More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions

by Catharina Raudvere (Editor), Jens Peter Schjodt (Editor)

Overview

Written by distinguished scholars from multiple perspectives, this account widens the interpretative scope on religious life among the pre-Christian Scandinavian people. The religion of the Viking Age is conventionally identified through its mythology: the ambiguous character Odin, the forceful Thor, and the end of the world approaching in Ragnarök. However, pre-Christian religion consisted of so much more than mythic imagery and legends and has long lingered in folk tradition. Exploring the religion of the North through an interdisciplinary approach, the book sheds new light on a number of topics, including rituals, gender relations, social hierarchies, and interregional contacts between the Nordic tradition and the Sami and Finnish regions.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9789185509713
Publisher:	Nordic Academic Press
Publication date:	07/01/2012
Pages:	288
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Catharina Raudvere is a professor of the history of religions at the University of Copenhagen and the author of The Book of the Roses. Jens Peter Schjødt is a professor of the history of religions at the University of Aarhus and the author of Initiation Between Worlds.

Read an Excerpt

More than Mythology

Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions

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By Catharina Raudvere, Jens Peter Schjødt

Nordic Academic Press

Copyright © 2012 Nordic Academic Press and the Authors
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-91-87121-31-9

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CHAPTER 1

The Study of Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions

Trends and Perspectives

Catharina Raudvere & Jens Peter Schjødt

The present volume is the result of a conference in Copenhagen in October 2008. An initiative taken by the editors of this volume to inaugurate a working group for historians of religions in the Nordic countries working on various aspects of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion developed into the Nordic Network for Research on Pre-Christian Religion. The advantages of such a network had been expressed over several years, and the meetings have proven to be productive in terms of debating disciplinary identity and (re-) formulating the core theoretical issues in the study of religions.

However, the study of Old Norse religion cannot be executed without close co-operation with literary scholars, historians, philologists, archaeologists and ethnologists who represent disciplines that all have a long tradition of studies in the field. Consequently, the steadily increasing interest in the pre-Christian religion has called for an identification of the state of the art from a religious studies perspective. The dilemma has long been whether to go into discussions of selected details in the sources or to take up a broader theoretical discussion of a religious phenomenon exemplified by an Old Norse case from a comparative angle–or take the (perhaps) impossible position in between. On the one hand, within the general history of religions, Old Norse religion is just a minor area of study compared with the overwhelming academic interest in world religions past and present; during conferences and seminars the exchange with colleagues with other empirical areas of interest has mainly been based on comparative and methodological reflections, since very few colleagues have a specific interest in the Old Norse source material. On the other hand, within the larger field of Old Norse and Viking Studies, religion–even if both the concept and the phenomenon have attracted a lot of interest in recent years–is often dealt with by scholars with focal areas other than religion. The encounters in this academic contact zone are rewarding, and constitute a point where a highly varied use of central analytical concepts are shared. In other words, the main purpose of the Nordic network has been to provide religious studies scholars, with a primary research interest in pre-Christian Scandinavia, a platform for exchange with colleagues who share empirical as well as theoretical interests, notwithstanding the diverse perspectives of the individual scholars. From that position, the network has so far been a success–even if the main purpose has not been to generate funding for large-scale projects, but to meet and exchange viewpoints with each other in the setting of modest workshops and to propose ideas and work in progress.

The conference in 2008 was more ambitious than the previous meetings. As organizers we received generous funding from the Royal Academy of Letters in Stockholm that made it possible to invite keynote speakers from outside the network. The presentations have been rewritten as chapters for this volume, each contributor emphasizing specific perspectives on the study of historic religions. The hope is that the readers will appreciate the varied efforts to approach the field presented here, and the ambition is to reach readers with a theoretical interest in religions of times past as well as an academic audience interested in Viking Age culture and society.

Pre-Christian religion is of necessity an interdisciplinary matter, from both an empirical and a theoretical perspective. The textual source material, although complex and rich, is limited (not least when compared to the classical corpuses of Antiquity, the Near East or ancient India) and mostly written in Old Norse. In older research the uniqueness of the North was strongly emphasized and the analyses often focused on a quest for origin and authenticity. Over the last few decades the literature in the Norse vernacular has been put in relation to the vast and varied text material from the Continent, which has made texts in other Germanic and in Romance languages, and certainly also in Latin and Arabic, even more relevant. The comparative methods that have always been a capstone in Old Norse studies are nowadays more distinctly differentiated between those that focus on direct contact or influences and observations at a more general level of structural and thematic similarities, but not necessarily pointing at a common heritage or contacts. In the following, Thomas DuBois applies a broad regional perspective in his analysis of animal symbolism in the cultural contacts between the Nordic areas and the Finnish and Saami regions. The discussions of the relation between language and cultural heritage, not least when it comes to mythological universes, have turned from origin to the development of cultural contacts. Reading texts in several languages, however, requires a vast range of philological skills which only very few individual scholars master. Therefore, already in dealing with the linguistic sources, philologies from various areas must be taken into account. As pointed out by Peter Jackson in this volume, the range of languages can even be extended to many Indo-European languages, the speakers of which were never in direct contact with the Scandinavians.

