Ancestor Worship and the Elite in Late Iron Age Scandinavia

A Grave Matter

Triin Laidoner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367000639
• eBook ISBN: 9780429815997
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Ancestor worship is often assumed by contemporary European audiences to be an outdated and primitive tradition with little relevance to our societies, past and present. This book questions that assumption and seeks to determine whether ancestor ideology was an integral part of religion in Viking Age and early medieval Scandinavia. The concept is examined from a broad socio-anthropological perspective, which is used to structure a set of case studies which analyse the cults of specific individuals in Old Norse literature. The situation of gods in Old Norse religion has been almost exclusively addressed in isolation from these socio-anthropological perspectives. The public gravemound cults of deceased rulers are discussed conventionally as cases of sacral kingship, and, more recently, religious ruler ideology; both are seen as having divine associations in Old Norse scholarship. Building on the anthropological framework, this study introduces the concept of 'superior ancestors', employed in social anthropology to denote a form of political ancestor worship used to regulate social structure deliberately. It suggests that Old Norse ruler ideology was based on conventional and widely recognised religious practices revolving around kinship and ancestors and that the gods were perceived as human ancestors belonging to elite families.

Part 1

Theoretical considerations

1 Old Norse religion

Approach, sources and method

1.1 Old Norse religion

1.1.1 What is ‘religion’?

Much ink has been spilt by scholars from various disciplines in the debate over how to define religion, and thus the criteria proposed to help us determine what can be classified as ‘religion’ are often contradictory. The definitions can be broadly divided into substantive and functional scientific ideologies, and into disciplinary discourses (e.g. theological, psychological, philosophical, sociological) (Cox 2010: 1–23).¹Substantive definitions explain religion in terms of its content: religion is present if there is belief in supernatural or transcendental power. Functional definitions, on the other hand, emphasise rather the effects of religion in people’s lives: religion is not intended to explain existence, but to help people cope with it emotionally (Furseth & Repstad 2006: 16–23; Cox 2010: 8–9). In very simple terms, the substantive definitions are more restrictive and focus on the philosophical question of what religion is, whereas the functional definitions are very broad and focus on what religion does (Furseth & Repstad 2006: 16). Scholars from various disciplines often find themselves on either side of this broad scientific division. Psychological definitions, for example, are on the functional side and emphasise that religion is the bridge between an emotional or psychological state and an object which is seen as being greater than human. Theological definitions, on the other hand, support the substantive definition, insisting that religion refers to a belief in God (Cox 2010: 2–7). The theological definition is thus very restrictive because it explains religion as a doctrinal belief in one god, excluding other gods and forms of spiritual life. The substantive approach has also been followed by scholars of Old Norse religion, who have suggested that Scandinavian paganism should not be viewed as a ‘religion’ proper because it was not a ‘formalised confessional religion with a corpus of holy texts’ (Nordanskog 2006: 30–33) and because ‘it had no holy scripture, but was basically a ritually and orally performed tradition’ (Andrén 2011: 853).

Some scholars, particularly archaeologists who focus on the study of rituals and the examination of ceremonial sites rather than the literary sources, prefer to speak of ritualised traditions and use the term forn siðr in the Old Norse religious context rather than the term ‘religion’ (e.g. Jennbert 2011). The expression forn siðr (‘old customs’) comes from Old Norse sources where it is used to refer to the ways of life people followed before Christianity, and is sometimes used interchangeably with heiðinn siðr (‘heathen customs’). This broad term encompasses ritual practices, faith, tradition, morality and customs and is therefore seen as more appropriate, because it was ritual that was central in Old Norse religious life, rather than belief in gods (Jennbert 2011: 164; Andrén 2011: 853). For example, the Swedish archaeologist Kristina Jennbert (2011: 220) writes that ‘the concept of religion itself is […] complicated to use, since it refers to belief and not to ritual, not to what people do’. Although rituals were certainly central to everyday life in pre-Christian Scandinavia and although there is no reason to object to using forn siðr as an alternative to ‘religion’, the latter term perhaps need not be taken in such a restrictive sense as this avoidance implies. The term ‘religion’ is indeed often confounded with Christianity in modern Western mindsets, but as noted above, there is no one explicit ostensive definition. Academics of most disciplines, including ethnological sciences such as anthropology, folkloristics and sociology, which rely upon direct observation of cultural phenomena, accept the term’s meaning as always being context dependent. All religions involve rituals which are performed with the purpose of connecting the believers to specific objects or beings. The subdivisions of different branches of Christianity, too, have a great deal of internal and temporal variety, despite following certain established principles and involving the concept of one supreme God (Nordberg 2012: 121). Medieval Christians in Iceland, for instance, who recorded history in written form must have had different ideas about God and religion than those of modern theologists. This means that religious diversity applies generally to all religion. As Andreas Nordberg (2012: 120) explains – and I could not agree more – it is therefore rather unfortunate that the definition of ‘religion’ within Old Norse studies is so often based on Western theological convictions, rather than on anthropological, psychological or folkloristic perspectives, which generally take a far more wide-ranging and inclusive approach to the concept. To borrow again from Nordberg (2012: 119–122), I believe that the understanding of ‘religion’ referring only to an institutional religious structure where faith in a monotheistic God is central and is reinforced by holy scriptures is in its own right Christo-centric.

