How to translate Valhalla. What is Valhalla? Viking afterlife performances

06.11.2019

Who first started talking about the "Silver Age", why this term was so disgusting to contemporaries and when it finally became a commonplace - Arzamas retells the key points of Omri Ronen's work "The Silver Age as Intention and Fiction"

Applied to the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, the concept of "Silver Age" is one of the fundamental ones for describing the history of Russian culture. Today, no one can doubt the positive (one might even say “noble”, like silver itself) coloring of this phrase - opposed, by the way, to such “decadent” characteristics of the same historical period in Western culture, as fin de siècle ("end of the century") or "end of a beautiful era". The number of books, articles, anthologies and anthologies, where the "Silver Age" appears as an established definition, simply cannot be counted. Nevertheless, the appearance of the phrase, and the meaning that contemporaries put into it, is not even a problem, but a whole detective story.

Pushkin at the lyceum exam in Tsarskoye Selo. Painting by Ilya Repin. 1911 Wikimedia Commons

Every time has its own metal

It’s worth starting from afar, namely with two significant examples when the properties of metals are attributed to the epoch. And here it is worth mentioning the ancient classics (primarily Hesiod and Ovid), on the one hand, and Pushkin's friend and co-editor on Sovremennik, Pyotr Aleksandrovich Pletnev, on the other.

The first imagined the history of mankind as a succession of various human races (in Hesiod, for example, gold, silver, copper, heroic and iron; Ovid would subsequently abandon the age of heroes and prefer the classification only “according to metals”), alternately created by the gods and eventually disappearing off the face of the earth.

The critic Pyotr Alexandrovich Pletnev first called the era of Zhukovsky, Batyushkov, Pushkin and Baratynsky the "golden age" of Russian poetry. The definition was quickly accepted by contemporaries and by the middle of the 19th century it had become a commonplace. In this sense, calling the next great surge of poetic (and not only) culture the “silver” age is nothing but humiliation: silver is a metal much less noble than gold.

So it becomes clear why the humanities scholars, who emerged from the cultural cauldron of the turn of the century, were deeply disgusted by the phrase “silver age”. These were the critic and translator Gleb Petrovich Struve (1898-1985), the linguist Roman Osipovich Yakobson (1896-1982) and the literary historian Nikolai Ivanovich Khardzhiev (1903-1996). All three spoke of the "Silver Age" with considerable irritation, directly calling such a name erroneous and incorrect. Conversations with Struve and Jacobson's lectures at Harvard inspired Omri Ronen (1937-2012) to explore the origins and reasons for the rise of the term "Silver Age" in a fascinating (almost detective) way. This note only claims to be a popular retelling of the work of the remarkable scholar-erudite "The Silver Age as Intention and Fiction."

Berdyaev and the memoirist's mistake

Dmitry Petrovich Svyatopolk-Mirsky (1890-1939), one of the most influential critics of the Russian diaspora and the author of one of the best "History of Russian Literature", preferred to call the cultural abundance surrounding him the "second golden age". In accordance with the hierarchy of precious metals, Mirsky called the era of Fet, Nekrasov and Alexei Tolstoy the “silver age”, and here he coincided with the philosophers Vladimir Solovyov and Vasily Rozanov, who allotted for the “silver age” a period from approximately 1841 to 1881.

Nikolai Berdyaev Wikimedia Commons

It is even more important to point out that Nikolai Alexandrovich Berdyaev (1874-1948), who is traditionally credited with the authorship of the term "Silver Age" in relation to the turn of the 19th-20th centuries, actually imagined cultural development in much the same way as his colleagues in the philosophical workshop . According to the established tradition, Berdyaev called the Pushkin era the golden age, and the beginning of the 20th century, with its powerful creative upsurge, the Russian cultural (but by no means religious) renaissance. It is characteristic that the phrase "silver age" is not found in any of Berdyaev's texts. In attributing to Berdyaev the dubious fame of the discoverer of the term, several lines from the memoirs of the poet and critic Sergei Makovsky "On the Parnassus of the Silver Age", published in 1962, are to blame:

“The languor of the spirit, the desire for the “beyond” has permeated our age, the “Silver Age” (as Berdyaev called it, as opposed to Pushkin’s “Golden Age”), partly under the influence of the West.”

The mysterious Gleb Marev and the emergence of the term

The very first writer who worked at the turn of the century and declared his own era the "Silver Age" was the mysterious Gleb Marev (almost nothing is known about him, so it is possible that the name was a pseudonym). In 1913, under his name, the pamphlet “Vsedury. Gauntlet with Modernity”, which included the manifesto of the “End Age of Poesi”. It is there that the formulation of the metallurgical metamorphoses of Russian literature is contained: “Pushkin is gold; symbolism - silver; modernity is a dull-coppered all-fool.”

