Chapters 44-95 - Germanic Mythology

with normal instincts has even entertained it and given it expression in their doctrine in
regard to future life.
The absurdity of the theory is so manifest that the mythologists who have
entertained it have found it necessary to find some way of making it less inadmissible
than it really is. They have suggested that Odin did not necessarily fail to get those heroes
whom sickness and age threatened with a straw-death, nor did they need to relinquish the
joys of Valhall, for there remained to them an expedient to which they under such
circumustances resorted: they cut themselves with the spear-point (marka sig geirs oddi).
If there was such a custom, we may conceive it as springing from a sacredness
attending a voluntary death as a sacrifice - a sacredness which in all ages has been more
or less alluring to religious minds. But all the descriptions we have from Latin records in
regard to Germanic customs, all our own ancient records from heathen times, all
Northern and German heroic songs, are unanimously and stubbornly silent about the
existence of the supposed custom of "marking with the spear-point," although, if it ever
existed, it would have been just such a thing as would be noticed by strangers on one
hand, and on the other hand be remembered, at least for a time, by the generations
converted to Christianity. But the well-informed persons interviewed by Tacitus, they
who presented so many characteristic traits of the Teutons, knew nothing of such a
practice; otherwise they certainly would have mentioned it as something very remarkable
and peculiar to the Teutons. None of the later classical Latin or middle age Latin records
which have contributed to our knowledge of the Teutons have a single word to say about
it; nor the heroic poems. The Scandinavian records, and the more or less historical sagas,
tell of many heathen kings, chiefs, and warriors who have died on a bed of straw, but not
of a single one who "marked himself with the spear-point." The fable about this "marking
with the spear-point" has its origin in Ynglingasaga 9, where Odin, changed to a king in
Svithiod, is said, when death was approaching, to have lét marka sig geirsoddi. Out of
this statement has been constructed a custom among kings and heroes of anticipating a
straw-death by "marking with the spearpoint," and this for the purpose of getting
admittance to Valhall. Vigfusson (Dictionary) has already pointed out the fact that the
author of Ynglingasaga had no other authority for his statement than the passage in
Hávamál, 43 where Odin relates that he wounded with a spear, hungering and thirsting,
voluntarily inflicted on himself pain, which moved Bestla's brother to give him runes and
a drink from the fountain of wisdom. The fable about the spear-point marking, and its
purpose, is therefore quite unlike the source from which, through ignorance and random
writing, it sprang.
43 Under the entry "geirr": marka sik geir-oddi, to mark oneself in the breast with a spear's point, so as to
make blood flow, was a heathen rite whereby warriors on their death-bed devoted themselves to Odin; it
was the common belief that a man who died a natural death was not admitted into Valhalla after death; this
rite is only mentioned in mythical sagas such as Yngl. S. chap. 10; cp. Gautr. S. ch. 7 --Þá stakk Starkaðr
sprotanum á konungi ok mælti, nú gef ek þik Óðni. The origin of this rite is in Hm., where Odin himself is
represented as hanging himself in Yggdrassil 'wounded with a spear and given to Odin, myself to myself';
some trace it to a Christian origin, which is not very likely.