Odin and Merlin: Threefold Death and the World Tree
2010; Western States Folklore Society; Volume: 69; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2325-811X
Autores Tópico(s)Historical and Archaeological Studies
ResumoA number of remarkable parallels may be adduced between the Norse god Odin and the Welsh poet-prophet Merlin and his fellow Celtic wild men: the Irish Suibne Geilt ('Sweeney the Mad') and die Scottish Lailoken. Among a number of corollaries that could be cited, perhaps the most remarkable one between the Norse deity and the Welsh forest madman lies in their mutual connection with a special tree of the cosmic variety, which will be designated here the or, alternatively, by the synonymous term, the We are able to identify a common pattern in both the Old Norse myth of Odin's self-sacrifice and in the various legends of the exile and madness of the Celtic wild man, in which the gift of mantic knowledge is conveyed to the initiate through a torturous process of ritual death and rebirth the World Tree. In botii mythic traditions, the motif of the threefold death may be seen to play a central role in the initiatory procedure. In the case of Merlin the Mad (Myrddin Wyllt in Middle Welsh) and his congeners, the importance of the threefold death motif in some of the narratives concerned with wild man figure has long been acknowledged by Celtic scholars (see, for example, Jackson 1940; Carney 1955, chap. 4). Significantly absent from the debate in Celtic circles, however, is a recognition of the primacy of the World Tree as an agent of the wild man's phenomenal transformation from wretched forest exile to magnificent poet and prophet.The situation would appear to be reversed in the scholarly discussion of the Old Norse myth of the self-sacrifice of Odin, which is found in the section of the Elder Edda poem Havamal, called the Runatals pattr, and is commonly known as The Rune Poem. In Old Norse studies, it has always been perfectly clear that Odin hung the windy tree/nine full nights, sacrificing himself to himself on that tree of which no one knows/from what roots it rises-in other words, a Cosmic Tree, one which is almost certainly to be equated with the well-documented World Tree known as Yggdrasil.It was not, however, until the appearance of Donald J. Ward's pioneering 1970 article, The Threefold Death: An Indo-European Trifunctional Sacrifice? that the full significance of the threefold death motif in Norse Odinic narratives, and, more generally, in Indo-European literature as a whole, became clearly established in the scholarship. In the present essay, it remains for us to apply Prof. Ward's conclusions to the cross-cultural comparison of Odin and the Celtic wild men, especially Merlin, and to clarify the signification of the World Tree, and its humanfashioned corollary, the sacrificial stake, in the Celtic material. First, however, it is necessary for us to examine some of the more general parallels to be found between Odin and Merlin in order to more fully explicate the scope of our discussion.PARALLELS BETWEEN ODIN AND MERLIN IN RELATION TO THE ATTAINMENT OF MANTIC KNOWLEDGEOdin and Merlin are both masters of occult knowledge who are able to communicate with demonic spirits and the dead or to speak from the grave. In the Eddie poem Baldrs Draumar (Balder's Dreams), for example, Odin rode his eight-legged horse, Sleipnir, far into the underworld called HeI and awakened a dead volva, or seeress, from her grave in order to gain esoteric knowledge about the death of his murdered son Balder and the future of the gods (Kuhn and Neckel 1983, 1:277-79). And in Snorri Sturluson's Ynglinga Saga, Odin is said to call the dead from their graves and meet with the hanged (Snorri Sturluson 1941, 1 iChapter 7, 18).In the Historia Regum Brittaniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (ca. 1 136) and in the French romance Merlin, attributed to Robert de Boron (ca. 1 200) , Merlin is identified as the son of an incubus demon and a virgin mother, a parentage which is said to account for both his demonically inspired knowledge of the past and his divinely gifted awareness of future events (Geoffrey of Monmouth 1985, 1:72, §107; Paris and Ulrich 1886, 1:28-29). …
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