8 - Baldr’s Achilles’ Heel? About the Scandinavian Three-God B-Bracteates
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 October 2021
Summary
Abstract
The article seeks to revise the currently dominant interpretation of the so-called ‘three-god bracteates’ as an early version of the Norse myth about Baldr. A detailed review shows that the elements of this myth as it is known from medieval literary sources and the iconographic elements depicted on the much earlier bracteates do not really match. It is clear that the motif on the bracteates is inspired by images from Roman coins, but it is also clear that it does not constitute a direct parallel. The article presents a new suggestion, which is that the bracteates must be considered with Norse narrative traditions in mind, but without forcing the motif to comply with preconceived ideas.
Keywords: Scandinavian Iron Age, iconography, Roman coins, Norse Mythology
A number of Iron Age bracteates from Scandinavia have long been thought to depict a version of the Norse myth about the death of the god Baldr. In two versions of the myth, as it is preserved in literary sources, Baldr is said to be invulnerable to everything except for one special or highly unlikely weapon. In the best-known rendition, this is the mistletoe. Despite efforts to avoid it, this improbable weapon ends up causing his death.
It is a fate that Baldr may be said to share with the Greek hero Achilles about whose invulnerability two stories have come down to us. In one, his mother Thetis attempts to secure immortality for her infant son by anointing him with ambrosia and purifying him in the embers of the hearth, but Peleus, the child's father, interferes and so the treatment remains incomplete. In another, better known, version, Thetis is said to have dipped her son in the waters of Styx and this has made his body invulnerable, except for his heel where she held him. Like Baldr, who is killed with the unusual weapon, Achilles dies when a wound is inflicted on his heel, and this part of his body has become a proverbial reference to a seemingly small, but crucial, weakness. These two mythological figures have little else in common, but Achilles’ heel is nonetheless relevant in the present context – proverbially and also in a more concrete sense.
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- Myth and History in Celtic and Scandinavian Traditions , pp. 173 - 196Publisher: Amsterdam University PressPrint publication year: 2021