Norse Mythology 1

                Norse Mythology 1

Norse Mythology in its form today comes down to us mainly from the Icelandic Eddas and sagas which were written down centuries after the Christianisation took hold in the north. There has been vast research trying to discern the true ancient religion as it was practiced by the people of the Scandinavian countries. This is opposed to the representation we are given in the written sources. Norse mythology presents us with a multilayered, often contradictory, world view with a myriad of parallels in other mythological systems. It is a playground for the comparative mythology researcher, rich with elements from Indo-European, Shamanistic, and other belief systems. It is with this thought that I hope to present some of the more better researched works of authors in the field of Norse Mythology. I will also include others of a more controversial nature that may conflict with varying scholastic views. I leave it to the discerning reader to make up their owns minds as to the validity of the information presented here.

Heathen Gods in Old English Literature By Richard North University College London

Hardcover: 390 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press (Jan 13 1998)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0521551838
ISBN-13: 978-0521551830
 

Heathen gods are hard to find in Old English literature. Most Anglo-Saxon writers had no interest in them, and scholars today prefer to concentrate on the Christian civilization for which the Anglo-Saxons were so famous. Richard North offers an interesting view of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian paganism and mythology in the pre-Viking and Viking age. He discusses the pre-Christian gods of Bede’s history of the Anglo-Saxon conversion with reference to an orgiastic figure known as Ingui, whom Bede called ‘god of this age’. Using expert knowledge of comparative literary material from Old Norse-Icelandic and other Old Germanic languages, North reconstructs the slender Old English evidence in a highly imaginative treatment of poems such as Deor and The Dream of the Rood. Other gods such as Woden are considered with reference to Odin and his family in Old Norse-Icelandic mythology. In conclusion, it is argued that the cult of Ingui was defeated only when the ideology of the god Woden was sponsored by the Anglo-Saxon church. The book will interest students interested in Old English, Old Norse-Icelandic and Germanic literatures, Anglo-Saxon history and archaeology.

Preface; List of abbreviations; 1. Nerthus and Terra Mater: Anglian religion in the first century; 2. Ingui of Bernicia; 3. Ingui’s cult remembered: Ing and the ingefolc; 4. Woden’s witchcraft; 5. ‘Uoden de cuius stirpe’: the role of Woden in royal genealogy; 6. Aspects of Ingui: -geot and Geat; 7. The cult of Ingui in Beowulf; 8. Ingui’s marriage: natural phenomena; 9. Ingui’s death: the world-tree sacrifice; 10. Paulinus and the stultus error: the Anglo-Saxon conversion; Bibliography; Index.

• Offers different interpretations of well-known Old English poems • Links with Germanic and Scandinavian literatures • Revision of the prevailing view of Woden as the leading Anglo-Saxon god

The Viking Way : religion and war in late Iron Age Scandinavia (Aun 31). 435pages, 159 figures, 3 tables. 2002. Uppsala: Uppsala University Department of Archaeology & Ancient History; 91-506-1626-9 (ISSN 0284-1347)

Neil Price’s Uppsala dissertation attempts to recapture ‘the subtlety and sophistication of the Viking mind’ (p. 93) in which the pervasive presence of magic – real magic within a real society – was an integral part of the world view. As such, it represents one of the most important contributions to Viking studies in recent years, quite possibly in recent decades. Price’s manner of proceeding is logical, persuasive and theoretically astute. After two introductory chapters, which discuss what an attempt at ‘cognitive archaeology’ for the Viking period would look like, and what the main problems are in investigating Viking magic (especially in its most celebrated form of seithr) there are three central chapters: the first examines seithr in fine and attentive detail; the second compares seithr with the Sámi equivalent (if that is what it is) of noaidevuohta; and the third connects seithr and noaidevuohta with broader phenomenon of circumpolar shamanism. The social role of magic is a prevalent theme of the medieval Icelandic sagas that claim to describe life several centuries earlier in the Viking Age, and indeed also saturates the Eddic poetry that is our primary source for the mythology and cosmology of the time. However, little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this aspect of ritual may really have meant to the men and women of late Iron Age Scandinavia.

This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned. In particular, it focuses on the notion of a ‘supernatural empowerment of violence’ - essentially the way in which the physical prosecution of warfare was supported by a structure of rituals intended to produce success in battle. At the core of this concept, it is argued, lay the extended complex of performances collectively known as seiðr, a form of operative magic connected with the god Óðinn and often interpreted as a form of shamanism.

