Abstract
The authors of the present volume, Myth, Materiality, and Lived Religion, focus on the material dimension of Old Norse mythology and the role played by myths in everyday life. More broadly expressed, the collection looks at the social, ceremonial and material contexts of myths. This topic has been underexplored in previous research on Old Norse myths, despite its important theoretical implications. However, discussions around materiality, in a more general sense, have for a long time been significant for historians of religion, especially archaeologists. Myth, Materiality, and Lived Religion seeks to make the case for the relevance of materiality to literary historians and philologists as well. Questions relating to the theme of materiality and lived religion are posed in this book, including: • What do myths tell us about the material culture of the periods in which they were narrated? • What role did myths or mythical beings play in connection to, for instance, illnesses and remedies during the Viking Period and the Middle Ages? • How did ordinary people experience participation in a more formal sacrificial feast led by ritual specialists? The editors of this book are all associated with the Department of Ethnology, History of Religions and Genders Studies at Stockholm University, Sweden.
Highlights
With respect to the social and historical context, we have to recognize different actors who are involved in shaping the meaning of the iconography
There is first the person or persons who wished to set up a monument, to make a tapestry or some other object and paid for them, second, the artist who designed and produced them, and third, the viewers who may have associated the pictures with quite different things than those the patron and the artist had in mind
The current paper focuses on depositions of human and animal remains in waters and wetlands in the wider Uppland region, where this archaeological material can feed into discussions of sacrifice and pre-Christian myth and religion
Summary
There has been a great deal of discussion surrounding conceptions of ‘souls’ and ‘spirits’ connected with vernacular religion, magic and ritual in an Old Norse milieu.6 The conclusions of these studies vary in relation both to the material foregrounded and to the scholar’s focus and methodology. Scholars tend to focus on the term and concept of seiðr, which gets connected to the vǫlva, deep-trance specialists, as well as being linked to a variety of other magic and ritual practices The orientation of these studies is customarily to reconstruct and generalize a more or less hegemonic model of the supernatural for the Old Norse world, a model often compared and contrasted with neighbouring and historically related cultures. The present discussion differs from earlier research on the following key points: a) the focus is on relationships between embodied experience and ritual technologies; b) ritual practices are approached in terms of technologies that are not assumed to be the same or even necessarily compatible for all varieties of ritual specialist; c) ritual technologies are considered to interface with body images and understandings of the unseen world, d) which are reciprocally accessed and internalized through practices and behaviours and the discourse surrounding them; and e) individuals are considered to relate to specific practices in different ways and to different degrees according to, for example, social role, age, status, occupation, interest and their relationships and interactions with authoritative individuals
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