The Lore (Part One)

(This is in part an older post, rewritten, and offered as an answer to a question asked by Granamyr about the “lore” – Hrafnkell)

All modern day forms of Heathenism (including the Anglo-Saxon variety) are based primarily on an understanding of the Icelandic literature known as the Poetic Edda, Prose Edda, and the various Icelandic sagas (Íslendinga sögur). All of these sources were compiled or composed from the 12th century on, a good two centuries after the official end of the Heathen era on the Continent and in Iceland. The traditional dates of conversion for the various Norse Heathen areas are Norway (995), Norse Scotland (995), Sweden (1008), Denmark (965), Iceland (1000), but it must be noted that in all areas that conversion was and is a gradual process, as noted earlier.

Georges Duby noted the slowness of the process:

Very striking, for example, is the slow progress made by Christianity…in the tribes which the great migrations of the early middle ages brought into close contact with less rudimentary civilizations. Archaeology has revealed that Christian symbols were only very gradually insinuated into the graves of Germanic burial grounds, and that pagan beliefs for long persisted under the superficial guise of rites, tales and formulae imposed by force on the rest of the tribe by the converted chiefs. Eleventh century prelates were still eager to extirpate them, and they had not wholly disappeared, at the very end of the middle ages, even in those provinces of Christianity most securely appropriated by the church.[1]

The dates specific to our inquiry reveal this tardy progress. For instance, Harald Bluetooth, king of Denmark from 958 to 986 claimed to have converted his country but this process was not completed until Knut’s reign (1018 to 1035) and the last island to be converted, Bornholm, remained Heathen until 1060. In Sweden, the conversion process was equally long-lived. For instance, in 1060 the Bishop of Sigtuna was driven out by the Heathens and in 1080, King Inge the Elder himself, though he returned in 1083 and destroyed the great Heathen temple at Uppsala which Adam of Bremen had described, building a church in its place. Even so, the public Heathen cult did not end until 1100. The conversion of Norway was not fully completed until about 1150, a century and a half after the official date. By these latter times, as it was driven underground, Heathenism was passing into folklore, but its resilience is testified to by the continued pronouncements of Christian authorities. As Snorri Sturluson is known to have traveled, it is possible that in some of the areas he visited Heathenism was little more than a century dead and probably lived on in one form or another in the remoter areas. Better yet, Heathenry was alive and well as late as Snorri’s time in some of the remoter areas of Iceland as well, especially the East fjords. Snorri is known to have been a frequent visitor in the east parts, and this is probably where he picked up all his Heathen tales and poetry.[2]

Even so, this limited patrimony becomes problematic, as James C. Russell notes:

The optimal sources that one could possess for reconstructing the pre-Christian religious attitudes of the Germanic peoples would be somewhat akin to the comprehensive exposition of early Christian religious beliefs and attitudes contained in the writing of the patristic authors. Unfortunately, there exist no extant sources written by members of pre-Christian Germanic societies. Since it is unlikely that such works exist, alternative sources must be carefully considered. These alternative sources may be generally categorized as written and archaeological. The written sources vary in their proximity to the conditions which they describe, while it is generally difficult to accurately derive religious attitudes from archaeological finds.[3]

Rudolf Simek is equally aware of the problem:

The incomplete information available can lead to a rather distorted picture of heathen religion if one looks at it uncritically. Most of our information comes from Christians and was in the main written down in Iceland, one of the last bastions of Germanic religion, where scholars wrote about Germanic beliefs two hundred years after the Christianization of Iceland in 1000 A.D. It is at this time that the younger Eddic lays were written, older ones transcribed and that Snorri Sturluson wrote his handbook for poets, the so-called Snorra-Edda. In this handbook, Snorri attempts to present what he knows about the Germanic gods in a systematic way; but his sources are mainly poetry from Viking times (skaldic and Eddic lays) from Norway and Iceland which were hardly representative of the whole of Germania and indeed were already influenced to a considerable degree by Christian thought. Nevertheless, his works are among our main sources of information about Germanic mythology.[4]

