though it is empty,
A ruse to leave Ghost Children at home.


They will not come here, they say,
Until they can run among pealing petal-bells,
Appealing rain-rockets of fairy pinks and whites
And nights of such tender blooming
That their hearts fairly burst in fury of rapture
At nature's cause,
Because this is their heart-food.

For us, it is enough to view the vision of these prodigious wonders,
Fecund habits of the apples and pears,
From the distance of winter's waiting.

In our eyes this miracle has already been and blossomed.


We have memorized the meaning, the meandering liturgy of every season,
Even the bare one.

That prepares us to take our pagan hearts part-way to the commitment of dying.

Lying here, already covered in leaving,
We build castles and altars of blood and sacrifice,
A flood of reasons why the orchard must go on without us,
And reasons why
We must not actively seek our release but,
Waiting,
Taking our time, like troubles, into our nest,

Rest and wait to be called to peace.

(March 21, 1988)

Riders to The Sea, Odin, part 1

Do you remember that Odin had a missing eye? The Old Testament advised an "eye for an eye" policy.

Here is a mathematical way to delete the "i":

"In talking about wave function in a system's quantum state, psi ( Psi upper case Ψ, lowercase ψ) is the 23rd letter of the Greek Alphabet), there is a way to predict the probability of a particle showing up at a particular place or with particular momentum is given by the square of the amplitude of psi."

In Teleportation, The Impossible Leap by David Darling, page 69, this question is asked "Why the square of the amplitude of psi and not psi itself?"

And he may well ask.

He continues, "Because psi is a complex function - complex in the mathematical sense that it contains terms that involve the square root of minus one √-1, (written as i)...
Using the amplitude (also known as the modulus) is a process that gets rid of all the i's."


http://lindamunson1.tripod.com/riderstotheseaodin

The Garden

The garden to Ghost House is barred, enclosed.
The yard is flowering, flowing in peony springs,
Waters-of-the-valley.

The grass sings concerts of constant companionship
With roses and kisses.
The lovely lies of summer rear their heads,
Promising eternity in beds of blossoms,
Butterflies vamping the honeysuckle, flourishing,
Jealous bees visiting from the orchard,
Bringing the profit of pollination
To the little apple trees.

Ghost Garden is planted with projects,
Rejecting nothing that will grow green,
A rendition of truth.

Joy has taken root, taken an interest here,
Sending out shoots and runners,
Blossoms and pregnant celebrations of life and self.

Ghost Garden is wife to Ghost House,
Espoused on the wedding day.
She is clever in getting her way
By being beauty to the beholder,
And what she wants is worship,
Which is, in her view,
Taking you into her confidence,
The penultimate of satisfactions.

You are seduced.
She woos, wins and compasses to her aim.

That purpose which is her glory,
She can safely claim,
Can tell the story of
Faithfulness, perfumes, mysticism,
Romance of the real and the compassionate.

She is glib in these matters,
Does not falter,
Does not alter
One line of fire.

Those not admitted are fated
Never to understand the poetry of her person,
Cannot even estimate its wealth.

Ghost House revels in its garden,
Glorifies its seasons,
Condones the triumph of emotion
Over sober reason.

(March 12, 1988)

In the play Riders to The Sea, Maurya had a vision of her sons riding on horses. There is an underlying or implied theme of the Norse god Odin in the play.

Odin had an eight-legged horse. A spider has eight legs and spins. The Norns, goddesses of fate, spun the fate of individuals on their spinning wheels. Since the Norns spun yarns, a person couldn't be sure if his fate was based on truth.

Sleipner was Odin's horse, and, of course, he was the greatest of all horses. He was sometimes linked with the color blue just as Garm might be. Perhaps this was because the Celts painted their bodies blue with woad before they went into battle and had blue tattoos on their bodies. The color blue was thought to have intrinsic magical properties.

Odin's horse, Sleipnir, was suggestive of funerary imagery, since Odin is the Lord of the Dead. Sleipnir's eight legs were thought to represent four men (two legs apiece) carrying a corpse.

