Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

in which a conscious being moves and acts. The blood and the power of a motion which
is voluntary were to the Teutons, as to all other people, the marks distinguishing animal
from vegetable life. And thus we are already within the domain of psychic elements. The
inherited features, growth, gait, and pose, which were observed as forming race- and
family-types, were regarded as having the blood as efni and as being concealed therein.
The blood which produced the family-type also produced the family-tie, even though it
was not acquired by the natural process of generation. A person not at all related to the
family of another man could become his blóði, his blood-kinsman, if they resolved að
blanda blóði saman. They thereby entered into the same relations to each other as if they
had the same mother and father.
Lodur also gave at the same time another gift, litur goða. 4 To understand this
expression (previously translated with "good complexion"), we must bear in mind that
the Teutons, like the Greeks and Romans, conceived the gods in human form, and that the
image which characterizes man was borne by the gods alone before man's creation, and
originally belonged to the gods. To the hierologists and the skalds of the Teutons, as to
those of the Greeks and Romans, man was created in effigiem deorum 5 and had in his
nature a divine image in the real sense of this word, a litur goða. Nor was this litur goða
a mere abstraction to the Teutons, or an empty form, but a created efni dwelling in man
and giving shape and character to the earthly body which is visible to the eye. The
common meaning of the word litur is something presenting itself to the eye without being
actually tangible to the hands. The Gothic form of the word is wlits, which Ulfilas uses in
translating the Greek prosopon -- look, appearance, expression. Certain persons were
regarded as able to separate their litur from its union with the other factors of their being,
and to lend it, at least for a short time, to some other person in exchange for his. This was
called to skipta litum, víxla litum. It was done by Sigurd and Gunnar in the song of Sigurd
Fafnisbani (Grípisspá 37-42). That factor in Gunnar's being which causes his earthly
body to present itself in a peculiar individual manner to the eyes of others is transmitted
to Sigurd, whose exterior, affected by Gunnar's litur, accommodates itself to the latter,
while the spiritual kernel in Sigurd's personality suffers no change (str. 39):
Lit hefir þú Gunnars
og læti hans,
You'll have Gunnar's litur
and his læti,
Vigfusson, states that lá literally refers to 'the line of shoal water along the shore, edged by the surf' and is
used generally in skaldic verse for 'liquid', of poetry and of blood. She concludes "lá might similarly refer
to the covering or mantle of flesh with which Lóðurr clothes the wooden bodies of Askur and Embla.
Compared with the wood it would be a moist covering, pulsing with the stream of blood." (PE II, p. 124).
Snorri includes lá among the heiti for hair, but does not support this definition in his paraphrase of the same
passage in Gylfaginning 9. The paraphrase reads: "The first gave breath (önd) and life (líf), the second
consciousness (vit) and movement (hræring), the third a face (ásjónu), speech (mál), and hearing (heyrn)
and sight (sjón)." (Faulkes' tr.)
3 "bearing, airs"
4 Here the manuscripts have litu góða, good litur, rather than litur goða, litur of the gods as Rydberg
maintains, although some scholars still discuss the possibility. While the phrase literally means "a good
litur" this does not prevent that litur, appearance, from originally belonging to the gods, since the gods are
consistently represented in human form throughout the mythology. Rydberg's point here is that since the
gods changed Askur and Embla from the form of trees into human form, the litu goða is identical to the litu
góða.
5 in the image of the gods