Though we have a limited patrimony in the eddas and sagas, we are fortunate in Snorri, as Russell notes:

Fortunately for the student of Germanic religiosity, Snorri’s accounts of pre-Chrsitian religious beliefs and practices do not follow the polemical style of his Latin Christian counter-parts in their accounts of pre-Christian classical religion. This is all the more significant for the cause of Germanic religious studies, since Snorri’s writings constitute the bulk of the contemporary documentation, while patristic apologetic documents do not constitute the sole source of classical paganism. In fact, Snorri’s historical perspective transcends mere tolerance of the religion of his ancestors. Whereas many contemporary chroniclers were Icelandic monks whose major literary concern appears to have been the lionization of the missionary kings of Norway, Snorri’s approach to his sources was more objective.[5]

The scholars noted above are at most cautiously optimistic about understanding Heathen belief from the sources left to us. But compare for a moment these assessments with the effusive confidence of Heathen authors. First, Edred Thorsson (aka Stephen Flowers), well known in both Heathen and occult circles:

The mainstays of the tradition of the Troth are contained in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, the Icelandic sagas, and other epics of the Germanic peoples (such as the Beowulf of the Anglo-Saxons), as well as in the folklore of those people. For example, the folktales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the so-called “Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” can be great repositories of ancient lore. This is a vast body of well-documented evidence. From it the revivification of the elder ways was quite easy – once all the sources were collected and properly interpreted.[6]

Bil Linzie take a middle approach in his assessment:

A…complaint has been that the Germanic worldview as represented in the sagas and eddas is incomplete. This may or may not be true, but until good complete investigation of the worldview has been done the contention is rather premature and inconclusive. Much new information has been developed in the area of better interpretation over the past two decades, and the overall indication is that the worldview is not incomplete but has been poorly interpreted by comparing to other worldviews which are significantly different such as Native American religions, the Judeo-Christian religion, the Hindu religion, and neo-pagan religions. Much new information has surfaced through experimental anthropology. By trying to recreate through the actual experiences of recreation based on available sources such as the various groups who have rebuilt and sailed Viking Age vessels or through the living history museums, the need for interpretation is often bypassed. This is an approach which should continue to be encouraged.[7]

There is obviously a difference of opinion here and we shall see further on that it is certainly debatable whether or not the “sources” have been correctly translated, much less properly interpreted. Indeed, for non-speakers of Old Norse, it would seem obvious that we cannot have one without the other and interpretation is problematic even among scholars who do speak Old Norse, where the meaning of a passage can hinge upon the hotly debated etymology of a single word.[8]

These problems become worse the further back one attempts to go. Simek notes that “the available source material is so sparse and incomplete that we know hardly anything about Germanic religion during the Iron Age (500 B.C. to 400 A.D.).”[9] For this era, we must make do with brief descriptions found in Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, dating from 53 BCE and in the Germania of Tacitus, written in 98 CE. Here the situation stands reversed, as both E.R. Ellis-Davidson and Turville-Petre have generally good things to say about Tacitus’ scholarship, despite the doubts one sometimes sees expressed on Heathen websites and forums:

Tacitus in his Germania, written c. AD 98, presented a lucid picture of the civilization of continental Germans and threw some light on that of Scandinavia. It is now generally believed that he worked chiefly from older books, and especially from a lost Bella Germaniae of the Elder Pliny (c. AD 23-79), although he must also have gained information from merchants, soldiers and others who had penetrated Germany.[10]

Still, by historical standards and compared to Mediterranean paganism in particular, the record is scant. Modern day Heathens may be ephemerally aware of the problem, and it can at times become a bone of contention, for instance, between those types of Heathens who want to base their beliefs entirely on modern scholarship, those who think all the answers are to be found in Snorri’s writings and compilations, and the type who feel that any historical documentation can only be a point of departure. The problem with the former view is that scholarship is always changing, forcing a re-appraisal of belief every few years or so, and with the latter that, as Russell notes, the sources were written down after the end of the era in question. Context is everything; unfortunately, many Heathens find context as poisonous as do Christians to their preconceived beliefs. Nobody likes to have their beliefs attacked, particularly by something as trivial as fact, logic, or reason.