R. V. Ivanov-Razumnik with children: son Leo and daughter Irina. 1910s Russian National Library

If we take into account the quite probable parodic nature of Marev's work, it becomes clear the context in which the phrase "Silver Age" was originally used to describe the modern era for writers. It was in a polemical vein that the philosopher and publicist Razumnik Vasilievich Ivanov-Razumnik (1878-1946) spoke, in the article of 1925 "The Look and Something" poisonously mocking (under the pseudonym of Griboedov Ippolit Udushyev) over Zamyatin, "Serapion Brothers" "Serapion Brothers" - an association of young prose writers, poets and critics, which arose in Petrograd on February 1, 1921. The members of the association were Lev Lunts, Ilya Gruzdev, Mikhail Zoshchenko, Veniamin Kaverin, Nikolai Nikitin, Mikhail Slonimsky, Elizaveta Polonskaya, Konstantin Fedin, Nikolai Tikhonov, Vsevolod Ivanov., acmeists and even formalists. The second period of Russian modernism, which flourished in the 1920s, Ivanov-Razumnik contemptuously dubbed the "Silver Age", predicting the further decline of Russian culture:

Four years later, in 1929, the poet and critic Vladimir Pyast (Vladimir Alekseevich Pestovsky, 1886-1940), in the preface to his memoirs "Meetings", spoke seriously about the "silver age" of contemporary poetry (it is possible that he did this in the order of the dispute with Ivanov-Razumnik) - although very inconsistently and prudently:

“We are far from claiming to compare our peers, “eighties” by birth, with representatives of some kind of “Silver Age” of Russian, say, “modernism”. However, in the mid-eighties, a rather significant number of people were born who were called to "serve the muses."

Piast also found the "golden" and "silver" ages in classical Russian literature - he tried to project the same two-stage scheme onto contemporary culture, speaking of different generations of writers.

The Silver Age is getting bigger

Magazine "Numbers" imwerden.de

The expansion of the scope of the concept of "Silver Age" belongs to the critics of the Russian emigration. The first to spread the term, applying it to the description of the entire pre-revolutionary era of modernism in Russia, was Nikolai Avdeevich Otsup (1894-1958). Initially, he only repeated Piast's well-known thoughts in a 1933 article entitled "The Silver Age of Russian Poetry" and published in the popular Parisian émigré magazine Chisla. Otsup, without mentioning Piast in any way, actually borrowed from the latter the idea of two centuries of Russian modernism, but threw out the “golden age” from the 20th century. Here is a typical example of Otsup's reasoning:

“Belated in its development, Russia, by the force of a number of historical reasons was forced into short term to carry out what has been done in Europe for several centuries. The inimitable rise of the "golden age" is partly explained by this. But what we have called the “Silver Age”, in terms of strength and energy, as well as the abundance of amazing creatures, has almost no analogy in the West: these are, as it were, phenomena squeezed into three decades, which occupied, for example, in France throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries."

It was this compilation article that introduced the expression "silver age" into the lexicon of the Russian literary emigration.

One of the first specified phrase noted the well-known Parisian critic Vladimir Vasilievich Veidle (1895-1979), who wrote in his article “Three Russias” published in 1937:

"The most amazing recent history Russia is that that silver age of Russian culture, which preceded its revolutionary collapse, turned out to be possible.

Members of the Sounding Shell Studio. Photo by Moses Nappelbaum. 1921 On the left - Frederica and Ida Nappelbaum, in the center - Nikolai Gumilyov, on the right - Vera Lurie and Konstantin Vaginov, below - Georgy Ivanov and Irina Odoevtseva. Literary Crimea / vk.com

Here the new term for the era is just beginning to be used as something obvious, although this does not mean that it was from 1937 that the idea of the “Silver Age” has already become public domain: the morbidly jealous Otsup in a revised version of his article, which was published after the death of the critic , specially added the words that it was he who first owned the name "to characterize modernist Russian literature." And here a reasonable question arises: what did the "figures" of the "Silver Age" era think about themselves? How did the poets themselves define themselves, representing this era? For example, Osip Mandelstam applied the well-known term “Sturm und Drang” (“Storm and Drang”) to the era of Russian modernism.

The phrase "Silver Age" as applied to the beginning of the 20th century is found only in two major poets(or rather, poetess). In Marina Tsvetaeva's article "The Devil", published in 1935 in the leading Parisian émigré magazine "Modern Notes", the following lines were removed during publication (they were later restored by researchers): we, the children of the silver age, need about thirty pieces of silver.”

