Nanna Nepsdóttir

Summary

Nanna is the wife of Baldr in Norse myth, daughter of a man called Nepr, and mother of Forseti, owner of the golden hall Glitnir, from whom all who come with disputes go away reconciled. Gylfaginning 32; Grímnismál 15. Snorri names her among the goddesses who sat at the feast of the giant Ægir, with Frigg, Freyja, Iðunn, Gerðr and Sigyn. Skáldskaparmál 1.

Her story is the story of Baldr's death. Blind Höðr threw at his brother the mistletoe that Loki had put in his hand, and Baldr fell dead. The gods carried his body to the sea, to his ship Hringhorni, to make his pyre on it, but the ship would not move until they sent to Jötunheimr for the giantess Hyrrokkin, who launched it with one push. Then Baldr's body was carried onto the ship, and when his wife Nanna saw it her heart burst with grief and she died. She was carried onto the pyre and laid in the fire with him, and Thor hallowed the pyre with his hammer.

Then Hermóðr, Baldr's brother, rode Odin's horse for nine nights to the hall of Hel, found his brother sitting in the high seat and stayed the night. Hel said: Baldr will return if everything in the world weeps for him. When Hermóðr rose to go back, Baldr led him out of the hall and sent with him the ring Draupnir, which Odin had laid on the pyre, as a keepsake for his father. Nanna sent Frigg a linen cloth and other gifts, and to Frigg's servant Fulla a finger-ring. The gods' messengers went through the world asking that Baldr be wept out of Hel, and everything wept except a giantess in a cave who said she would not, so he stayed with Hel.

The idea the story turns on is that Nanna follows her husband through the whole of death: grief kills her when she sees his body, she burns with him on the same ship, she sits with him in Hel's hall, and from there she sends gifts to the living. The gifts are addressed: a cloth to Frigg, Baldr's mother, who had taken an oath from everything not to harm him, and a ring to her servant. The dead answer the living with things to wear and carry, as Baldr sends the ring back to his father. At the end of time Baldr comes out of Hel's hall with Höðr, and the text does not mention Nanna.

We read the name in the Arabic tongue like this, as a proposal on the method, since neither essay reads it. The final -a of Nanna is the Old Norse feminine ending; in the oblique cases it becomes Nönnu, as in "the son of Baldr and Nanna Nepsdóttir", leaving Nann-. It has the doubled n of Arabic ḥanna, and ḥ drops in the European languages, as the Hebrew name Ḥannāh became Anna in the Greek translation. In Lane ḥanna is "he was affected with a yearning, or an intense emotion of grief or of joy"; one says of a woman "she yearns towards her former husband", of a she-camel that she cried after her young, and ḥanna qalbī ilayhi, "my heart yearned towards him", without a sound. On this reading Nanna is "the one who yearns", whose heart went out to her husband, which is what the story makes her: she saw his body, her heart burst, and she followed him to the pyre and to Hel. The Norse word the dictionary sets beside the name, nenna, means to have the heart for something, so the two readings meet in the heart.

Linguistic Root

Nanna and ḥanna

Cleasby and Vigfusson call Nanna "the name of a goddess, the wife of Balder", set beside it the word nenna, "energy", and note that the name is frequent in poetic terms for a woman, such as "Nanna of the bed" and "Nanna of rings". Orel derives the Norse verb nenna, "to strive, to have a heart for", from a Germanic word meaning to take courage, to dare, Gothic ana-nanþjan, "to take courage".

Lane gives ḥanna, "he was affected with a yearning, longing, or desire, or an intense emotion of grief or of joy"; ḥanna ilayhi, "his soul yearned towards him"; "she yearns towards her first, or former, husband"; ḥannat, said of a woman, "she yearned towards her child"; of a she-camel, "she uttered a cry with emotion after her young one"; ḥanna qalbī ilayhi, "my heart yearned towards him, without the uttering of a cry"; and ḥanna ʿalayhi, "he was merciful, compassionate towards him". Lane, ḥ-n-n. The doubled n of the Norse name answers the doubled n of ḥanna, and ḥ drops or becomes h, as the Juthoor table records for the guttural letters. One name shows the drop exactly: Ḥannāh, the mother of Samuel, was written Anna without ḥ in the old Greek translation, as Brown–Driver–Briggs notes. Brown–Driver–Briggs, Ḥannāh. What this comparison does not explain is the n at the start of the Norse name, unless it repeats the sound of the root, as sounds repeat in many names by which women and children are called.

