Did You Know the Vikings had Cats? Magic, Freya and Norse Folklore

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
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[BELL RINGING]

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What are you doing?
It's not-- no!
Mine goes-- [BELL RINGING]
[BELL RINGING]
[BELL RINGING]
Welcome back to 6 Degrees of Cats.
A podcast about how cats have shaped our past, present, and future.

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Folks, I think my lucky stars that all my systems were backed up
on the cloud.
I was inspired by this episode to hand the reins over to my cats,
but that has had some mixed results.
Anyway, it's me, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B.
So glad to have you back here as we continue exploring

(00:43):
every single possible way that cats have an influence on ourselves
or our culture.
We are over half way through, season one.
And we've come pretty far.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
From the fertile crescent to understand how cats were domesticated.
To ancient Greece and Egypt, where they

(01:03):
were rewarded handsomely for keeping
vermin away from our grains to Kosovo,
where we learned about how we can show care in return.
Among other places--
So I'd say at this point, we've established just
how important cats have been to us humans.
But in this day and age, are we really

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giving kitties the shine they deserve?
Sure, their numbers have grown, but their position in society
seems to have declined.
And in this episode, I, Captain Kitty--
Ow!
OK, OK.
Let me read this, you have very strange handwriting.

(01:47):
And my co-producers, Binky and Snuggles,
will be discussing yet another way that..."the man
did us cats dirty by not giving us the credit they are doing history."
OK, this is the last time we're going to do your script.
Sorry.

(02:08):
So cats were venerated and worshipped in Egypt as gods.
Or, god-adjacent.
But it's not only Egypt.
Last time I told you we were heading to Norway.
Why?
Norway?
Well, it all started
a while back when we were all watching this new film,

(02:28):
the Northman. (sleigh bells/Santa sound)
Not that Northman.
The title refers to the word Northman, which means people
from the North.
The Northman is actually a film about a Viking, a lot of them.
As an aside, boy, am I grateful to be living in the 21st century
sometimes?
Anesthesia, toothpaste, deodorant, lice treatment.

(02:51):
Anyway, compelling stuff.
Lots of great acting, quality cinema by most measures.
Most.
I hate to say this.
But there was a huge historical miss here.
Not enough cats.
Typical Hollywood.
They totally dogwashed the film.

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Because, you see, the Vikings?
They had cats.
Oh, yes, they did.
And not only did they have cats.
They liked cats.
Heck, they loved cats.
Cats were in their homes, on their boats.
And as we'll discuss today, in their stories.

(03:36):
We likely have the Vikings to thank for all the paw prints
across the American continent.
So in this episode, we'll take the Northway
to Norway and other countries in the North of Europe, sort of,
to continue understanding where, why, and how cats came to influence the world.

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Now we here at 6 Degrees of Cats have no direct connection to this culture.
Vikings apparently aren't really around anymore, despite what those folks in Minnesota
think.
And for the record, no, my accent is not from Minnesota.
It's from the other cold state in North America, with lots of northern European settlers

(04:23):
who love cheese curds.
And American football.
(Michigan.)
The Vikings certainly left their mark on the world.
I can't walk around my area without seeing their influence on the facial hair of every white
man under 50 years old.
To grossly simplify, the Vikings were a group of seafaring folks whose descendants settled into

(04:47):
the countries like Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden and Norway.
Later, collectively referred to as Northmen, North people.
On that note, when I used the word "norse" or "nordic" in this episode, it doesn't mean
it's specific to Norway, which is what I thought that meant until recently.

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North, or Nordic, is derived from the word "north" that someone in the Middle Ages came up with
to describe folks from those countries I named earlier.
I debated with the cats on using the word "scandinavian."
But since apparently some people do not count Finland or Iceland as Scandinavia, I'm going
to stick to the word Nordic or North.

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Like culture, like all culture is bound up in stories.
Stories bind us.
They're the soul of our relationships.
They're what help us understand ourselves and our connections to others.
The stories will touch on, come from one specific text that I tried to read but then abandoned

(05:56):
because there are far more authoritative voices on this than mine.
So without further ado, our first expert.
My name is Molly Dowdeswell.
My pronouns are she / her.
I am a freelance writer.
My website is mollydowdeswell
d-o-w-d-e-s-w-e-l-l- Dowdeswell.

(06:17):
Writer dot wordpress dot com.
And that's where you can contact me and find my recent articles and what I've been working on
in some reviews and all of that good stuff.
So about that big book of Norse stories.
The prose editor was written by an Icelandic historian called Snorri.

