The Role of Kenning in IE mythology

An article in two parts explaining the use of metaphor and literary reference instead of proper names in Indo-European legends and poetry. (A contribution to the topic how Gods get their names.)

                                                                               Dublin, December 2012

Part 2:

The Example of Sleipnir, the Eight-legged Horse of Odin

It is vital to recall that kennings, in both earlier and later forms, are cultural artefacts and require an understanding of the culture that produced them to decode them – that is to understand them in the manner in which they were originally intended to be understood, and to perceive them as a source of pleasure. As illustrated by the example of Cú Chulainn (in Part 1 of this essay), kennings can survive for millennia and during that time there is every possibility that the usage would be understood in different ways at different times, leading later mythic constructions to take the original metaphor or reference out of context and explain it in new, highly creative, but often rather literal ways. Later thinkers would then take these secondary myths to represent the original tradition and use these linguistically more literal tales to explain something that was once only a highly-pointed ironic or heroic metaphor.

Thus, if we look at Norse mythology, we are given the name Sleipnir, “The Slider”, for Odin’s famous eight-legged Horse. It is another example of what seems to have been a simpler early form of kenning that later tale-makers re-imagined in legendary terms. How are we to understand this bizarre feature of Odinic lore?

To start with, it is useful to note that Odin, also called Woden and earlier Wodan(az) – the “Frenzied One”, came to take on the role of the Indo-European Sky-Father, originally called Tiw(az) in Germanic. This sky god could be seen personally as a Bull, a Horse or any other potent, swiftly traveling animal: an eagle, since it flies and sees all, a Ram or a Stag, since they are symbolic of the fertility of the herds or the hunt, the salmon, since it travels far, is full of sexual vigour and famous for its skyward leaps, and so on. Whether transformed into the animal itself or as an aristocrat aboard the animal or on an animal-drawn vehicle, the Sky Father was often associated with a prize horse or horses in Indo-European society.

We can safely say that in as much as he was identified with the role of the Sky-god, Odin would have been seen as a swift celestial traveler, and one explanation of the eight-legged Sleipnir is simply this: that in as much as any horse with eight legs is clearly symbolically faster than a normally-endowed horse with only four legs, such a super-swift horse would be perfectly suited to be the mount of a sky-god. So illustrators gladly show Odin aboard a patently ridiculous horse with eight legs. (Quite how these were attached to the horse it is hard to imagine, and one is reminded of the various multi-armed Hindu gods whose arm-pits must have resembled a highway turnpike! Clearly, in the Indian case, the idea of a god having many arms is a metaphor for the diverse reach of their powers, and equally clearly we are not expected to think about such details where excess limbs are concerned, be they human or equine.)

The identification of Odin with the Sky-Father suggests a further possible explanation of the origin of the eight-legged horse: it could be a reference to a two-horse chariot, illustrations of which (as on coins) might show what looked like an eight-legged horse to anyone from a horse-riding culture. Odin was probably associated with whatever was the swiftest form of travel currently available, be that a four-wheeled cart, a two-wheel chariot or a war-horse, as military technology and the travel habits of the elite changed over the ages. Since the golden age of the chariot was the Bronze Age, and the golden age of the war-horse was the Iron age that succeeded it, it is easy to imagine how a bronze-age image of a chariot riding God could be transformed into a rider on a single, albeit eight-legged, horse.

Different suggestions for the possible underlying meaning of the eight-legged horse Sleipnir have centred on the role of Odin/Woden not as sky-god, but on his function as a psychopomp, a god figure that leads the souls of the dead on their journey into the other world, the messenger-god Hermes in Greek myth, the God of Trade, Mercury, in Roman myth. One such explanation of the eight legged horse refers to the idea that the funeral bier, on which the dead were carried to burial, was eight-legged, as four men carry the four corners of the bier in a funeral procession. If correct, Sleipnir would refer to the funeral bier as “the Horse of Odin”. The meaning of Sleipnir as “Slider”, on the other hand, could suggest a boat, rowed by 4 men, equipped with 8 oars, prior to a ship burial or sea funeral pyre, as in the tradition of Baldr, the boat being an “eight-legged horse” that “slides” through the waves, brining the soul into the next world. This would be a double-kenning, a form much loved in later Icelandic verse.

Attractive as these readings are, there is yet another possible allusion hidden in Odin's “eight-legged horse” that is potentially more likely: to a traditional Nordic form of gallows, made of two upright poles with a cross-bar forming the arm to which the ropes were attached. Such gallows an be called “the horse of the hanged” or, more poetically “The horse of Odin”, since those who “rode on it” went to the other world to join Odin as “Hangaguð” God of the Hanged. In this reading, the gallows were “eight-legged” for the reason that both the support poles needed to be secured in two directions and, depending on the exact design, each pole would have needed 3 struts at the base, connected to the central pole by pieces of timber running along the ground. Including the central poles, there would have been four “legs” that held the gallows in place at each end. Thus, or with similar structures, we get an “eight-legged horse of Odin” = the gallows used for either for execution and/or sacrifice.

