Evergreen Ash

Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature

Christopher Abram

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780813942285
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria e natura

Norse mythology is obsessed with the idea of an onrushing and unstoppable apocalypse: Ragnarok, when the whole of creation will perish in fire, smoke, and darkness and the earth will no longer support the life it once nurtured. Most of the Old Norse texts that preserve the myths of Ragnarok originated in Iceland, a nation whose volcanic activity places it perpetually on the brink of a world-changing environmental catastrophe. As the first full-length ecocritical study of Old Norse myth and literature, Evergreen Ash argues that Ragnarok is primarily a story of ecological collapse that reflects the anxieties of early Icelanders who were trying to make a home in a profoundly strange, marginal, and at times hostile environment.

Christopher Abram here contends that Ragnarok offers an uncanny foreshadowing of our current global ecological crisis—the era of the Anthropocene. Ragnarok portends what may happen when a civilization believes that nature can be mastered and treated only as a resource to be exploited for human ends. The enduring power of the Ragnarok myth, and its relevance to life in the era of climate change, lies in its terrifying evocation of a world in which nothing is what it was before, a world that is no longer home to us—and, thus, a world with no future. Climate change may well be our Ragnarok.

1. Ecocriticism and Old Norse

This book looks at Scandinavian myths and Old Norse–Icelandic literature through an ecocritical lens, which is to say that it is concerned with relationships between texts, humans, and the nonhuman world. It places texts in the physical contexts that provide the conditions in which all cultural life on earth takes place. It asserts the possibility of extending the critic’s realm of inquiry into existences beyond human control and perhaps even beyond human experience. As Cheryll Glotfelty famously defined it, ecocriticism “takes an earth-centred approach to literary studies.”1 Or, as Serpil Oppermann states, as a loose and amorphous movement, ecocriticism can be identified by “its interest in environmental literature, its aim in promoting ecological awareness and bringing ecological consciousness to the practice of literary criticism.”2 By these standards, all literature may be considered potentially open to “environmental” criticism, though in practice certain genres have proven much more congenial to ecocritics than others.

All cultural production takes place within particular ecological contexts in which both human and nonhuman actors are enmeshed, and the whole business of human life takes place in a biosphere shared with countless other actants: there is no pristine “cultural” realm into which we can retreat to escape the influence of the world-beyond-us. To think otherwise runs the risk, in the light of the ecological crises that have been unfolding around us for decades, of leading us into what Gillen D’Arcy Wood has called a “dangerous determinism”: “Historical materialism without ecological awareness [is liable to produce] a grand narrative of class, government, empire, and trade whose anthropocentric terms are no less a product of imperialism and the Enlightenment than the current ecological crisis itself.”3 Nature abhors a vacuum, so the saying goes, yet prevailing humanistic critiques have been guilty of attempting to vacuum seal Society away from Nature, either by ignoring the nonhuman world altogether or by backgrounding it as merely the stage on which the drama of human history takes place. Ecocriticism asserts that nothing—not class, race, gender, or any other form of hegemonic or counterhegemonic power structure—operates beyond or apart from the oikos. Everything is ecology.

And since nothing exists outside ecology, there is a growing feeling in the twenty-first-century academy that all scholarship has to be engaged with, or at least informed by, ecological concerns. The burgeoning field of the environmental humanities encourages humanists to look beyond the human, and indeed beyond the humanities, in an attempt to confront a crisis in the world-beyond-us that we believe may be unparalleled in history. The catastrophe that is unfolding around us is so important, many ecocritics would agree, so acutely pressing, that it demands the attention of all thinkers and the action of all citizens. Global warming, mass extinctions, overpopulation, and the unsustainable exploitation of the Earth’s resources are now far too important to be left to scientists or (even worse) politicians. The global environmental crisis provides an ineluctable context for everything we do, leaving nothing untouched. It is this feeling, the feeling that we all must do something to address ecological matters in our work—whatever is within our capabilities—that provides the overarching project for ecocriticism. As sea levels rise, even the uncalloused hands of the theorists and critics must man the pumps.

New modes of literary criticism are unlikely to save the world, however. Indeed, it is a feature of my argument in this book that the world (as we have always known it) is past saving and that our focus should be on new types of world-building, new realms of possibility in the wake of the collapse of humanity’s ancien régime of separation from, antagonism toward, and exploitation of what we have been pleased to call Nature—a thing that never existed as such in the first place.

