Mead in Anglo-Saxon Myth & Culture
A lecture given at Jarrow Hall by Brúnwulf Leornere
The following is from a lecture and scópcræft performance that Brúnwulf Leornere gave at Jarrow Hall (Bede’s Museum) on the 18th of November 2023.
Introduction
Mead is one of the most ancient alcoholic drinks, older even than agriculture which produced wine and beer, older even than the neolithic pottery from which it was drunk, because of the natural occurrence and fermentation of honey. While early chemical traces of honey and rice fermentation can be found in pottery from China, dating back to at least 7000 BC, in Europe it was introduced by the third millennium BC Bronze Age Bell Beaker culture, themselves shaped by the Indo-European peoples of the Eurasian Steppe.
For the European peoples, mead was more than just an alcoholic drink, but a deeply spiritual substance which was said to bring long life, immortality and divinely inspired wisdom. Many of us may feel wiser and even immortal after a strong drink of mead, but there is something deeper here.
The Mead of Poetry, Inspiration and Immortality
Parallel to our Anglo-Saxon traditions and possibly once known to them, is the myth of the Mead of Poetry, recorded in the Skáldskaparmál of the Norse Prose Edda:
“After the war between the two families of the gods, the Æsir and the Vanir, they made a truce by spitting in a vat, from this spit they made a man named Kvasir, who was so wise, wiser than all the gods, that there were no questions he could not answer, and he shared his wisdom with the world on his travels. One day Kvasir visited the dwarfs, Fjalar and Galar, they killed him and poured his blood into two vats and a kettle called Boðn, Són and Óðroerir. They mixed his blood with honey, creating a mead which made anybody who drank it a "skáld eða froeðamaðr”, a poet or a wiseman. The dwarfs explained to the gods that Kvasir had suffocated from intelligence.
These wily dwarfs, Fjalar and Galar invited a jǫtunn, a kind of giant, named Gilling and his wife. They took him to sea and sank his boat. They returned home and told Gilling’s wife that he had drowned and offered to show here where he had died, but Galar was tired of her crying and simply dropped a millstone on her head. When Gilling’s son, Suttungr, learned what happened, he visited the dwarfs, and took them to a reef where they would drown at high-tide. The dwarfs begged for mercy and offered him the mead of poetry in return for his father’s death. Suttungr agreed and he stored it within a mountain named Hnitbjǫrg, guarded by his daughter Gunnlǫð.
The god Óðin, who is always keen to seek more wisdom, heard of this mead made from Kvasir’s blood and sought to get it back. He travelled to the home of Baugi, Suttung’s brother, where he met nine slaves scything hay and offered his whetstone to those who wanted it, where they all cut each others’ throats in the struggle for it. He spent the night as a guest at Baugi’s home, who complained that business was poor because he had no one to work for him, Óðin, who said his name was Bǫlverk said that he would do it in return for a draught of Sutting’s mead. Baugi said he would try to convince his brother and Bǫlverk (really Óðin) worked throughout the summer. When winter came, he asked for his reward but Suttungr refused a single drop.
Bǫlverk then suggested that Baugi use an auger, Rati, to drill into Hnitbjǫrg to steal some. Bǫlverk blew into it and his breath returned, knowing that Baugi had only drilled half way and tried to deceive him. When Baugi drilled the rest of the way, the hole was very small, but Óðin transformed into a snake and entered the mountain, as Baugi tried to hit him. Inside he met Suttung’s daughter, Gunnlǫð, with whom he spent three nights and thus was promised three draughts, but with each draught he drank the vats empty.
He then transformed into an eagle and flew away, leaving Gunnlǫð heartbroken. When Suttungr had discovered what happened, he too turned into an eagle and chased after Óðin. When the Æsir saw him returning to Ásgarð, they set out vessels to catch the mead and Óðin spat the mead into the vessells. But with Suttungr so close to him, in his fear Óðin let some of the precious mead fall from his anus. This portion fell into Miðgarð among mortal men, and anyone could drink this tainted mead, which hopefully we are not drinking tonight! This was known as the Skáldfífla hlutr, the rhymester’s share, but the greater share Óðin gave to the gods, and to those truly skilled in the craft of poetry.”
The sacred mead seems to belong to a much more ancient mythic tradition which transcends geographically distant Indo-European cultures and peoples, from Ireland to India. The gods are said to enjoy a special food and drink which gave them immortality. For the Greeks the Olympian gods were brought Ambrosia and Nectar, both meaning ‘undying’, just as the cognate Indian Amrita, where it is first used in the Rig Veda as another name for the sacred drink, Soma. The Rig Veda is also the oldest text of Indo-European literature, and the first mention of mead:
“Wisely have I enjoyed the savoury drink of life… The food to which all gods and men, calling it madhu, gather themselves together. We have drunk Soma and become immortal; we have attained the light, the Gods discovered... These glorious drops that give me freedom have I drunk... Fathers, that draught which our hearts have drunken, Immortal in himself, hath entered mortals.” In another hymn to the Viśvedevas, it is said of Soma that “the mead's bright glittering juice which dwells in mountains.” There is a similar tradition recorded in the Zoroastrian tradition of ancient Iran about the substance, Haoma, directly cognate with Indian Soma. “And the holy spirit... Took Zoroaster's hand and filled it with all-encompassing liquid knowledge and said ‘drink it.’ And Zara Westra drank it, and all-encompassing wisdom was blended within Zoroaster... And he was in the Holy Spirit’s wisdom for seven nights.”