The limited textual sources still cover a vast area of verbal expressions, from fully-fledged mythological narratives to place names and personal names. The texts in Old Norse written down in the Middle Ages could further be put in relation to early modern legal and ecclesiastical documents as well as later folklore recordings. Laura Stark's contribution to this volume discusses long-term perspectives based on Finnish sources and opens up for a discussion of how beliefs and practices have been instruments for defining the body, sexuality and gender. Taken into serious account by Old Norse scholars, these sources supplement the more conventional search for surviving mythological elements as they open up for a renewed focus on religion as a communal practice.

The other angle of religious life, the material, is grounded in archaeological sources. The time span covered by this material is even wider (stretching at least from the Iron Age well into the Middle Ages) and so is the geographical space that may be of relevance (from Russia in the east to Iceland in the west, from the northern parts of Norway to the Mediterranean area). During the last few decades archaeology has provided enormous amounts of new material on the Viking expansion and the cultural contacts established, which must have had a definitive impact on religious concepts and practices, and created spaces for a multitude of merged traditions. More than any other source group, the remains of material culture can give indications of variation in terms of region, social status, gender, ecology and, not least, over time. Since religious discourse is always embedded in historical events and cultural contexts, both material and intellectual, the interdisciplinary co-operation with historians and anthropologists prevents a view of religion as a category sui generis, disconnected from other cultural expressions.

Over the last century other disciplines have contributed significantly to the development of theoretical frameworks. Anthropology, sociology and ethnology have offered an excellent base for theoretical rethinking religion as part of social coherence and the importance of visual representation, and thus formulating relevant new questions about the material and analysing religion in a broader scope of cultural expressions. The theoretical emphasis in the study of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion has traditionally been on comparative methods and literary analyses with a certain focus on mythology. Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in ritual studies (see Stark and Price in this volume), inter-regional contacts, not least the relation to Saami and Finnish traditions (see Stark, DuBois and Anttonen in this volume) and the variety and stratification within communities. These and other contributions have certainly added to a more complex view of the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia.

The question often raised towards the end of seminar discussions is whether it is possible to observe some significantly new tendencies in the field. Old Norse studies have to a large extent been focused on the complexity of the sources and the interdisciplinary communication about the specific material. To a lesser extent, more general trends in the humanities have been acknowledged. Given the recent emphasis on diversity, change and cultural exchange, however, Old Norse studies should have the possibility to formulate general theoretical issues on the study of ancient religions.

An interesting aspect of the chapters is the fact that the basic understanding of where religion takes place is very different and that this point of departure does not follow any disciplinary lines. The importance of emphasizing diversity in terms of gender, social status, locations and spaces, as well as individual inclination is today a shared common ground rather than regarding the pre-Christian religion as a coherent unit (see DuBois, Nordberg, Price, Raudvere, Schjødt, Stark and Sundquist in this volume). Likewise, it is clear from most of the contributions that a general theoretical interest is apparent, to a much larger extent than was the case only a decade ago. Discussions of analytical principles thus have a prominent place in several of the articles, without which further interdisciplinary co-operation is impossible. On the one hand, there is a tendency to oppose the idea of an absoluteness in relation to the absoluteness of the results achieved, and on the other, there is a boldness in the discussions of the methods used and in the way the ancient religions of the North are allowed to become a laboratory for theoretical discussions. For instance, it seems as if comparisons at various levels are accepted in order to get a better understanding of the pre-Christian religion. Regional and social distribution have long since been held up as important, but in recent years much more specific analyses of the theme have seen the light of day. The articles by Jackson, DuBois and Anttonen are thus directly concerned with comparing two or more religions (the Indo-European religions, the Saami and Scandinavian religions, and the Old-Fennic and Christian respectively), whereas comparisons are discussed from a theoretical point of view by Schjødt.

Other issues could, no doubt, be mentioned, but it is now up to the readers to judge whether this volume will have an impact on the analysis of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. The editors hope it will, and we therefore thank all the authors for their challenging chapters.

CHAPTER 2

Mythic Acts: Material Narratives of the Dead in Viking Age Scandinavia

Neil Price

Where Does a Mythology Come From?

