"The transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages is best seen as the reassertion of dominance by the native elements in each of the three chief parts of the Roman Empire. The bland cosmopolitan culture of Imperial times—itself a blend of Latin, Greek and Levantine ingredients—began to differentiate once more into vigorous localisms. A distinctive feature of the Islamic world, or of Byzantium, or of the West, may therefore be partly intelligible as the re-emergence of an indigenous trait." (Lynn White 1963: 280)
Generations of scholars have traced the intellectual lineages from the U.S. to England, France, and Germany, and thence through a chain whose nodal points are the Enlightenment, the Renaissance and the Reformation, the Middle Ages, Imperial Rome, Hellenistic societies, and Classical Greece. The more broad-minded have digressed to include a smattering of the Arabs, some suitably ancient Hebrews, and some highly ancient Egyptians. In intellectual history, this has not been inaccurate because it is both self-confirming and self-generating. For as each successive generation of scholars penetrated more deeply into the analysis of Latin, Greek, and Hebrew texts, they created an intellectual culture that amalgamated the ancient literatures even more intimately with the European learned tradition. Thus, it is not incorrect to say that a good deal of European and American Kultur—as expressed in the ideas and manners of the elite—was derived from other cultures. But to apply this notion in an anthropological or cultural-historical sense—as, for instance, Max Weber did when he traced the Calvinistic hostility toward magic to its origins in the denunciations of the Hebrew prophets—is plain nonsense. We today are environed by peoples who have seized upon Christianity, wrested it from its missionaries, and reformulated it in accord with their native values and institutions. (Indeed, the argument could be advanced, and is implicit in much of the better theological history, that Christianity itself represents just such a transmutation of Judaism by members of the Hellenistic ecumene.) If this view is correct—and it should at least be theoretically plausible to the anthropologically sophisticated—then a basic source of Protestantism and its ethos must be sought in the native cultures of northern Europe, so that the use by Luther and Calvin of the Holy Scriptures should be regarded as being as much ideological (and nativistic) as causative. Knowing what was right, good, and proper from their own cultural background (which by this time was a wonderful mixture of their indigenous values, codes, and folk beliefs, plus missionaries' doctrines and reformulated Greek philosophies), and contemning the cultural peculiarities of the Latins—not to mention the restrictions and demands of the Roman Church—Luther, Calvin, and others sought and found justification for their reforms in the ancient Scriptures.
But the argument now becomes nettlesome for the ethnohistorical anthropologist. History—civilized history—preserves mostly the record of high culture, for, in the main, it reflects the interests of the scribe. As to the folk history of Europe, it is an aggregate of shreds and patches from various times, places, and peoples. To pretend that the Old Scandinavians represented more than one element of the folk background of Europe would be an exaggeration. To stand Weber on his head to see the genesis of Protestantism and the capitalist ethos in the existential anguish of Viking heroes would be folly. Yet, if we are to engage in the tracings of cultural genealogies, and to look for the origin of ideas and cultural themes in Hesiod and Plato, then we have an equal duty to look as best we can at the folk underpinnings of European civilization. In this book, I believe that I have demonstrated that such an examination need not be futile, and that the reader can discern, if not "the origins," then themes and ideas that are strikingly congruent with those later to be of importance in European science, religion, and art. In any case, the question of origins—in the strict sense of who invented it and should get credit for it—is, anthropologically speaking, immature. The communication of ideas among cultures is the stimulant to be emphasized, not the evolution of a culture in pristine isolation; and certainly this is illustrated by the outburst of literary creativity among the Old Scandinavians who came into contact with the civilized societies that had developed about the Mediterranean. On the other hand, what the Old Scandinavians chose to narrate—albeit prodded by foreign influences, ideologies, and religions—was something unique among the cultures of the world and yet, in some respects, strangely familiar and moving to the modern denizen of Western civilization.
My argument may be further clarified by applying the conceptual scheme that ethnological students of India, China, and Japan have begun to find so fruitful, namely the notions of the Great and Little Tradition (Redfield 1940: 40-59). The Little Tradition refers to the little community and to that which is transmitted informally (predominantly orally) from generation to generation; while the Great Tradition refers to the corps of disciples within a civilized society and to the special wisdom, preserved in scriptures, which they guard and transmit. Within the imperial societies of the ancient world, the two traditions often stood in tension with each other. The apostles of the great tradition tried to bring the true message to the proud-minded gentry and the simple-minded peasantry, while the latter, in turn, attempted to interpret these high-faluting messages into policies meaningful within their own local round of existence. One classic set of examples is provided by traditional India, where the Brahminical custodians of the Vedic traditions have brought the true messages to the peasants of the villages. Another set of examples is provided by the Old Testament with the prophets as the representatives of the great tradition and the folk beliefs represented by the so-called cults of Baal.
