Naming a son

In the book, the Long Ships, by Frans G. Bengtsson, there’s a part about the main character, called RED ORM, whose sword is called, ‘Blue-Tongue,’ and he became a Christian, but still practiced an old Viking custom of naming his son. The new child is brought to the father, and as the book states:

  

 “Orm took Blue-Tongue down from her hook on the wall, drew her from her sheath, and placed flour and a few grains of salt upon the tip of her blade.” Then the boy’s head is carefully placed “toward the sword until his tongue and his lips touched the offering.” {Here the Christian priest isn’t very happy about this ‘pagan’ custom and blesses the child with the ‘sign of the cross,’ and believed the ceremony to be evil, since it “involved bringing the child into contact with a weapon of death…”)

  

 Orm’s wife Ylva, however, states to the Christian priest:  “It is the custom for children of noble birth to be initiated thus… For it brings them the courage of chieftains and a contempt for danger, and weapon-luck, and, besides, skill in the choosing of words. I cannot believe that Christ, from all that you tell us about Him, is the sort of god who would be likely to object to any child receiving such gifts as these.”

 Red Orm then states:  “It is a rite honored by time, and the ancients had a great store of wisdom, even though they did not know about Christ. I myself was made to lick a sword-tip for my first meal, and I do not intend that my son, who is King Harald’s grandson, shall  have a worse start in life than I had.”

Love that.

Long live the fighters