jennbert, k.; andrÉn a.; raudavre c. [org.] - old norse religion, nordic academic press, 2006, cap....

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One of the most remarkable texts from prehistoric Scandina-via stands in a field near the church of Rk in stergtland.e unique text is a very long runic inscription carved onfive sides of a granite block almost four metres high. e RkStone, as this famous inscription is called, was written at thestart of the ninth century, and it includes allusions to heroicpoems and myths that are unknown today. e text contains

alliterations, kennings, and a stanza in thefornyrislagmetre,and is partly written in secret runes. It ends with a pieceof solemn, repetitive, artistic prose. e difficult text hasbeen quoted and interpreted since the 750s, and no otherScandinavia rune-stone has been studied in so many works.

According to the interpretation that is generally acceptedtoday, the inscription runs as follows:

ese runes stand in memory of Vmo, but Varin wrote them(lit. painted), the father, for the dead (lit. death-marked) son.

We tell a folk-memory (or: Let us tell, to youth), which the twospoils were that were twelve times taken as spoils, both togetherfrom different men.

at we tell as the second, who nine ages (generations) agolost his life (or: came to life, or: came to the shore) with theHrei-goths and died with them for his crime (or: because ofhis pride, or: and he still makes verdicts, or: and he still rulesover the battle).

eoderic rules (or: rode), the bold ruler of sea-warriors,over the shores of Hreimar (the shore of the Hrei-Sea).Now (he) sits equipped on his horse (lit. on his goth, or:on his gothic horse), with the shield fastened, the princeof the Mrings.

at we tell as the twelfth, where the horse of the Valkyrie (lit.the horse of Gunn) sees food on the battlefield, where twentykings are lying.

at we tell as the thirteenth, which twenty kings sat in Zea-land (or: in Sillende) during four winters under four names,sons of four brothers.Five Valkis (i.e. Five by the name of Valki), sons of Raulf,five Hreiulfs, sons of Rugulf, five Haisls, sons of Haru, fiveGunnmunds (or: Kynmunds), sons of Bjrn.Now I tell the memories completely(?). Somebody (?) (or:Now youth I foster ? May somebody tell ?) grew up(or: may grow up) from this (?)

We tell a folk-memory, which among the Ingeldings was com-pensated (or: avenged) through a wifes sacrifice (or: throughthe sacrifice of a wife).

We tell a folk-memory, for whom a kinsman was born, for(which) young warrior.

Old Norse religionSome problems and prospects

Vilin it is (or: It is the Will, or: Do you want that?).He knew how to beat a giant (with his knuckles).Use (or: Enjoyment, or: Milk) (?)

We tell a folk-memory (or: to youth): be bold (or: or).Sibbi, the guardian of the temple, begot a child at the age ofninety.

e Rk Stone and its ambiguous text can serve as a highlyillustrative example of all the problems and paradoxes thatencounter anyone who wants to study pre-Christian Norsereligion. e text was written in an age that is convention-ally regarded as pagan, but the references to pre-Christianreligion are vague and indirect. A supernatural being like agiant is crushed by a champion. According to one readingof the inscription, this hero is called Vilin, which arousesassociations with the brother or double of the god Odin, Vili.But according to other interpretations this is not a name, sothis divine association is lost. e name or is mentioned,but it is uncertain whether it is a man or the thunder god thatis meant. Otherwise the text refers to tales of heroes and more

or less historical persons. Despite the pre-Christian content ofthe Rk Stone, the main figure in the inscription, iaurikthe bold, that is to say, the Ostrogothic king eodericthe Great (c. 455526), was an Arian Christian. e crypticformulation suggesting that he is still, after nine generations,sitting armed on his Gothic horse, has been convincinglyinterpreted as a reference to the equestrian statue of eodericthe Great that originally stood in Ravenna. is statue wasmoved from Ravenna to Aachen in 80, causing a great com-motion, after Charlemagne had been crowned emperor bythe Pope in Rome.

It is surely no chance that the Ostrogothic king eodericthe Great plays a central part on this rune-stone in stergt-

land. Someone wanted to claim his own genealogy. e poemabout eoderic probably alluded to the Ostrogoths mythof their origin, according to which they originated from theScandinavian peninsula. e stergtland magnate Varinmay even have believed himself and his family to be distantrelatives of the famous Ostrogothic hero-king. e Rk Stonethus contains both political claims based on history and in-direct references to the great political power of the day, theChristian Carolingian empire.