(06:41):
My pronunciation is not the best.
And he wrote it in the 13th century.
It's quite an interesting example of how you've got to be careful with how you pick your
historical sources even when they're historical themselves.
But I think it's century to us is a long time ago, but not as long ago as the Vikings were.

(07:02):
And at the point that he wrote the prose editor, Vikings had long since died out and Christianity
had become quite prevalent.
The Vikings were absorbed into the general population and kind of faded away around or almost
exactly in 1066.

(07:23):
So doing a little mental math, which is one of my great strengths, that's about 150 years apart.
Think about how much time passed for knowledge to travel back then.
This was obviously before the internet, the printing press and movable type heck a working

(07:45):
postal system.
So I would say that 150 years was more like 300 or something.
That is my amateur opinion anyway.
Here's another thing to bear in mind about The Prose Edda.
It's this huge textbook of all these old North myths written through the lens of Christian

(08:06):
writer.
So whilst they are brilliant source of all the North myths, they have to be kind of taken with
the pinch of salt because it's a completely new and different lens in the 13th century,
based that these myths are being viewed through.
And we are seeing these myths as the writer did not as the Vikings did, which means

(08:31):
bits possibly could have been changed for whatever reason.
And it's hard to tell what actually Vikings believed in and what was added by medieval writers
who were fascinated by these myths.
Because the Vikings didn't have any written records.
It was all overall.

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These written sources have to be taken alongside archaeological remains and items found in burial
sites and things like that.
And here's where the cats come in.
Would you see them buried with people?
They're, like skyrocketing in the Vikings for cats being buried with people.
They're important animals.

(09:13):
Like horses were very important as well dogs too.
That was Dr. Brenda Prahaal, an archaeologist in fellow cat lover.
My university is the city University of New York, the Graduate Center.
Basically wrote my entire master's thesis on one cat skeleton.
2010 I was working on my master's thesis.

(09:36):
My advisor has been working in ice for over 20 years.
I was looking for something to write about.
And so one of the Icelandic researchers that we worked with, he said,
"Brentha, how do you like cats?"
I love cats.
Why?
Oh, because we have this weird site that has a cat skeleton and you should look at.

(10:00):
So that's part of my doctoral dissertation.
I came every summer to dig.
And get this.
Somehow my master's thesis is kind of in the top Google searches of cats and Norse Mythology.
So yeah.

(10:21):
Thank heavens for that.
Because that's how I came to be aware of how important cats were to the Vikings.
Like the Egyptians, they took the trouble of burying kitties.
We have cats and burials in Scandinavia and the Viking age.
We get them sometimes in the Stone Age, but they usually wild cats then.

(10:43):
Starting from maybe late Bronze Age, you start seeing the domestic kittic cat once in a while.
In the Viking age, when we see this really big increase of cats, at least in burials,
which is really quite strange.
So we have that happening.
So prevailing theories are that they were luxury items.

(11:08):
You go into contact with people when you're traveling around and trading.
You see, oh, this is an interesting animal wall to come back with me.
But my opinion is that they're more than that.
Nordic people have been exposed to wild cats and links for very long times since the Stone Age.
So they've recognized the feeling and they've associated that with special properties.

(11:33):
Okay, slight Tigger--
I mean, trigger warning.
Skip ahead about 12 seconds.
If you don't want to hear about using the body part of the cats' special.
Here it comes.
Cat fur was expensive.
So in Viking age, Denmark there's a few different sites that have cat burials sites.

(11:56):
So there's just pits of cat skeletons with cut marks for skinning.
Don't worry, folks.
I do not plan to ever dive deeply into the true crime element of cats.
It's too much.
But anyway -
I hope that illustrates how and when we see cats being prioritized as a very magical animal to these north peoples.

(12:23):
It all starts with a goddess called.
Freya.

It was a fertility goddess.
Cats are associated with fertility because they reproduce quite frequently.
They have large litters and are known to be very promiscuous.

(12:45):
Here we go with the fertility again.
She has a brother.
His name is Frer.
He's also a fertility god.

They all have their own special animals.
Odin has a few.
He's got more than one.
Ravens and the horse.
Freya has cats.

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That's her special animal.
She also has a chariots or a cart.
It's supposedly drawn by some tom cats.
And that's one of the ways she gets around.
She's associated with falcons.
She is also a magician.
She's a shapeshifter.
Known for practicing magic.

(13:28):
If you've been listening to this podcast from the start, you may have picked up on a theme here.
Okay, yes cats, captain obvious.
But also.
Shape shifting.
And magic.
So Freya.
We'll continue learning more about her and her cats after the break.

