At the beginning of this book I remarked that I was drawn by a number of interesting problems to the study of the Old Scandinavian literatures. As they had been produced during the period when the Northmen were turning from heathens into Christians, I hoped that their analysis would serve to clarify the process of transformation from the primitive (or enchanted) world view toward more modem views of the world. Further, I hoped to find and describe the fundamental and indigenous northern European assumptions about order (and disorder) and good (and ill), anticipating that if these could be discerned, their influence—or their lack of influence—on such phenomena as the Reformation, the Protestant ethic, and Western science, might more clearly be assessed. And, finally, as an anthropologist, I was interested in the judgment that has been made by scholars of great repute—that this literature had exhibited a precocious rationalism together with an extraordinary tough-mindedness and freedom from superstition.
For me, the most significant results of this lengthy study are first, the high relief into which it throws the phenomenon of disenchantment, and second, the suggestion that disenchantment first manifested itself in the literature as a tension between the heroic ethic (or ideal of manly excellence) and the concept of fate. By disenchantment I mean the disintegration of a world view in which life, health, and well-being were inextricably intertwined with virtues or correct social behavior.
My emphasis on disenchantment, rather than on secularization, sophistication, intellectualization, science, or civilization is, in itself, a product of the investigation. For when I first began the study and separately examined the various genres of the literature (myths, proverbs, lays, skaldic verse, laws, etc.), I found that all of them reflected some degree of quasi-sophistication, some refinement or development which, if carried to its logical conclusion, might eventually have clashed with the enchanted world view. Yet, of all these potentially "enlightening" phenomena within the literature, only the heroic ethic seems to have been used by the Northmen, and particularly by the saga writers, as a device for highlighting the futility of human forethought and wisdom. There may, of course, have been other quasi-sophisticated phenomena which were not reflected in the literature but yet did contribute to the deterioration of the enchanted world view.
Legal practice, for example, took on some relatively secular aspects even in heathen times. Laws were seen as formulated by men, and not as transmitted to priests or favored persons by superhuman beings. The abilities of Lawspeakers and arbitrators seem to have been regarded as innately human, and not as derived either immediately or ultimately from Beings of Power. Honorable men defended their rights by blood revenge or a suit at law and did not try to obtain justice through sorcery, unless the law failed them. No one in late heathen times is reported to have won a case at law by bewitching his opponent. On the other hand, these rather secular notions and practices do not seem to have contributed significantly to the erosion of the magical world view. When Egil Skallagrímsson's rightful claim to his wife's inheritance is denied by King Éirik Bloody-Axe, Egil curses the king in, good conscience and thereby (according to the saga) brings about Éirik's ultimate ruin. Again, when the revenants in Eyrbyggja saga (see chapter 5) are censured first by heathen law and then by a Christian exorcism, there is no sign that this double treatment is supposed to be viewed as a conflict between a secular (legalistic) heathen view and a moral Christian view. Instead, Snorri goði seems to be following the principle that: when in trouble, take no chances. While we today may feel that the more refined legal practices of the Old Scandinavians are not consistent with the sorcery in which some angry or cowardly men indulged, the stories told by the people of the time do not reflect any consciousness of tension.
To turn to the Skaldic verse—I have found very little in this verse that is implicitly or explicitly out of tune with a magical world view. Like chess and certain forms of mathematics, Skaldic verse is a form of play—and one of the beauties of play is that it transcends many barriers—including world views. At an earlier period in the investigation, I entertained the notion that the skalds' interest in fact and precise reporting was somehow unmagical or unprimitive. But this notion, I eventually perceived, sprang from my own incorrect belief that the magical view is somehow illogical and contrary to fact, which, of course, it is not (see chapter 4). Early in the investigation I also wondered whether the skalds' extraordinary obsession with their own rights and their disinterest in the rights of others was somehow anti-social, and by extension, unmoral and unmagical. Later, when I began better to understand the principles of the old heathen law and social organization (see chapter 5), the skalds' interest in their personal rights seemed entirely proper. To be moral and uphold the law a man had first to see that no one took advantage of him. If men did not do this, there was no law. Perhaps I have swung too far to the other extreme, but I think I could now make a fairly strong case that the skalds, on the whole, regarded themselves as the most moral of men.
