Off-Center: Considering Directional Valences in Norse Cosmography

Abstract

In this article I offer an account and analysis of several patterns of valuation of the cardinal directions in medieval Scandinavian texts. While my topic is not al together novel-ideas about space, along with those of time, have been matters of widespread and perennial concern to scholars of culture and religion, and those interested in the Norse context have proven no exception-I seek to go beyond previous examinations in several ways. First, many of the scholars who have fo cused on directionality in Old Norse sources have been concerned with catalogu ing and elucidating terminology for the cardinal points and for movement along and between them, with a particular emphasis on assessing the correctness of such terms' application in respect to ultimate or relative orientation.1 While I draw on the insights of such studies, my interests lie less in efforts to map or to describe movement in the real world known to medieval Scandinavians than in the values that they can be shown to have attached to the cardinal directions. My focus, therefore, is on imagined or moral as opposed to physical or topographical space. Of the studies that have taken a similar interest in Norse ideas about space, most have focused mainly or exclusively on the attempt, often from a structuralist per spective, to reconstruct from available sources pagan cosmography, to discover or assemble a systematic summa of the pre-Christian Norse mythical Weltbild.2 While pre-Christian ideas, or their traces, are also a focus of my article, I pay more