From this passage it follows that Tsvetaeva, firstly, was familiar with the name "Silver Age"; secondly, she perceived it with a sufficient degree of irony (it is possible that these words were a reaction to the above reasoning of Otsup in 1933). Finally, perhaps the most famous are the lines from Anna Akhmatova's Poem Without a Hero:

On Galernaya arch darkened,
In Summer, the weather vane sang subtly,
And the silver moon is bright
Frozen over the Silver Age.

Understanding these lines is impossible without referring to the broader context of the poet's work, but there is no doubt that Akhmatova's "Silver Age" is not a definition of an era, but a common quotation that has its own function in artistic text. For the author of "A Poem Without a Hero", dedicated to summing up the results, the name "Silver Age" is not a characteristic of the era, but one of its names (obviously not indisputable), given literary critics and other cultural figures.

Nevertheless, the phrase under discussion quickly lost its original meaning and began to be used as a classification term. Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov wrote in the preface to the poetic anthology of the turn of the century: “The poetics of the Silver Age, about which in question, is primarily the poetics of Russian modernism. This is how it is customary to call three poetic trends that announced their existence between 1890 and 1917 ... ”So the definition quickly took hold and was accepted on faith by both readers and researchers (it is possible that for lack of a better one) and spread to painting, sculpture, architecture and other areas of culture.

VALHALLA.
Val (b) halla, Val (b) galla (ancient Iceland. Valh?ll) in German-Scandinavian mythology - a heavenly chamber in Asgard ("hall of the slain" in the chamber of Odin) for those who fell in battle, Paradise for valiant warriors.

Valhalla was located in Asgard next to the ash tree Yggdrasil. It is surrounded by the full-flowing stream Tund, which the Einherjars cannot cross.
On its roof are the deer Eikturmir and the goat Heidrun, eating the leaves of the World Tree Yggdrasil (a gigantic ash (or yew), in the form of which the Scandinavians imagined the universe). It belonged to the supreme god Odin and was part of the complex of his palace, which was called Gladsheim.

According to legend, Valhalla is a giant hall with a roof of gilded shields, which are supported by spears. This hall has 540 doors and 800 warriors will come out through each at the call of the god Heimdall for the last battle of Ragnarok. Instead of fire, Valhalla was illuminated by shining swords.

Doors five hundred
and forty, as I remember, -
Valhalla has:
at the door every eight
hundreds of warriors
goes to battle with the wolf

Eliseeva L. A.

Odin rules Valhalla. He selects half of the soldiers who fell in battle, and the Valkyries deliver them to the chamber. The other half of the fallen goes to Folkwang ("People's Field") to the goddess Freya.

Einheria enter Valhalla after death. These are the chosen people, marked by military prowess and who died a death worthy of a warrior. During their lifetime, they already enjoyed the special patronage of the supreme God Odin, and when they died, the Valkyries took them away and transferred them to Valhalla. There they spend their time in feasts and battles.

The warriors who live in Valhalla are called einherii. Every day in the morning they put on armor and fight to the death, and after that they rise and sit down at the common table to feast. They eat the meat of the boar Sehrimnir, who is slaughtered every day and every day he is resurrected. Einherias drink honey, which is milked by the goat Heidrun.

In order to oust pagan cultures, Christianity and the baptists identified Valhalla with hell. Aces were identified with demons, einheria (heroes) - with great sinners, the principle of endless bloody slaughter and the daily feast after the resurrection from the dead (and the regrowth of severed limbs) - identified with the infinity of hellish torments.

Gladsheim is the fifth
it's full of gold
Valhalla shines;
there Hroft collects
brave warriors,
killed in battle.
It's easy to guess
where is Odin's house,
looking at the chambers
rafters there - spears,
and the roof - shields
and armor on the benches.
It's easy to guess
where is Odin's house,
looking at the chambers: Hall of Valhalla. Illustration for the "Prose Edda". 1760
the wolf is out there to the west
hanging from the door
an eagle soars from above.

Elder Edda "Speech of Grimnir" (8-10)

Valhalla, as a heavenly kingdom for the elect, apparently differentiated relatively late from the underworld kingdom of the dead (Hel). In the "Speech of Grimnir" ("Elder Edda") Valhalla is correlated with Gladsheim ("dwelling of joy"), and in the "Younger Edda" the dwelling in which Odin and "all people worthy and righteous" (Christian influence) live is called Gimle ("protection from fire") or Vingolf ("abode of bliss").

