Episode 29 - Spotting the Christian Influence

Welcome to Norse mythology, the unofficial guide. It's unofficial because I'm neither a credentialed academic nor a time traveling medieval Norse pagan, but I deal with this material directly from the sources, interpreted through the lens of the experts in their opinions. If you're looking for depth and detail in a simple and accessible way, then you're in the right place. Recently, I was browsing through some of my normal online forums where people talk about Norse mythology, and I came across a really weird comment that was advising an interested new learner to avoid reading the prose etta. It's not the first time I've seen this sentiment show up, either. From what I can tell, it seems like there's some kind of a philosophical movement out there among certain enthusiasts built on this idea that the prose etta is some kind of a horrendously corrupt source that just shouldn't be trusted whatsoever. In this case, the same commenter who advised against the prose etta highly recommended reading Neil Gaiman's Norse mythology instead. The irony there, of course, is that Neil Gaiman retells a bunch of stories that are only found in the prose etta, and even admits in his own introduction that he made some things up for the book. I get the sense that what people are afraid of is probably Christian influence. They've heard that the prose etta was written by a Christian in the 13th century, and that it contains Christian influence, and they're afraid either that everything it contains is just some nefarious collection of lies by some evil Christian trying to ruin Norse mythology, or maybe that they just won't be able to tell where that influence is. So they'd prefer to just stay away from it entirely, for fear that they might accidentally internalize some kind of corruption of ancient pagan canon. So what I want to do today is address a few of these ideas and show you specifically what outside and maybe sometimes Christian influence actually looks like in our sources, so that you'll be able to spot it just as well as anybody else can, and you won't have to be afraid of it. And of course, also to remind you that the prose etta is an extremely important source for our ability to understand Norse mythology in modern times, and you should absolutely not avoid it. But let's start by talking about what ancient Germanic people thought about outside religious influence, and whether or not this idea of mythological purism even makes sense. Here's a question for you. We've talked a few times on this show about a theory that Frig and Freya could have been a single character at some point in the past. Now, let's pretend for just a second that we could know that that was true, back in, say, 800 AD. We also know that by the late 900s, among real Norse pagan poets, it's not true anymore. So which version of this idea is more correct? Is it the earlier one? Let's take a step further. In 1996, Lottie Mott's wrote a book called The King the Champion and the Sorcerer, and in this book, she proposed that the Asier gods and the Vonier gods each entered Scandinavia via two different cultures that were settling in the area in a similar timeframe. Now, of course, there are plenty of ways this theory can be challenged, and it has been. But let's assume for a second that Mott's is right. One group moves in believing in Othin, Thor, and Tier, and another group moves in from a different direction believing in Northern, Freya, and Freya. They end up meeting, intermarrying, and by the Norse period, the full Pantheon, for lack of a better word, includes all six deities. It's the kind of thing that's entirely plausible. So which one of these groups has the original, pure mythology? And regardless of which group you choose, how much of the Norse mythology that has survived into modern times was influenced by corrupted ideas that seeped in from the other group? The right answer is, there is no moment in the timeline where things are the most correct. Because in reality, ancient oral traditions are almost like living things, continually growing and changing over time. Like any point on the timeline, and you can always ask what happened before that. Maybe at this point you're saying to yourself, well, this is different from Christian influence because Christianity was forced onto ancient Scandinavians who didn't want it. But let's go back to Mott's theory for a second. What if the blending of these two pagan groups wasn't peaceful at all? What if one of these groups forced their beliefs onto the other by violence? There's really no way to know exactly how it happened if indeed it is what happened. Does that change things for you? And of course, the larger problem is that the story of Christianization in Scandinavia actually isn't one of Crusades and war. Instead, it was a much more boring story of Scandinavian kings willfully adopting Christianity because they saw it to be politically advantageous. And this was a process that happened incrementally over about 400 years from the 8th to the 12th centuries. This isn't to say that there was never any tension between paganism and Christianity because there