If the references to pre-Christian religion are vague andcontradictory, then the expressions of the cultural and mentalworld of the day are all the more explicit. e text was writtenby a man, for a man, and with narratives about men. esenarratives are about war, booty, battlefields, an armed and

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mounted king, and kings with warlike names alluding topower, glory, combat, and fierce beasts of prey. Characteristi-cally, the only glimpse of women is a reference to a wifessacrifice as punishment for a mans acts.

e Rk Stone is a memorial raised to a young man. Butthe significance of memory and the allusions to history are

underlined throughout the text by the recurrent questionsabout stories from the distant past. e solemn style and thepoetic stanza in the middle of the inscription also express hownarratives in oral cultures were remembered through formal-ized speech. Someone has suggested that the Varin who carvedthe stone was aulr, a speaker or sayer of saws who preservedmemories by reciting special poems with a mythologicalcontent. e text in itself is an expression of the very specialknowledge of reading and writing, which was limited to thearistocracy of the time. e power of the written word hasbeen further underlined in the text in that parts of the inscrip-tion are carved in secret runes, which can only be read througha special cipher placed on the top of the tall stone.

Unfortunately, the original location of the Rk Stone is un-known. e first time the stone is recorded in writing it waswalled into the church at Rk. We thus do not know whetherthe Rk Stone, like later rune-stones, stood in a cemetery,at an assembly site, beside a road, at a village boundary, onin a farmyard. e only certain thing is that the large stonewith the long and remarkable inscription was noticed, sinceit gave the place its name: Rk comes from the word rauk,meaning stone. e Rk Stone thus provokes discussionsof central concepts in the study of Norse religion, as well asfundamental questions about text and materiality.

Some central concepts

Phenomena in the distant past must of necessity be studiedfrom the point of view of the present day and with the aidof present-day language. e crucial question is thereforewhich terms are most suitable in modern-day translationsand interpretations of a past reality. e concept of pre-Christian Norse religion in itself causes problems, since theterm religion was introduced to the Scandinavian languageswith Christianization, and only acquired its modern meaningthrough studies in the history of religion during the nine-teenth and twentieth centuries.

e word religion goes back to Latin religio, meaningobligation, conscience, reverence worship of god(s), andis etymologically connected to the verb religare, reconnect,

bind. Although this etymology is disputed, the interpretationhas been that the essence of religion is about how humansrelate to a transcendent sphere. e consequence has beenthat studies of ones own and other peoples religion havefocused on the intellectual content of religion as put forwardby institutional representatives, while everyday, ritual, andhabitual behaviours have been more neglected.

e Norse sources to the extent that a need was felt to usea specific term at all for the old religion use expressions like

forn sirold custom or heiinn sirheathen custom. echange of religion was called siaskipti, change of custom.e old days were thus denoted not only by their beliefs but

just as much by the actions and behaviours that people had

performed: religious rites, judicial acts, behaviour to mark

ownership and belonging. An expression like the old cus-tom has far-reaching connotations: the traditional, regularpractice, but also with reference to knowledge about the past.e past stands as a guarantee for honourable behaviour.

Just like many aspects of the material culture, a deliberatelink back to history is palpable in a linguistic expression like

this. e presence of the past becomes concrete, and onecan detect simultaneity in the interaction between past andpresent. e conventional scholarly use of the term religionis therefore not really applicable, but the word is neverthelessneeded in its everyday modern sense to mark the approximateboundaries of the research field.

At the centre of many studies of pre-Christian Scandina-vian is the Norse mythology, with its gods and its cosmicevents. e word mythology derives from the Greekmythos,the spoken word, which at an early stage acquired the sec-ondary meaning of something that is not really true, a storyor fictitious narrative. is distinguishes it from the otherdesignation for the spoken word, logos, which acquired theopposite meaning of rational knowledge. e word mythol-ogy may therefore seem like a contradiction in terms, and itoften has negative and condescending connotations.

Mythology is never used by people about their own religiousnarratives; instead the term refers to systematic knowledgeabout other peoples untrue stories. e word mythologyhas thus been used ever since the Middle Ages, explicitly orimplicitly, as a contrast to correct religion, as a fundamentallydisparaging term. We may note that the word is rarely ornever used in accounts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam,whose dogma and doxa are emphasized instead.

e concept of myth can nevertheless be useful as a desig-nation for narratives about the past. Myth therefore containsa historical pre-understanding of the value of things from

the past. e world of gods presented by Snorri Sturluson inhis Eddais a monument to the past, but it is never superiorto Christianity. In the Roads to Midgardproject, mythologyin the conventional sense has not been studied closely. isis not because we have undervalued the function of the nar-ratives in religious life; it rather expresses an ambition to getaway from the analyses of pre-Christian Norse religion whichhave placed the narratives at the centre.