The commander of one of the companies of the Norwegian motorized infantry battalion "Telemark" inspires his soldiers before attacking the positions of the Taliban with the battle cry "Til Valhalla!" (To Valhalla!) Literally: "You are predators, the Taliban are your prey. To Valhalla! To Valhalla! To Valhalla!"

Valhalla is a heavenly chamber for fallen warriors in German-Scandinavian mythology. Valhalla is located in Asgard (the world or city of the gods) and is a real paradise for the valiant Viking warriors who fought with honor and died with weapons in their hands.

In the paganism of the Slavs Ancient Russia we do not find an exact match with the concept of Valhalla. Perhaps the warriors who fought in battles in Russia had such an idea and even called the place that was prepared for them in the other world by some term, but today nothing is known about this, so Valhalla is a truly unique phenomenon that speaks about such a side of pagan culture that has not been preserved in other countries. In Russian paganism there are concepts of the Upper World, Rule. It is quite possible that Iriy was once presented to the Slavs as a place where the most worthy warriors get, but there is no reliable evidence for this, but the name "Perun's army" came across. Therefore, it is worth considering precisely the German-Scandinavian version of the structure of the Upper World of Asgard and, in particular, Valhalla (Valhalla, Valhalla).

The world for warriors who fell in battle is divided into two parts. Some end up in Valhalla (Palace of the Fallen), while others end up in Folkwang (People's Field). Folkwang is run by the goddess of war and love, Freya. Folkwang was also a place of honor for warriors, as it was considered a paradise for the strongest and most courageous. By the way, the best women also got here, and not only warriors. However, it was Valhalla that enjoyed the greatest respect among the warriors. Valhalla is ruled by God Odin. The Supreme God, as well as the father and leader of the Ases (gods) Odin, sits in the Palace of the Fallen on a throne called Hlidskjalf. From this throne he can see all the worlds and all human affairs. Therefore, deceiving Odin will not work. He sees all the battles and how bravely warriors fight and how fearlessly they die. After another battle, Odin selects the most daring warriors and sends the Valkyries after them.

Valkyries, which translates from Old Norse as “choosers of the slain,” are spirits or goddesses who hover over the battlefield on winged horses and pick up fallen warriors to deliver them to Valhalla. The image of the Valkyries goddesses is undoubtedly very interesting, but we will deal with this in one of the following articles. Maiden warriors, who, according to various ideas, number nine or thirteen, collect souls and see off their world dead soldiers to Odin. Here the warriors enter the Palace of Eternal Pleasures.

There is detailed information about what is happening in Valhalla. God Odin does not just gather the best warriors so that they feast every day and indulge in various pleasures. Bold and fearless warriors are preparing for the decisive battle, which is known as Ragnarok (the death of the gods and the whole world). Valhalla itself looks like a huge hall that can accommodate a large number of people. This hall has 540 doors, through each of which 800 warriors will emerge on the day of the decisive battle. If you do a simple multiplication, it turns out that there are 432 thousand warriors in Valhalla. The roof of Valhalla consists of gilded shields, which is supported by stakes.

The warriors of Valhalla are called Einherjars. Every day from early morning, the Einherjars don armor, train, and fight to the death. However, there is no death here, and therefore the warriors are resurrected and go hunting for the boar Sehrimnir. After a successful hunt, the boar is boiled in his cauldron by the "cook of Valhalla" Eldhrimnir (Andhrimnir). The boar also does not die, and after the meal it rises again until the next day. Warriors sit down to feast, drink honey, which is milked by the goat Heidrun. Goat Heidrun lives on the roof of Valhalla and feeds on the leaves of the World Tree Yggdrasil. After the meal, beautiful maidens come to the warriors.

Getting here was the main dream of any warrior and Viking. The place of pleasures and pleasures that will last until the very end of the world could only be reached by being truly brave and fearless. Each Viking, according to these beliefs, had to fight without sparing his strength, and at each battle he had to fight as if for the last time, and die without shame and fear, and always with a sword in his hands. The real grief was the death of a warrior who at the very last moment lost or dropped his sword. Then, according to legend, he could not become one of the Einherjars and could no longer meet with God Odin to participate in the very last battle.

Val (b) halla, Val (b) galla (ancient Iceland. Valh?ll) in German-Scandinavian mythology - a heavenly chamber in Asgard ("hall of the slain" in the chamber of Odin) for those who fell in battle, Paradise for valiant warriors.

Valhalla was located in Asgard next to the ash tree Yggdrasil. It is surrounded by a full-flowing stream of Tund, which the Einherjars cannot cross.
On its roof are the deer Eikturmir and the goat Heidrun, eating the leaves of the World Tree Yggdrasil (a gigantic ash (or yew), in the form of which the Scandinavians imagined the universe). It belonged to the supreme God Odin and was part of the complex of his palace, which was called Gladsheim.

