More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and

Regional Distribution in Pre-Christian Scandinavian

Religions by Ed. Catharina Raudvere and Jens Peter Schjødt
(review)

Carl Olsen

Scandinavian Studies, Volume 86, Number 1, Spring 2014, pp. 105-109 (Review)

Published by University of Illinois Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/scd.2014.0004

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/542767

Access provided at 12 Jan 2020 08:42 GMT from Western Ontario, Univ of
 Reviews 105

Danes in Schleswig; see Allen, pp. 130ff), by the 1920s, his views had taken
a far different, decidedly less progressive turn. As he told a reporter for
The Independent in an interview following his return from his one and
only trip to the United States (he and Asta Nielsen made the crossing
on the Hamburg-America Line’s Vaterland in May 1914; pp. 16–17, fig.
1.1), “I am proud that I haven’t a drop of democratic blood in my veins”
(The Independent, June 15, 1914).
Like that statement, Brandes’s work in the post-World War I period
(including a series of massive biographies of “great men” that are now
largely forgotten but easy to acquire at library book sales in the United
States and in used book shops in Germany) no longer incited debates
about the problems of the day. Nielsen’s work, which embraced the
possibilities of that most American of media, the cinema, was doing just
that. Beyond the personal connections between the two (Brandes and
Nielsen were friends and exchanged letters, but Brandes wrote to pretty
much everybody who was famous; it would be far more remarkable had
he not written to Nielsen), Allen’s book suggests how Brandes’s métier
necessarily gave way to Nielsen’s cinematic project and its uncanny ability
to circulate powerful, even revolutionary images. Born forty years before
Nielsen, Brandes—now only verdensberømt i Danmark (world famous in
Denmark) as another saying goes—may have made “die Asta” possible
in the first place. Of course, both of these “icons of Danish modernity”
should be part of a contemporary image of a hip Danish culture with its
cutting-edge architects and filmmakers, its Nomas, and its livable, cosmo-
politan capital, for these are products of a Modernity that Brandes and
Nielsen helped to create. Julie K. Allen’s book is a welcome reminder of
that fact.
Neil Christian Pages
Binghamton University, SUNY

More than Mythology: Narratives, Ritual Practices and Regional Distri-

bution 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.
106 Scandinavian Studies

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 meth-
odological 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 Reli-
gious 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 compara-
tive 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
 Reviews 107

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 itself.
Sundqvist takes on the question of sacral kingship in order to find a more
rigorous middle ground between the skepticism of Walter Baetke’s source-
critical approach and a naïvely comparative perspective. He replaces the
term “sacral kingship” with “religious ruler ideology,” using the latter
as an open concept to be related to four religious strategies for gaining
legitimacy and authority: (1) the ruler’s specific relation to the mythic
world, (2) religious rituals, (3) religious symbols, and (4) control of cult
organization. The emphasis is on variation in the historical and cultural
situation of religious ruler ideologies, as opposed to the decontextual-
ized idea of sacral kingship. Sundqvist tests his approach by comparing
and contrasting religious ruler ideologies in three ruling families from
the sources: the Ynglingar in Sweden, the Hlaðir Earls in Norway, and
the Þórsnesingar in Iceland, emphasizing the plural of “religious ruler
ideologies” as he investigates the differences between the three and the
potential relationship of those differences to the specific cultural and social
context of those families.
While not as explicitly comparative in approach, archaeologist Neil
Price’s opening essay “Mythic Acts: Material Narratives of the Dead in
Viking Age Scandinavia” makes use of evidence both from Anglo-Saxon
archaeology as well as interdisciplinary perspectives within Old Norse
studies in his discussion of burial rituals as narrative dramas, in particular
taking inspiration from Terry Gunnell’s work on Eddic poetry as drama.
His starting point is the extremely varied nature of Viking burial practices,
even within single communities and in limited time periods. With a nod
to Jens Peter Schjødt, Price suggests that rather than looking for fixed
burial traditions, we think of the burial rituals as discursive acts within
a space of possible expressions. Each burial may have involved, both in
performance/narration and in the attendant use of the grave goods, the
creation of mythic or other narratives, such that we may hypothesize
that we see traces of the creation of myths in the surviving burials—not
primal origins, as Price is quick to note, but details created within the
108 Scandinavian Studies