In some legends, Odin leads the Wild Hunt, riding Sleipnir. Whether under the name of Grim or Wotan, Odin the Gallows God led a terrifying hunt in the sky, but who or what was his prey? It may be that the Wild Hunt was practiced by his devotees, not in the sky, but on the ground in the name of their god.

This myth served as a memorial of all the dead from the Wild Hunt and the physical routes they had taken to and from their graves.

The theme of resurrection occurs in this myth. If you look at the Viking burial customs described by Ibn Fadlan, you can see that when the corpse of the king was dug up after its first burial, he was still considered one of the living.

http://lindamunson1.tripod.com/riderstotheseaodin

There is a theory, or if not I can make one up, that speakers who are fluent in more than one language tend to mix, match, and meld, not only single words but also the elements and ideas found in all the languages stored in their brains. Here are some examples of what I mean:

In Irish the word gorm means blue. In an Odin tale, Odin names the best of everything. This takes quite a long time, because this naming is a form of bragging, and Odin owns the best of everything and wants everyone to know it. Just ask him. When he gets to the subject of dogs, he names his dog Garm as the best dog ever. Obviously, gorm and Garm sound a lot alike.

It is an old folk maxim that gives the name Old Blue as a proverbial dog name, just like Spot. Old Blue is a good name for a hunting dog, but rarely used for a poodle.

Those of us who live in the sticks have heard of a coon dog (Not corn dog).

In the book Arcade of Word Origins by John Ayto, page 287, some explanation is given about the origin of the word hound. "Until superseded around the 16th century by dog, hound was the main English word for dog (and indeed its relatives in the other Germanic languages remain, so German, Swedish, and Danish hund, for instance, and Dutch hond)... It goes back ultimately to Indo-European *kuntos, a derivative of the base which also produced Greek kuon do'..."
(Arcade of Word Origins, John Ayoto, Arcade Publishing, Little, Brown and Company, New York, 1990).

Of course, there's also the phrase hound dog, which is really dog dog, called a reduplication.

Here's another example: The Old English word for wise is horsc.
Horse, horsc is, therefore, Horse wise or horse sense.

A lot of these types of old phrases are really reduplications.

The brain seems to want to balance out both sides, but since the left brain and the right brain differ in function, just as in England long ago when there were Norman French words and Anglo-Saxon words for essentially the same thing, such as pig and pork, calling to mind the expression pig in a poke.

The brain seems to want to divvy out a slightly different form of a word to each hemisphere of the brain and then to come up with a new product in phrases as in the case of horse sense.

Unless you look up word origins, you probably won't know the Old English or the Old Irish words, but people like these combinations, as evidenced by their use up until the present time.

Why do we die? What process causes the human body to stop protecting and building itself and start to malfunction? The answer to this, if it is ever found, touches on religious and scientific perspectives.

The seekers for the proverbial Fountain of Youth were and are many. Even today, scientists look for the key to unlock the riddle about why humans age and die.

In times past, riddles about old age were plentiful, as were riddles about all sorts of other things.

In one Norse legend, Thor wrestled with a symbolic woman who represented old age. He lost the contest because the answer to the riddle about the City of Illusion was that death was inevitable. Every man must die sooner or later.

The Sphinx became a symbol for many things. ("The word "sphinx" comes from the Greek Σφιγξ — Sphigx, apparently from the verb σφιγγω — sphiggo, meaning "to strangle" (note that the ng and nx sounds were written in ancient Greek as a double gammas.")

In Oedipus Rex, the hero answered the Sphinx's riddle. In so doing, he was granted entrance to Thebes. The fable teaches that the king cannot escape his fate. If a person knew his fate ahead of time, this could cause the same despair Thor experienced when he was defeated by Elli who symbolically represented old age.

Another riddle is found in the story of the Gordian Knot. It is said that Alexander the Great cut the knot with his sword, fulfilling a prophesy. Other opinions were that he pulled out a pin that held the knot together. Some suggest that the knot was a cipher guarded by the religious priests of the time. What knowledge did this cipher unlock?

