Did The Vikings Invent Surrealism?

Did the Vikings invent surrealism? In a word, no. Far from it. Viking culture was brutal, every bit as violent and cruel as all the stereotypes: gruff, beetle-browed, muscular men sailing dragon-prowed longships intent on plundering the riches of neighboring countries and territories. But here is where all the contradictions begin; as savage and inhuman as they were in battle and plunder, they produced wonderful art, elaborate wood carvings and delicate metalwork, intricate interlacing patterns and fabulous beasts, and most notably fantastically beautiful ships as perfect for sailing on the open sea as they were for navigating the banks and shoals of rivers.

Their literary culture was renown for its wit and lively description, its vivid narratives and striking images. It was an oral culture, requiring a prodigious memory and rhythms and sonorities powerful enough to endure in the breath of its scalds.

The bulk of what we know of the details of Viking lore is captured in two main books: the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. The material in the Poetic Edda was garnered from anonymous sources in the thirteenth century, who drew from an even older source called the Codex Regius, an Icelandic codex in which many old Norse poems are preserved. The production of the Prose Edda is thanks to a thirteenth century Icelandic chieftain named Snorri Sturluson. The Poetic Edda, sometimes referred to as the Elder Edda, is the older of the two. The Prose Edda, a.k.a. Younger Edda, is considered the fullest and most detailed source of Norse Mythology.

The two Eddas are filled with stories of treachery, trickery, cunning and betrayal. Competition and strength are main obsessions, as is wisdom. All the gods and heroes of these tales crave wisdom as much as strength and prowess in battle. Odin, the chief god of Norse Mythology, ventured to the mystical Well of Urd at the base of Yggdrasil, an immense ash tree that held the cosmos together, its branches spreading over all the world, its three central roots spreading very far apart; one was among Aesir, the pantheon of the Norse gods; a second was among the frost giants where Ginnungagap – the primordial void – once was; and the third reached down to Niflheim, meaning “World of Mist,” and is a realm of primordial ice and cold. “Under the root that goes to the frost giants was the Well of Mimir. Wisdom and intelligence were hidden there, and Mimir was the name of the well’s owner. He was full of wisdom because he drank the water from the Well of Urd from the Gjallarhorn.” Gjallarhorn was just that: a horn, a loud sounding or yelling – as in ‘gjallar’ – horn.

This is where Odin shows up, looking for wisdom. I’m not entirely sure what the Viking conception of wisdom happened to be, but it seems to be associated with intelligence in general, not necessarily our narrower conception of prudence and sound judgement. Nevertheless, it seems odd and not a little contradictory that a people so thrilled and gratified by slashing people to bits for their gold and silver would treasure this thing called wisdom. Viking wisdom, as it is described in the lays and sagas, is associated with dominance, skill in weaponry, and survival.

Ayn Rand would’ve loved Viking culture; her conception of wisdom is completely in sync with Viking predation. The Vikings, like Miss Rand, were not known for their empathy and compassion. They obsessed over wealth and the heroic feats of individuals exalted far and above their communities. Compassion is a weakness. Going berserk with an ax or sword and setting an English village afire after raping all its women, killing all its men and running off with all its accumulated wealth is a worthy goal, enough to make any Wall Street banker or hedge fund investor nut in his pants.

That said, Odin was jonesing for some wisdom, so much so that he gouged out one of his eyes and gave it to Mimir as a pledge, and got his wisdom on. Whatever wisdom meant to the Vikings, and however I may be distorting their conception of it, it was quite definitely a highly valued asset.

Wisdom was not a prominent goal of the surrealists. If anything, wisdom would be an obstacle to an agenda far more nourished by the irrational, by the unconscious and dreams. So why would this notion even flit across my brain? Aligning Viking culture with surrealist preoccupations is like setting up a wedding between John Wayne and Patti Smith. The incongruities are stunning.

And yet there are parallels and flashes, here and there, of highly imaginative conception, ideas that are absolutely in harmony with surrealist manias.