discursive space of Pre-Christian religion that then became part of the

narrative tradition. Here and throughout this volume we find variation
highlighted as the norm of Pre-Christian religion, rather than as a devia-
tion to be accounted for in pursuit of an ideal original form.
Two essays in this collection deal exclusively with non-Germanic Nordic
religion. Laura Stark’s essay “Gender, Sexuality and the Supranormal:
Finnish Oral-Traditional Sources” is not a comparative study, but she offers
it as a point of departure for future comparisons, exploring the ways in
which “the abundant Finnish materials recorded in the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries illuminate earlier modes of thought, particularly
with regard to gender and sexuality” (p. 153). In particular, she explores the
dynamistic religious phenomena of väki (impersonal supernatural forces
or beings) and luonto (inborn supernatural force), which she compares
to the Norse náttúra (virtue, power) and megin (strength, might). Her
discussion is interesting in its own right as a presentation on the väki of
women and dynamistic forces more generally in Finnish folk belief, as
well as an interesting supplement to the body of comparative evidence
available for the investigation of Pre-Christian Nordic Religion. Veikko
Anttonen’s essay “Literary Representation of Oral Religion: Organiz-
ing Principles in Mikael Agricola’s List of Mythological Agents in Late
Medieval Finland” engages critically and productively with research into
the list of Finnish supernatural agents in the preface to his Psalter, but
primarily focuses on the learned nature of the text. Rather than taking
Agricola’s list as a window on a decontextualized family of Pre-Christian
deities, Anttonen analyzes it as an artifact of the collision of oral tradition,
or “folk” religion, and the learned culture of literate Christendom.
The editors of the volume each contribute essays heavy on theoretical
and methodological discussion. Catharina Raudvere’s “Fictive Rituals in
Völuspá: Mythological Narration between Agency and Structure in the
Representation of Reality” emphasizes the “More than Mythology” of
the title of this collection. The myths themselves point beyond narrative,
as they speak of “cosmology, anthropology, norms and values; in other
words, they tell of more than mythology” (p. 99). She takes rituals as
her case-in-point, both because they are essential to religion and because
of their cultural and social contingency. She describes those in Völuspá
as fictive rituals, representations that serve the purpose of the narrative
while demonstrating an implicit understanding of what ritual is, rather
than functioning as simple one-for-one representations of—or sets of
instructions for—Old Norse rituals. Jens Peter Schjødt’s concluding essay
“Reflections on Aims and Methods in the Study of Old Norse Religion”
wraps things up with a defense against hypercritical perspectives that would
 Reviews 109

suggest that we simply cannot say anything about pre-Christian religion.

Such perspectives must backfire, he argues, as we have no privileged access
to the past regardless of the target time period: we are always building
models, and while we can certainly construct better and better models,
no model will have a 1:1 correlation to reality. As with many others in this
volume, he insists that we give up on finding some idealized original, pagan
version of Old Norse mythology, and instead suggests that we make use
of the concept of discourse, or a “space of possible expressions (verbal or
otherwise)” (p. 272), looking at Pagan discourse versus Christian discourse
and the ways in which they bleed into each other. He concludes with a
discussion of the various levels of comparativism, defending comparative
approaches at the grander level of regional neighbors or Indo-European
cultures by noting that, given the degree of variation we have learned to
expect in both time and space throughout Scandinavia, any engagement
with the material will be necessarily comparativist, dealing with local vari-
ants rather than a set of representative elements of a unified tradition.
To this he adds the value of typological comparison between religions,
universals that may prove useful in the absence of local specifics. We may
summarize one of his major points as the claim that no discipline has
privileged access to the past—our engagement with the past is always
comparative to some degree, filling in gaps that we no longer have the
cultural competence to take for granted. This does not mean a “free-for-
all” of speculative comparison, but it does free us up to take comparative
data into consideration in a rigorous and critical manner.
This collection of essays is a productive point of departure for further
work on comparative analysis and/or reconstruction of Old Norse reli-
gion, although I expect that many of the case studies would benefit from
extended treatment beyond the short essays here. The “hypercritical”
skeptics may not be particularly won over by some of the more polemical
arguments, but I find this volume a valuable contribution to the problems
and potential in methodologically rigorous and theoretically informed
engagement with Pre-Christian Scandinavian religions.
Carl Olsen
Independent Scholar

Gunnar Iversen. Norsk filmhistorie: spillefilmen 1911–2011. Oslo: Univer-

sitetsforlaget, 2011. Pp. 368.
Gunnar Iversen’s Norsk filmhistorie, published in 2011, marks the centen-
nial of Norwegian film. Iversen’s highly anticipated book comes forty-four
years after Sigurd Evensmo’s pioneering work on Norwegian film and
cinema, Det store tivoli (Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1967). Although the