This knot was a symbol for a difficult problem. Like the Sword in the Stone of Arthurian legend, it was considered nearly impossible to solve. This puzzle, like Oedipus' riddle and the sword in the stone, was linked to kingship.

Myths reflect our cultural and psychological souls. The fables of gods and goddesses, fairies and elves, gnomes, giants, and various otherworldly people and customs tell a lot of things about the people who keep them alive by thinking and writing about them.

The Forgotten Language by Erich Fromm, page 195, tells:

"If one fails to grasp the true meaning of the myth, one finds oneself confronted with this alternative: either the myth is a prescientific, naive picture of the world and of history and at best a product of poetically beautiful imagination, or- and this is the attitude of the orthodox believer- the manifest story of the myth is true, and one must believe it as a correct report of events which actually happened in 'reality'".

Generally, the myth is seen in symbolic terms by people in the 21st century.

Leach discusses the fairies in The Standard Dictionary of Folklore, Mythology and Legend:

"One of the oldest Irish sagas states that the barrows where the fairies dwelt were open about Samhain... According to Keating, in heathen times the druids on Ireland assembled to sacrifice to the gods and burn their victims on Samhain Eve. All other fires were extinguished to be rekindled only from that fire" (Leach, 968).

In this statement, we see the elements of the hill barrow or fairy mound where an underground world flourished. Samhain or Halloween (All Hallow's Eve) was the time when the gates between two worlds were open and where, through these gates, the living human and the Otherworld folk, including the dead, could pass freely.

In Ibn Fadlan's historical account of the Viking king burial, the dead chieftain was buried in the ground for a while, but he was exhumed at a later time. By the time of exhumation, the dead king's skin had turned black from being in the cold earth.

In olden times, preceding burial and during the Wake, the dead body was often treated as if the person were alive. Sometimes the corpse was set up to a table in a chair, spoken to, and danced with by the living before being buried.

All these funeral customs were expressions of cultures that showed a conviction about this present life as we know it. There was a strong belief that there was another existence or afterlife. It was felt that a life on earth preceded a new life in some other dimension or realm.

Many of the old pagan customs involved lighting fires and subsequently passing people and cattle through the fire. Passing people through fire was symbolic of moving people or spirits from one condition to another and maybe representing some kind of purification. These fires were often lit during the nights when spirits were said to enter into this world through spiritual portals with very narrow time opportunities.

These fires may have been lit because of fear and to appease the spirits. In ancient times, the passing of people through the fire was most often literal, burning them alive as sacrifices. Those ancient customs seem to be nearly identical to the heathen practice of sacrificing children to Molech, burning them alive. Eventually, the practice of Christianity caused people to modify their behavior and make symbolic burnings. As Christianity made progress in changing the heathen rites, the more acceptable custom of having people dash across and through a bonfire became acceptable.

The pagan fires of Beltain were lit on the eve of the festival and burned all night, leaving only ashes the next day. People rubbed the cold black ashes on their faces. The word Beltaine or Beltane was Gaelic and referred specifically to May or May Day. Today, this festival has both pagan and Christian significance.

If you consider the extinguished life fires in Maurya's household in Riders to The Sea, you can discern the need for a new fire to be lit on the hearth, as the Beltaine fires were each year.

The Old English word for cup is bune. If you really want to be confused, you can read that bune can also mean purchase and maiden. A long time ago there used to be a thing called bride price. It actually cost something to get a wife. These days people expect to get everything for free, and then they don't appreciate it. Instead, they complain that it wasn't worth what they got it for - nothing.

Toward the end of the play Riders to The Sea, there is a small container of holy water mentioned in connection with Bartley's death:

"MAURYA (raising her head and speaking as if she did not see the people around her). They're all gone now, and there isn't anything more the sea can do to me. ...I'll have no call now to be up crying and praying when the wind breaks from the south, and you can hear the surf is in the east, and the surf is in the west, making a great stir with the two noises, and they hitting one on the other. I'll have no call now to be going down and getting Holy Water in the dark nights after Samhain, and I won't care what way the sea is when the other women will be keening. (To Nora.) Give me the Holy Water, Nora, there's a small sup still on the dresser."