One aspect of mythology is cosmology, which in themythical narratives is the geography of the universe, fromwhat is very near to the furthest limits of creation. e figuresacting in cosmologies are gods, beings, the dead, humans,and sometimes also pure abstractions. Cosmology is not the

criterion for religion, no more than the occurrence of a cos-mology necessarily means that the purpose of an account isexclusively religious. ere may be reason to consider a bodyof evidence that is to be studied and ask at what point it hasbeen systematized: in a scholars argumentation, in a compilerlike Snorri, or in the local tradition as it was handed down.

Representations of the world-view and understandings ofthe world can take other forms than systematized accounts,but then they are not as accessible to research. In the caseof Norse cosmology, the literary background is essential forunderstanding the totality brought together by Snorri, withclassifying units and their mutual relations. Yet we still facea problem. e Eddic poems that present a cosmology were

compiled on the basis of an editors interest in the poetic

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form, but they nevertheless give a hint as to how cosmologicalelements are used in the poetry. We can only speculate aboutthe circumstances that dictated which contextual and metri-cal versions have come down to us or what variations on thetheme might have looked like. If the ambition is to proceedfrom the system to the context, the search for cosmology and

world-view must therefore be extended beyond the world andthe geography created in the texts.e project has been geared in large measure towards ritual,

as a way to broaden and supplement the conventional studiesof pre-Christian Norse religion, from mythological structureto religious practice. But even the concept of ritual is difficultto handle, as is particularly evident from the intense debateson ritual in the last decade. Whereas ritual was formerlyregarded mostly as the staging of myth, it is perceived todayas a separate social category distinct from myth. Ritual canbe a represented act and thus express myths, but it does notneed to be this. Not all rituals are religious in the sense thatthey refer to a religious discourse. Ritual acts can very wellbe interpreted on the basis of other types of societal defini-tions: legal, political, or aesthetic. It is thus not the individualpractitioners intention that defines the act, but the contextsthat place it in a specific discourse.

Based on an open definition, there is a risk of getting stuckwithin the boundaries of the convention and regarding onlycertain acts (for which we have names in the texts) as ritual.

An analytical advantage is that the discussion does not stop atthe question of the type of the act but leads on to questionsabout power and ideology: Who has access to social arenasin which to perform certain acts? Such discussions require aknowledge of and interest in the context, with parameterssuch as gender, class, and hierarchy.

e interdisciplinary work has also meant that the concept

of material culture, and its relation to religion, myth, cosmol-ogy, and ritual, has been discussed intensively. In previousarchaeology, material culture was viewed as passive traces oftechnology, economy, and social conditions, while religioustraditions were a kind of residual category for everythingthat could not be explained. Since the contextual turn inthe 980s and 990s, the outlook on materiality has changedin several fundamental ways. Objects, buildings, places, andentire landscapes are regarded as active elements in the con-stantly ongoing negotiations and renegotiations taking placebetween people. Material culture affects peoples lives, it canbe ascribed meaning, and it can represent complex ideas. Asin many other human sciences, interpretation has come into

focus in archaeology.e changed view of material culture means that artefactscan play a different, more active part in the study of pre-Christian Norse religion. But the relationship between theIcelandic texts and the objects is still complicated. e linksbetween the poems and the artefacts are indirect, and theyshould therefore be viewed chiefly as being analogies for eachother. e distance in time and place between thirteenth-century Iceland and Iron Age Scandinavia means that thetexts never contain descriptions of the actual contexts thatcan be studied archaeologically. Instead it is always a questionof comparing similar structures with each other, for example,descriptions of a hall with the remains that can be unearthed

by an excavation.

e indirect relationship also has constructive causes, sincethe common denominator for the written word and mate-riality is oral tradition. As many scholars have stressed, oraltradition is both changeable and rich in variation. An extanttext is therefore just one possible variant of a narrative. Andsince pictures of the same narrative can render other versions,

the relationship between artefact and text is only indirect.e use of material culture in the study of pre-ChristianNorse religion thus has its weaknesses and its strengths.e changed view of ritual means that it can be difficultto ascertain from material traces of ritualized acts whetherthe rituals were connected to a religious discourse or not.e variation in the oral tradition also means that the iden-tification of different motifs and figures can never be anymore than provisional. At the same time, the active role ofmateriality in all oral culture means that artefacts can be atruly primary source for narratives, conceptions, and patternsof action in the Norse world. Pictures of narratives could beused as mnemonic devices for composing new variants of thenarratives. Cosmological perspectives are sometimes merelyhinted at in mythical or heroic narratives, while the view ofthe world could be depicted in a highly systematic way inmaterial culture, for example in settlement, buildings, andartefacts. Recurrent formalized acts at one and the same placemay even show concretely how certain patterns of action weremaintained for generations, in that the place and the acts werepart of the collective memory. ere is thus great potentialto find new perspectives on pre-Christian Norse religion byusing material culture, although the limitations of the objectsmust receive critical attention and scrutiny.