When I first read the Hávamál I was much impressed by the appearance of so instrumental and cynical a philosophy in verses which some authorities considered the oldest that we possess. If this tough-minded, irreverent, and self-interested point of view, which saw man's most valuable possession as his wits, accurately reflected the view of the Vikings, then, I reasoned, it ought to be considered as a possible source of disenchantment. Against this reasoning is first the fact that the Hávamál contains some very pious verses and many others that concern professional-sounding magical practices. Moreover, it is not, strictly speaking, a poem, but a collection of originally discrete spells, proverbs, aphorisms, and recipes, few of which can be assigned an accurate date. Faced with these difficulties, I have contented myself with commenting on certain of the more interesting aspects of the Hávamál, comparing its philosophy with that of the heroic ethic, and suggesting (as have other scholars before me), that the most hard-bitten and ruthless-sounding of the verses may well reflect the view of warriors who had spent long years away from their kith and kin and the ceremonies and protective Powers of their home communities. It is quite possible that we have in these verses a reflection of a little tradition of disenchantment. But whether this tradition, if it existed, contributed significantly to the disenchantment of other folk, and what relationship, if any, it bore to the ethic of manly excellence, I hesitate to say.
In fine then, if all of the different genres of literature produced during the late heathen or late Viking age are set side by side with the literatures of the hunting and gathering peoples of the world, they seem, all in all, to be relatively sophisticated. Preferred legal practice is carried on without sorcery, "fact" and accurate observation are respected, individualism is admired and emphasized, and some persons, at least, exhibit an astonishing instrumentalism and scepticism. More often than not, this relative sophistication is native to the heathen point of view; indeed, some of the indigenous Old Scandinavian notions seem less naive and less magical than those introduced by the Christian missionaries. On the other hand, the literature itself does not contain any convincing evidence that these indigenous developments tended to erode or shake the basic assumptions of the enchanted world view: the belief that life, health, success, and joy sprang from correct relationships with Beings of Power and that death, illness, bad luck, and misery sprang from the alienation or dissolution of such relationships.
From the beginning of my investigations, and indeed long before, my husband and I had worked out our version of the ideal typical definition of the enchanted world view, [l] I was inclined to regard the heroic lays as the most "unmagical" of all the heathen literature. If I remember correctly, the first thing that impressed me was that in most of these poems the activities of the gods, trolls, witches, or other Beings of Power had little significance. [2] They might, on occasion, be blamed for some misfortune, and they might, even more rarely, appear in bird form and address the hero, but they, and the Powers they controlled, were rarely ever essential to the plot. For example, the myth about the theft of Thór's hammer remains magical whether it is related in verse or in prose, because the plot is firmly based on the belief that Thór's hammer has tremendous Power. In contrast, the magical swords, helmets, curses, and what not that appear in the heroic lays are usually mere trimming—the real plot is concerned with the fact that peerless heroes and heroines cannot escape their fate. Later I began to perceive that the Beings of Power and their magical gifts were ignored for good reason: they were props or adjuncts to the major protagonists, fate and the hero. I also became aware that the emphasis on the struggle between man and fate, which manifests itself in some of the very early lays, was continued, developed, and used as an organizational framework by the authors of the most notable of the family sagas and the histories. This suggested that the heroic tradition, in some form or other, had existed over a long period. Some of the lays may date from the ninth century (though the stories on which they are based are much older), whereas some of the finest fate-oriented sagas were not composed until the thirteenth.
Very early in the investigation I applied my own moral notions to the lays and I wondered why poets and writers should devote themselves for centuries to memorializing men and women who had first committed detestable and inhuman deeds and then stubbornly insisted—to the invariably bloody end—that they had done only what was right. Further study, and especially an appreciation of the Old Scandinavian law and social organization, brought me to my present conclusion, which is that the heroic ethic represents a highly moral tradition, by which the poets show that a man may be blessed with all manner of excellent gifts and qualities and nevertheless commit what folk would call a terrible wrong, that man may suffer misery and pain through no fault of his own and no deficiency in his conduct toward the deities or Beings of Power, and, finally, that despite the abysses into which the ruthless dictates of fate may plunge him, he may still behave honorably and keep to the code of excellence. The poets also suggest, less explicitly, that doing right can be painful in and of itself and may yield no reward but the expectation that men will remember the deed. And, further, they exalt the man or woman who keeps to the ideal of excellence under the most demanding of circumstances—the individual who is put to the ultimate test of courage and loyalty and does not falter or fail.