These days, "surf's up", surf sup, at the beach.

In Riders to The Sea, there is no living husband, but since there is a sub-theme of Odin the trickster in Riders to The Sea, and Colum is in the house making the coffin, you can't help but wonder what they are really talking about.

In Porgy and Bess, a collection is taken up to pay for a funeral. They "fill up de saucer 'till it overflow". My grandmother would pour her cup very full with coffee and then spill it into her saucer and drink from it first before drinking from the cup. The practical reason for this was to cool the coffee quickly in the saucer, but I'm wondering if there is an unremembered custom behind this.

My great-grandparents homesteaded their farm. Buan is an Old English word that means to dwell, settle, or cultivate. In times past, the husband of the household would lead in the work of homesteading.

One linguist gives this definition:

"Webster's gives the etymology of husband as:
Etymology: Middle English husbonde, from Old English husbonda master of a house, from Old Norse husbOndi, from hus house + bOndi householder; akin to Old Norse, bua to inhabit; akin to Old English buan to dwell."

An agrarian society marked the seasons of the year with festivals that celebrated not only the important planting and harvesting times but also threw religion into the festival mix.

Sir Walter Scott writes: "On Hallowmas Eve, ere ye boune to rest". Halloween was once the festival of Samhain with customs and ideas that were really scary at that time.

Easter is a springtime festival. In England, they make hot crossed buns. The origin of this custom is pre-Christian:

"At the feast to Eastre, an ox was sacrificed and the image of his horns carved into ritual bread - which evolved into the twice-scored Easter biscuits we call 'hot cross buns.' In fact, the word 'bun' derives from the Saxon for 'sacred ox,' 'boun.'" Sacred Origins of Profound Things. A cross bun kept from one Good Friday to the next was thought to bring luck, the buns were supposed to serve as a charm against shipwreck, and hanging a bun over the chimney-piece ensured that all bread baked there would be perfect. Another belief was that eating hot cross buns on Good Friday served to protect the home from fire."

Livestock was once a vital part of the old homestead, but don't mistake the Old English word horsc, which means wise, for horse, even though real horse sense was needed in those times and also in ours.

Bart's body is carried home in the play Riders to The Sea, and he is put on the table. His feet are bare, and "a great wind" is blowing on them.

Feet are often symbolic, and this symbol occurs in mythology.

A Scottish custom called first-footing is still remembered today. If a tall, dark, and handsome man is the first to enter your home on New Year's Eve, it is considered a lucky omen for the coming new year. First-footers crossed the threshold at the stroke of midnight during Hogmanay.

"In all countries Halloween seems to have been the great season of prying into the future; all kinds of divination were put into practice that night."

In Wales, Halloween was the weirdest of all the Teir Nos Ysbrydion, or Three Spirit Nights, "when the wind, blowing over the feet of corpses, bore sighs to the houses of those who were to die within the year."

The familiar tune My Bonnie Lies Over The Ocean seems silly, but some versions of it have winds blowing and stinking feet, possibly forgotten references to pagan customs of prediction.

The Norse also had a legend about feet. Skadi did a favor for the gods, so they told her she could marry any man she wanted, but there was a catch. She could only look at their feet to make her choice. She looked long at all of the feet, and then chose the cleanest pair.

Njord's home was called Noatun, which means harbor, and his wife was the giantess Skadi who married him because he had "beautiful feet". She later left him because they couldn't decide in whose dwelling they should live.

Since people will inevitably compare some ideas in Riders to The Sea to the story of Christ, it might be noted that nails were driven through His feet, and women cried at the foot of the cross. Christ also washed the feet of his disciples.

Various customs come together to make whole cloth of our beliefs and celebrations.