Vikings loved battle. The surrealists, despite their many arguments and occasional fistfights, were not particularly fond of war, but war was crucial to the birth of surrealism. When André Breton was doing his military service in a neurological ward in Nantes he met a young soldier named Jacques Vaché, who was being treated for shrapnel wounds. They hit it off, and after Jacques returned to the battlefield they maintained a correspondence. Vachés letters collected during this period – most of them written to friends and family – have been published in a book called Lettres de Guerre (Letters of War). Vachés’s letters were written in wretched circumstances, the trenches of the first World War, muddy, bloody, cadavers everywhere, bombs exploding, machine gun fire raking the ground and mowing down soldiers on both sides. He wrote hastily - directly to the point - with an abundance of irreverent, anti-militaristic humor, or ‘umour,’as he liked to spell it. There are frequent requests for clothing and food (the French army was very poorly supplied) including insightful asides as to the uses he puts these items and actualizing the day-to-day reality of trench warfare. Vaché had no literary ambition, yet he wrote in a style of great detail and riveting precision, creating a virtual hyperreality that intensifies the imagination. The effect is dynamic, and telegraphic: there’s an ongoing juxtaposition of unrelated events which creates a form of collage, all of it fueled by the adrenalin of war. The excitement is palpable. It’s no wonder that this seeded the way for Breton’s innovative approach to poetry.

One finds the same effect in the work of Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars, who were also involved in the first World War. One can’t help but see a connection between war and poetry, not that this should serve as a recommendation for aspiring young poets to go to war. But the energy war fuels is also evident in the Viking sagas.

Viking poetry as a whole has more in common with the objectivists than the surrealists; the lines, rhythms, and imagery are extremely compact, extremely direct and lucid. But there are moments of great imaginative force, energies that transcend the mundane and create riddles of cosmic proportion. One of these is an item called Gleipnir.

Gleipnir is the fetter that holds a giant ravenous wolf named Fenrir from devouring the entire world. It is made of six items: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the beard of a woman, the roots of a mountain, the sinews of a bear, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird. These are sometimes described as six impossible things, but there’s nothing impossible about the sinews of a bear, the spittle of a bird, or the beard of a woman. They’re just extremely rare and – particularly in the case of the bear’s sinews – extremely difficult to procure. The breath of a fish, the roots of a mountain (roots in a botanical and not a geological context) and the sound of a cat’s paws on the ground enter the realm of surrealism.

The language of surrealism, according to Peter Stockwell in his book The Language of Surrealism, “has a connected double function: it operates in the everyday waking world and it operates in the inner world of dream, the irrational, and the marvelous.” It’s a language embodied in psychic experience and which aims for a convulsive, striking, unfamiliar beauty. Gleipnir easily satisfies all these qualities.

The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard was fascinated by Gleipnir. He read into gleipnir a form of imaginative power that could so hold us in its spell that – taken in a more negative sense – could describe metaphorically how we become prisoners of our own mind, obsessed with irrational interpretations of subjective experience, trapped by phantom, non-existent beliefs and judgments. “And so am I, while the whole world cannot bind me,” he observed, "yet bound and raving in my chains, and I am bound by a chain that is unreal and that yet is the only thing that can hold; just as the chain…

…that the Fenrir wolf was bound with was braided of things which did not exist (can be elaborated), and which still was the only chain that was able to hold that monster, thus am I bound in the unreal and yet real chains of my dark imagination.

This is an opposite tact to the surrealist conception of language, which is a poesis of liberation, but the idea that ideas can restrict and restrain is a theme running throughout the surrealist project. They used language as a hatchet to break those bonds rather than use it to bind and inhibit.

In a narrative titled “Sigurd the Volsung” included in the Prose Edda, a Viking blacksmith named Regin travels to Thjod to work for King Hjalprek. He forges a sword so sharp that when the legendary hero Sigurd – the slayer of Fenrir- lowered it into running water “it sliced through a tuft of wool carried by the current against the sword’s edge.”  Sigurd digs a pit under the path used by the wolf Fenrir, lowered himself into it and as Fenrir crawled toward the river for a drink Sigurd thrust his sword into him, killing him instantly. Regin then “came forward and said that Sigurd had killed his brother.” “As settlement between him and Sigurd, he asked Sigurd to take Fafnir’s heart and roast it on the fire.”

Sigurd roasted the heart, and when he thought it was cooked, he touched it with his finger to find out if it was still raw. The boiling juice from the heart ran on to his finger, scalding it, and he stuck his finger into his mouth. When the heart’s blood ran to his tongue, he suddenly understood the speech of birds.

This story bears a remarkable affinity to the fables of André Breton’s Poisson soluble (Soluble Fish), and many other surrealist stories.

The Vikings may not have invented surrealism, anymore than they invented the predations of neoliberal economics destroying the communities and working class of the world, but the affinities are there. Cultural paradigms come and go, but the forces of the imagination are as universal as fire, as elemental as water, and as fabulous as the speech of birds.