Part 4

The psychopomps of those fallen by the sword are, as we have seen, stately dises, sitting high in the saddle, with helmet, shield, and spear. To those not destined to fall by the sword Urd sends other maid-servants, who, like the former, may come on horseback, and who, as it appears, are of very different appearance, varying in accordance with the manner of death of those persons whose departure they attend. She who comes to those who sink beneath the weight of years has been conceived as a very benevolent dis, to judge from the solitary passage where she is characterised, that is in Ynglingatal 30 (Ynglingasaga 44), where it is said of the aged and just king Halfdan Whiteleg, that he was taken hence by the woman, who is helpful to those bowed and stooping (hallvarps hlífinauma). The burden which Elli (age), Utgard-Loki's foster-mother (Gylfaginning 47), puts on men, and which gradually gets too heavy for them to bear, is removed by this kind-hearted dis.

Other psychopomps are of a terrible kind. The most of them belong to the spirits of disease dwelling in Niflhel (see No. 60). King Vanlandi is tortured to death by a being whose epithet, vitta vættur and tröllkund, shows that she belongs to the same group as Heiðr, the prototype of witches, and who is contrasted with the valkyrie Hild by the appellation ljóna liðs bága Grímhildr (Ynglingasaga 13, Ynglingatal 3). The same vitta vættur came to King Adils when his horse fell and he himself struck his head against a stone (Ynglingasaga 29). Two kings, who die on a bed of straw, are mentioned in Ynglingasaga's Thjodolf-strophes (ch. 17 and 47) as visited by a being called in the one instance Loki's kinswoman (Loka mær), and in the other Hvedrung's kinswoman (Hveðrungs mær). That this Loki's kinswoman has no authority to determine life and death, but only carries out the dispensations of the norns, is definitely stated in the Thjodolf-strophe (norna dóms - ch. 47), and also that her activity, as one who brings the invitation to the realm of death, does not imply that the person invited is to be counted among the damned, although she herself, the kinswoman of Loki, the daughter of Loki, surely does not belong to the regions of bliss.

Og til þings
Þriðja jöfri
Hveðrungs mær
úr heimi bauð,
þá er Hálfdan,
sá er á Holti bjó
norna dóms
um notið hafði.

As all the dead, whether they are destined for Valhall or for Hel (in the sense of the subterranean realms of bliss), or for Niflhel, must first report themselves in Hel, their psychopomps, whether they dwell in Valhall, Hel, or Niflhel, must do the same. This arrangement is necessary also from the point of view that the unhappy who "die from Hel into Niflhel" (Grímnismál) must have attendants who conduct them from the realms of bliss to the Na-gates, and thence to the realms of torture. Those dead from disease, who have the subterranean kinswoman of Loki as a guide, may be destined for the realms of bliss - then she delivers them there; or be destined for Niflhel - then they die under her care and are brought by her through the Na-gates to the worlds of torture in Niflhel.

Far down in Christian times the participle leikinn was used in a manner which points to something mythical as the original reason for its application. In Biskupasögur (i. 464) it is said of a man that he was leikinn by some magic being (flagð). Of another person who sought solitude and talked with himself, it is said in Eyrbyggja (270) that he was believed to be leikinn. Ynglingatal gives us the mythical explanation of this word.

In its strophe about King Dyggvi, who died from disease, this poem says (Ynglingingasaga 17) that, as the lower world dis had chosen him, Loki's kinswoman came and made him leikinn (alvald Yngva þjóðar Loka mær um leikinn hefir). The person who became leikinn is accordingly visited by Loki's kinswoman, or, if others have had the same task to perform, by some being who resembled her, and who brought psychical or physical disease.

In our mythical records there is mention made of a giantess whose very name, Leikin, Leikn, is immediately connected with that activity which Loki's kinswoman - and she too is a giantess - exercises when she makes a person leikinn. Of this personal Leikin we get the following information in our old records:

1. She is, as stated, of giant race (Younger Edda, Nafnaþulur - Tröllkonur).

2. She has once fared badly at Thor's hands. He broke her legs (Leggi brauzt þú Leiknar - Skáldskaparmál 11, after a song by Veturliði).

3. She is kveldriða. The original and mythological meaning of kveldriða is a horsewoman of torture or death (from kvelja, to torture, to kill). The meaning, a horsewoman of the night, is a misunderstanding. Compare Vigfusson's Dict., sub voce "Kveld".

4. The horse which this woman of torture and death rides is black, untamed, difficult to manage (styggr), and ugly-grown (ljótvaxinn). It drinks human blood, and is accompanied by other horses belonging to Leikin, black and bloodthirsty like it. (All this is stated by Hallfreður Vandræðaskáld.) [*] Perhaps these loose horses are intended for those persons whom the horsewoman of torture causes to die from disease, and whom she is to conduct to the lower world.