The second reading

We also read the name as anna: in Lane anna, yaʾinnu, anīnan is "he moaned, or uttered a prolonged voice of complaint, by reason of pain". It has the same doubled n, and the glottal stop drops as ḥ does; the Arabs even join the two roots in the saying mā lahu ḥānnatun wa-lā ānnatun. Moaning is the sound of grief and ḥanīn the movement of the heart, and in the text Nanna dies without a sound, so ḥanna is closer to her story.

Key Mythic Narratives

Nanna in Saxo

Saxo Grammaticus makes Nanna the daughter of King Gewar and foster-sister of the hero Hother. Balder, Odin's son, saw her bathing and fell madly in love, and asked her father for her; Gewar told him to learn her own mind. She refused, saying that a god could not wed a mortal, because the vast difference of their natures prevented any bond. She married Hother, and Balder was so harassed by night phantoms in her likeness that he could no longer walk. In the Danish version the woman is the cause of the brothers' feud, and she chooses the killer rather than the killed. The full story is on the page for Höðr. Saxo, Gesta Danorum, Book III, Elton translation.

Another Nanna

In Hyndluljóð a woman named Nanna, daughter of Nökkvi, appears in the ancestry of Óttarr, the man Freyja protects. The text does not say she is Baldr's wife.

The dead woman at the feast

Snorri tells in Gylfaginning that Nanna died on Baldr's pyre, and then, at the start of Skáldskaparmál, counts her among the goddesses sitting at Ægir's feast, with her son Forseti among the judges. Snorri does not place the two reports in one time.

Ibn Faḍlān and the burning ship

The Arab traveller Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān described, on his journey of 309 AH, 921–922 CE, the funeral of a great man of the Rūs on the river Ātil. They burned him in a ship, and asked his slave women: which of you will die with him? One said: I will. On the day of the burning they lifted her three times above something they had built like a door-frame, and the third time she said: I see my master seated in Paradise, and Paradise is beautiful and green; his men and his slaves are with him; he summons me, so bring me to him. She took off two bracelets and gave them to the woman who was to kill her, and two anklets to the two slave women who had waited on her; then she was taken into the ship, killed, and burned with her master. Ibn Faḍlān, trans. Montgomery, Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 3. Both accounts have a ship burned with a great man and a woman who dies with him, a woman who gives away her ornaments, and a man seen seated in the hall of the dead. They differ in that Nanna is a wife who dies of grief, while Ibn Faḍlān's slave woman volunteers and is killed.

Symbolic Reading

The essay Rereading Norse Myths reads Baldr's death and his return after Ragnarök as the sun's absence in the polar winter and its return in spring, and does not mention Nanna. If Baldr is the absent sun, Nanna, who goes with him and stays with him in Hel's hall, is the warmth of the household that departs with the sun.

The texts support a reading from people's lives: a funeral on a burning ship, a woman burned with the dead man, and gifts carried by a messenger from the dead to the living. Ibn Faḍlān's account shows that burning a great man in his ship, with a woman dying beside him, was a custom an eyewitness saw among a northern people in the tenth century, although there the woman was a slave who was killed, not a wife killed by grief.

Cross-Cultural Parallels

Osiris was killed by his brother Set, and his wife Isis searched for him, mourned him and gathered his body until she conceived Horus by him. Baldr was killed by his brother's throw, and his wife Nanna died of grief and was burned with him. Both wives grieve for a husband killed by his brother, and they part in their answer: Isis stays among the living and brings her husband back to a kind of life, while Nanna follows her husband into the house of the dead and does not return.

Hermóðr's ride to Hel's hall, where Baldr and Nanna sat, is one of the witnesses of the descent to the underworld, and Baldr's death and his return after Ragnarök stand beside the stories of death and return.