A medieval Norwegian ballad Steiner read as a genuine record of an initiation-sleep through the Thirteen Holy Nights of the cosmic New Year.
The Dream Song of Olaf Asteson is the Norwegian visionary ballad, known as the Draumkvedet, that Rudolf Steiner read as an authentic account of spiritual experience. In it the shepherd Olaf Asteson sleeps from Christmas Eve through the thirteen days to Epiphany and wakes to tell of a journey across the Gjallar Bridge into the worlds beyond the senses. Steiner presented it at the turning of the year as an image of the soul's path into the macrocosm.
In Steiner's Own Words
My dear friends, we have just heard how Olaf Åsteson fell into a sleep that was to reveal to him the secrets of worlds that are hidden from the world of the senses and ordinary life on the physical plane. We could feel that Olaf Åsteson experienced something of this descent into the elements when we come to the part where Olaf reaches the Gjallar Bridge and crosses over it on to the paths of the spiritual world that all led far away. It is described in such detail that he tells us he himself feels earth in his mouth like the dead who lie in their graves. And then there is a clear indication of his going through the element of water, and of all that can be experienced in the watery element when one also experiences its moral quality.
What it Means Today
The ballad Steiner read aloud at Dornach has a documented life outside Anthroposophy. The Draumkvedet, or Dream Lay, is a Norwegian visionary ballad whose surviving stanzas were collected from oral singers in the Telemark district during the nineteenth century, by figures such as Magnus Brostrup Landstad and Sophus Bugge. The Norwegian folklorist Moltke Moe (1859 to 1913) made the great scholarly reconstruction, assembling the scattered variants into the composite text that most readers now know. Scholars read it as a Christian otherworld vision in the lineage of medieval dream poetry, where the sleeper crosses the Gjallar Bridge, passes through the realms of the dead, and witnesses a final judgment. Within the anthroposophical movement the song entered through the Norwegian writer Ingeborg Møller, who drew Steiner's attention to it, and Marie Steiner-von Sivers recited it at the year's turning while Steiner spoke. That practice continues: at the Goetheanum in Dornach the Dream Song is still performed during the Thirteen Holy Nights between Christmas and Epiphany.
Thalira synthesis: where folklorists treat the Gjallar Bridge crossing as a literary motif inherited from the Norse afterlife, Steiner treats the same passage as a memory of real soul-experience, so the philologist's reconstructed ballad and the seer's initiation-record describe one document read from two ends.
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