☽︎Sky and Signs

The Norse sky

Old Norse star names and how old they really are

Lists of ‘Viking star names’ are easy to find. Few say where each name comes from, and the dates matter. Some names really are medieval, some were used by country people a few hundred years ago, and at least one was put forward by a scholar in 1828. Here they are with their earliest evidence.

The genuinely old ones

The oldest Norse star names are in an Icelandic manuscript whose earliest part dates from about 1192. Its reckoning text, known as Rím I, calls the Plough simply vagn, the wain, and the Little Bear kvenna-vagn, the women’s wain. The same manuscript has two more: Fiskikarlar, the fishermen, for Orion or its belt, and Úlfs keptr, the wolf’s jaw, for the V-shaped Hyades in Taurus. Fiskikarlar was still in use among country people in Norway and Iceland in the early 20th century.

Even these are 12th-century evidence, not Viking-age. Much of the sky lore in the same text is borrowed Latin learning from Isidore, Bede and Honorius. Whether the wolf’s jaw has anything to do with the wolves that chase the sun is a scholar’s guess.

Odin’s Wagon and Charles’s Wain

The Swedes call the Plough Karlavagnen, the men’s wagon, and the name is related to the English Charles’s Wain; Old English had carles wæn. The first Swedish citation is from 1538. Folk etymology later took the Charles to be Charlemagne.

Odin’s Wagon, Óðins vagn, is quoted everywhere, but it is not found in any Old Norse text. Grimm noted as much: no Old Norse Óðins vagn, only the wain in the heavens. The real evidence is Dutch: Woenswaghen, Woden’s wagon, in a manuscript of 1470. The Norse form is an inference from that.

Frigg, Loki and the Milky Way

Friggerock, Frigg’s distaff, is a Scandinavian folk name for Orion’s belt reported by Grimm in 1835. In 1695 Peter Syv recorded the Christian version, Marirok, Mary’s distaff. No medieval source has the name; the Old Norse-looking form Friggjarrokkr seems to be a scholar’s tidying-up. Frigg’s star, Friggjarstjarna, for Venus, does appear in medieval prose, but it is probably a translation of the Latin stella Veneris.

Lokabrenna, Loki’s burning, is often given as the Norse name of Sirius. It goes back to the Icelandic scholar Finnur Magnússon in 1828, and so does the link with the fires of Ragnarök. It is a 19th-century name.

For the Milky Way, the Swedish Vintergatan, the winter street, is first recorded in 1579. Far older is a Saxon name: around 970 the chronicler Widukind of Corvey wrote that the Milky Way was still called by the name of Iring, and Old English glosses have Iringes weg. And English has its own: Chaucer, in the House of Fame, calls the Milky Way Watling Street, after the Roman road.

See it in the sky

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