This ethic, which probably developed among the warriors of early heathen times, flourished during the Viking Age and continued to fascinate the aggressive and disenchanted Icelandic chieftains and learned men of the 12th and 13th centuries. Indeed, one might argue that the heathen heroic ethic provided the chieftains with a most useful instrument. If they were greedy and ruthless men, they could use these exaltations of individualism and uncompromising pride to sanction their self-aggrandizement and their impatience with the claims of kinship, fair-dealing, and other ancient scruples. If they were reflective, like the author of Njál's saga, they could use it to make some sense out of the complex and threatening times, when both honest and honorable warriors like Gunnar, and wise and considerate elders, like Njál, could be destroyed by men who also had "right on their side."
One additional point should be emphasized. While many of the heathen traditions maintained themselves in attenuated or altered form after the Christian conversion, and while some, like the Skaldic verse, were revived for a period, the ethic of manly excellence not only survived, but flourished. [3] It is the one heathen tradition which the sophisticated but sensitively provincial learned men of Iceland did not, in some instance or other, hold up to ridicule or apologize for. They satirized the tricky Icelandic legal procedures and the venality and selfinterest of the chieftains, pointed out that the ancient gods were oath-breakers, censured the naive miracle tales of the more credulous Christian scholars, and made wryly humorous comments about the stupendous cosmic destruction depicted in the Völuspá—noting the problem of them Míðgarð-worm (the world-encircling serpent) who, on the day of judgment, will gape from earth to heaven, but would open his jaws even further if there were room. But never, under any circumstances, did they exhibit anything but respect for the man who stubbornly maintains his honor and manliness in the face of his fate.
On the basis of these data I think it reasonable to suggest that the heroic ethic, with its implicit emphasis on character and implacable fate, represented a significant step toward disenchantment. It enabled the warrior to view the death of a loyal fighting man not as a sign of his loss of enchanted virtue but as a supremely admirable phenomenon. Further, it presented the learned but stubbornly "nativistic" Icelanders with a prestigeful, barbaric, ideological structure for their highly sophisticated works.
The question arises: did the processes of transformation which culminated in other Great Traditions (like Judaism, Buddhism, Islam or Hellenic philosophy), follow much the same pattern as that reflected in the Old Scandinavian literature? In answer, I would say that on the whole the patterns of change by which various enchanted world views become more sophisticated (though still relatively enchanted) or become disenchanted (and more or less anti-magical) were often very different indeed. For example, let us compare the Northmen with the Hebrews. The Hebrews developed a Great Tradition by vesting all Power in God, and, for the most part, ignoring fate. The Northmen, judging by their literature, began to develop a Great Tradition by relating human honor and character with fate—and letting the gods stand around in the background. By the same token, the Hebrew tradition, very early in its development, withdrew all personality and independent life from nature and vested it in God. (The last animal who gets to speak his mind in the Bible is Balaam's ass, and even he is only temporarily given the power by Yahweh.) In contrast, the Old Scandinavian heroic tradition withdrew all personality from fate and vested it in man, while the magical or little traditions continued to see animals and other "natural phenomena" as "people."
On the other hand, both the Hebrews and the Old Scandinavians tried to reconcile the existence of a moral universe with the fact that virtuous and blameless men must suffer and die. (In the Old Testament the outstanding examples of this reconciliation are Job and the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, who was later to be seen as Jesus. The Great Tradition of Greece also had its blameless sufferer—Socrates) Both also developed a linear perspective of time and a remarkable sense of history. But the conclusions or resolutions they reached with these conceptions were entirely different and, to a considerable degree, I would say, they have remained different to this day.
Before leaving this topic I would like to remark that the literature of many of the Great or at least moderately elite Traditions contains examples and sometimes whole genres of tales which deal with the matter of conflicting loyalties: there is Abraham commanded by God to slay his son; Brutus, who, according to law, must order his sons to be executed; Antigone, who must choose between death and the shame of leaving her brother unburied; not to mention the numerous bloodcurdling tales of the conflicts of loyalty to which the Japanese samurai were subjected. Interestingly, most of these literary elaborations of the dilemma of choice differ from the Old Scandinavian in that they provide the listener with an answer: God, the law, or one's feudal overlord are to be served rather than one's blood kin. The northern poets, in contrast, give no answer and prefer to emphasize, not that the ideal man makes the "right" choice, but that the ideal man acts and stands by his decision. [4]
In turning to the question of what, if any, influence, the culture of the Old Scandinavians or other indigenous and closely related people might have had on the shape and structure of the Reformation, let us first consider the intriguing similarities between the Northmen's notion of fate and the Calvinist doctrine of predestination.