Bruno Latour calls Nature “a premature unification of all existents, probably political in origin,” which strikes me as an excellent definition if modified by the caveat that, for some, Nature encompasses all existents minus the (Western) human subject, at least when that distinction is politically expedient for them.4 Elsewhere, Latour has expanded on this definition:

Nature is not a thing, a domain, a realm, an ontological territory. It is (or rather, it was during the short modern parenthesis) a way of organizing the division (what Alfred North Whitehead has called the Bifurcation) between appearances and reality, subjectivity and objectivity, history and immutability. A fully transcendent, yet a fully historical construct, a deeply religious way (but not in the truly religious sense of the word) of creating the difference of potential between what human souls were attached to and what was really out there.5

It is a commonplace among ecocritics currently to assert that our ecological crisis arises ultimately from certain human cultures’ strictly dualistic worldviews, worldviews that insist upon the separateness of mankind from a reified Nature which exists only so far as it exists for our benefit. This dualism, as Val Plumwood has laid out so convincingly, is particularly prevalent in Western patriarchal cultures and requires the deployment of enormous resources of power to maintain. For Plumwood, dualisms are “not just freefloating systems of ideas; they are closely associated with domination and accumulations, and are their major cultural expressions and justifications.” Human domination of Nature is wrapped up with all other oppressive regimes of dualistic thought, including those which insist upon clear and inevitable distinctions of gender, race, and class, for example. These dualisms are far from transcendentally natural. Rather,

their development has been a historical process, following a historical sequence of evolution. Thus dualisms such as reason/nature may be ancient, but others such as human/nature and subject/object are associated especially with modern, post-enlightenment consciousness. But even the ancient forms do not necessarily fade away because their original context has changed; they are often preserved in our conceptual framework as residues, layers of sediment deposited by past oppressions.6

If our current ecological predicament is the result of historical processes, as Plumwood claims, we may be able to work back through human history, stripping away these “layers of sediment” and revealing mentalities that precede and undermine the modern West’s systematic and oppressive dualisms.

Accordingly, though all work in the ecological humanities should aim to lead us toward new paradigms for a more successful mode of being-in-the-world in the future, much literary ecocriticism has been explicitly backward looking, even nostalgic. This book is, in one way, no exception to this trend. It deals, after all, with texts that were written down seven or eight centuries ago, and delves into cultural traditions of even greater antiquity. The basic goal of historically oriented ecocriticism of this sort is to seek alternative ways of looking at our place in the world and our interactions with the world through our reading of texts that represent Nature, Society, and their interrelationships in ways that are less ecologically disastrous than our own (post)modern conditions of thought. And since the catastrophe is taking place in the present—since it is frequently argued to be a direct product of modernity, in fact—one way of preparing ourselves for a different possible future is to look for examples from many possible pasts. How did we live before we divorced ourselves from the rest of the universe, before we regarded Nature as mankind’s dominion? When did the separation of the world into two ontological zones that must never overlap—human/nonhuman, or Nature/Society, or Us/Other (there are many names for the same fundamental divide)—take place, and how might we achieve a reintegration of these two zones into a harmonious and sustainable prelapsarian unity? As Carl Phelpstead puts it, the hope of premodernist ecocriticism is that “knowledge that things have been different in the past and so need not be the way that they are now offers encouragement to those who seek to ensure that things will be different again in the future.”7

Medievalists therefore increasingly believe that we might have a particular contribution to make to ecocritical studies because, as Vin Nardizzi writes, “medieval and Renaissance ecocriticisms can help to imagine for our world a range of futures unfolding from banned, censored and forgotten pasts.”8 If the origin of global warming lies in technologies of the Industrial Revolution, or if the equation of the human/nonhuman and subject/object dichotomies is the product of Enlightenment thought, those of us who study periods before these points of fracture believe that we may have special new insights to contribute to ecocritical study. Frankly, we also appreciate this opportunity to imagine that medieval studies (and medievalists) might be relevant to a burgeoning discipline that has the advantage of being fashionable and therefore more than normally visible to our peers working on other periods and in other disciplines—and to do work that feels important, even imperative, in our current perilous situation.