(14:02):
Before the break, we learned a bit about Freya and this text, The Prose Edda.
Now you might wonder, Freya's really cool and interesting already.
Why isn't she influencing modern-day culture?
Well, she is somewhat part of our daily lives.
But how you might ask?

(14:24):
Her name and her fellow god Thor's are both part of our week.
Thursday is Thursday.
Friday is Freya's day.
I think.
Is it?
One interesting thing about Freya though, is she often gets conflated with another goddess called Frigg,

(14:45):
who was actually the wife of Odin.
The god of gods.
He was the old father.
And because Frigg was the goddess of healing, marriage, motherhood, childbirth,
the two of them often get conflated.
In some sources, they are the same person and Freya is Odin's wife.

(15:12):
And she sits on the throne next to Odin.
In other sources, to separate goddesses, but have very, very close kind of realms that they oversee.
Okay.
So apparently, I'm either saying happy Frigg's day or happy Freya's day.
When I say
Happy Friday.
This raises a really important thing that we need to keep in mind before we continue

(15:36):
down the rabbit - or, cathole.
The Viking people weren't one cohesive group of people.
They were very spread out.
Their religion also was not one cohesive religion.
So what a Viking and Norway or England believed perhaps would have differed somewhat to what a Viking and Iceland is.

(16:00):
And I think Iceland would have believed because of that combined with the fact that they had no written records.
Everything was passed down through word of mouth.
What we've ended up today is a conflation of all these different streams of mythology.
It often makes it hard to tell what beliefs came from where and to try and understand what

(16:25):
North people actually believed instead of what medieval people are telling us.
North people believed.
Historians tend to take the written sources that we have today that often come from the medieval,
an early modern period and kind of dissect them in conjunction with richness, figures and things like that.

(16:46):
Which is generally the best practice for all historians and researchers.
Back to Freya , I think I got that right.
We got to hear about those cats.
She was given two cats by Thor to pull this chariot.
Their described as "gib cats".

(17:09):
Historians aren't sure what that meant then.
And they were said to be according to The Prose Edda.
Of course this is just one source.
Kind of blue, gray color.
I'd been informed that those cats had names.
Bygul and Trygul.
But the cats weren't named.

(17:31):
A lady from North America in the 80s.
(the 1980s) gave them names in something she wrote and then the internet kind of took it from there.
See?
Mythology.
That's how it works.
Let's continue enjoying this speculative fiction on these two kiddies who pulled Freya's chariot.

(17:52):
They were seen then as per constant companions and often in arts.
She's depicted with these cats.
I don't know either.
There is a direct cause of the myth that said she received these cats from Thor or it predates the myth.
But she's been seen as linked with cats.

(18:14):
It was said she would bless whoever was kind to cats.
Valhalla, here I come.
So what do they look like?
They're described as gray or blue.
However, Norwegian forest cats don't tend to be that color.
So that's possibly an example of how these stories were passed from place to place in the middle ages into these textbooks of North and the mythology written by medieval men.

(18:42):
So it's possible that wherever the tale comes from that the cats were gray or blue was not Norway.
Somewhere where native cats or the cats they had, had been brought from wherever were gray, such blue.
You know, I wonder about that breed of cat.
I have a feeling this might be trace evidence of how cats got around and spread their DNA as passengers on these Viking boats.

(19:08):
That's not the only place that blue cats show up.
One of my favorite stories, well, the only one I actually read when I downloaded the English translation of The Prose Edda is the story of a challenge that Thor encountered while on a very interesting Odyssey.
In this scene, the host of this great hall that Thor ends up in, challenges him, to pick up his cat.

(19:35):
Here's what happened.
Next, a kind of gray cat ran out on the whole floor and it was rather big.
Thor went up and took hold with his hand down under the middle of its belly and lifted it up.
But the cat arched its back as much as Thor stretched up his hand.

(20:00):
And when Thor reached his high up as the furthest he could, then the cat raised just one paw and Thor was not able to perform this feat.
The author of this story has definitely tried to pick up a sleeping cat before.
Alrighty, we've well established that cats are definitely mentioned in The Prose Edda

(20:25):
What did they actually mean or symbolize to the early Nordic peoples?
With Freya, it kind of links to her.
She is known for being quite independent, quite strong.
And I think that links to how cats have come to be known.
They're very loving, very loyal, very affectionate animals, but they're also incredibly independent.

(20:50):
And they do things on their own time. I think that perhaps links to Freya's own personality.
So we have a story about a sorceress or a prophetess in Eric the Red Saga in Greenland.
The sorceress or prophetess whether she has cat fur gloves.