This sounds very similar to Óðin’s experience in the Hávamál of the Poetic Edda, hung on the world-tree, Yggdrasil for nine-nights in a state of spiritual ecstasy, whereby he learned the runes and their wisdom. Poetry is a very important tradition among the Germanic peoples. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus wrote in his Germania that song and poetry was how we recorded our ancient history, and so poetry, which itself was a form of divinely inspired magic, could be preserved and recorded by carved runic letters. It is one thing to carve the runes, but can you also give them magic and meaning beyond recorded memory? There must have been something more potent to this than just an alcoholic drink. Many have suggested that many ancient pagan cultures across Europe and Asia used mead in such sacred rituals, not just as as a libation to the gods, but possibly combined with some kind of crushed hallucinogenic plant which granted ecstatic visions.
It is no coincidence that the name of Óðin, our English Woden, means the wode, furious or ecstatic one. This tradition with Woden, not just as king and ancestor of one’s tribe, but as bringer of poetic inspiration, wisdom and runic magic must surely have been known to Anglo-Saxons. In the riddles Solomon and Saturnus, and Adrien and Ritheus, we find two equivalent question and answer sets:
Saga me hwā ǣrost bōcstafas sette. Ic þe sēcge, Mercurius se gygand.
Saga me hwā ǣrest bōcstafas wrāt. Ic þe sēcge, Mercurius se gigant.
“Tell me who first set down or wrote book-staves. I tell thee, Mercury the giant.” Mercury was seen by Roman authors as equivalent to Woden or Óðin. Likewise the Anglo-Saxon rune poem for ōs uses an ambiguous double meaning for Anglo-Saxon ōs, a god, one of the Æsir, and Latin os, a mouth, both as the source of all speech, a pillar of wisdom and comfort of the wise. Its equivalent in the Old Norse Rune Poem was more obvious, describing Óðin as the prince of Ásgarð and lord of Valhǫll. All of this suggests a similar tradition among Anglo-Saxons, albeit obscured, of Woden as the source of wisdom, poetic speech and runes.
The earliest poem in Anglo-Saxon was recorded by Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People. He writes of the cowherd Cædmon of Whitby who was honoured with a divine gift of song and poetry by god. Within the mead-hall it was tradition to pass around the harp and sing in turn, but Cædmon had no skills and left beership in the hall out of shame. He left to sleep among the cattle where he was visited in his dream by a holy voice which asked:
“Cædmon, sing me something.” He answered “I cannot sing anything. I do not know how.” The voice replied “Yet you are able to sing. Sing me the song of original creation.” And so Cædmon was able to sing in praise of god:
Nu sculon herigean heofonrices weard,
meotodes meahte 7 his modgeþanc,
weorc wuldorfæder swa he wundra gehwæs
ece drihten, or onstealde.
He ærest sceop eorðan bearnum
heofon to hrofe, halig scyppend;
þa middangeard, moncynnes weard,
ece drihten, æfter teode
firum foldan, frea ælmihtig.
After this, Cædmon composed many songs and poems and took thereafter to a religious life. That such a song was inspired by Cædmon’s divine vision, as well as the heroic vocabulary used for devotional liturgy, greatly suggests the reworking of something pre-Christian, the divine poetic inspiration of Wóden, especially by the consumption of mead in the hall.
Mead as unifier of culture and friendship
For Anglo-Saxons the meadhall itself was not just a place to drink but the centre of cultural life. It is frequently used in poetry as a synonym for society and community itself, and he who is without the mead-hall is an exile, bereft of home and hearth. The hall defined the in-group where friendship, community, joy, warmth, law and order, culture and religion existed, as opposed to the out-group where there was hostility, loneliness, bitter cold, lawlessness and monsters hostile to the gods. This is the context in which we read the epic poem Beowulf within the Danish hall of Heorot, where outside lurked Grendel and other monstrous hellish creatures of the fens and marshes.
For Anglo-Saxons, religion and tradition was inseparable from community, and the meadhall was where ritual feasts and drinking such as Symbel and Beership were held. So too was the meadhall at the centre of legal matters, as Tacitus noted in the Germania that the debate of important issues would be accompanied by strong drink, but decisions were only made when sober. In the meadhall also came the yelp of one’s past deeds and the boast of one’s future deeds, where oaths were made to one’s lord and king, where guests were welcomed and where weddings and funerals were celebrated with communal feasts. It is clear then why the meadhall was not just central to earthly life, but for the Vikings, the afterlife in Valhǫll, the hall of the slain.
Let us then return again to Bede, who tells us of the hall as communal life in the story of King Ēadwine of Northumbria, who takes counsel from his advisors on whether they should convert to the new Christianity or remain with the old gods. Ēadwine’s chief priest compares mortal life to the measure of time which is unknown to them, as if we were sat in a meadhall at banquet in wintertime, warmed by a fire from the rain, snow and storm outside. And a sparrow comes flying through the house, through one door and out the other, and for that brief blink of an eye he is not touched by the storm, and what came before and after we cannot know, so it would be more prudent to accept the new faith if it can tell us what came before and after this present life, here in the hall.
Conclusion
So let us enjoy the mead here at Mead With Bede, as friends sat in the hall on a cold winter night, in this case Jarrow Hall, a good community which our museum upholds. May the mead unite us here for good times in the warmth of the hall, our own Middangeard, safe from the giants, the beasts and the monsters such as Grendel or Fenrir who dwell in the cold moors outside. So too may mead inspire us with wisdom, poetry, creative art, a living culture and spiritual insight, many things which I hope that Jarrow Hall’s work may inspire in all of us. Thank you.
The above is an article that will be published in the upcoming Solmónaþ (early to mid February) 2024 issue of Spellstów. If you enjoyed it, be sure to become a paid subscriber to have access to the entire issue.