Applying this schema to Europe, we see Christianity (and the associated learning of the Hellenistic world) as the great tradition borne by the missionaries to the heathen of the north. There it encountered an ancient social and legal system, a code of manly excellence, a poetic and moral tradition (which, in its own fashion had faced the fact that blameless and honorable men may be visited by great evil), and, in addition, a great number of little traditions (which may have been much alike), by which each community and household maintained its relations with the gods and other supernatural beings. Vestiges and sometimes whole sections of these various indigenous traditions, both big and little, have been preserved in the riddles, spells, lays, tales, and proverbs of the eddas, in the sagas, and in the recorded laws.
In any such contact between traditions, it would be an error to think of the greater tradition as simply and utterly eliminating its counterpart, and certainly in Medieval Europe, the Christian missionaries were too few and too powerless to wreak major alterations in the basic fabric of the folk cultures. In the long run, much greater changes were instituted by converted native zealots, kings and churchmen, who were able to re-define the new faith in terms that appealed to their followers, and sometimes use this new definition to their own self-interest.
Very early in my investigation I discovered that the Old Scandinavian literature is not nearly so primitive, unsophisticated, or "little traditional" as an anthropologist might wish. Most of it was recorded or composed during the late twelfth and the thirteenth century by men who defined themselves as Christians and knew the fearsome Vikings of heathen times only as their old-fashioned great or great-great grandparents. Still, for men in this situation, the newly-literate Icelanders and other Scandinavian peoples did a unique job of what we today would call collecting and recording data. They set down the Elder Edda, an entire volume of miscellaneous heathen or heathen oriented poems, without, apparently, trying to alter or censor them. They preserved an even larger body of Skaldic poems—the Vikings' favorite verse form—by incorporating them into prose sagas. At the same time the Icelanders themselves wrote some remarkably accurate prose histories and less accurate "historical novels" relating the doings and deeds of their ancestors. In still other histories some of them recorded contemporary or near contemporary events.
It should be emphasized at the outset that the heathen works thus transmitted are often fragmentary, difficult to understand, and by no means easy to date. A few sound as if they came directly from the mouths of what Lévi-Strauss forthrightly calls savages, but most sound as if they were the works of reflective or quasi-sophisticated barbarians trying to make ethical or artistic sense out of changing times and values. Still others show Christian influence. Nevertheless, it may fairly be said that no other people undergoing the throes of extreme cultural and religious change, managed to preserve so much of the genuine or near genuine poetry of their "preliterate"[1] ancestors. While the Hebrews did preserve a great volume of ancient materials, they also censored a very great deal of that which was Little Traditional, excluding it from their canon as Canaanitish and impious. And the Hellenic literature retains but little of the very words of the men who had themselves sacked Troy.
If we repress our anthropological fascination with the earliest, oldest, "before the Christians or the White Men came" aspects of a culture, and turn to the literature written down and composed in the late twelfth and the thirteenth century, we have something else again. There is here volume upon volume of a spontaneously recorded cultural diary of what happened and was happening to these people during the two or three centuries in which they were transformed and did transform themselves from members of a folk society to members of the civilized ecumene of their time. Indeed, I do not believe that there is any other record of comparable richness, volume, and interest in the world.
There are many ways of studying world views in literature. One is to disregard precise questions of date and provenience, read widely, and see what basic patterns or ideas emerge. There is much to be said for this carefree and hedonistic approach: it is interesting and exciting, and one is likely to perceive important phenomena which might escape the attention of an investigator who stays too closely within the protective walls of a preconceived hypothesis or an arbitrarily defined period of time. Indeed, it was by this approach that I first became aware of some of the most important general characteristics of the Old Scandinavian literature: its extraordinary tough-mindedness and dislike for fantasy and gross exaggeration, its obsession with motion or action, its focus on the individual, and its existential resolution of the conflict between the individual and his fate.
