A Dream of Valhalla/Folkvangr and Freyja

I do not often discuss my dreams on my blogs but on occasion I feel that there is a pressing need to do so and this is one of those occasions. Last night I woke up at about 3.00 am following a very vivid dream. In my dream I saw a procession of warriors and they were led by a female who I sensed was a deity but not a Valkyrie. She rode on a horse. I do not recall if the warriors she led were on horseback or not as everything in my dream was indistinct and the whole dream lacked colour. It was entirely monochrome in nature, consisting of various shades of grey. There was no light in the dream but it was not entirely dark either but resembled twilight. The female at the head of the procession also carried a very large round shield in front of her. I instinctively realised that this was a Goddess and was Freyja Herself.

Freyja led the warriors through a gateway, the details of which I could not make out. I was not part of the procession but watched it from the side. There was no interaction between them and I. Then immediately after this I found myself inside a very large enclosure with thousands of people. I could not discern their features but I knew that these were all dead people and the enclosure was indeed the fields around Valhalla. I found that not only was I in Valhalla but I was positioned upon a hill and started 'preaching' to the masses. Please excuse my use of a Christian term but I cannot think of a more appropriate alternative! I started to tell the masses in front of me that Odin was the father of all the Gods, that He was the father of great heroes that bear His blood in their veins and that He is the father of all our people whether they can claim direct descent from Him or not. In essence I was publicly proclaiming my faith in Him. I make no apology for using the Norse version of His name as 1/4 of my ancestry can be traced back to the original Norwegian colonisers of a hitherto deserted area of western Lancashire in the 10th century. Of course my ancestors also knew Him by the name of Woden, Wodan and indeed Gwydion too. At this point I woke up. I did not see Odin within the dream, only Freyja. Of course the fact that it was Freyja who led the host of dead warriors and it was a field that I found myself in would lend to a better interpretation that this was Folkvang ('field of the host') that I visited rather than Valhalla but both are equally worthy places to spend eternity!

I have had a few mystical dreams over the years, all of which I have been able to interpret and I do hold a qualification in Dream Analysis but do not claim to be any kind of expert in the field and the interpretation of dreams is by necessity a personal one. Not all dreams have a 'meaning' but are merely the actions of the subconscious playing through and rerunning thoughts encountered in the  conscious mind during the daytime. However this dream stands out as one which merits a spiritual interpretation. I am not going to attempt an interpretation here because my intention is to initially make the dream publicly known. In addition to a spiritual or mystical interpretation it should be noted that the ancients believed that via the dream state they could encounter other entities including Gods. This is the first time that I have ever encountered a deity within a dream and the first time that I have dreamed about Valhalla or the afterlife. Whilst I was aware of being in Valhalla I had no awareness of whether I was dead or still a living, breathing human being.

My late mother who has been dead 31 years this year was a spiritualist medium and she often told me of her out of body encounters in the dream state where she engaged in astral travelling and encountered the spirits of the dead and angelic beings. This was her belief and I am not in a position to judge that belief as beliefs are inherently personal things. As an aside on one occasion she told me that she had left her body in order to minister healing to my half sister in Germany. Many years later my half sister related to me the experience of her being seriously ill and seeing the spirit or form of my mother by her bed. They had fallen out with each other before this encounter and never spoke to each other again and yet both parties related to me the very same experience which I cannot explain through rational or scientific means.

The dream could be interpreted as an example of astral travelling to a different realm and there are a few examples of this in the saga literature of northern Europe so it is a belief that was held by our pre-Christian ancestors. A third interpretation may be that of a premonition. This is partly why I am making known this dream today on my blog, in order to strengthen the faith of my fellow heathens in the reality of our Gods, the afterlife and the existence of worlds outside of along side of Midgarth if indeed it is a premonition. A few weeks ago I discussed with my partner how both my mother and my late brother had premonitions in the form of dreams of their impending demise and speculated whether this would be my experience as well.

On Sunday 2nd of July 1989 my mother told my late former first wife of a dream that she had a few days previously in which she saw her gravestone. My wife told me about the dream after we returned home that evening. I was rather sceptical and dismissed the dream straight away. I was at the time a fundamentalist Bible-believing Christian. However 4 days later on Thursday 6th of July she was dead. She had a heart attack which she could not possibly have predicted by any rational means. My late father pointed out the rather unusual date: 6/7/89!

In 2009 I received a telephone call from my brother who likewise told me of a dream in which he had received a premonition of impending death. 10 days later he died suddenly and again there is no rational explanation for how he could have predicted this. My German grandfather who died in 1933 was taken ill and shortly before his death he sat up in bed and told my grandmother of seeing a crowd of dead relatives at his bed who had come to greet him. Shortly after this experience he died. This was not a dream that he had but a vision whilst awake. The appearance of dead relatives prior to death is a form or function of the psychopomp. Odin, Freyja and the valkyries all performed the function of a psychopomp. The Grim Reaper is the best known form of the psychopomp in western Europe since the middle ages and I have already speculated on the association between Him and Odin in another article: The Grim Reaper, an Aspect of Grimnir the Hooded One

We will see what this dream actually means with the passing of time and thus I dare not venture an interpretation.

Heathen Elements in Wagner's Lohengrin

The tension between Christianity and the old Germanic heathen faith is present in all of us of Germanic ancestry and this is the consequence of the forced conversion of the Germanic peoples to this alien desert religion, often the result of the lack of faithfulness and downright treason of their kings and chieftains. Those of us who have children and raise them in the spirituality of our ancient Gods will thankfully not transmit this inner tension onto our sons and daughters who will grow to become genuinely free heathens, not exposed to the direct or indirect Christian indoctrination that more often than not occurs in schools. By home schooling children or failing that, taking them out of worship assemblies and Religious Education classes we protect them from the tyranny of monotheism.