Some perspectives

Since the project is based on individually formulated sub-projects, these inevitably emphasize different contexts andperspectives. Discussions of concepts were held within theproject to arrive at a common denominator, or a sharedplatform summing up our new perspective on the researchfield. ese perspectives can be specified as follows.

From mythological structure to ritual history

A great deal of research on pre-Christian Norse religion con-cerns the Norse myths and their internal structure. ere areseveral attempts to place the myths in their contemporarysocial context. With our work on the project, however, wewant to go one step further and create a ritual history, which

should be viewed as a complement to the studies of myth.In addition, we want to investigate this ritual history over avery long time, unlike the often short temporal perspectivesin many of the mythological analyses. rough these changesin perspective we hope to reach a new understanding both ofpre-Christian Norse religion and of the individual myths.

From one to several traditions

By switching the focus from myth to rite it has become highlyobvious that pre-Christian Norse religion is not a uniformor stable category. Instead there were profound chronologi-cal, regional, and social differences in pre-Christian religiouspractice in Scandinavia. e archaeological traces of ritesare in fact so different in time and place that one can seri-

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ously question the term Norse paganism. Instead a pictureemerges above all of regional rites. Social differences in ritescan likewise be detected, since certain rituals, and also sacralplace-names, seem to be connected to a small but politicallyimportant aristocracy, with contacts all over Scandinavia andcontinental Europe.

Traditions without a common originApart from the regional and social differences there is also acomplex multitemporality in what is often called Norsepaganism. e elements that are attested in the late pre-Christian religion differ greatly in age and origin. A symbollike the ors hammer is not evidenced before the ninthcentury, when it should probably be viewed as a consciousreaction to the Christian cross. In contrast, the mythologicalmotif of the sun being drawn by a horse has a much longerhistory, since it is attested by archaeological finds and imagesas far back as the fourteenth century BC. Similarly, everyritual element and every mythological motif seems to have itsown history and its own origin. In cases where it is possible

to trace a non-Nordic origin we see influences and contactsin many different directions. Pre-Christian Norse religion canthus no longer be regarded as an archaic expression of anoriginal tradition on the periphery of Europe.

From deconstruction to hybridization

e results of the project mean that a concept like Norsepaganism can in a way be deconstructed. But we do not wantsolely to break down the concept; through our ritual historywe attempt to build up a new image of religious practiceover a very long time in Scandinavia. is ritual history canbe described as a continuous hybridization, in which ele-ments and motifs from outside are constantly incorporated in

traditions, which are thereby successively altered. is meansthat even elements with a long history have changed in mean-ing, depending on the different contexts in which they havefunctioned. It seems, moreover, that the hybridization wasnot constant; it was particularly noticeable in certain periods,such as the Early Bronze Age, the Roman Iron Age, and theEarly Viking Age.

Ongoing hybridization

Norse paganism is often perceived as ending with theChristianization of Scandinavia, but we believe instead thatwe can see ritual practice with pre-Christian features, and

the history of the reception of pre-Christian Norse religion,as cases of ongoing hybridization. rough new contexts andnew perspectives, the interpretation of pre-Christian rites andmyths has gradually changed from Christianization until thepresent day.

Back to Rke Rk Stone and its obscure text thus raises many of thequestions and problems that concern studies of pre-ChristianNorse religion. How should concepts such as religion, culture,and mentality be perceived and related to each other? Whatwas the significance of the long-term cultural encounters be-tween pre-Christian Scandinavian regions and Christian con-tinental kingdoms? Who had the power over memory, myth,and history? Who had the knowledge of writing, poetry, andformalized speech? How should we perceive the relationshipbetween the text and the stone? Why was the materiality ofthe stone so important that it gave the place its name? Whatrole did material culture play, and how should its relation totext be perceived? ere are no set answers to these questions,and we have not solved the problems in any definitive way.But by formulating them we hope that we have created aplatform for further interdisciplinary research.

e English translation and interpretation of the inscrip-tion on the Rk stone are taken from: Lars Lnnroth 977e Riddles of the Rk stone. A structural approach.Arkiv

for nordisk filologi92:-57.

Anders AndrnDepartment of Archaeology and Classical Studies,

Stockholm [email protected]

Kristina JennbertDepartment of Archaeology and Ancient History,

Lund [email protected]

Catharina RaudvereSection for History of Religions

Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies,Copenhagen University

[email protected]

jennbert, k.; andrÉn a.; raudavre c. [org.] - old norse religion, nordic academic press, 2006, cap....

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