Fate, as defined by the more sophisticated Old Scandinavian poets and prose writers, seems to be identical with the Calvinist notion of predestination. In both systems fate is seen as immutable, inexorable, and impersonal—as a force whose decrees and goals are and always will be beyond the comprehension of man. Neither fate nor the Calvinist God are or ever will be approachable; neither has sympathies, love, hate, honor, nor a sense of justice—at least as these qualities are ordinarily understood by human beings. To use an overworked contemporary term—they are thoroughly and utterly "alienated."
It is precisely this uncompromising conception of predestination that makes Calvinist doctrine and the fate-dominated Old Scandinavian literature so a- or anti-magical. For, carried to its ultimate logical conclusion, the idea of fate is incompatible with the conception of the cosmos as an on-going social system. Magic can operate only in an environment where deities or beings of Power are sensitive to sanctions, where they can be moved, impressed, bribed, or even threatened by the prayers, repentance, good deeds, offerings, or sacrifices of men. If the supreme Power is conceived of as absolutely impersonal and immutable, magic of any variety becomes a futility.
In certain other respects, however, the Old Scandinavian and the Calvinist world views differ markedly. The Old Scandinavian poets exalt the brave and determined individual to a degree surpassing any other literature, and give him every opportunity to exhibit the strength of his character. What the Northmen desired above all else was fame, and the poets gave the greatest fame to the man who stood fast against hopeless odds. Fate offered no odds at all, so the man who made his choice and then strove valiantly and unfalteringly against hopeless doom, attained the ultimate pinnacle of fame. In contrast, Calvinist doctrine, by allocating all power and virtue to God, reduced man to a mere tool or instrument, whose existence had no personal or social significance except that which had been assigned to it by God from all eternity.
In respect to the place that they assign to the gods, the Old Scandinavian poets appear to have been more hard-headed and rationalistic than Calvin. Having defined fate as the ultimate force, they placed it over and above the gods. Thus, most of the heroic poems and sagas deal primarily with the struggle between the hero and his fate; gods and other beings of Power are relegated to the background. In the relatively sophisticated Völuspá, the gods themselves meet their fate, resisting to the end in grand, heroic style. Calvin, on the other hand, defined predestination as an attribute of God, and by so doing he transformed the passionate, compassionate, legal minded, bargaining deity of the Hebrews into an austere monstrosity—an omnipotent Being outside all human experience.
In a number of other respects, however, the phenomena involved in the two ethics exhibit some uncanny similarities. Admittedly, men like Gísli, Gunnar, and Grettir have little in common with the self-centered, unctuous Christian of Pilgrim's Progress. But when we recall that the northern hero is brought to a state where he has nothing left but his own strength and determination so that he must, in consequence, fight all alone, and we compare this with Weber's assertion that Calvinism tended to isolate man from all the usual social ties and forced him to go his way alone, we sense a similarity of pattern, fugitive though it may be. A more obvious similarity lies in the fact that both the heroic ethic, with its emphasis on inexorable fate, and the Protestant Ethic with its emphasis on the Predestination of the Elect, seem to have functioned to screw men up to the utmost activity of which they were capable. If Weber is correct, the Calvinist worked like the very devil to convince himself that he was among the elect. The Northman, on the other hand, fought like the very devil to demonstrate, even with his last breath, that he was a man and a hero.
This striking similarity in function is well exemplified in Sverrir Sigurðarson's (1184-1202) pre-battle address to his men. Sverrir, an anti-clerical and anti-aristocratic rebel, is facing King Magnus and his knights with a following composed mostly of small farmers and poor folk. He encourages his "Birchlegs" (so-called because of their poverty) with an anecdote about a farmer advising his son before battle:
"The farmer counselled his son to be brave and bold, for, 'Fame lives far longer than man.' He then asked his son, 'How would you bear yourself in battle if you knew beforehand that you were doomed to be slain?' 'What else but to hit them right and left,' answered the son. The father then asked, 'And what if you were absolutely sure that you could not fall?' 'I'd charge them with everything I've got!' said the son. The father said: 'In any battle only one of two things can happen: either you get killed or you come out alive. So be brave. Since fate determines all, he who is not fated to die does not go to Hel, whereas he who is fated to die cannot escape. And remember, "The fleeing man dies the worst death." ' " [5]Emboldened by these words, Sverrir's men carry the field and after further victories he becomes King of Norway.