Finally, there is the issue that almost everything we do know of Heathen beliefs comes from the Viking Age. This is the period from 793 (the raid on Lindisfarne) and 1066 (Harald Harðraða’s death at Stamford Bridge). As Turville-Petre has noted, this was “a society in the throes of social and political upheaval.”[11] To take a snapshot of this era and call it typical of Heathen Norse culture and society would be as inaccurate as taking a snapshot of the Native American in the mid-1800s and calling it representative of Native American culture and society. DuBois offers us an example of why this is so:

If we can point to evidence of Þórr or Freyr worship in some Nordic communities of the Viking Age, the case for Óðinn is far more emphatic, at least among the aristocrats and poets who were responsible for the formal poetry that has come down to us from the pagan era. In the retrospective view offered by Snorri in his thirteenth-century Prose Edda, Óðinn stands as the uncontested ruler of all, the All-Father, who counts Þórr as a son and leads the other gods in counsel at Ásgarðr. His missing eye (ransomed for wisdom), attendant ravens, and eight-legged horse make him easily recognizable in iconographic as well as narrative depictions. Although presiding as the leader of the Æsir as well as dead warriors, he also seems to have subsumed older aspects of both Vanir magic and shamanic tradition into himself, figuring as an ever-present and resourceful deity, one always behind the corner, waiting to enlist the dying hero in the afterlife wonders of Valhalla or plotting to gain a new type of magic or wisdom. Tellingly, Óðinns apparent rise to power in the Scandinavian pantheon finds reflection in in recurrent images of him as a crafty, usurping, duplicitous deity, lacing in many accounts the unambiguously admirable qualities of Þórr. Again, we are led to wonder whether worshippers of the Viking Age could have regarded Úðinn’s exploits as completely worthy of emulation, or whether instead, they represented the extreme acts of a divine being or the marginalized behavior ofa practitioner of magic.[12]

The fact then that most of our evidence, both literary and archeological, comes from this era, is therefore problematic. The fact that the literary evidence was only written down a century or two after the end of the Heathen era, and by Christian chroniclers at that, only adds to our woes.

Given that so much depends on Snorri Sturluson’s testimony, the fact that his accuracy is so hotly debated in academic circles is a cause for concern:

The reliability of Snorri’s Edda as a source of mythology has been judged very variously. Snorri was writing more than two centuries after Iceland had adopted Christianity, and a Christian spirit runs through his work. He sometimes misunderstood the sources which he quoted, and tended to systematize and rationalize. Some critics have suspected that nearly everything which Snorri adds to known sources was invented, either by him or by his contemporaries…Such views have been found hypercritical, and a sharp reaction has set in in recent years. Using the comparative method, G. Dumézil has shown that Snorri’s evidence cannot be so lightly dismissed.[13]

It should come as no surprise then that there is heated disagreement in the Heathen “community” over the evidence presented by Snorri. One very important bone of contention is whether or not Snorri believed the Reginn were only mortals who were play-acting at being gods.

This is also known as the “Trojan fallacy.” There are two schools of thought on this subject. They are the euhemerist and the anti-euhemerist. The euhemerist position is that myth grows out of real history and that deities are men made into gods over time. This theory comes from Euhemeros of Messene who lived c. 300 BCE. You see this expressed at the beginning of Peter Jackson’s LOTR as well, with Galadriel saying “history became legend, legend became myth…”

You’ll find a number of scholars accuse Snorri of being a euhemerist (for more, see Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology, 75-77). But there is another school of thought led by Rory McTurk. In his Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture he says,