But to build such impressions and insights into a satisfactory picture of cultural transformation and the process of becoming civilized is another matter. One obvious way of proceeding would be to divide the data into three categories: (1) the most primitive or unsophisticated works; (2) the body of works which are neither primitive nor sophisticated, and for which we have no other word but barbarian [2] (3) the most sophisticated or civilized works. With such categories one might emerge with a characterization of three world views—a very early or magical world view (shreds and patches of which are still embedded in some of the Eddic poems and the myths), a barbarian or partially sophisticated view (exemplified in most of the literature), and a very sophisticated view (exemplified in the works of Snorri Sturluson, the great Icelandic historian (1179-1241), and some of his contemporaries. If, to these three characteristic views one added a knowledge of the peoples' history and their experiences, one might be able to say something significant about the process by which one world view was mixed with or exchanged for another.
This plan of procedure, however, had a fatal flaw: there are very few works in the Old Scandinavian literature which are genuinely primitive. What we have are a great many collected poems and mythological stories which may but probably do not reflect the authentic view of the ancient heathen. The odds are all in favor of their reflecting a late or an elite heathen point of view or the view of a sophisticated litterateur like Snorri who retold certain of the myths in his own words so that the young men of his time might be able to compose skaldic verse properly.
At first, I tried to deceive myself about this situation and boldly wrote an impressionistic description of what the "earliest" mythological view had been like. But I was never happy with this description, for though it might be fairly correct in detail, it left too many important questions unanswered. Besides, I felt foolish talking about change or transition when I could not be sure how things had been at the beginning.
It was at this time that my husband and I enlarged the scope of our investigations and began the comparative study of world views in transition referred to above. From this study, we emerged with, among other things, a fairly clear and satisfying ideal typical picture of how many genuinely primitive people see the world. We called this picture, which, in large part, was based on the works of Redfield, Evans-Pritchard, Hallowell, and de Angulo, the magical or the enchanted world view. (See chapter 4). Using this model, I now perceived that some of the early poems—and especially some of the sagas—were even less primitive or enchanted than I had thought. Conversely, I was now able to identify what probably are some of the most ancient notions in the literature, and give the reader a fairly reliable, if rather skeletal picture of what the truly enchanted Scandinavian world view once was like.
The work as it now stands consists of a series of essays, each of which is focussed on a particular genre. I began with the literary genres, rather than with general discussions of such notions as impersonalization, scepticism, or rationality, because I wished first to try to understand each variety of literature in its own right, and second, because I wanted to see whether any particular kind of enchantment or disenchantment was specifically related to a particular genre. In chapter 2, I present a brief sketch of what is generally known about the culture and history of the Vikings and the Icelanders. In chapter 3, I present my impressionistic observations on the general Old Scandinavian notions about motion, matter, and space. I then discuss the ideal typical enchanted world view, using the Old Scandinavian myths as exemplificatory material. In chapter 5, 1 describe something of what the Old Scandinavians meant by law, comparing their views with those of certain African peoples, and discussing the degree to which these various legal systems diverge from the enchanted world view. There follows a chapter on the skaldic verse, which, though it is the most authentic and unchanged of all the Vikings' literature, is also the hardest to understand. In chapter 7, 1 come to grips with the phenomenon of disenchantment. I present the evidence which leads me to conclude that certain of the heroic lays of the ninth and tenth centuries reflect an ethic or code which defined the relationship between man and his fate in a relatively new and unmagical fashion. I further suggest that this heroic ethic may mark the beginning of a profound change in moral perspective, a change which culminated in the astonishingly disenchanted and sophisticated world view of certain of the Icelandic saga writers. In chapter 8, I discuss the Vikings' tough-minded proverbs and touch on the possibility of disenchantment among the common folk. Next I focus on the sagas and discuss the most civilized of the elite Icelanders' literary achievements. In the concluding chapter I suggest that the heroic ethic (or ethic of manly excellence as some authors call it) is the most explicitly anti-magical of the themes appearing in this literature. I further suggest that the Reformation may usefully be viewed as an eruption of accumulated tensions between the political and moral notions of the native north European populations and the political and moral notions of the Roman ecclesiastical establishment, and I discuss the extent to which north European empiricism may have influenced western science. Finally, I present my reasons for concluding (contrary to Toynbee) that the Northmen were not more rational or "precociously scientific" than any other peoples of their time.
In simplest terms, the Old Scandinavian literature may be divided into Skaldic verse, Eddic verse, the sagas and histories, and the recorded laws. The Skaldic and Eddic verse are universally recognized as heathen inventions. The sagas and histories are prose accounts by Christian scholars of events (real and imaginary), which, for the most part, occurred in late heathen times—or during the century and a half in which some people were heathen, some Christian, and some followed the creed that was most convenient. Specialists still debate the degree to which the men who wrote the sagas used oral sagas as their source material. Laws, of course, are usually not classified as a type of literature, but as an anthropologist I have found them extremely useful, if not indispensable.
