Scandinavian Religion Research Articles

Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf

Reviewed by: Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds by Jonas Wellendorf Łukasz Hajdrych Medieval Scandinavia, Norse Paganism, old Norse religion, old Scandinavian religion, Christianization, demonology, mythology, the Eddas jonas wellendorf. Gods and Humans in Medieval Scandinavia. Retying the Bonds, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Pp. x + 206. The study of the mythology and religious practice of pre-Christian Scandinavia poses many problems for contemporary scholars: incompatibility of terminology, lack of extended sources, and their contamination by later Christian tradition. Jonas Wellendorff's recent Gods and Humans deals with these issues in a highly interesting way. Over the five chapters of the monograph, Wellendorf discusses pagan Scandinavian religion and its transition towards Christianity through the perspective [End Page 120] of ancient and medieval Latin and Scandinavian texts. Wellendorff devotes Chapter 1 to the process of Christianization of Scandinavian lands and the attempts of missionaries to reduce the old Norse gods to the ranks of Christian demons. In Chapters 2 and 3, Wellendorf discusses the issue of anti-pagan texts in their relation to the old Scandinavian religion, showing the attempts by bards and other indigenous authors to preserve the memory of the old gods in a new way, acceptable to Christianity. However, by far the most interesting issues Wellendorf discusses are treated in the final two chapters, in which he analyses how Saxo Grammaticus and Snorri Sturluson deployed new methods of thinking about pre-Christian beliefs. Both thirteenth-century authors reinterpreted the old Norse gods as humans who had traveled to the Scandinavian lands from western Asia to found the various dynasties of these lands, and claimed that, because of their extensive knowledge and skills, they were eventually mistakenly worshipped as gods. Wellendorf shows that through this euhemerizing strategy, those authors secured the memory of the old gods among the Scandinavian peoples, protecting them from oblivion in the new Christian conditions. The great value of this work lies in its principles of interpretation and the perspective that Wellendorf uses to show us what kind of religion the pre-Christian Norse actually practiced. By using Augustine's and Varro's tripartite theological classification of religion into the mythological, the civil, and the natural, Wellendorf demonstrates that the Scandinavian cultus indeed involved very different forms of "religion" than what we are accustomed to denote by that term today. Although his analysis deploys categories from classical Latin works, in every moment of the study Wellendorf remains aware of more recent methodological problems, especially the issue of the definition of "religion." Indeed, Wellendorf devotes a considerable part of Chapter 1 to discussions of the problem of the modern creation of the category "religion" and the issues raised by applying this term to pre-Christian religions (or "beliefs," or "faiths," or "traditions," or whatever term we use to describe old Norse "religious" practices and mythology). But Wellendorf's book is more than just a brilliant study devoted to medieval Scandinavian culture. It is also an invaluable work for anyone interested in early modern Scandinavian historiography. In the final sections of the book (Chapter 5 and the Epilogue), Wellendorf describes an important transition from Scandinavian pagan mythology to the fully Christianized historiography of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. During the Christianization era, the old Norse gods were, as elsewhere, reduced to the rank of demons. However, there is a notable contrast to what happened for example in eastern Europe, where old beliefs were slowly but systematically eradicated and incorporated into Christian religion or eventually died out, in the process losing [End Page 121] almost every aspect of their former identity., In the Scandinavian culture, the memory of old gods survived into an era when they could be drawn upon without fear of being accused of practicing paganism or witchcraft: they were thus available to be incorporated anew into the culture. The discovery of the manuscript of the Poetic Edda in 1640 was one of the inspirations for early modern Scandinavian scholars to rewrite their old mythology, debunk it, and link it directly to the classical Greco-Roman mythology. Wellendorf shows the sincere will of the seventeenth-century scholars and bards to preserve ancient culture by proving that what had been rejected in recent centuries...

Sacral rulers in pre-Christian Scandinavia: The possibilities of typological comparisons within the paradigm of cultural evolution

This article offers a new perspective on the century-old discussion of sacral rulers in the history of religions generally, and pre-Christian Scandinavian religions specifically, namely the application of a cultural evolutionary theoretical framework based on the work of Robert N. Bellah. In doing this, the article opens the possibility of wider typological comparisons within this paradigm and suggests a nuancing of Bellah’s typology with the addition of the category of ‘chiefdom religion’. This is utilised in the main part of the article, which features a comparison between the figure of the sacral ruler in pre-Christian Scandinavian and pre-Christian Hawaiian religions through an analysis of: 1) the position of the ruler in society, cult, and ideology; 2) the societal structure in which these religions are found; 3) the idea of a ruler sacrifice; 4) incestuous relationships and their ideological implications; and, finally, 5) the idea of a double rulership. Following this comparison, the perspectives in and the usefulness of cultural evolutionary theories in the history of religions are briefly evaluated.