In his well known discussion of the Protestant Ethic and Calvinism, Weber points out how uniquely "hostile to magic" was the Calvinist doctrine. The Calvinist, he asserts (1958:104-105) "was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which had been decreed for him from eternity." Neither priests nor sacraments could help him. "There was not only no magical means of attaining the grace of God for those to whom God had decided to deny it, but no means whatever." This hostility to magic Weber considers essential to the development of capitalism, and he traces it to the Old Testament Hebrew prophets. What Weber does not assert, though he seems to be aware of it, is that Calvinist predestination and Calvinist "hostility" to magic and to human social norms, are not discrete ideological notions, but aspects of the same phenomenon. A doctrine that conceives of God in the uncompromising fashion of Calvin, cannot have any use for magic or for supplications, or for good works.
The Hebrew prophets' hostility to magic was something very different. By their Great Traditional teachings, the prophets tried to make a distinction between carrying on social relations with Yahweh (religion) and carrying on social relations with other Beings (idolatry or magic). Pious, God-fearing folk did the first, whereas evil and foolish folk did the second. The dictum: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" was, of course, hostile to magic, but only in the sense that the practitioner of magic behaved toward other Beings in the way that the pious man was supposed to behave only toward God.
It is on the basis of these data that I would assert, most emphatically, that it is highly unlikely that Calvin's anti-magical view is to be derived from the Old Testament. I would assert, with equal emphasis, that the Protestant form of "disenchantment" was an integral part of the Protestant Doctrine of Predestination.
Calvin, apparently, derived his predestinarianism from Augustine and Paul. Indeed, a doctrine very like Calvin's was put forward by the English heretic John Wycliffe in 1378 (McFarlane 1952:100), who in turn was influenced by Thomas Bradwardine, the archbishop of Canterbury (died 1349). Long before this, Gottschalk (ca. 835), a Saxon monk of noble family, had insisted on a specific predestination of the individual to salvation or damnation, pressing the doom of his opponents "with fanatical violence" (Poole 1920:44 ff.). Gottschalk, it is interesting to note, had been placed in a monastery as a child by his father, but as an adult had denied the obligation of his father's vow. After several hearings he was condemned for life to the rule of Saint Benedict. Thereafter he devoted his energies to study, and as others were to do later, found what he wanted in Augustine.
In the face of this chain of intellectual influence, even I would not be so bold as to suggest that Calvin derived his anti-magical doctrine from the Icelandic traditions. On the other hand, I think a good deal might be learned about the process of disenchantment by trying to answer the question of how it came about that a warlike Old Scandinavian gentry trying to keep from being overwhelmed by an alien Great Tradition, a Saxon youth, striking at the authority which would not let him go free, a learned doctor attacking the authority of the Pope, and a French-Swiss reformer trying to reshape the Christian tradition to his own ethical and logical demands, developed doctrines resting on an absolutely ruthless and deterministic definition of fate.
My husband and I have long been convinced that the Reformation was not merely a peculiar extension of the Great Judeo-Christian Tradition—stimulated or sparked on the one hand by access to the classics, and on the other by access to the Scriptures—but, rather, an eruption of accumulated tensions between the political and moral notions of the indigenous North European populations and the notions of the Roman ecclesiastical establishment. What we have suggested is that the political and religious leaders of the Reformation in England, Germany, and the Netherlands behaved toward the Church of Rome and the Emperor very much as the political and religious leaders of Tanzania and Ghana are today behaving toward the great establishment of western power. This is not to say, of course, that the Reformation represented a revival of the ancient Teutonic Traditions or that the developments of African and Asian nations represent a re-institution of archaic tribal life. What we are saying is that a proselyted people do not commonly abandon all of their indigenous values and patterns of social organization. Instead, and especially if they remain numerous, vigorous, and relatively independent, they adopt those parts of the doctrine which please them. Should they come to take the doctrine really seriously, they take hold of it and reformulate it in their own terms. There is, so far as we know, no case on record in which the original disseminators of the Great Tradition greeted these reformulations with pleasure and appreciation.