“Hárr, Jafnhár and Þriði … are members of a tribe called the Æsir who have arrived in Scandinavia from Troy. Gylfi visits them in their Scandinavian stronghold, Ásgarðr, built on the model of their former home, Old Ásgarðr or Troy, to find out whether their apparent ability to make everything go according to their will is due to their own nature, or to the gods they worship. They are aware in advance of his coming, and subject him to various optical illusions, the purpose of which is apparently to trick him into believing that they, the human Æsir, are identical with the divine Æsir, their gods. [...] There is, however, a case for saying that Gylfi has the last laugh, since he now returns to his kingdom and tells people what he has seen and heard, including presumably the fact that the gods in the stories he has been told, the divine Æsir, were not identical with the human Æsir telling them; whereas the human Æsir, it emerges after Gylfi has left, had wished it to be thought that they were identical. After his departure the human Æsir hold what we may assume is rather a hurried, panicky conference, assigning the names of personages and places in their stories to people of their own company and to places in their new homeland, Scandinavia, in the hope that, in spite of what Gylfi is telling people, they may still be able to put it around there that they and the gods are identical.

This is the passage from Gylfaginning that McTurk discusses above:

“En Æsir setjask þá á tal ok ráða ráðum sínum ok
minnask á þessar
frásagnir allar er honum váru sagðar, ok gefa nöfn
þessi hin sömu
er áðr váru nefnd mönnum og stöðum þeim er þar
váru, til þess at
þá er langar stundir liði at menn skyldu ekki ifask í at
allir væri
einir, þeir Æsir er nú var frá sagt ok þessir er þá
váru þau sömu
nöfn gefin.” (Gylfaginning 54)

In Faulkes’ translation:

But the Æsir sat down to discuss and hold a conference and went over all these stories that had been told him, and assigned those same names that were mentioned above to the people and places that were there [in Sweden], so that when long periods of time had passed men should not doubt that they were all the same, those Æsir about whom stories were told above and those who were now given the same names.

and Byock’s translation:

As for the Æsir, they sat down to discuss and take counsel. They recalled all the stories they had told him (Gangleri). Then they gave the same names, mentioned above, to people and places there, so that, after much time had passed, peopel would not doubt that all werre one and the same, that is, those Æsir who have been spoken about and the ones who were now assigned the very same names.[14]

This passage does seem to bear out McTurk’s position that Snorri knew the difference between the real Æsir and the fake, who were trying to sell themselves to the people as gods. This would make Snorri an anti-euhemerist and not a euhemerist at all, and do nothing to negate the genuine nature of the gods.

Consider the Normanist Controversy for a moment. Everyone knows that Russia owes its origins to Swedish Vikings, called Varangians, who sailed across the Baltic and settled in the new land among the Slavs, gradually going native until their original identity was subsumed by the indigenous culture.

Or do we? That is what people are taught in the west. Few people are taught that there is another school of thought entirely. That just mentioned is the theory of the Normanist camp. The anti-Normanist school strongly disagrees with this version of history. Remember, history has become nationalized. There are all sorts of reasons to want to interpret the past in a certain light, as I mentioned yesterday. The Ibn Fadlan account is a perfect example of this problem.

The account of Ibn Fadlan seems to be the tale of an encounter between an Arab traveler and Varangians. There are similarities between some of the details he imparts and what we know of Norse culture of the time. But it has also been argued that some of these things can be explained away through Slavic or other influences. The whole issue is hotly debated, even today, and as always, nationalist interests stir the pot. People are protective of their national identities. In the same way Nationalist pride drove the Romantic image of the Vikings in 19th century Scandinavia, the Macedonian heritage today is gold in the Balkans, and as hotly fought over by Greeks, Albanians and Macedonians alike, the origins of the Rus is not a subject to be taken lightly in Russia.

So what then do we make of Ibn Fadlan’s account? Here we have contemporary documentary evidence from an outside source, but no agreement can be reached as to its veracity. Do we really know what we thought we knew about the origins of Russia?