(21:11):
At least in my research in Icelandic literature, medieval literature, cats seem to be associated with magic only.
So they're either magical themselves or they're associated with somebody that's a magician.
And that can possibly be like the fact of Freya also.
She was had to be a seer and she could kind of manipulate fate to some extent.

(21:36):
She was quite involved in magic.
Magic and women, you don't say.
What else was she connected to?
She was seen also as the goddess of death.
It was said in North mythology that when warriors died, half of them would be taken by Freya into her field of people.

(22:02):
And then the other half would be taken into the afterlife by Odin.
And they split all the souls of the warriors.
So that's where she gets the goddess of death part.
Hmm, I'm confused.
Wasn't she also associated with childbirth?

(22:23):
What's going on here?
The earlier idea seems to be that the world of death was in the hands of women.
That was an expert on Norse folklore with whom I had the privilege of consulting a while back.
My name is Terry Gunnell and Professor Folkloristics at the University of Iceland.
And I've been teaching here for about 20 years.

(22:45):
Dr. Gunnell shared a really cool observation about this death and birth duality we're talking about here.
So regularly the winter seems to be associated with women.
An argument that I've been putting out there was that some people the year was divided into two.
Because we have gods being here and gods traveling away.
Some of the times they're away when you want them.
But this is the period of course of darkness and growth.

(23:10):
And if we think of the growth of the land and in terms of a pregnant woman,
of course the land is growing inside out of sight over the winter.
There appears a gestation to a certain extent.
And then it comes to life as summer comes.
The growing is taking place over the winter time in the darkness.
This is just a position from my sight and I've been arguing this in various lectures.

(23:33):
I'm going to explain why women are always associated with women.
Love, cats, fertility, birth, magic.
Now winter and death, pick a lane Freya.

(23:55):
She's representing some pretty important stuff about the human experience.
So why don't we hear a lot more about her?
Part of the way that the image of the powerful women develops,
especially as the old Nordic religions were gradually taken up by a warrior class.
Women who used to be the priestesses who put to one side,

(24:18):
men take over religion, religion moves in from the landscape into the whole of the kings and the warriors.
Who are in a sense emulating Christianity, which they've seen with Shava Man and the other countries,
where religion is very much in the hands of men, men who take on the role of a god in the shape of a priest.
What we see gradually happening is sort of God s is, for example, being put more and more to one side,

(24:42):
more and more in possessing male gods, then of course Christianity takes over and underloughed finishes that process.
And I think in parallel, this explains why cats roles were also diminished from the culture.
Once Christianity happens, you don't get any inclusion in burials and they more anyway.
This isn't the first nor will it be the last time this has happened in the history of the world,

(25:08):
and it certainly isn't unique to Nordic cultures.
We'll be hearing more from Dr. Gunnel in a future episode.
More magic, cats, and Nordic culture to come.
It's been said that the version of history were told is by the winners and the people in power who publish.

(25:31):
The Viking Way of Life, you know?
Don't you think the Vikings are little differently now that you know they had cats on board?
And who believed in a magical maternal goddess of death on a chariot drawn by two blue or blue gray cats?
I sure do. So I'm telling you.

(25:56):
The Northman would have been better with cats.
And more historically accurate, just saying.
Well folks, I don't know about you, but a very clear pattern is emerging in the world.
And if Fridays weren't already magical for you, now you can add cats and goddesses to it.

(26:20):
In the next episode, we'll follow this thread about maternity and motherhood.
Talk about magic, huh?
I want to thank my wonderful experts, Molly Dowdeswell, Brenda Prehal and Terry Gunnell.
While the opinions are my own, the research and work is theirs

(26:44):
If you'd like to learn more about them or their work, please check out our show notes, which also include the references and research that went into this episode.
If you loved it, please give us a five-star rating and a review until all your friends about 60 degrees of cats.
Oh, and big thanks to my production team, which includes my co-executive producers, Binky and Snuggles, who are threatening a mutiny if I don't feed them more.

(27:08):
Thanks again, folks. I appreciate you.
Everything is connected, including Vikings and cats.
6 Degrees of cats is produced, written, edited and hosted by yours truly, Captain Kitty, aka Amanda B.
Please subscribe to our mailing list by visiting tinyurl.com/6degreesofcats, or find us on all those social media platforms.

(27:36):
And for my paid subscribers, you'll have access to the extra audio with more deep dives by our experts.
This and all episodes are dedicated to the misunderstood, the marginalized, the resilient, and the weird.
And of course, all the cats we've loved and lost.

(28:04):
Our newest cat, she's pretty young. My husband is not allowed to name our children because he named this cat Poopy.

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