In those long-ago days of middle school, the bus ride home sometimes seemed like it took forever. The meandering path wove in and out of side streets, stopped at corners that enclosed cul-de-sacs, and paused interminably at train tracks. As fall faded into winter, the shortening days would already be darkening before we arrived at my corner.
One afternoon, as the long shadows of trees stretched across the street, we approached my stop. As always, I stood up early and shrugged on my backpack, heavy as it was with hardcover textbooks and overstuffed folders.
As the bus slowed, I turned halfway around to look back down the aisle between the green vinyl seats, and my throat was slit. My hand went to the wound, and I knew immediately that it was fatal.
Floating there was the thing that had made the cut. It hovered in the aisle, a head-sized sphere of blackness, a globe of empty void.
“Why?” was the one word that I managed to speak.
I could feel nothing from the thing. No anger, hate, desire, or satisfaction. It had simply killed me without reason.
Paysage Noir (1923) by Max Ernst [Public Domain]
m,The shock of that cold emptiness woke me up. I was a young adult then, and the icy sensation of that total lack of any human feeling whatsoever lingered with me as the dream slid away. That chill returns now, many years later, when I recall that supremely vivid nocturnal revelation.
Shouting down the inner voice
Since that dreamtime, I have considered the deepest evil to be an utter lack of empathy.
Manipulators throughout history have known that empathy is a bulwark against atrocity, and they have done everything possible to short-circuit that basic structural element of human connection. Members of the constructed in-group are actively convinced to view members of the asserted out-group as less than human, as beasts underserving of sympathy.
When Germans were persuaded by propaganda denouncing Jewish people with the hoariest of anti-Semitic tropes, the horrors of the Holocaust were made possible. When the English were buried in books arguing for their own inherent superiority over African and Asian peoples, the bloodiness of British colonialism was manifested. When Americans embraced the quacks who promoted the pseudoscience of racialism, our uniquely awful system of racist slavery was built.
In these cases and countless others, everyday people willfully turn away from human connection. Differences are greatly exaggerated and outright fabricated in order to shout down that little voice inside telling us that the other is fundamentally like us and reminding us that others feel pain and heartbreak just as we do.
The youngest children will burst into tears when another child cries. Toddlers will drop their toys to hug another toddler who is hurt. Kids will feel pain when a beloved character is in trouble onscreen or on the page. It is a wonderful trait of humanity that we have empathic natures and feel a tug at our hearts when someone else is hurting.
“A poor reward I let her have in return”
Despite all their violently macho bravado, even the gods have empathy.
After Thor slaughters his goats for a meal shared with a peasant family, the little boy of the household secretly disobeys the thunderer’s instructions and breaks one of the bones to get the marrow out. The next morning, Thor magically revives his goats and discovers the disobedience when one of his animals has a lame leg. His godly rage rises up, he raises his hammer, and he is about to smite the entire family to a bloody spot when he sees the terror of the small human household.
Thor’s fury immediately dissipates, and he agrees to spare the family and accept their two children as compensation. Spared by the workings of empathy, the kids go on to a blessed life as the god’s sidekicks in further mythic adventures.
After the gods kill the giant Thjazi, his daughter Skadi puts on her armor, takes up her weapons, and goes to Asgard to wreak her vengeance upon the Æsir. The gods decide to offer her compensation, including a god for a husband and the placement of her father’s eyes as stars in the sky.
It’s hard to believe that Odin the furious, Thor the thunderer, Freyja the gatherer of battle-dead, and the other assorted gods, goddesses, Valkyries, and undead warriors of Valhalla are all terrified of one girl and her wrath. More likely, they were impressed by her somewhat insane bravery and, possibly, they had some empathy for the girl made fatherless on account of Loki’s machinations and their own deadly deeds.
After Odin returns from the halls of Suttung with the Mead of Poetry, he reflects on his deceitful seduction of the giant’s daughter during his quest for the mystic liquid. In Carolyne Larrington’s translation of Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One”), the god says:
Gunnlod gave me on her golden throne
a drink of the precious mead;
a poor reward I let her have in return,
for her open-heartedness,
for her sorrowful spirit.
Yes, Odin also tells us that he “made good use of” Gunnlod. That is to be expected in a cultural product of the exceedingly macho and braggadocious time and place that produced the poem. What is notable is that the god whose name means “fury,” whose domain includes war and death, and whose manipulation of his own human descendants can be coldly calculating, here steps back and expresses empathy for the young woman whose heart he abused in order to gain the “stirrer of frenzy” for both the godly and human realms.
“Outside the yard”
I’m not so sure that the inhabitants of our own time and place are so good at feeling or expressing empathy.
Far too many of our fellow citizens gleefully cheer those who impose needless suffering on others, throw their votes and dollars at the worst examples of personal selfishness and wanton cruelty, and generally seem to view those outside their own political, religious, and subcultural bubble as less than human and therefore fully deserving of harassment, violence, and even death.