So while Snorri is valuable to modern day Heathens, the systemization he began continues today. The fact that the only version we have is Snorri’s is a problem in that while we know there were other versions, we don’t have any information about them. The built-in flexibility spoken of by Bil Linzie seems phantasmal; in a sense, Snorri’s version is a codified Heathenism. Snorri didn’t worry about regional variations, and there were clearly regional variations. Consider the Hávamál for a moment. As Turville-Petre points out, its origins are West Norway:

Few would deny that Norway was the land in which most of the strophes originated. The descriptions of nature apply more readily to Norway than to Iceland. The poet describes a withering pine-tree, and he speaks of tools and appliances better known in Norway than in Iceland, of piles of dried timber stored for winter, and of wooden tiles for roofing (str. 6o), which could hardly have been used in Iceland. He speaks also of cremation, which was well known in Norway during the Viking Age, but never widespread in Iceland. He speaks of the son of a prince (str. 15), who filled no place in the social system of Iceland.[16]

Since Iceland was originally settled from this area, the origins of the Hávamál are no surprise. But what other versions of the Sayings of the High One might have once existed we shall never know.

Snorri was packing as much as he could of a knowledge rapidly being lost into a book designed to serve poetics. The fact that Heathens are put into the position of relying upon Dumézil’s comparative theology presents another sort of problem since such studies have their limits.

What then, are we to do? We know that the lore was important enough to Heathens that it was passed down from generation to generation. On the Swedish Rök Stone,

raised in memory of a chieftain named Wæmoþ, the priest and rune-carver Biari exhorts men of knowledge to pass on myths of the heroic past to the rising youth. Biari’s catalog of thirteen important piece of knowledge – truncated references to myths and that tantalized scholars ever since – suggests the array of history and myth possessed by the wise goði and used as a means of shaping the behaviors and ideas of each new generation.[17]

But were they speaking of Snorri’s lore? Or some other lore? We know that Snorri wrote down only part of the whole but we don’t know what or how much is missing. We don’t know if he got what our Heathen ancestors considered the really important parts or just some bits and pieces of them.

The best solution is to read as much as possible, but of course, even scholars can get it wrong. No number of college degrees can bestow infallibility, and where a scholar might be right in one theory he might be utterly mistaken in another. Then too, not all scholars are equal. More than one Heathen will say “so and so says this” and base their beliefs on the claim of scholars who are not really qualified to make the assertions they are claiming. And then we have the problem of translations. This is another long argument and I’ll continue the discussion later, or tomorrow, as time permits, along with my own conclusions.

Notes:

[1] Georges Duby, The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 216. op cit Russell, 133. See also Carl Erdmann, The Origin of the Idea of Crusade, trans. Marshall W. Baldwin and Walter Goffart (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 1977)

[2] As noted by Jesse Byock, there is a controversy over whether Iceland converted in 999 or 1000. See Medieval Iceland (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 11 n. 7.

[3] Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, 108.

[4] Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1993), ix

[5] James C. Russell, The Germanization of Early Medieval Christianity, 110.

[6] Edred Thorsson, Northern Magic (St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1992), 41-42.

[7] Bil Linzie, Germanic Spirituality, 52.

[8] Many of these debates are brought to light in Simek’s Dictionary of Northern Mythology.

[9] Ibid., ix

[10] E.O.G. Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964), 6.

[11] Ibid., 10. See also James Barrett et al, “What Was the Viking Age and When did it Happen?” Norwegian Archaeological Review, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2000. Barrett suggests a traditional dating would be 793-1050 but says that recent research has moved the beginning of the period back to the mid-8th century. Barrett makes mention of the “World-Systems Model” which asserts that the “ambiguity of dating may be due to the fact that different elements of the Viking Age were adopted earlier in some places than in others, perhaps reflecting the distinction between cores and peripheries” though he does not find this a “completely satisfying solution.”

[12] Thomas A. DuBois, Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 58.

[13] Turville-Petre, Myth and Religion of the North, 23.

[15] Gylfaginning, 55, The Prose Edda, tr. By Jesse Byock, 79.

[16] Turville-Petre Myth and Religion of the North, 267.

[17] DuBois, 65. There are other interpretations of the meaning of the inscription.