Working with Mordgud
by Gary DeJong
In a way, Mordgud’s relative obscurity was helpful to me. It
allowed me time to form my own impressions of her before comparing them to the
accounts of others who have dealt with her. This way my perception of her
was, to a large extent, simply complemented and confirmed rather than being
formed and led by any preconceptions. The first dreams, which I took to be
contact with Hela, were very confusing and I had to wonder if it was just her,
or whether other members of her family were dropping in. Due less-than-understanding
scholarship, one writer (of whose work I am a great fan) describes her name as
a cognate of Mud God, and with the very grave-and-decay themes of the worse of
these dreams, I had to wonder if I had been contacted by Mordgud at some point.
That line of wondering proved to be enough to call up her presence, and far from being a "mud god", she took on a form that reminded me a lot of Luis Royos fantasy art, Bifid Churasco standing out as a case in point. Positive, outgoing, and enthusiastic, her personality was a far cry from what one would, off-the-cuff, associate with Helheim. However, it seemed to match the stories of her I came by afterwards from others. She exhibits some of the best traits of her dad (reputedly Loki) matched with much of the steadfastness of her older sister. And, like others, I really do have this feeling of her being under-rated; she warrants more than the meagre mention the lore would accord her.
In The Jotunbok, Mordant Carnival noted that "She, or one of the beings that fed in to her, was the subject of considerable reverence at one point". That brings to mind other mythological precedents. Mordgud as Guardian of the Bridge resonates with the archetype of woman as passageway; in a sense she is the bridge that she keeps. Closer to that part of Europe are echoes of such a notion in tales of supernatural females standing stride over the river. As narrated in the Second Battle of Mag Tuired:
84. The Dagda had a house in Glen Edin in the north, and he had arranged to meet a woman in Glen Edin a year from that day, near the All Hallows of the battle. The Unshin of Connacht roars to the south of it. He saw the woman at the Unshin in Corann, washing, with one of her feet at Allod Echae (that is, Aghanagh) south of the water and the other at Lisconny north of the water. There were nine loosened tresses on her head. The Dagda spoke with her, and they united. "The Bed of the Couple" was the name of that place from that time on. (The woman mentioned here is the Morrigan.)
A rather burlesque version apears in Skáldskaparmál:
Then Thor saw Gjálp, daughter of Geirröðr, standing in certain ravines, one leg in each , spanning the river, and she was causing the spate. Then Thor snatched up a great stone out of the river and cast it at her, saying these words: “At its source should a river be stemmed.” Nor did he miss that at which he threw.
But it is in the Zoroastrian text Avesta that we have the clearest analogue for Mordgud [excerpted from Vendidad, chapter 5, verses 29 and 30]:
At the head of the Chinwad bridge, the holy bridge made by Mazda, they ask for their spirits and souls the reward for the worldly goods which they gave away here below. ...'Then comes the beautiful, well-shapen, strong and well-formed maid, with the dogs at her sides, one who can distinguish, who has many children, happy, and of high understanding. She makes the soul of the righteous one go up ....above the Chinwad bridge she places it in the presence of the heavenly gods themselves.
This is either a motif derived from a common Indo-European source or a case of direct cross-cultural borrowing from Indo-Iranian traditions, in which case we might have to attribute a role to the Alans, a Saramatian tribe whose range of settlement briefly reached into Northern Europe in historical times.
To come by a harder polytheist understanding of her origins, I have had to rely on what subjective impressions I could glean from her and her family. During an initial period of my involvement with the Rökkr clan I went through a phase of testing and training. Part of that was a brief, prelimininary intro to the nature of the elements, starting with the Jotun basics of fire and ice. At what turned out to be the behest of Loki I was contacted by a young fire-etin named Einmyria, a descendant of the Einmyria mentioned in the lore (although Loki later told me she was a “construct”). He had decided at that point not to deal with me too directly, as my mistrust of him was still too obstructive. If I was going to be learning about fire, it seemed logical I should be exposed to the mysteries of ice as well, but the only ice-thurse I could think of as a possible contact (I was getting passed around among family members after all) was Mordgud's mum.
“Loki's daughter by a random frost-thurse” is how I have seen Mordgud depicted, and this is something she agrees with. So a referral was handed out in due order. Here I got some insight in to how Mordgud herself understood her beginnings. Her mother dealt with me in an entirely civil manner, even if there was the subtext that her normal mode of handling strangers was to render them inert and hopefully edible as quickly and expediently as circumstances would allow. An icy solitude in a place made of stone was the baseline condition of her existence. The first time she met Loki, she tried to kill him simply on general principles. It is not often Loki gets such an almost insurmountable challenge to his personal charisma, and there is nothing he finds more enticing. The end result of that was Mordgud.
"What's bred in the bone will out in the flesh," as they say, so it wasn't long in coming before Mordgud found the isolation and quiet of her mother's lifestyle stifling in light of what she inherited from her dad. Dangerously so, in fact; her sheer loneliness led her to seek out confrontations with the neighbours, which was not the safest past time in that corner of Niflheim. Subsequently she left the den to find the company of others, and to this day has a passion for interacting with beings she can regard as non-threats (and by “non-threats”, read “humans”). By the way, I suspect very strongly that her mother is the thurse mentioned in the lore by the name of Thok.
Artwork by J. Roesch.