I do not have the space here to pursue this question at length. But I would like to point out that the Icelandic goðar (the chieftain-priests) put up a long and bitter struggle to keep control of the churches they had erected on their lands, and the Christian kings of Norway (though some of them were most zealous in converting the heathen and bringing them under their rule), fought a long battle against the encroaching power of the bishops. Indeed, if one is familiar with developments in Iceland and Norway in the llth, 12th, and 13th centuries, the great contentions that took place in England, Normandy and France from the late llth to the end of the 13th century look, not so much like "new developments," as the continuation of a long and intermittent conflict that was joined as soon as the church at Rome tried to dictate terms to the native chieftains who were either controlling or administering the local churches. [6] Speaking as an amateur in the field, I would say that the first wave of tension involved the attempt of the Roman establishment to remove the churches from the control of the great and powerful native families. The device used was the insistence on the celibacy of the clergy (which transformed the numerous, family-run, religious patrimonies into a centralized bureaucracy) and the insistence that certain activities, like fighting and the pursuance of lay cases at law, were incompatible with the religious way of life. In this reforming effort, the church was ultimately successful, so that the upper clergy no longer formed a normal part of the aristocracy and duke's sons no longer fulfilled simultaneously the duties of counts, archbishops, and the fathers of legitimate families. (We have already seen how the same conflict took place in Iceland, Chapter 2).
But in the thirteenth century (Strayer 1964; McFarlane 1966), the aristocratic families of England and France made a highly successful counter-attack, insisting that secular law was entirely independent of the church and that, moreover, the royal government had the right to define the powers of the church courts. It is unlikely that the kings and nobles of France and England invented these notions out of hand, for we recall that the recently Christianized Icelanders of the late twelfth century, despite the scandalized protests of Rome, took the question of lay jurisdiction over ecclesiastics as a matter of course and were themselves shocked by the "unlawfulness" of a bishop who dared to forbid a secular court to pass judgment on a priest (see Chapter 2).
White (1933) has suggested that in England the survival and elaboration of traditional Saxon legal practices may be intimately related to the administrative genius of the Norman conquerors. The Norman kings commanded the local communities, on pain of fine or imprisonment, to perform all manner of legal and judicial duties which otherwise would have had to be performed by paid hirelings of the king. Since most of this legal work followed the precepts of Saxon law, the Norman kings compelled the freeholders to do a great deal of the legal work which, as responsible men, they would have done voluntarily according to the traditional law. But whether the king's subjects served him voluntarily or not, the result was that the backbone of the traditional law was preserved. (While this practice may have been energetically pursued by the Norman rulers, it was not original with them. Svein Forkbeard, the Danish king, followed the same policy with English subjects in 1013, and when the English kings brought back under their rule the areas settled by Danes, they did not interfere with the Danelaw [Whitelock 1952:69, 1361.])
In a recent discussion of the laicization of French and English society, Professor Strayer (1964) has pointed out that the definition of the rights of the lay authorities forced many men to choose between loyalty to the state and loyalty to the church, and he has added that the theory of lay authority implicit in this system cannot be reconciled with the old medieval system. I would agree, but would comment that the anti-medieval theory may have drawn much of its vitality from the social structure and ideology that preceded Christianity. Indeed, the marked disharmonies between the indigenous social structure of the northern European peoples and the old medieval system do not seem to be appreciated by some historians. For example, to the medievalist, the idea of choosing between loyalty to the king and loyalty to the church was unthinkable. But to the north European, the making of a difficult choice, between lord and kin or between death and shame, was the apotheosis of manliness or human worth. The man who chose thereby demonstrated that he was a free being. Moreover, the personal and voluntary association between chieftains and young warriors characteristic of the social organization of the ancient Germanic tribes (and the later Vikings) was carried on and developed in the relationship between the feudal lord and his vassal (La Monte 1949:39). [7]
That the North European princes of the fifteenth century took, like ducks to water, to the notion of uniting in one person the headship of church and state, of appropriating state property, and appointing the clergy, is in no way surprising. This is what their high-born ancestors had done, both in heathen and in the early Christian times. Indeed, in this particular aspect of Protestantism, there is a curious reincarnation of the office of the goði, the able leader of men, who built, maintained and officiated in a temple he had built for his favorite god.