What Ecocriticism Has to Offer Old Norse–Icelandic Studies

Ecocritical medieval studies has thus become an increasingly vibrant field of research in the discipline over the past decade or so. To date, however, Old Norse–Icelandic literary culture, which is the subject of this book, has received hardly any attention from ecocritics. Carl Phelpstead has led the way with the first explicitly ecocritical study of an Icelandic saga, and other scholars have produced studies of medieval Scandinavian landscapes that are certainly ecocriticism adjacent, but scholarship on Old Norse has lagged behind work done by ecocritics working on different linguistic and literary traditions.9 Our field has traditionally been resistant to theoretical or politically inspired modes of criticism; indeed, Old Norse–Icelandic studies could fairly be described as a methodologically conservative enterprise. Things are changing, as younger scholars (belatedly) embrace poststructuralist critique with as much enthusiasm as a previous generation of Scandinavianists (belatedly) embraced structuralism. But there remains a certain anxiety of influence among critics working in a tradition that has foregrounded empirical philology and resisted status quo–challenging hermeneutics. Part of the attraction that an ecocritical approach to Old Norse–Icelandic literature has for me thus lies precisely in its novelty. As Graham Harman notes in another context, “From time to time something new is needed to awaken us from various dogmatic slumbers. Properly pursued, the search for ‘the next big thing’ is not a form of hip posturing or capitalist commodification, but of hope.”10 It is my hope that this book will provide a stimulus to readers of Old Norse who are open to new approaches—the theory curious or those who might be anxious about the contemporary reception of their work outside their home discipline, perhaps—to embark with confidence on new interpretative adventures.

It is my contention in these pages that ecocriticism has much to offer Old Norse–Icelandic studies. In many important ways, this literature, the vast bulk of which originated in Iceland between about 1150 and 1400, is an intrinsically ecopoetical project, an act of literary world-making unparalleled in other regions of medieval Europe. Nowhere else in the Old World was such a new world to be found. Iceland, itself a remarkably young landmass in geological terms, was an effectively pristine ecosystem, untouched by human hand, when it was discovered and settled, allegedly by a few Irish monks and then by droves of Norwegian colonists in the ninth and tenth centuries. With its constant volcanic activity, marginal climate, and unique flora and fauna, Iceland presented its Norse settlers with a new oikos that was both uncannily like home—like Norway, it has fjords on its coastlines and uninhabitable mountains in its center—and almost entirely alien. As any visitor to present-day Iceland will attest, there are places where the landscape feels more lunar than earthly. For outsiders, Iceland can be profoundly unsettling, and the first Icelanders were faced with the task of settling it.

These new Icelanders had to imagine new ways of being-in-the-world that made sense in, and of, their new home; or rather, they had to make a home in and out of a new and presumably to them dramatically strange ecological situation. If we are to understand fully the political and cultural development of Iceland in its foundational centuries, we omit consideration of nonhuman factors—climate, natural disasters, changing patterns of resource availability—at our peril: such is the claim of ecohistoricism, an increasingly important mode of ecological humanistic discourse that bridges the political and cultural concerns of the ecocritical project and the more data-driven methodologies of ecological history and anthropology. Without reverting to a crude determinism—suggesting, for example, that a certain Icelandic national character arises from the relative inhospitableness of the weather, or that the origins of the sagas lie in the fact that there wasn’t very much else to do during Iceland’s interminable winter darkness—ecohistorical approaches can attempt to explain, in Gillen D’Arcy Wood’s terms, what the “hard data of historical climatology meant in cultural terms, in the minds and lived experience of the people who endured or benefited from a specific meteorological regime, and how human cultures have both adapted to and shaped environmental change.”11 As we have seen, there is ample evidence of how Iceland’s constant seismic activity and intermittent episodes of near-apocalyptic catastrophe have always imposed a unique set of environmental pressures on its inhabitants. We can thus attempt to trace the impact of these physical phenomena on the Icelanders and the development of their worldviews, ways of life, and social and political institutions as they are reflected in the society’s cultural responses to the land and its climate, geology, flora, and fauna.

Or we can look at the question from the opposite direction. We know that medieval Iceland was for three centuries or so a polity unique among European nations, a decentralized “commonwealth” that lacked a monarchy or other form of ultimate executive authority. We know, too, that the Icelanders produced one of the largest and most varied of medieval Europe’s vernacular literary corpuses, which includes in the Íslendinga sögur (sagas of Icelanders) a sui generis form of prose narrative that arguably anticipates some of the concerns and aesthetic mores of the much later realist novel. These texts and the society that produced them have an ecohistorical context just as much as the social or political contexts that literary critics are so comfortable exploring. They arise in and out of particular moments of human interaction with the physical environment just as much as from historical moments of interaction between differ...