Table Of ContentOLD NORSE MYTHS,
LITERATURE
AND SOCIETY
Edited by
MARGARET CLUNIES ROSS
UNIVERSITY PRESS OF SOUTHERN
DENMARK
2003
THE VIKING COLLECilON
Studies in Nontiem civilization
G~MraJ EditOt'S
Margaret Clunies ROii
Matthew Driscoll
Mats Malm
Volume 14
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• '-f editor and publisher gratefully acknowledge
the financial support ofa subsidy from
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?Jhe Australian Academy of the Humanities, Canberra.
© The VJ.king Collection and the authors 2003
Printed by Special-Trykkeriet Viborg a-s
ISBN 87-7838-794-9
ISSN 0108-8408
Contents
Introduction. By MARGARET CLUNIES Ross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Archaeological and Historical Perspectives
Myth and Reality: the Contribution of Archaeology. By JOHN HINES 19
Material Metaphors - some Late Iron Age and Viking Examples.
By FRANDS HERSCHEND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40
Reminiscences of Old Norse Myths, Cults and Rituals in
Old Russian Culture and Literature. By ELENA A. MELNIKOVA . . 66
Magic, Death and the Other in Medieval Scandinavia
Cultures in Contact. By JOHN LINDOW . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Encounters with VQlur. By JOHN MCKINNELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110
Magic as Acquired Art and the Ethnographic Value of the Sagas.
By STEPHEN MITCHELL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
The Un/Grateful Dead - from Baldr to Blegif6tr.
By VESTEINN 6LASON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
Old Norse-Icelandic Literature as Mythography
Interpretations of the Roman Pantheon in the Old Norse
Hagiographical Sagas. By SIMONETTA BATTISTA . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175
Origin Legends and Foundation Myths in Flateyjarb6k.
By ELIZABETH ASHMAN ROWE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198
The Role of VQluspa in the Perception of RagnarQk in
Old Norse-Icelandic Literature. By STEFANIE WORTH . . . . . . . . . 217
The 'Conversion Verses' in Hallfreoar saga: Authentic Voice of
a Reluctant Christian? By DIANA WHALEY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
Myth and Ritual in Old Norse-Icelandic Traditions
Myths as Sources for Rituals - Theoretical and Practical
Implications. By JENS PETER SCHJ!/JDT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Two Old Icelandic Theories of Ritual. By MARGARET CLUNIES Ross 279
About the Authors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300
Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3()4.
Introduction
Margaret Clunies Ross
Most of the thirteen essays in this volume were presented in an earlier
form at the Eleventh International Saga Conference on Old Norse Myths,
Literature and Society, held at the University of Sydney from 2-7 July
2000 (see Barnes and Clunies Ross 2000 for the versions presented there).
I subsequently invited a small number of the conference participants,
including two of the plenary lecturers, John Lindow and Vesteinn 6lason,
whose papers do not appear in the preprints volume, to rework and enlarge
their papers for this book, believing that the chosen selection represents not
only some of the best work on Old Norse myth and related subjects among
contemporary researchers, but gives the reader a good idea of current
approaches to the subject from a variety of disciplinary and interdiscipli
nary perspectives. In addition to the essays by Lindow and 6lason, my
own chapter on indigenous theories of ritual is new. As one of the main
organizers of the saga conference, I was not in a position to present a paper
myself, so I have availed myself of editorial privilege to include an essay,
an earlier version of which I presented in February 2001 to the interdisci
plinary research group at Lund University, 'Vagar till MidgArd - nordisk
hedendom i lAngtidsperspektiv', whom I thank for the opportunity to lec
ture there and discuss issues of common interest in Scandinavian religion
and mythology.
At a time when the pre-Christian religion and mythology of Scandinavia
are having a strong, though often not fully recognized influence upon the
lives and beliefs of large numbers of people in the contemporary world, the
scholarly study of the medieval evidence for that religion and those beliefs
has not had the influence it might had have upon the popular imagination.
In many cases, of course, stubborn ideological agendas shut the door to
what scholarship can tell people about past beliefs and ideologies, and
scholars tend to be cautious in what they say, qualifying certainty with ifs
and buts. Those who make use of Norse myth and cult for reasons of
national, political or ethnic identity, or see in it the basis for alternative reli
gions (asatru and the like) usually find what they are looking for in the
sources, or distort them until they fit their preconceptions. In a different,
7
Margaret C/unies Ross
though perhaps more acceptable fashion, the creators of fantasy literature
and film also mine the medieval sources, directly or indirectly, and produce
works of undoubted popular impact, like The Lord of the Rings in both its
print and film versions.