The Northman's interest in practical skills, his hard-headed respect for "facts," and his inclination (Larson 1917:101) "to be suspicious and think everything fiction that he has not seen with his own eyes" has not been exaggerated by the commentators. And when one adds to works like Landnámabók, Heimskringla, and Konungsskuggsjá, the chronicles written by other Europeans and works of certain of the English scholars of the same period, one can understand why recent investigators (Gibb 1954; L. White 1963) have suggested that the European attitude toward the sciences (as contrasted with that of Islam) was from the first conditioned by a practical approach. Europe, these scholars assert, had a distinctive and developing native system of experiment and thought of a highly pragmatic bent. The men who had been reared in this system of thought accepted and integrated into it new concepts of scholarship and new craft techniques, and this yeasty mixture gradually developed into what we today call western science. Whitehead (1948) earlier made a similar point when he ascribed to the western Europeans "a widespread instinctive conviction" that simple natural objects and events merited the careful attention of even the ablest and most intelligent of men.
The reader may object here that I equate too casually the hardheadedness and respect for fact characteristic of some of the Old Scandinavian learned men with the attitudes and world views that specialists in the history of science have ascribed to Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon (Crombie 1963). In reply, I suggest that he read the works of these men and see for himself whether their ideas, aims, and point of view are not far more like each other than they are like those of the learned Arabs or the learned Greeks of antiquity.
In any case, I would like to complicate the question of North European empiricism by pointing out that the very qualities and attitudes ascribed by historians of science to the early or proto-European scientists (and by the Old Scandinavian specialists to the learned men of Old Scandinavia) are also characteristic of most of the peoples whom anthropologists once called primitive. Many ethnographers and social anthropologists have remarked that the so-called non-urban, tribal, or folk peoples are often thoroughly pragmatic in their outlook on life, that their knowledge of concrete matters, contracts, ownership of property, genealogies, and degrees of relationship may be extremely accurate and that they are, more often than not, peerless observers of the world about them. Similarly, field investigators (myself included) have been impressed by the scrupulous accuracy of certain native informants and by their skill and efficiency in gathering data (Lowie 1960). Ethnographers who have worked among the warrior peoples of the North American Plains have reported that their scouts, sent to spy on the enemy, or young men announcing war exploits, were expected to be absolutely factual in their statements. Moreover, the Northmen, in common with the early or proto-scientists of north Europe and with many relatively "underdeveloped" peoples, had a great deal of confidence in and respect for common bodily sense experience. A man's eyes, ears, and hands, were, for them, reliable instruments of perception, and a man trusted and acted upon the information given by his senses.
The notion that man was capable of perceiving a factually true picture of every natural object or human event, and that he could communicate this factually true picture to other men if he chose to do so, was essential to the conception of proper legal evidence and proper Skaldic description of a raid or battle. It also helped to produce some fine reports on the flora and fauna of Greenland and North America.
This particular point, namely, that "savage" or "early" people possess a particular variety of "science" characterized by "intellectual application and methods of observation" of phenomenal accuracy and by a systematization of what is "immediately presented to the senses" has recently been independently and far more eruditely asserted by Lévi-Strauss in The Savage Mind (1966: ch. 1). But even if one is willing to take seriously the probability that western science (for all its subsequent borrowings, accretions, and stimulating prods from the south), was rooted in an indigenous or native north European point of view, one is still obliged to face the "hard fact" that the world view of most modern scientists—nd especially the physical scientists—s very different from the world view of the Old Scandinavian historians and the proto-scientists of the 13th century. These differences began to manifest themselves as early as Galileo. For Galileo, if I read him correctly, was not nearly so interested in the systematization of "plain facts" or the things man could perceive with his senses, as in the wonderful fact that man, by using the proper instruments, could perceive hitherto unknown things which his ordinary senses were incapable of perceiving:
"In this little treatise I am presenting to all students of nature great things to observe and to consider. Great as much because of their intrinsic excellence as of their absolute novelty, and also on account of the instrument by the aid of which they have made themselves accessible to our senses.
"It is assuredly important to add to the great number of fixed stars that up to now men have been able to see by their natural sight, and to set before the eyes innumerable others which have never been seen before and which surpass the old and previously known (stars) in number more than ten times." (Quoted from Koyré1958:88-89.)(As anyone who has taken a rote introductory course in the sciences knows, Galileo's excitement over the phenomena revealed by his instruments has undergone some ironic transformations.) The sophisticated European man, before he was influenced by the Great Tradition of Science, defined Man as an observer of nature. Today he defines Man as a being who has made nature his servant or slave, yet simultaneously the pious disciple of science is obliged to define his human perceptions, his emotions, and even his moral convictions, as untrustworthy, biased, fallible, and misleading. (Few students today get through introductory courses in the sciences without being subjected to some form of pseudo-experiment, designed to "demonstrate" that their senses and emotions are thoroughly untrustworthy, and that instruments are essential to accurate observation.) It would seem, then, that the more closely a man's relationship to nature came to resemble that between an impersonal master and an impersonal slave, the more man lost of his trust in and respect for his self. This development, I venture to suggest, would have appeared odious to the Vikings or the Icelanders.