According to legend, Valhalla is a giant hall with a roof of gilded shields, which are supported by spears. This hall has 540 doors and 800 warriors will come out through each at the call of God Heimdallad for the last battle of Ragnarok. Instead of fire, Valhalla was illuminated by shining swords.

Doors five hundred
and forty, as I remember, -
Valhalla has:
at the door every eight
hundreds of warriors
goes to battle with the wolf

Eliseeva L. A.

Odin rules Valhalla. He selects half of the soldiers who fell in battle, and the Valkyries deliver them to the chamber. The other half of the fallen is sent to Folkwang ("People's Field") to the Goddess Freya.

Einheria enter Valhalla after death. These are the chosen people, marked by military prowess and fallen by death, "worthy of a warrior." During their lifetime, they already enjoyed the special patronage of the supreme God Odin, and when they died, the Valkyries took them away and transferred them to Valhalla. There they spend their time in feasts and battles.

In order to oust pagan cultures, Christianity and the baptists identified Valhalla with hell. Ases were identified with demons, einherias (heroes) with great sinners, the principle of endless bloody slaughter and the daily feast after the resurrection from the dead (and the regrowth of severed limbs) were identified with the infinity of hellish torments.

Gladsheim is the fifth
it's full of gold
Valhalla shines;
there Hroft collects
brave warriors,
killed in battle.
It's easy to guess
where is Odin's house,
looking at the chambers
rafters there - spears,
and the roof - shields
and armor on the benches.
It's easy to guess
where is Odin's house,
looking at the chambers
the wolf is out there to the west
hanging from the door
an eagle soars from above.

Elder Edda "Speech of Grimnir" (8-10)

Valhalla is a heavenly chamber for fallen warriors in. Valhalla is located in Asgard (the world or city of the gods) and is a real paradise for the valiant Viking warriors who fought with honor and died with weapons in their hands.

In the paganism of the Slavs of Ancient Russia, we do not find an exact match with the concept of Valhalla. Perhaps the warriors who fought in battles in Russia had such an idea and even called the place that was prepared for them in the other world by some term, but today nothing is known about this, so Valhalla is a truly unique phenomenon that speaks about such a side of pagan culture that has not been preserved in other countries. In Russian paganism there are concepts of the Upper World, Rule, Navi and (Slavic Paradise). It is quite possible that Iriy once seemed to the Slavs to be the place where the most worthy warriors go, but there is no reliable evidence of this. Therefore, it is worth considering precisely the German-Scandinavian version of the structure of the Upper World of Asgard and, in particular, Valhalla (Valhalla, Valhalla).

The world for warriors who fell in battle is divided into two parts. Some fall into Valhalla (Palace of the Fallen), while others fall into the Folkwang (People's Field). Folkwang is run by the goddess of war and love, Freya. Folkwang was also a place of honor for warriors, as it was considered a paradise for the strongest and most courageous. By the way, the best women also got here, and not only warriors. However, it was Valhalla that enjoyed the greatest respect among the warriors. Valhalla is ruled by the god Odin. The supreme god, as well as the father and leader of the aces (gods) Odin, sits in the Palace of the Fallen on a throne called Hlidskjalf. From this throne he can see all the worlds and all human affairs. Therefore, deceiving Odin will not work. He sees all the battles and how bravely warriors fight and how fearlessly they die. After another battle, Odin selects the most daring warriors and sends the Valkyries after them.

Valkyries, which is translated from Old Norse as “choosing the slain,” are spirits or goddesses who soar over the battlefield on winged horses and pick up fallen warriors to deliver them to Valhalla. The image of the Valkyries goddesses is undoubtedly very interesting, but we will deal with this in one of the following articles. Maiden-warriors, who, according to various ideas, number nine or thirteen, collect souls and escort their world of dead warriors to Odin. Here the warriors enter the Palace of Eternal Pleasures.

Warriors inhabitants of Valhalla are called einherchians. Every day from early morning, the Einherjars don armor, train, and fight to the death. However, there is no death here, and therefore the warriors are resurrected and go hunting for the boar Sehrimnir. After a successful hunt, the boar is boiled in his cauldron by the "cook of Valhalla" Eldhrimnir (Andhrimnir). The boar also does not die, and after the meal it rises again until the next day. Warriors sit down to feast, eat boar meat and drink honey, which is milked by the goat Heidrun. Goat Heidrun lives on the roof of Valhalla and feeds on the leaves of the World Tree Yggdrasil. After the meal, beautiful maidens come to the warriors.

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