This inner tension as I term it may be found in the operas, or more correctly, the music dramas of Richard Wagner. Whether this tension between the two religions was consciously or unconsciously woven into the fabric of these works, I am unsure. One particular work that has occupied my attention and meditation in recent years is Lohengrin. This is one of his earlier works, first performed in 1850. This was during Wagner's revolutionary phase; revolutionary in the political sense of the term. Of course we know that Wagner was a music revolutionary as well!

Lohengrin unlike some of his other works was grounded in history. It was a skilful blend of German history and elements of Germanic mythology although one must look beneath the surface a little bit to understand this. In Act 2 Scene 2 we have a scene which focuses on a confrontation between the heroine of the work, the obviously Christian Elsa who was to marry the swan knight Lohengrin, the son of Parsifal. Ortrud is portrayed by Wagner as the scheming wife of Friedrich von Telramund, Count of Brabant. In essence in this scene we have the conflict between the new and alien religion of Christianity and the heathenism of the pre-Christian Germanic peoples as Ortrud calls upon the ancient Gods:

"Entweihte Götter! Helft jetzt meiner Rache! Bestraft die Schmach, die hier euch angetan! Stärkt mich im Dienste eurer heil'gen Sache! Vernichtet der Abtrünn'gen schnöden Wahn! Wodan! Dich Starken rufe ich! Freia! Erhabne, höre mich! Segnet mir Trug und Heuchelei, dass glücklich meine Rache sei!"

Ortrud invokes the Gods Wodan and Freia. It should be noted that Wagner chose the Wodan form of Wotan, quite possibly because the Duchy of Brabant is situated in modern day Belgium and is mainly Flemish. It was part of the First Reich or the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. The First Reich included within its borders all of Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Belgium, parts of Eastern France, northern Italy, Slovenia and western Poland so much of this empire was genuinely Germanic. Wodan was predominately used by Dutch, Flemish and Platt Deutsch (Lower Saxon) speakers. Freia amongst the continental Germanic tribes embodied the attributes of the Norse Frigga and Freyja as it is believed by many scholars that this deity was once regarded as a single unified Goddess and I am inclined to agree.

The concept of the swan knight is rooted in both Germanic and Celtic mythology and it is interesting how this theme is melded with the concept of the Grail which is rooted in Celtic mythology and ultimately Proto-Indo-European. Anne Ross in her excellent Pagan Celtic Britain (1967) points out the solar nature of the swan in the solar cults of the Bronze Age which continues into the legends of mediaeval Europe. In Germanic mythology we may recall the stories of swan maidens such as in the legend of Wayland the Smith. It would appear to be an inheritance that is common to both the Germanic and Celtic peoples and thus probably signifies a joint inheritance from Proto-Indo-European times. Anne Ross makes the observation that the legends of mediaeval Ireland and the Germanic countries feature chain or boat pulling swans that have the ability to make music. She concludes that the longevity of this theme is indicative of their origins in Pre-Celtic Europe which illustrates their great heathen antiquity. This is a subject which is worthy of further exploration. Certainly the similarity between the Celtic and Germanic legends in relation to swans points to a common Indo-European inheritance.

The swan solar motif is not confined to the Celto-Germanic cultural area but can be found in other lands settled by Aryans such as India:

"The Irish gods and the Celestial Rishis of India take the form of swans, like the swan-maidens when they visit mankind."(Indian Myth and Legend, 1913, Donald A. Mackenzie)

Some scholars seek the origins of Lohengrin in the Anglo-Saxon myth of Skeaf, the culture-bringing hero of the Anglo-Saxons:

"Scholars are now universally agreed that the origin of the Swan-Knight story is to be found in the myth of Skeaf, the reputed ancestor of the Anglo-Saxons. This legend relates how to the shores of these, our own ancestors, there drifted a rudderless boat, in which, cradled on a sheaf of corn, and surrounded by arms and treasure, there lay a sleeping child. To the child the Angles gave the name of Skeaf, from the sheaf of corn on which he lay. Grown to manhood he became their king, and from him they learned the arts of peace and of war. At length the king died, and obedient to his will they bare the body to the seashore, laid it again in the ship which had brought him hither, and the vessel and its burden drifted away into the unknown distance. From Skeaf sprang a mighty race of kings, and the folk were fain to believe that this mysterious ancestor of their rulers had been in truth a god." (Legends of the Wagner Drama, 1900, Jessie L. Weston)

Recently on rereading an article by Wulf Ingesunnu's in the Sword of Wayland (Black Front Press, 2016) I saw a reference by Wulf which linked the God Hoenir to the stork who in fairytales is responsible for delivering new born babies to their parents. Jessie Weston also links Hoenir to a bird but this time both the stork and the swan:

"Some scholars hold that Hoenir himself may have been a personification of the swan, or stork, the white water-bird, and translate aurkonungr as 'lord of the ooze.' Cf. Corpus Poeticum Boreale, Introduction, p. cii. The origin of the myth is certainly extremely ancient, and involved in great obscurity." (Legends of the Wagner Drama)

She relates a tale from the Faroe Islands in which a peasant, playing a game of skill with a giant has to forfeit the life of his son if he is unable to hide the child. He calls upon the aid of Odin, Hoenir and Loki. It is Hoenir who is successful in hiding the child by transforming him into a piece of down and concealing him in the neck of a swan. she consider that Hoenir is a spring or light God.