There are now a number of very accessible handbooks and guides to
Norse mythology which set out what we know about the subject (and what
we don't) in a form that is both clear and authoritative. The most recent and
the best example of this genre is John Lindow's Handbook of Norse
Mythology (2001). The present book has a different aim, but one which
may also help to make the subject more accessible to a variety of inquirers,
particularly those, whether students or scholars, who are looking for a
holistic approach to the subject or one that problematizes the sorts of
methodologies that can be applied to it. It attempts to show what kinds of
evidence exist for Norse myth and attendant beliefs and what types of ana
lytical methods can legitimately be applied to our sources. In juxtaposing
essays by archaeologists, historians, historians of religion and literary
scholars, it asks whether the methods characteristic of these various disci
plines can be fruitfully combined, and, if so, to what extent this is possible.
I think there is now a widespread recognition among specialists in these
fields that we are often much too ignorant about discoveries and ap
proaches in one another's areas. The contributors to the Eleventh Interna
tional Saga Conference, who work in the various disciplines mentioned
above, appreciated how useful it was to come together in conference and I
think the reader of this book will benefit in a similar way. For me the
process of editing the papers has taught me a lot and made me question
some of my own assumptions as well as revealing certain areas of igno
rance in which I should be better informed.
The Viking Age and the first period of Christianity in Scandinavia saw a
society on the cusp of literacy as a mode of communication. It is ttue that
runic literacy predates the Viking Age, but the majority of runic inscrip
tions, nevertheless, come from either the late Viking Age or the centuries
immediately after it. Recent research has demonstrated how much new
information can be gleaned from runic monuments using a combination of
historiographic, linguistic and literary skills (cf. Jesch 2001; Sawyer 2000).
Likewise, the rich runic resources revealed from the excavation of the mer
chants' quarter at Bryggen in Bergen have forced us to rethink many of our
assumptions not only about the uses of runes and the length of time they
were used in this part of medieval Norway, but also about the kinds of texts
8
Introduction
and genres of literature, particularly poetry, that were known to the twelfth
and thirteenth-century inhabitants of Bergen (Knirk 1994; Lieswl 1968).
Similarly revolutionary has been the unearthing of a corpus of birch bark
letters from early medieval Novgorod (Poppe 1993). These finds indicate
that, if we had more such survivals, we would gain a much broader picture
of the various ways in which medieval Scandinavians and their neighbours
communicated. Limited though they are, these discoveries show that a
much larger section of the populace was involved in literate communica
tion than the elite circles that we know about from surviving textual
records in manuscript (Garrison 1999).
One of the attractions of studying early medieval Scandinavian society,
as well as one of its frustrations, is that we have both a great deal of archae
ological material of Viking Age provenance and earlier, which can be dated
with reasonable certainty, and many written texts in the vernacular, which
purport to be transmitted from the Viking Age and possibly earlier, but
which in their current form come down to us in manuscripts of either the
late Middle Ages or, in not a few cases, in manuscripts and occasionally
printed texts of the post-medieval period. Most of these written records, in
addition, come from Iceland rather than from Norway, Sweden or Den
marlc, even though they often treat of subjects and actions based in main
land Scandinavia. The attraction is that we ought to be able to bring archae
ological material to bear on what the written sources tell us about customs,
beliefs and events of the Viking Age and later. The frustration is that we
can never be sure that the written records are telling the 'truth' about the
past in terms in which the societies of the past experienced it. This is
because the great majority of these texts are either embedded in larger texts
of much later date, as is the case with most skaldic poetry, or have been
substantially reworked over time, to take account of changing ideologies,
of which the most pervasive and arguably the most important is that of
Christianity.