The name Sleipnir, “Slider”, could possibly refer to the transportable nature of such a construction, but it would seem more likely that it was thought of a “sliding” people into the other world, since it is in the nature of ropes, especially those on gallows, to “slide” as they tighten around a person’s neck. Indeed the hangman's rope itself might be the true identity of Sleipnir, with its eight legs referring to the stand that kept the gallows erect. The title “Slider” would then be a euphemism – a euphemistic kenning – for “rope”, and an “eight-legged rope” would be another double-kenning for the gallows. The fact that later tellers of tales took up the image of an eight-legged horse and created what we might call sub-myths to explain the origins, and expound the deeds of this fine animal should not distract us from the fact that Sleipnir quite possibly got his name and eight legs, as well as his owner, from the construction of a gallows.

This interpretation need not be seen to be in total conflict with the above explained image of Odin, as a horse-loving sky-father. Clearly, for the kenning “Odin’s Horse” for the gallows to make any sense in the first place, there had to have existed the tradition that Odin rode on or used a horse (or horses), particularly so as a psychpomp, so as to allow of the reference to both a horse and the dead in one kenning. Is there any evidence to make this connection?

In fact, just such a tradition is indeed seen in later Germanic times where Odin/Woden is the Hariking, (“Army king”) Head of the Wild Hunt in which he gathers or drives the souls of the dead to Hel(l) and – at least in Icelandic tradition - assembled the Einherrjar in Valhalla to the Heroes' feast, a role notably performed in Irish and British tales by Fionn Mac Cumhaill/Gwynn ap Nudd. There seems every reason, then, to see Odin as linked as a psychopomp both to horses and to the dead, independent of his links to the image of gallows, which in English we can refer to (using a modern kenning) as the gallows' tree.

Odin is, of course, most famously linked to another tree in the Nordic tradition, the world tree that grows up to reach the sky, thereby acting as a ladder between the worlds of men and immortals, thereby establishing an axis mundi or navel. That tree is called Yggdrasil. While there are different possible interpretations of the name, they all seem to imply a link to Odin and to death. The most frequently cited is Yggr's drasil , “The Horse of The Terrible One”. This is understood to refer to Odin, addressed as Yggr when seen as a god that inspires terror, either in war, during the Wild Hunt or to those victims about to be hung, possibly sprung skywards by the neck from traps, speared with javalins, or otherwise tortured, from his sacred tree, be that an oak or an ash tree. A second proposed interpretation of Yggdrasil meaning “Horse/Tree of Terror” clearly makes a direct reference to gallows. (A third is “Yew Pillar”, referring to another tree sacred to the sky father.) Whether one was hanged on a tree or from a specially constructed gallows, the God invoked in the ceremony of execution was Woden, and while Yggdrasil may refer to the original myth that explains the cult of hanging victims on trees to Odin, Sleipnir refers to the more practical business of hanging from a specially (and easily) constructed gallows as part of the same cult, while both kennings reference Woden’s trajectory as Sky Father, and Head of the Wild Hunt.

Implications for the Modern Interpreter

The fact that the metaphorical Sleipnir is later imagined as an actual horse to whom a highly convincing array of legends are attached should act as a warning to any modern interpreter that many of the tales handed down to us may have had their origins in the desire of poets to explain names and phrases that had intellectual origins in early kennings - whose vivid imagery invited explanation in the form of adventurous and colourful tales; tales that, however, were not part of the original logic of the myths and the kennings involved. The case of Sleipnir, in all probability, closely reflects that of the reinterpretation of the name Cú Chulainn in the Gaelic tradition from a metaphorical name for a chariot warrior to that of a legendary hound-killer.

The problem is particularly relevant to the reading of Celtic literature, where the earlier kenning tradition of the Indo-Europeans seems to have had most of its metaphoric and symbolic character transformed into literal, medieval, legendary romance. It is all too easy to take names and images that have come down to us at face value, when in fact they refer to very specific beliefs and practices. Often it is only by reconstructing (lost) metaphors and cultic practices that we can hope to extract the original significance of the kennings.

What seems unintelligible and self-contradictory to us (such as an eight-legged horse, or a young boy acting as a guard dog) can in fact be a clue to a deeper cultural reference and imaginative word-play. Without useful theories about the original kenning/metaphorical values of names, by-names and key phrases, we cannot hope to understand many of the texts which have survived in various Indo-European traditions, nor reach anything like a realistic appraisal of their mythic or cultural world. Even the most famous of modern interpreters are prone to fall at one of these many hurdles, and nothing written today can be taken for granted as representing the original meanings or associations of these religious terms. That said, culturally sensitive study and deep linguistic analysis can open many locked doors.

© Mícheál úa Séaghdha, Praha 2013