The Rudolf Steiner Archive

The Dream Song by Olaf Åsteson

[ 1 ] A significant piece of folk poetry is to be presented. It tells the story of the young Olaf Åsteson, who lives on in the legends of the Norwegian people. A dream of this Olaf Åsteson is told in a truly folk-poetic form. A dream which the people had as a mental image—that it filled a long sleep of thirteen days and nights—those thirteen nights and days that lie between Christmas Eve and Epiphany, on January 6. These thirteen days play a role in many folk traditions. To understand what is expressed in such traditions, one must create a mental image of how, until relatively recently, the people in rural and mountainous regions felt a deep connection with the course of nature. They felt differently when plants sprouted from the earth in spring than when the bare ground stretched out in autumn; differently when the sun blazed hotly in the sky at Midsummer, and differently when snow clouds hid all the sun’s rays in December. In summer, the soul lived in harmony with nature; in winter, it withdrew into itself, living within itself. This withdrawal of the soul into itself became particularly deep as Christmas approached, when the nights are longest. And it was then as if the soul withdrew from the entire external world, as when falling asleep, when the eyes no longer see and the ears no longer hear. A brooding of the soul, absorbed in itself, set in, which for particularly predisposed people became like a dream. Then some souls experienced their immersion in the spiritual world with particular vividness. Everything they felt—about guilt and sin, about hope for life and the soul’s sorrows—came before them. And just as dreams take on special forms as morning approaches and the first ray of sunlight falls upon the dreamer’s still-sleeping face, so too does the soul’s brooding and dreaming take on a special form when, from Christmas onward, the sun begins to appear earlier in the day, as the approach of nature’s new dawn is sensed. Anyone who has ever lived among country or mountain folk is familiar with the dream experiences under consideration here, which introduce the Folk-souls to other worlds. In the present day, however, one no longer finds much of such experiences. They do indeed vanish when locomotives and factory chimneys invade the landscapes. In many regions, even the legends of those ancient dream worlds have already faded away. In regions that have been less influenced by modern industrial and transportation culture, such as certain areas of Norway, beautiful fragments of that legendary world have been preserved, as exemplified by our song of Olaf Åsteson. It dates back to ancient times; yet it has recently been revived among the Norwegian people and is spreading rapidly, so that today many people know it again, after it had long been lost.

[ 2 ] It recounts a long dream that Olaf Åsteson has, in which he experiences the fate of souls after death. The mental image is based on the idea that after death, the soul journeys into the starry realms; that it arrives, for example, in regions where the constellations of Taurus, the Serpent, and Canis Major are nearby, and that it comes into the spiritual proximity of the moon. The soul enters these realms by crossing the Gjallar Bridge, which connects the earthly world with the spiritual one. In many folk tales, the rainbow is depicted as this bridge. Part of this spiritual world is Brooksvalin, where the deeds of the souls are weighed and retribution is meted out to them. The entire manner in which the song portrays the experience points to the era in which it was shaped by folk poetry. The mental images of life after death are not yet entirely Christian; they are partly those that were formed in the old pagan era. Yet the time in which Olaf experiences his dream is already presented as the Christian era. This is evident not only in the fact that he recounts his dream at the church door, but also in the fact that Christian concepts of Michael and Christ are interwoven amidst the pagan mental images of the Gjallar Bridge and Brooksvalin. Indeed, one can directly recognize in Christ’s approach from the south the penetration of Christianity into Norway from the south. We are dealing with a folk epic that is probably eight to nine centuries old, for Christianity penetrated Norway that long ago.

[ 3 ] Through the presentation of this poem, we would like to direct your spiritual gaze toward the life of the Folk-souls, which, through the creation of legends such as that of Olaf Åsteson, demonstrates that it was aware of its connection to the spiritual world, that it experienced inner images of this connection, and that these images gave it the certainty that the spiritual world exists. For if anyone had approached Olaf Åsteson and said to him, for example, “Such things do not exist; science has proven it,” Olaf Åsteson would have looked at him with pity, smiled sympathetically, and said, “There are more things in heaven and earth than you can dream of in your bookish wisdom.”