In addition, as I mentioned above in connection with the chance survival
of non-elite texts, the majority of the written sources that have survived
from the Scandinavian Middle Ages have done so because someone was
powerful or wealthy enough, or both, to commission them or write them
himself, perhaps with assistance from clerics. There is an undoubted elite
bias to the texts that have survived from the Scandinavian Middle Ages,
except perhaps for some eddic poetry, even acknowledging the partially
democratic ideology of the Icelandic saga, which is still, by modem stan-
9
Margaret Clunies Ross
dards, concerned with an elite, though one less narrowly defined that was
the case in other parts of medieval Europe. None of this should surprise us,
for the technology of writing in the Middle Ages was itself largely con
fined to the clergy and the upper classes of the laity and it was natural
enough for them to record their interests and their mentality rather than
that of people outside their own groups, except when the latter played a
marginal part in their activities. Similarly, although, in principle, medieval
Scandinavian archaeology is not confined to excavating elite sites, in prac
tice a very great deal of the immense amount of new material that has been
excavated in recent decades has come from high-status sites, including
Viking Age and late Iron Age so-called manors, often with attached cult
places and later churches, from trading places and early towns, and from
the graves of merchants, smiths (as John Hines discusses in his essay) and
members of the aristocracy or royalty (as discussed by Frands Herschend).
The fact is that people of high status left more material signs of their exis
tence behind them for the most part than the less affluent did, and that dif
ference is reflected in the ground for modem archaeologists to excavate.
In principle, therefore, there should be a good 'fit' between much
archaeological and textual evidence for aspects of early Scandinavian men
tality such as the beliefs and ideologies that caused people to bury their
dead in certain ways or construct certain kinds of cult places and believe
that certain deities were powerful within them. But here we come to yet
another methodological problem when we look to the evidence of material
culture to provide evidence for aspects of human culture that have no direct
material manifestation. What sorts of questions can we ask of the tangible
and visible remains of the archaeological record and how do these things
relate to what we know of the intangible, invisible concepts and ideas that
motivated early Scandinavians to construct material objects and place them
in certain configurations in dwellings, graves and objects such as boats or
sledges, as well as to compose poems, for example, on the burial places of
royal dynasties, such as we have in Ynglingatal? At this juncture we must
recognize that even when both the archaeological and textual records point
strongly to consensus in the understanding of a particular phenomenon,
such as the custom of burying high-ranking people in boats, in both cases
we are interpreters of the cultural record and not simply its recorders. In
recent decades a greater carefulness and self-awareness in the process of
interpretation has marked the work of those who seek to understand both
archaeological and textual records from medieval Scandinavia and a num-
10
Introduction
ber of the papers in this book are concerned to explore interpretative
methods that will offer legitimate advances in our understanding of the
medieval records, whether material or textual (which are of course also
material in one sense).
The first three essays in the collection, by Hines, Herschend and Mel
nikova, look at various ways in which archaeology and history can help us
understand Old Norse myth. John Hines starts from the assumption that
myth and reality, by which he means the experience of everyday life and its
structuring in early medieval Scandinavia, are related in some way. The
question is, how? His essay provides a very useful overview of the various
ways in which material and textual culture can 'talk' to one another in the
hands of modem scholars and illuminate problems in the understanding of
the nature and genesis of Old Norse myth. Frands Herschend comes at the
same question from a different perspective, in which he first describes
some late Iron Age and Viking Age ship burials (including the well-known
Oseberg ship burial from south-western Norway) as installations, allowing
us to see similarities between these medieval works of human expression
that, through their spatial semiotic, bridge the mental and the material, and
the installations of modem artists. His second move is to represent these
medieval installations as 'material metaphors', showing, in his analysis,
how the juxtaposition of various objects can be interpreted metaphorically
to represent certain key ideas of early Scandinavian elites about life, death
and the passages between the two. He goes on to compare what he argues
to be the greater plasticity and subtlety of material metaphors over
metaphors that were realised textually in the kennings of Old Norse skaldic
poetry. While not all will agree with this last proposition, it raises in a very
interesting way the question of the semiotic potential of archaeological
sites considered as wholes.
Elena Melnikova has done much in recent years to make Old Norse
scholars aware of the significant comparative material from Old Russian
culture which often makes sense of certain puzzling features in Old Norse
literature and myth, not to speak of Scandinavian historical records. With
the resumption of contact with Russian scholars of Old Norse after the end
of the Soviet era, there has come a renewed awareness among those work
ing in this field of the importance of the cultural miscegenation that took
place in the Rus settlements of Eastern Europe in the Viking Age. Mel
nikova' s predominantly historical approach to mythic material has much in
common with dominant themes in the essays of the next group of authors
11