This is an obviously daunting question, but an equally obvious answer is that any mythology as we have it today is an organic thing, something that has evolved over a long period. The stories have been told and re-told on countless occasions, elements have been added or fallen away, details have been changed or embellished, probably thousands of times. Sometimes several versions are in circulation at once. Many mythologies contain internal contradictions, and that of the Scandinavians is certainly no exception. There is also the factor of transmission to consider, all the copyists' errors and biases over the centuries, as well as the deliberate distortions and suppressions. Finally there are the simple vagaries of preservation.

Simultaneously we must acknowledge that in its twenty-first century form any mythology deriving from a culture of the past is now something artificial, a construct. In a sense, the slow process of accretion and redaction has now ceased, and the tales have solidified into something that they never really were from the beginning –dead, static texts, very different from the dynamics of true narrative and storytelling. In this light we perhaps need to remind ourselves that the Norse did not know about 'the Norse myths'. These are things that we have created for them through academic endeavour, condensing and compiling tales into the illusory canon of the critical and popular editions that pack our bookshops (and the same of course is true for the 'mythologies' of the Greeks, the Romans and any other ancient people, even when–as with Classical Antiquity–we raise them up as supposed cornerstones of our intellectual culture).

Behind all this, though, there is also a basic truth so fundamental that it sometimes tends to get lost in the minutiae of scholarly analysis. At some point, or rather at a succession of such points, each individual element of these stories was invented. Whether it is Óðinn giving up his eye, or Þórr losing his hammer, or the binding of Fenrir, somebody made them up. Even if we acknowledge the unfolding creation of tales within the framework of centuries-old traditions, or if we trace millennia of myth-making across the arguable Indo-European paradigm, the precise detail of each story within its own cultural context nonetheless must have had a specific moment of germination.

But what was it? Who shaped these tales, and in what circumstances? What were they originally for, and what did they mean? In this paper I shall make the risky proposition that we might be able to tentatively find out, at least for the Viking peoples, at least for some of the time.

Before beginning, however, if we are to contemplate a serious expedition into Viking minds and mythologies, as manifested in behaviour that leaves a material trace, then we must at least briefly address the question of sources. It is now some four decades or more since archaeologists awoke to the problems of inevitably subjective interpretation, contemporary political situation and general bias in the process of understanding the past through its physical remains. Links to textual scholarship have always been part of this process and central to the debate, and it is no accident that one of the key archaeological works from this period was called specifically Reading the Past.

When these perspectives are brought to the Old Norse texts, in combination with the much more direct work upon them undertaken by philologists and literary scholars, we enter a realm of great potential but also with a number of pitfalls. In all our analyses of saga narratives, their motifs and characters, and similar dissections of Eddic and skaldic poetry, we must be acutely aware of context: put simply, what exactly are we talking about when we discuss the content of the texts? We know that they do not date from the Viking Age in any direct sense, just as we can date their manuscripts with approximate accuracy, argue about when and by whom they were composed in the form that we have them, and debate whatever oral tradition lay behind that process. This is central to a fundamental but rarely remarked upon difference between overtly textual scholars and archaeologists, in that the latter are without question concerned with the Viking Age when it happened, not as re-imagined in subsequent centuries. While often wonderful as literature, in terms of source material the medieval texts are, for archaeologists, a means to an end, not objects of study in their own right (unless they are concerned with medieval mentalities rather than those of the Viking Age). Historians of religion often span this divide, while philologists and literary scholars tend to work on the other side of it.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

1 The Study of Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions Trends and Perspectives Catharian Raudvere Jens Peter Schjødt 7

2 Mythic Acts: Material Narratives of the Dead in Viking Age Scandinavia Neil Price 13

3 The Merits and Limits of Comparative Philology Old Norse Religious Vocabulary in a Long-Term Perspective Peter Jackson 47

4 Diet and Deities: Contrastive Livelihoods and Animal Symbolism in Nordic Pre-Christian Religions Thomas A. DuBois 65

5 Fictive Rituals in Völuspá: Mythological Narration between Agency and Structure in the Representation of Reality Catharian Raudvere 97

6 Continuity, Change and Regional Variation in Old Norse Religion Andreas Nordberg 119

7 Gender, Sexuality and the Supranormal Finnish Oral-Traditional Sources Laura Stark 153

8 Literary Representation of Oral Religion: Organizing Principles in Mikael Agricola's List of Mythological Agents in Late Medieval Finland Veikko Anttonen 185

9 'Religious Ruler Ideology' in Pre-Christian Scandinavia A Contextual Approach Olof Sundqvist 225

10 Reflections on Aims and Methods in the Study of Old Norse Religion Jens Peter Schjødt 263

Editorial Reviews

"This is one of the finest collections of essays I have read in our field: that the editors have included material and authors that normally might not be in such an anthology by reasons of cultural tradition or discipline is to the book's credit and truly enhances the experience of reading the essays."  —Stephen Mitchell, professor of Scandinavian and Folklore, Harvard University

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