The greater part of the verse composed by the Vikings was called skaldic. Though it was probably invented in Norway [3], it reached a pinnacle of artistic development among the Icelanders in the ninth and tenth centuries. A genre of an almost incredible complexity, it is marked by an extravagant use of the implied simile, internal assonance and rhyme, freedom of work position, sentence separation and, in addition, multiple meaning or interpretations. Many verses could not be composed, appreciated, or understood without an arduous and consciously acquired technical education. Though the composition of skaldic verse declined immediately after the Christian conversion, the verses of the great (and even of the inferior) skalds and the rules of composition were remembered, and in the thirteenth century Snorri Sturluson wrote a text to aid young men in re-learning the art. (It is this work which we today call Snorri's Edda or The Younger Edda.) Specialists agree that some of the skaldic verses are the exact words uttered by the poet—be he Viking or farmer of early days, or dilettante of later times—for the original form is so complicated, not to say distorted, that a stanza could not easily be reshaped. Moreover, a great deal of the skaldic verse was inserted into or perhaps used as a framework for prose sagas about notable skalds, so we frequently know who wrote a particular poem, when he wrote it, and a great deal about the circumstances under which it was supposed to have been composed. Beyond doubt then, the skaldic verse is our most valid and genuine literary data on the heathen or Viking age. On the other hand, much of it is so complicated and abstruse that it cannot be understood today, even by experts. Indeed, it is doubtful if some of the verses were completely understood by the poet's contemporaries.[4] For the English reader, the most helpful sources on the skaldic verse are Hollander (1945), Turville-Petre (1953), and Einarsson (1957:44-68).
Eddic verse is a repository of the mythology and much of the heroic lore of the Teutonic race. It reflects both the ethical views and the culture of the North during heathen and early Christian times (Hollander 1962: ix). Most of the surviving Eddic poems were collected and recorded sometime in the latter part of the thirteenth century by an anonymous Icelander. Others were preserved because they were incorporated in sagas or recorded in a Latin synopsis by Saxo Grammaticus, a Danish scholar of the twelfth century. Eddic verse is relatively simple and straightforward in form, though the poems are very diverse in subject and content. They comprise the famous cosmic prophecy, Völuspá; didactic poems crammed with mythological lore; collections of wise saws, spells, oaths, dialogues that sound like the remnants of ancient dramatic rituals; lays about wonderful heroes like Helgi or Sigurth; lays based on the Nibelungen story; the laments of tragic heroines, and verbal contests of insult. Though based in a rich and thoroughly magical, ancient folk tradition and set in ancient forms, many of the Eddic poems were composed or recomposed by relatively sophisticated heathens who were aware that they were living in a rapidly changing society. Thus, one can never be absolutely sure whether a particularly interesting theme or point of view is Uralt, whether it represents a late heathen little tradition, a late heathen sophisticated tradition, or a notion tacked on by a literate scholar familiar with thirteenth century medieval thought. On the other hand, scholars have been able to assign rough dates to a fair number of the poems. There is, for example, general agreement that the lays of Völund, Atli (Atlakviða), and Hamðir are relatively old even as they stand (ninth century? ), that the lays of Grimnir, Skirnir, Hirbara, and the Flyting of Loki date from about the tenth century, that Baldr's Dream, the Short Seeress' Prophecy, and the lay of Svipdag date from the twelfth, and that the lay of Alvis and the prophecy of Gripir were not composed until the thirteenth. This dating can be of considerable help, especially when, as happened in this investigation, a particularly sophisticated phenomenon (the opposition of man and fate) manifests itself as emphatically in the fragmentary lays of the ninth century as in the better preserved poems of the twelfth and thirteenth.
One of the Eddic poems, the Hávamál (The Sayings of Óðin) contains material which sounds as if it comes directly from the mouths of hard-headed, close-fisted, practical "fighting-farmers," rather than from the mouths of poets praising proud, reckless, lavish and high-minded chieftains. Unfortunately, the Hávamál is a conglomeration, the parts of which cannot be accurately dated, though we know, from other sources, that men were quoting some of the verses in the tenth century. I have given this poem a chapter to itself, not only because it gives us a picture of what the common man was like, but because it provides an interesting contrast to the elegant and uncompromising ideals of the gentry.
(Hollander's translation of the Edda [1962] contains especially balanced and helpful information about dating and provenience. See also Einarsson [1957:14-431 for cogent discussions.)