Bubbles within bubbles from New Games and Amusements (1905) by Meredith Nugent
The absolute absence of empathy for anyone not in the approved array can be stomach-churning. There is something truly disgusting about elderly male lawmakers crowing over legal decisions assaulting the bodily autonomy of young women. There is something fundamentally nauseating about internet personalities who build their brand on inciting violence against the minority groups they constantly vilify on the basis of their own archaic notions of nationality, ethnicity, ability, race, gender, and sexuality.
This malignant embrace of othering is nothing new. Long before any of us were born, there was already a long tradition of attaching hateful bigotry to Norse mythology and legend. English scholars used the myths and sagas to build grand discourses on the supposedly shared blood of the northern peoples. German mystics tied myth, legend, and even early writing systems to some imagined “soul of the folk” that united various pale-skinned peoples under a white flag.
Some strains of the post-1972 new religious movements known as Ásatrú and Heathenry continue to embrace this tired old conflation of us-versus-them thinking, even going as far as adopting the Danish scholar Vilhelm Grønbech’s channeling of racialist völkisch concepts through his own interpretations of the Icelandic sagas as theological doctrine for today’s religious practitioners.
Our chosen community forms the innangard, they chant. All others are in the utangard, and they matter not.
The terms are not really Old Norse but are modern imitations derived from actual Old Norse words that simply mean “within the yard” and “outside the yard,” both of which first appear in church histories and other texts from three centuries after Iceland’s conversion to Christianity.
Giants and Huns
The giants – the supposedly prototypical “utangarders” of Norse mythology – aren’t actually portrayed within the myths as so extremely “other” as they appear in today’s comics books, role playing games, television shows, and movies. Whether in Dungeons & Dragons, the Marvel Universe, or other media that lifts material from the Old Norse sources, contemporary creators appear to have signed a shadow pact agreeing to portray the jötnar as monstrously enormous blue-skinned creatures that are consistently portrayed in art and CGI across competing franchises.
The myths don’t present the jötnar in this racialized-via-skin-color fashion. The giants aren’t even all that “giant,” since the gods repeatedly show an ability to change size and shape. The jötnar simply seem like another supernatural tribe vying for power in the nine worlds, like the god-tribes of Æsir and Vanir. Giant women marry gods and have children with them, and even the elder gods are up to fifty percent giant. There’s a sense in the mythology that, if the giants can capture the right goddesses and magical objects, they themselves will ascend to the seats of godhood and push the Æsir down into the role of frustrated competitors.
In the Saga of the Volsungs, that great but confused mish-mash of poetic sources turned into prose, Attila the Hun appears as Atli, brother of the Valkyrie Brynhild, nephew of the Danish king, and husband of the Burgundian Gudrun. In a text that shows the heroic descendants of Odin taking their turns as kings of “Hunland,” the great historical leader of the invaders from Central Asia is consistently portrayed as just another Germanic warlord. It can be difficult for modern readers to accept that this foundational northern European text of long ago doesn’t portray Attila as fundamentally different in either race or ethnicity. We so often see the deeper past through the lens of the 19th century.
Part of the blame for all this othering can be traced through the Dungeons & Dragons concept of race-based characterization back to J.R.R. Tolkien’s portrayal of race as determinant of moral character to the Romantic Era’s racialization of the old myths and sagas via the racist theorizing of the time. Amazingly, many Baby Boomer academics now in the twilight of their academic careers in Scandinavian Studies still insist on translating the Old Norse word ætt (“family, kindred”) as “race,” an outdated choice that provides fodder for those on the far right who continue to read the myths and sagas as some sort of glorious history of the “white race” versus racialized others.
Embracing empathy
As an educator, writer, and follower of Odin in his guise of the wandering wizard seeking after wisdom, I believe that digging into the backstory of the problems and prejudices of our own age can be the path to progress for all of us. Tracing the history of our core concepts can be liberating as it shows us how we’ve been manipulated in adopting aspects of worldview rooted in malicious misreading and purposeful propaganda.
But can we teach empathy? Can we consciously choose to be empathetic?
My dream of the throat-slashing entity was not a dream about an actual person. It was a vision of an inhuman presence completely devoid of the basic empathy that is a defining characteristic of humanity. That void is what made the dream so terrifying.
It’s not so much a question of teaching empathy as it is of peeling back the malevolent cultural accretions that bury the trait, of undoing the harm that has been done to ourselves and our neighbors by the relentless onslaught of othering that we continuously face.
Even in diffuse and decentralized religions like Ásatrú and Heathenry, even in the branches that loudly proclaim their own inclusivity, empathy can be damped down by internalizing theologies of coded otherness such as the völkisch-derived theories of Grønbech. We have to be willing to examine our own worldviews, especially when – as for the vast majority of today’s practitioners – these worldviews are consciously adopted in adolescence or adulthood.
On the spectrum between the child who cries when a friend is hurt and the inhuman presence that feels nothing as it watches someone bleed to death, it should go without saying that it is most truly human to embrace the child. When our adult worldview has pushed us towards the monster, it is time to reevaluate the choices that led to this dark place.
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