The world view of the physical scientists of today is in many other ways quite alien to that of the Old Scandinavians. One obvious and striking contrast is that the Northmen, even at their most sophisticated, lived within a closed universe where all phenomena were mysteriously and intricately ordered by fate. Indeed the most learned and disenchanted of the saga writers seem to have taken delight in their ability artfully to arrange numerous complicated events, so that the alert reader could perceive that each event influenced those that followed it. The physical scientists, after centuries of struggle and doubt, have come to conceive of the universe as indefinite and infinite, and, as Koyré (1958:4) puts it:
"bound together by the identity of its fundamental components and laws, and in which all these components are placed on the same level of being. This, in turn, implied the discarding by scientific thought of all considerations based upon valueconcepts, such as perfection, harmony, meaning and aim, and finally the utter devalorization of being, the divorce of the world of value and the world of facts."Perhaps one might say that the Northmen, in their ethic of manly excellence, also ventured to face a world in which value had been divorced from fact. But their response to this terrible eventuality was to exalt man's indomitable determination to hold to his values in despite of their irrelevance to the hard fact of fate.
The hard-mindedness of the most admired of the Old Scandinavian writers, their disinclination to believe either in Christian miracles or heathen old wives' tales, their general restraint and seeming "respect for fact," could not but impress the progressive and liberal minded westerners of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Here were a people who, though they lived in the "Dark Ages," had to see and touch a thing to believe in it, who weighed sources and evidence and disliked tall tales; meanwhile, on the continent, their learned contemporaries were writing about fabulous monsters and miracles, or, on more intellectual levels, trying to reconcile Christian doctrine with Greek philosophy.
But if one looks at the Icelandic writers' "freedom from superstition" in the context of the transformation of their indigenous world view, it becomes not a manifestation of a precocious, proto-scientific enlightenment, but rather a terminal expression of an extraordinary disenchantment. The elite Icelanders of Snorri's time could not have been so casual about wonders and miracles had they not reached an ultimate point in a profound moral transformation. To be superstitious, pious, or religious, man must see himself as living in a moral universe, in which good is rewarded and evil punished. The men who wrote the most admired of the sagas and histories no longer lived in such a world, but had substituted for it an austere, proto-existential, warrior philosophy, within which a man's brave and honorable deeds were the most valuable and lasting of all things. Indeed I would say that Snorri Sturluson and the author of Njál's saga were more sceptical men than either Mark Twain or Ingersoll. The latter were thoroughly moral men, who wished to do away with superstitions because they thought them harmful to mankind. To the much more disillusioned Snorri, the credulous beliefs of the folk, be they heathen or Christian, were merely amusing.
I wish I had been able to learn more about the process by which some of the elite Scandinavians became, for a short period at least, so "super-civilized." But the best I can do is suggest, as many investigators have done before, that the processes of change and development are infernally complicated. If I were asked to put my finger on crucial elements I would opt, first of all, for the development of the warrior aristocracy, with their pride, independence, and urge for "putting other men and their lands under their rule." During the ninth and tenth centuries (and perhaps even before), this aristocracy and their poets developed the remarkably disenchanted ethic of manly excellence. The cosmopolitan experiences of the widely travelling warriors and traders, and their long absence from the ceremonies of their home communities, may also have contributed to a little tradition of disillusionment, a phenomenon which we have touched on in the chapter on the Hávamál.
In Iceland, an additional impetus toward disenchantment might reasonably be the fact that the chieftains were, for so long, able to hold off the power and influence of Rome and to keep control of the new Christian church in their own hands. Competent and powerful men who, on the one hand, had come to see their indigenous gods as backward or déclassé, and, on the other hand, were busy trying to keep the benefits of controlling a new religion (about which they know relatively little), were not likely to find it easy to relate their behavior to a moral universe. In addition, these newly converted Icelanders had not dropped or discarded the heroic poetic tradition of their ancestors with its implicit challenge to the logic of moral behavior - and this tradition, I suggest, provided a splendid and untarnished ideological framework for ambitious, aggressive, disillusioned, and sceptical men.
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Last Modified 9 May 2000
Comments to Manny Olds, oldsma@pobox.com