The One with the Horribly Aimed Spear

Every mythology, like I have mentioned before, is similar. European mythologies came out before modern catholic or protestant churches thus they have a very different take on the god/deity system. As times progressed, poets and balladeers turned into authors who wrote according to their vision for society, thus religion became a textbook of moral codices and principles to follow strictly rather than a bunch of stories slapped together to unite a bunch of people and entertain them at the same time. This is where ancient European and Scandinavian mythologies, or different branches of SouthEast Asian mythologies came into the picture.

These were stories of gods and deities as not supernatural all-knowing omnipresent but invisible faces but as humans with superpowers. Think of Marvel before Marvel was a thing. Anyway, these stories then sort of became a foundation for the mortal followers of these mythologies to behave and act in certain ways, because if it worked for their gods, why can’t that same spiritual model work for them? Thus, every single god you will find here, from Odin to Tyr (yay, rhyming!) are going to be more human than “ideal and perfect” creatures. They will have flaws and you will easily be able to tell the mistakes they have made from the noble and excellent things they have done because of how human they are.

Thus, to explain and explore the nuances of norse mythology and each character or deity involved in creating this pool of heroes, gods and axe-bearing women, we must first look into the one major division that they made to sort of categorise the gods better. (Wow, I just realised that the Europeans had invented the IRS before the USA was even a thing to white people) there were basically two types of gods - the nice peace loving tree hugging kind and the AAAAAAA kind. The peace loving kind were called the Vanir gods, or gods who loved nature or were gods of nature. Consequently, the other part of the gods were the warlords, the sharp, cunning, intelligent and murder-y gods who loved to cut heads to store their mead, instead of waiting to harvest wheat. They were called the Aesir gods. Now, both these names have their singular words as well, in the same sense as to say being a citizen of India would make you an Indian. The Vanir gods were known as Vanr and the aesir gods were known as Ass (Short end of the stick in my opinion) (if you laugh, you are a child)

Before we continue, you must understand that all of this information is circumstantial at best because there are a lot of contradictions within the norse text alone. Vanir gods were known to be very hot headed and warlike several times as well and for that very reason the very distinct line between them gets blurred. Much like the roots of the great Yggdrasil, the branch of this section of the mythology finds itself withered and lost in translation, for Norse mythology was written in ancient Icelandic, which finds very little similarity to modern Icelandic, much less english.

However, there is a proper popular culture definition of these gods and the distinction that was made amongst them. So, for the ambit of this blog, we shall follow that. If you would like to read more, however, please refer to works by Dr Jackson Crawford. He has been excellent and almost instrumental in reviving works of ancient norse times and will provide you with further clarity (at least more than a dishevelled sleep deprived college student would)

Moving on, the Aesir gods and the Vanir gods were different in a few major categories, and to explain it, I would like you to imagine a block where two different shops exist. One is your run of the mill ammunation shop with guns and a shooting range and explosives, and then the other is a modern art gallery with soothing music playing in the background. In the middle, there is a massive ground with nothing to show but barrenness.

Do you think these two shops and the customers that graced these two shops would exist peacefully? Yeah, I didn't think so. Neither did the Norse myth writers! So the Aesir and the Vanir gods fought. Big Whoop. Odin, the norse counterpart for dear old Zeus, threw a spear into the no man’s land between the domains of the Aesir and Vanir which led to a generationally long, first civil war in the history of the universe. Man, imagine if the poor guy was just trying to play darts and missed. Anyway, that is how the war started and it sort of lasted for a very long time, and created concepts of Ragnarok in its midst, which is the norse mythology counterpart to Kalki - the end of the world.

In the War, the gods fought ferociously. The Aesir knew of war tactics while the Vanir knew of war magic. While neither side completely outweighed each other, the fighting was still catastrophic. Eventually, however, the fighting sides grew weary of each other and decided to call it quits. Following tradition, each side sent three people to live amongst the other side as a tribute to the war and to maintain the peace. Happy ending. Or was it?