More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions

More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions

Book review: More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions, written by Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt

Book review: More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions, written by Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt

More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions by Ed. Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt

Reviewed by: More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions by Ed. Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt Carl Olsen More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian Religions. Ed. Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt. Lund: Nordic Academic Press. Pp. 287. The nine essays collected here are based on the presentations of the keynote speakers at the 2008 conference of the Nordic Network for Research on Pre-Christian Religion. The Network, according to the editors, aims to facilitate close interdisciplinary contact between religious studies scholars and those other fields (literature, history, philology, archaeology, and ethnology are those they list in their introduction) that have their own long traditions in the study of Old Norse religion. The contributors to this volume bring a wide variety of disciplinary perspectives to the topic. [End Page 105] While Jens Peter Schjødt has some strong words for the “hyper-criticism” of “some modern philologists” (p. 269) in his concluding essay, we may take this volume as an indication that there is indeed some optimism in these parallel fields that one can actually say something about Pre-Christian religion in the North, and do so in a rigorous fashion. “Hyper-criticism” is not the only target, as many of these essays, and the volume as a whole, make a point of criticizing speculative and comparative excesses of past scholarship. The goal is a happy (but rigorous) medium, although the ideal presented varies from essay to essay. The essays range from cases-in-point to more abstract discourses on theory and methodology, although most of them combine some methodological exposition with a particular test case for their approach. A comparative angle is prominent in most of these essays. Peter Jackson’s essay “The Merits and Limits of Comparative Philology: Old Norse Religious Vocabulary in a Long-Term Perspective” discusses the degree to which historical linguistics and comparative Indo-European research can shed light on Pre-Christian Norse religion, drawing his own comparative examples from Old Norse myth, Homeric formulas, and the hieratic poetry in Vedic and Avestan from the second and early first millennium BC. He is careful to emphasize, however, that he is not attempting to uncover some “timeless ideational structure” but instead is attempting to rediscover aspects of Germanic religion “at work elsewhere, in a no less contingent historical reality” (p. 62). Jackson is not alone in this volume in noting the parallel between linguistic reconstruction of lost forms and comparative research into prehistoric religion, and he reminds us that Dumézil himself recommended that historians of religions take their inspiration from historical linguistics. His approach is not a return to Dumézil, however, and in particular he attempts to transcend Dumézil’s “top-down” approach by means of a “bottom-up” approach founded on a “careful comparison and reconsideration of the linguistic data” (p. 53). Thomas DuBois’s essay “Diets and Deities: Contrastive Livelihoods and Animal Symbolism in Nordic Pre-Christian Religions” involves a more immediate regional comparativism. Where his Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999) explores the commonalities between Norse and Sámi religious cultures, here he explores one way in which Scandinavian and Sámi communities emphasized their particular ethnic identity in spite of shared economic and cultural phenomena. DuBois takes animal and food symbolism as his case-in-point, showing that, while the archaeological evidence demonstrates that wild animals were certainly important to Scandinavian communities, these communities drew their primary religious symbols from domestic animals, and while [End Page 106] Sámi communities depended more and more on domesticated species borrowed from the neighboring Scandinavians and Finns, they continued to emphasize animals traditionally important to them such as reindeer, fish, and bears as religious symbols. He suggests that there is a degree of mythic lag, in which a culture’s mythic systems fail to “keep apace of changing dietary staples and customs” (p. 66), but he also emphasizes these symbols as a way for communities to differentiate themselves from neighboring cultures. With Olof Sundqvist’s essay “‘Religious Ruler Ideology’ in Pre-Christian Scandinavia” we move into comparative research within Scandinavia...

Chronospecificities: Period-Specific Ideas About Animals in Viking Age Scandinavian Culture

Abstract The archaeology of animals is often unhelpfully split between pure symbolism and pure economy. This paper will examine Viking Age Scandinavian religion as one sphere where the two overlapped and where symbolism was manipulated for economic ends and vice versa. Scandinavian Viking Age culture reasoned and understood animal symbols in a way that was internally coherent, yet it was very different from anything in modern science. The paper asks how, or if, this made any difference in the lives of real animals in Viking Age Scandinavian society. Viking Age Scandinavia is a particularly appropriate case study because art and literature suggest a great interest in thinking with animals. Like modern culture, it had a lot of animal references. Yet, unlike modern culture, most people also lived in everyday contact with economically important animals.

Ideology of the Ruler in Pre-Christian Scandinavia: Mythical and Ritual Relations

This article is an attempt to analyse some of the important aspects of the ideology of the ruler in pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. These aspects are the notion of ‘sacral kingship’ as it has been perceived within the study of Norse religion and the methods used in dealing with this subject; the relation between the notions ‘descent from the gods’ and ‘euhenerism’; possible solutions to the fact that we have both the gods Freyr and Óðinn as progenitors of the Scandinavian and Germanic kings; the relation between the Christian notion of rex iustus and the pagan ideology of kings. Basically the article argues that these subjects cannot be dealt with without a comparative view of the Scandinavian and Germanic material.