If one defines law in its broadest sense—as the fundamental structure of social order and morality—one may find data about the law in many of the poems and virtually all of the sagas. In addition, there are the codes of Iceland and Norway [5] drawn up in the tenth but written down in the late 12th and 13th centuries, and several discussions in English of the Icelandic or Norwegian laws (Larson 1935; Jones 1935; Sveinsson 1953:8-34). In this work I have used law primarily as a means of familiarizing the reader with the notions of social order, for it is very difficult to understand much of the literature proper without a fair notion of what these people meant by law.
The reader may feel that I am too casual about using Norwegian codes to explain the behavior of Icelanders, and perhaps I am. On the other hand, most of the early settlers of Iceland came from Norway and their descendants returned for frequent visits. So far as I have been able to determine, the fundamental notions of right and social order remained much the same.
As the Northmen became Christians, those who had the opportunity and the desire acquired Latin and Latin literacy. The notion of the native script on the Roman model occurred first to the Icelanders. The script devised, they seem to have taken to writing with the energy and passion that their ancestors devoted to the search for wealth and renown. The sheer volume of pages derived from about 1100 to 1550 is almost unbelievable. There remain today about seven hundred skin manuscripts, and experts believe that these represent less than one tenth of the original (Hallberg 1962: 47).
During the twelfth century, when the powerful families were having their young men ordained and trained in continental learning, the Icelanders produced sober, utilitarian, and highly factual works: native traditions, genealogies, brief but scrupulously accurate histories, and lists of laws. Simultaneously they translated the lives of saints and sermons into their own language, employing (Sveinsson 1953: 108) "a manly and forceful language, charmingly awkward and unadapted to book learning." Native and foreign matters were sometimes combined, Latin grammar with native poetic theory, and there was a remarkable interest in what we today would consider the exact sciences, mathematics, calendrical computations, and phonetics. Most notable of the authors of this period was Ari Thorgilsson the Learned (1067/8-1148), the author of a remarkable history, the Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók), which follows the rule of "nothing but the truth" (Einarsson 1957: 106-109).
The separation of the chieftainship from churchly office and the subsequent divergence of interest between churchmen and chieftains was accompanied by a divergence in literary form and style. Churchmen began to follow the more parochial continental models, producing increasingly fantastic miracle tales. Thus, in the now distinct area of "religion," a new variety of other-worldly Christianity rapidly swallowed up the matter-of-fact, "materialist" view that had characterized much of the late heathen literature.The chieftains, on the other hand, turned their literary energies to writing the Icelandic sagas and they produced what has been designated (Hallberg 1962: 1) "collectively as the sole original contribution of Scandinavia to world literature." The most notable writer of this period was the lawspeaker and historian, Snorri Sturluson (1179-1241), the author of Heimskringla (History of the Kings of Norway), the Younger Edda, and, probably, Egils saga (Einarsson 1957: 115-120).
Broadly speaking, one might say that the Icelandic literary efflorescence began with the acquisition of a native script and took the form of a naive but vital interest in sober scholarship and elementary science. With the division of labor between church and chieftain, part of this energy was turned into a kind of religious propaganda which differed considerably from the Great Traditional thought of the church. Another part was turned into the development of a literary style which, though based on the heathen tradition, was transformed into something both new and unique.
Though modern specialists distinguish between family sagas, biographical sagas, and historical sagas, and also between such works as Snorri Sturluson's sagas about the kings of Norway and the Sturlunga saga (a contemporary account of the family conflicts of the late twelfth and thirteenth century), there is no evidence that the creators of these works made these distinctions. However they considered them, they were all thought of as belonging to the same genre. On the other hand, Icelanders and Norwegians made a clear distinction between sagas in which an author had written about events in an objective, restrained and matter-of-fact style, and sagas in which a hero would be credited with all manner of fantastic feats. The latter were based either on old Scandinavian legends, in which case they were called fornaldar sögur (sagas of ancient times), or on imported continental romances, in which case they were called lygi sögur (lying sagas).
By the end of the twelfth century Norwegians also were writing in the vernacular, specializing in prose translations of the Anglo-Norman metrical romances—like Tristan and Percival—by which means the Norwegian kings hoped to introduce cosmopolitan chivalry into their courts. Norwegian writers also produced a vernacular resume of the Kings' Sagas, recorded the ancient and contemporary legal codes, and produced an interesting work on courtly etiquette, Konungsskuggsjá (The King's Mirror). A more detailed description of the saga literature appears at the beginning of chapter 8.
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Last Modified 28 April 2000
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