I should nevertheless stress that the aim here is not to criticise the use of expressions like forn siðr, ‘ritual tradition’, ‘paganism’ or any other alternative in the context of Old Norse religious life, but to simply justify the use of the term ‘religion’. Although some theoretical foundations are necessary, getting overly involved in definitional critique means that we could endlessly come up with new expressions, which would all, in their own way, be problematic and open to challenge. The suggestion that, for example, forn siðr is a more valid expression to denote Old Norse religious practices than ‘religion’ because this was the term that was used by early Christian scribes and because it refers to religious activities in a broader sense might be disputed, in addition to what was said above, by the fact that Christianity is similarly called kristinn siðr (‘Christian customs’) or nýi siðr (‘new customs’) rather than ‘religion’ in Old Norse literature, and that the conversion is referred to as siðaskipti ‘change of customs’. Clearly, people living in the Viking Age and early medieval era made no concrete distinction between ritual and religion in the terminology they used, and for the early Christians the old and new concepts existed in parallel. As long as it is accepted that the beliefs, traditions and practices involved in the spiritual and cultural life of the Norsemen did not involve a formal doctrinal religion, but a range of beliefs and ritual activities that were not subject to any strict rules, that evolved and changed over time and that had many regional variations, it is perfectly valid to call these ‘religion’. It is in this sense that the term is used in this book.

1.1.2 What is ‘Old Norse’?

Andreas Nordberg’s (2012: 119–123) article, which offers perhaps the most thought-provoking approach to ‘Old Norse religion’ to date, calls attention also to the consideration of what ‘Old Norse’ means in the Nordic cultural context. The expression ‘Old Norse’ is essentially a philological term and designates a medieval manifestation of a west Nordic dialect that followed the scribal norms of Norway and Iceland and which was used in Icelandic literature, although it is often used to refer to both the west and east dialects and their sub-groups as a single unit.² Although first and foremost a linguistic term, it is commonly extended also to denote the people who spoke the Old Norse languages and dialects in the Viking Age, to the entire geographic area where the speakers of ‘Old Norse’ lived, and to their religious practices. Although this kind of unified language-based approach to the Germanic Scandinavian population as a whole is to some extent necessary and appropriate – a common language with only minor dialectal variations must have distinguished the Norsemen from other adjacent groups, like the speakers of Sámi and other Finno-Ugric languages (DuBois 1999: 12–20, 23–28) – it is important to acknowledge that most surviving texts that contain information about ‘Old Norse religion’ were written in west Nordic and thus represent primarily the west Nordic variant of the religion (Nordberg 2012: 123, 126). This means that the information found in medieval literature is not necessarily representative of the entire Germanic population in Scandinavia and must be interpreted with caution. Interdisciplinary co-operation has consequently become a necessity (e.g. Raudvere & Schjødt 2012).

We can of course within reason – and within a broader socio-cultural context – consider that the Norsemen shared a language and therefore a broadly similar lifestyle and worldview; however, influences from other cultures, too, must be taken into consideration in the study of Old Norse religion (DuBois 1999: 10–28). Disregarding the influence of the Sámi, in particular, whose populations reached as far south as the central regions of modern Scandinavia (Sandnes 1973; Price 2000, 2019; Zachrisson 2005) can give a distorted image of Scandinavia’s pre-Christian past (e.g. DuBois 1999). Co-operation with neighbours must have been a key factor in successful cultural development, and the Norsemen’s dense interaction with the Fenni (i.e. Sámi; see Valtonen 2007) is mentioned regularly in Old Norse sources and in the early histories by Roman and Greek historians.³ The different languages may have restricted communication, perhaps creating a certain nervous wariness on either side, but the communities cannot have been immune to mutual influences and the Sámi, too (among many others), certainly contributed to the formation of what we today consider to be ‘Old Norse religion’.

1.1.3 The non-static and heterogenous nature of Old Norse religion

The borders among ethnically and linguistically distinct communities in northern Europe, as well as among groups that did share a common language, are thus considered today to have been very blurred in the pre-Christian era. A number of academics over the last few decades have advanced the approach that the Scandinavian geographic area and its religious landscape must be interpreted openly regarding regionalism, diversity and temporal variation; they argue that the earlier tendency to lump the different and often conflicting elements found in literature together under a uniform, homogenous and static Old Norse religion distorts rather than clarifies our perception of life in pagan Scandinavia (e.g. DuBois 1999; Brink 2007; Price 2002; Gunnell 2007b; Shaw 2011; Nordberg 2012; Schjødt 2012). Following the ground-breaking Indo-European Stammbaumtheorie (‘language-tree theory’) developed by the German linguist August Schleicher (1861) and carried out in the spirit of 19th-century nationalism, scholars of philology and folklore became particularly keen in their attempts at reconstructing a common and systematic Indo-European ideology from which the Old Norse myths were believed to have descended and which could be fitted into a shared Germanic heritage (Arvidsson 2006: 22–32).⁴ The ideas of a uniform Indo-European ideology and culture, propagated most famously by George Dumézil (1958) with his formulation of the tripartite paradigm of social structures, are today viewed with a critical eye (Schjødt 2012: 278–279). Such earlier views have, however, done a great deal to shape present-day approaches. Treatments of Old Norse religion are still often focused on the mythological tradition and centre around the idea of a shared religion, built around a hierarchical family of gods. This certainly holds true of popular culture; however, academics also – although usually paying at least lip service to the idea that no religious system is entirely static – still prefer to interpret the Old Norse gods as belongi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART 1 Theoretical considerations
• PART 2 Case studies
• 8 The Háleygjar
• 9 The Settlers of Breiðafjǫrðr
• Primary sources
• Index