jörmungandr

Jörmungandr - the Midgard Serpent - is the sea monster of Norse mythology and bears some resemblance to Leviathan. The Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlason tells of a battle between the serpent and the god, Thor, who - throughout the story is disguised as a young man.

Thor set out, wearing his disguise and persuaded the giant, Hymir, to take him fishing. The giant refused to share his bait with his visitor, so Thor lopped the head from Hymir's biggest ox and took it with him in the boat. He rowed far out to sea and Hymir protested that this was the territory of the fearsome Midgard Serpent. But - unabashed - the god baited a hook with the ox-head and cast his line into the sea. Caught by the hook, the serpent struggled and Thor's efforts to land him were so ferocious that his feet went straight through the bottom of the boat and dug into into the bed of the sea itself. Finally, Thor succeeded in pulling the serpent into the boat but Hymir was so afraid that he seized his knife and cut the line so that the creature sank back into the deep and is living there still, far out at sea. In his fury, 'Thor clenched his fist and gave Hymir a box on the ear so that he fell overboard head first'. Then the god himself 'waded ashore', presumably looking a lot less like a 'scrap' of a boy by this point!

Two things occur to me about this story. One arises from Johan's point about the wisdom of the young. I think it's important that the god comes to Hymir disguised as a 'youth'. I'm not sure why this is necessary - would it be such a problem if the giant knew the truth of Thor's identity? In a way, the point seems to be that Hymir underestimates the young man, whom we know to have the power of a god at his disposal but who, for the giant, is just a 'scrap of a young fellow. You might object that the youth who approaches Hymir is not 'really' a young man. But perhaps this is one of those stories of recognition.(Treat the stranger kindly for a stranger may be a god in disguise.) It is always possible that a youthful body may hide a powerful moral purpose and a great deal more strength than one imagines.

The other thing to mention is that the image of Thor's struggle with Jörmungandr is appropriated to a Christian purpose on a stone cross from the Anglo-Saxon period to be found in the churchyard of St Mary's at Gosforth in Cumbria, a point made by Robert Eisler in Orpheus The Fisher (published in 1921 - and, yes, there's lots more in that book that I should blog about!). '[T]he German myth of the god Thor, angling for the Midgard-snake from a boat, is,' he says, 'a distant mirage' of the same 'primeval Oriental myth' that is preserved in the story of Leviathan. And on the Gosforth cross, the two tales are reunited when the story of Thor is used 'as a simile for Christ's victory over the ancient dragon'.

The simile is not, I'd have thought, perfect. Thor does not - in fact - succeed in killing the serpent, at least not during his fishing trip with Hymir. Another confrontation will come at the time of Ragnarök, the cataclysm in which the whole world, including the sphere of the gods, will be reordered fundamentally and entirely. At this point the serpent will be defeated, although so - it seems - will Thor himself, who will not live on into the future that comes after the destruction of the world in water.

Whatever the nature of the comparison, though, the story clearly remained important in Christian times and there is another stone fragment in the church at Gosforth which also depicts a figure, possibly Thor, out fishing in a boat. To the left is a drawing of that image, originally published in 1913 in Finnur Jónsson's Goðafræði Norðmanna og Íslendinga eftir heimildum and usefully available via wikimedia commons. The hook and line are huge and thick. But perhaps they need to be - after all, the fish themselves are dauntingly large.