The Balance of Light and Dark
Life contains both light and darkness; wisdom is finding balance between them.
Norse lands experience extreme variations in light - midnight sun and polar night. This natural reality taught acceptance of darkness as part of life, not its opposite. Both light and dark seasons have their purposes and gifts.
Without darkness, we would not know the gift of light; both are teachers.
The extreme light variations shaped Norse philosophy about balance.
Various Sources
Written about in
- What the Norse year looked like, season by season
In the far north the light does not merely shorten, it goes. What came out of living with that is a habit of treating darkness as a season with its own use rather than as an absence of the good one.