* Tíðhöggvit lét tiggi,
Tryggva sonr, fyr styggvan
Leiknar hest á lesti,
ljótvaxinn, hræ Saxa;
vinhróðigr gaf víða
vísi margra Frísa
blökku brúnt at drekka
blóð kveldriðu stóði.
[Ólafs saga Tryggv., ch. 29.]

Popular traditions have preserved for our times the remembrance of the "ugly-grown" horse, that is, of a three-legged horse, which on its appearance brings sickness, epidemics, and plagues. The Danish popular belief (Thiele, i. 137, 138) knows this monster, and the word Hel-horse has been preserved in the vocabulary of the Danish language. The diseases brought by the Hel-horse are extremely dangerous, but not always fatal. When they are not fatal, the convalescent is regarded as having ransomed his life with that tribute of loss of strength and of torture which the disease caused him, and in a symbolic sense he has then "given death a bushel of oats" (that is, to its horse). According to popular belief in Slesvik (Arnkiel, i. 55; cp. J. Grimm, Deutsche Myth., 804), Hel rides in the time of a plague on a three-legged horse and kills people. Thus the ugly-grown horse is not forgotten in traditions from the heathen time.

Völuspá informs us that in the primal age of man, the sorceress Heid went from house to house and was a welcome guest with evil women, since she seið Leikin (síða means to practise sorcery). Now, as Leikin is the "horsewoman of torture and death," and rides the Hel-horse, then the expression síða Leikin can mean nothing else than by sorcery to send Leikin, the messenger of disease and death, to those persons who are the victims of the evil wishes of "evil women"; or, more abstractly, to bring by sorcery dangerous diseases to men. [*]

  * Völuspá 22 (Cod. Reg.) says of Heid: seið hon kuni, seið hon Leikin.

The letter u is in this manuscript used for both u and y (compare Bugge, Sæmund. Edd., Preface x., xi.), and hence kuni may be read both kuni and kyni. The latter reading makes logical sense. Kyni is dative of kyn, a neuter noun, meaning something sorcerous, supernatural, a monster. Kynjamein and kynjasótt mean diseases brought on by sorcery. Seið in both the above lines is past tense of the verb síða, and not in either one of them the noun seiðr.

There was a sacred sorcery and an unholy one, according to the purpose for which it was practised, and according to the attending ceremonies. The object of the holy sorcery was to bring about something good either for the sorcerer or for others, or to find out the will of the gods and future things. The sorcery practised by Heiðr is the unholy one, hated by the gods, and again and again forbidden in the laws, and this kind of sorcery is designated in Völuspá by the term síða kyni. Of a thing practised with improper means it is said that it is not kynja-lauss, kyn-free.

The reading in Cod. Hauk., seið hon hvars hon kunni, seið hon hugleikin, evidently has some "emendator" to thank for its existence who did not understand the passage and wished to substitute something easily understood for the obscure lines he thought he had found.

From all this follows that Leikin is either a side-figure to the daughter of Loki, and like her in all respects, or she and the Loki-daughter are one and the same person. To determine the question whether they are identical, we must observe (1) the definitely representative manner in which Völuspá, by the use of the name Leikin, makes the possessor of this name a mythic person, who visits men with diseases and death; (2) the manner in which Ynglingatal characterises the activity of Loki's daughter with a person doomed to die from disease; she makes him leikinn, an expression which, without doubt, is in its sense connected with the feminine name Leikn, and which was preserved in the vernacular far down in Christian times, and there designated a supernatural visitation bringing the symptoms of mental or physical illness; (3) the Christian popular tradition in which the deformed and disease-bringing horse, which Leikin rides in the myth, is represented as the steed of "death" or "Hel"; (4) that change of meaning by which the name Hel, which in the mythical poems of the Elder Edda designates the whole heathen realm of death, and especially its regions of bliss, or their queen, got to mean the abode of torture and misery and its ruler - a transmutation by which the name Hel, as in Gylfaginning and in the Slesvik traditions, was transferred from Urd to Loki's daughter.

Finally, it should be observed that it is told of Leikin, as of Loki's daughter, that she once fared badly at the hands of the gods, who did not, however, take her life. Loki's daughter is not slain, but is cast into Niflhel (Gylfaginning 34). From that time she is gnúpleit - that is to say, she has a stooping form, as if her bones had been broken and were unable to keep her in an upright position. Leikin is not slain, but gets her legs broken.

All that we learn of Leikin thus points to the Loki-maid, the Hel, not of the myth, but of Christian tradition.