Kundskab og indvielse – En ikonografisk tolkning af udvalgte B-brakteater

Kundskab og indvielse – En ikonografisk tolkning af udvalgte B-brakteater

The Clay Paw Burial Rite of the Åland Islands and Central Russia: A Symbol in Action

The clay paw burial rite is a special feature of the Åland Islands. It is introduced already in the seventh century shortly after a marked settlement expansion and considerable cultural changes. The rite may be connected with groups involved in beaver hunting since the clay paws in many cases can be zoologically classified as paws of beavers. On the Åland Islands only minor parts of the population belong to this group. Other groups specialized in contacts with the Finnish mainland. The clay paw group became involved in hunting expeditions further and further east and in the ninth century some of the members established themselves in three or four settlements on the middle Volga. There is a later expansion into the area between the Volga and the Kljaz'ma. The clay paw burial rite gives us an unique possibility to identify a specific Scandinavian population group in European Russia in the ninth and tenth centuries. With the introduction of Christian and semi-Christian burial customs ca. A.D. 1000 we cannot archaeologically distinguish this group any more but some historical sources could indicate its existence throughout the eleventh cetury in Russia. The clay paw burial rite brings to the fore questions about local variations and special elements in the Pre-Christian Scandinavian religion. Possibly elements of Finno-ugric religious beliefs had a connection with the development of this rite.

Scandinavian-Saami religious connections in the history of research

The religions of Scandinavians and Saamis have, for decades of scholarship, functioned as sources of analogies to explain elements in one another. For the study of Saami religion answers to questions about origins were sought in Scandinavian religion, while Saami religion has been seen by students of Scandinavian religion, as a preserver and a faithful witness of Scandinavian concepts and rites that had vanished in the times reflected in the literary sources. This view has now changed. In recent decades the tendency has been to use the loan- explanations more and more sparsely. Elements in Saami religion that were seen earlier as Scandinavian loans are now explained in a Finno-Ugric context, whereas the few elements in Scandinavian religion that were thought of as loans from the Saamis are more often looked upon as inherited from a common origin, a North Eurasian cultural stratum. The search for analogies has, in any case, preoccupied the historian of religions in this field, too. The purpose here is to provide a short and selective résumé of some aspects of a theme in the history of scholarship, a theme where "resemblances" have been found, compared, used as analogies, and — called into question: the comparative study of the religions of the Scandinavians and Saamis.

Horizontale und vertikale Achsen in der vorchristlichen skandinavischen Kosmologie

The article analyses the cosmology of Old Norse religion before the arrival of Christianity to Scandinavia and strives to illuminate the image of the world upheld in this context on the basis of the scarce source material that is available. Special attention is given to the relationship between the so-called vertical and horizontal sub-systems included in the spatial model for understanding Scandinavian religion, proposed by E. M. Meletinskij. The article discusses the dichotomies of culture and nature, cosmos and chaos that are often alluded to in the source texts and their interpretation as symbols for order/un-order on the basis of a structuralist analysis.

The Relevance of Religion: Iceland and Secularization Theory

in Iceland provides the focus for a historical-comparative and participant observation study of the supposed of religion in secular society. judgment of irrelevance appears to depend largely on a peculiar definitional construct, formed with little immediate connection to the experience of the participants in the system. A situational definition grounded in the participants' understandings of their own actions produces a rather different assessment of the religio-social systems under investigation. When people act in ways they define as religious, religion must be accepted as real for social-scientific analysis. On this basis judgments of the irrelevance of Scandinavian religion are premature and one-sided, with predefined functions of religion in society skewing both research and theory. A bout a decade-and-a-half ago, Richard Tomasson published an article entitled Religion is Irrelevant in Sweden, based on his considerable field research there (1968; see 1970). More recently he has published a monograph on Iceland (1980), in which he offers a similar analysis. Subtitled The First New Society, this book draws general theoretical inspiration from S. M. Lipset's synthetic work First New Nation and carries an introduction by him. In his own earlier book Political Man Lipset had cited Icelandic politics particularly its communist party - as an example of political sectarianism acting as a functional alternative to traditional religion. In a similar vein, Sigurdur Magniisson (1977) writes: Even though the Icelanders care little about Christianity and organized religion, they are still an essentially religious people in a more general sense (165). appearance of Petursson's monograph on religion and society in Iceland from 1830-1930 (1983) also brings this setting to particular prominence.

Book Reviews

THE WHITE GODDESS. By ROBERT GRAVES. London, Faber and Faber, 1948. Pp. 430. Price 30s Reviewed by Raglan. CIVILISATION TRADITIONELLE ET GENRES DE VIE. ANDRE VARAGNAC. Albin Michel, Paris, 1948. Reviewed by V.A.. THE CELTIC AND SCANDINAVIAN RELIGIONS. J. A. MACCULLOCH, D.D. Hutchinson's University Library. 7s. 6d. net. Reviewed by Lewis Spence. ANCIENT GREEK RELIGION. By H. J. ROSE, F.B.A. Hutchinson's University Library. London. 1946. Pp. 160. Price 7s. 6d. Reviewed by John L. Myres. THE BEGINNINGS OF RELIGION. By PROFESSOR E. O. JAMES, D.Litt., D.D. (Hutchinson's University Library: 1948, London, pp. 159. 7s. 6d. net.) Reviewed by J. A. Macculloch.