The thesis addresses these issues by exploring the relationship between two aspects of life in the Viking Age, namely religion and war. For early medieval Scandinavia, neither of these concepts can be exactly equated with their modern, Western equivalents. The text examines a wide range of topics relating to the above themes, including surveys of current thinking on Viking religion and the frameworks proposed for the study of shamanism; claims for pre-Viking shamanism in Scandinavia and Europe, especially recent work on the Migration period; the cult of Óðinn and its rituals; gender boundaries and sexual concepts in Old Norse society, focusing on magic and studies of female ritual specialists; the concept of the soul; spirits and other supernatural beings; the material culture of seiðr and related practices; battle magic and the ritualisation of aggression; Viking Age cultural attitudes to animals; and lycanthropic, ‘totemistic’ beliefs relating to warriors. The concluding section examines the overall concept of ritualised violence, as articulated by a gender-bounded caste of specialists corresponding to what might elsewhere be termed shamans, in the context of the socio-political changes taking place during the Viking period in Scandinavia.

The societies of Viking Age Scandinavia spanned a complex border zone between the Germanic and circumpolar cultural spheres, and their belief systems are discussed in this light. Throughout the book, the ritual practices of the Norse are examined in relation to those of the Sámi people with whom they shared much of the Scandinavian peninsular. Late Iron Age understandings of religion and war are also reviewed against the background of similar perspectives among the ‘shamanic’ cultures of the circumpolar region, from Siberia to the North American arctic and Greenland.From this position, Price is able to return more purposefully to Viking Age Scandinavia itself in his two concluding chapters; these consider how violence and aggression may have been supernaturally empowered and understood (with a recurrent focus on the figure of Óthinn, the god who brings together the war and religion of the book’s subtitle) and finally how this may have resulted in – or from – a distinctive mentality (the Viking way  of the title). Price’s powerful conclusion is that Viking Age shamanism was at the same time both ‘a kind of battle magic’(p. 390) and also ‘nothing less than a view of the nature of reality itself’ (p. 393).

From this perspective, therefore, what we might now call ‘becoming a Viking’ may well have been ‘a profoundly religious act’, appreciated most clearly in the form of ‘ritualised aggression’ (p. 391).On the way  to these striking and well founded conclusions there is much to learn from and enjoy. Particular highlights include: a reasoned advocacy as to why archaeologists should concern themselves with written sources just as much as historians or literary scholars do; a penetrating account of the ways in which the study of Norse religion became dangerously entangled with Nazism in the course of the 20th century.

It's a brilliant survey of the archaeology of seithr, with a particular emphasis on the apparent graves of völur or prophetesses; a lucid meditation of a good deal of specialist scholarship on shamanism the world over; a startling vindication of Ibn Fadlan as a prime witness to Scandinavian practices; and convincing re-evaluations of the nature and function of valkyrjur and berserkir.Especially important is Price’s desire to reinstate the Sámi (that is, the people previously known as the Lapps) into the study of Viking Age Scandinavia, to rectify the distortion of ‘a Sámi-less Viking Age’ (p. 239) which standard syntheses of the period depict. The proposal that we should think in terms of a shared Norse-Sámi culture in Viking Age Scandinavia has the potential to effect a profound shift in our perceptions.

This is also a very easy book to read Price’s prose is always lucid, and often stylish and witty; the quantity and quality of the illustrations are outstanding and the bibliography is enormous. One complaint, though, is that there is no index (perhaps as the result of its status as a dissertation) and cross-references are only in terms of chapters and not pages. In terms of the assurance with which he handles an extremely wide range of sources, both material and textual, Price is hardly to be faulted (and indeed is greatly to be marvelled at), though students of Old Norse poetry might feel that Price’s source-criticism could at times discriminate more sensitively between different types of text (both generically and evidentially). 

In conclusion this is an exceptional book which deserves to establish itself immediately as essential reading for anyone interested in seithr, shamanism, the Sámi, circumpolar religion, óthinn, violence, warrior ideology or simply the Viking Age more generally. Furthermore, literary students of the mediaeval sagas should pay attention to this archaeologist, for Price shows that saga accounts of ‘socially-embedded magic’ (p. 394) are not likely to be literary inventions of the post- Viking period, but rather ring true and have their roots in the shamanistic world-view of the Viking Age itself.

MATTHEW TOWNEND Centre for Medieval Studies,University of York, UK

**** Rating 4 Stars

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