Power and ‘Sacral Rulers’ in Pre-Christian Scandinavia: Top-Down and Bottom-Up Dynamics

Abstract

This paper considers the intricate relationship between religious and political power in pre-Christian Scandinavia. Drawing on power theory and aspects of power legitimation in cultural memory theory, it identifies and discusses a blind spot in the current research debate on the religious aspects of rulership. It argues that the ‘top-down’ perspective that currently dominates research on this topic needs a complementary ‘bottom-up’ perspective. Only then can we reach a more nuanced understanding of the power mechanisms surrounding the religious aspects of rulership. With a theoretical discussion of the social and ontological bases of political power, this paper argues that the religious dimensions of rulership were rooted in underlying (socially constructed) assumptions about the nature of reality, which were shared by rulers and subjects. On this basis, this paper proceeds to discuss the figure of the ruler in the context of the community’s formation of collective identity. It proposes that the ruler served as a focal point for the community’s cultivation of a shared past, a process that underpinned a sense of a collective self and of the community’s durability across generations. Ruler genealogies are highlighted as instrumental to this process, and a new, tentative reading of Ynglingatal is proposed.