certainly was. But for the most part, conversion happened in this context because it was voluntary and practical. To be clear, there was some violence over conversion that did occur among Germanic groups on the continent, most famously committed by the Franks against the Saxons. But even in this case, this is a case of two Germanic groups fighting against each other. It's not a case of Italian crusaders riding into Germanic territory and hacking everyone to bits who refuse to get baptized. In fact, throughout most of history, ancient Germanic pagans were completely fine with religious syncretism. In other words, there's all sorts of evidence of moments where they merged some of their own religious ideas together with ideas of outside groups that they were in contact with. Rudolf Zimmäck points to ancient Germanic finds from the lower Ryan region depicting a character called Hercules Magusinus, for example, who gets portrayed with a club in a lion's skin just like the Roman Hercules, but who is generally thought to be a merger between Hercules and the corresponding Germanic thunder god who we have come to know as Thor in our time. The character Mimir, in fact, has pretty commonly been suggested to be a borrowing from Celtic mythology, which apparently associates severed heads with holy wells all over the place. To be fair, some scholars disagree with this idea and believe that heads and wells have an earlier Indo-European origin. But let's imagine it is a Celtic borrowing. Does that mean we toss out Mimir now? If so, now we have a problem in that Mimir is mentioned all over the poetic edda, in poems like Voluspa, Vavthruðnusmall, Sigridrifumall, and one of the Helgi poems, and probably Grimnasmall as well. If Mimir is a Celtic borrowing, are these no longer trustworthy poems? What about Mimir's well as a concept? What about the instance where Othin sacrificed his eye to Mimir's well for knowledge? What about the fact that Othin is one eyeed? Personally, I think there's good evidence for the fact that Germanic groups had their own native ideas about heads and wells. But the big important point I'm trying to make is that for all we know, ancient religious syncretism could be all over Norse source material. But if it is, it's now just part of the DNA that makes up real pagan mythology. When I had Joseph Hopkins on the show recently, he mentioned that sometimes language evolution is illustrated with tree charts, where each language represents a branch, and then you see new languages branching off from the older ones. He also mentioned that the problem with these charts is that they don't show how the different branches can influence each other and sort of partially merge into each other over time as well, which would be much more in line with reality. And the truth is, ancient religion is like this as well. It's extremely common that when two ancient peoples come into extended contact with each other, that they trade a few ideas. Back in episode three, I talked about the old English poem Dream of the Roode, and how it showcased early Christianity in England borrowing animistic ideas from Germanic paganism. In that poem, a sentient tree that very much resembles Idrisil is cut down and fashioned into Jesus' cross, which retains its sentience even in cross form and describes its experiences of feeling the nails that were hammered into Jesus' hands also hammered into itself. At the end of the poem, the author describes how he prays to the cross as though it were a deity itself, and how he hopes the cross will one day carry him from this life into heaven, like some kind of catholic ferryman between this world and the next. This sort of thing is part of the process for how religions develop over time. It's normal and expected, so the fear over whether or not there might be some Christian influence in our sources may not be entirely founded when it comes right down to it. I mention all this to prepare you for the idea that Germanic paganism was in extended contact with Christianity for a very long time. The ancient Norse pagans in particular were in close contact with Christianity over a few centuries, and it would be almost impossible for ideas not to have been traded both ways. Even if some of those syncretic ideas didn't end up making it into the mainstream in the long term. So for any idea we find in our Norse sources that might smell a little bit like Christian influence. We have to ask ourselves whether that idea was something Christian scribes added to the story hundreds of years after Norse paganism was replaced by Christianity, or whether it was a voluntary and deliberate borrowing from Christianity that happened much earlier during the pagan period. And of course, there's the third option that sometimes two unrelated groups just so happen to come up with ideas that seem similar at face value, just by coincidence. There's a lot of debate about the event in Havamal, where Othin sacrifices himself to himself, hanging on a tree, wounded with a spear, and without food or drink. In that it sounds suspiciously like Jesus Christ, sacrificing himself to himself, or to his father, which is kind of still like himself in certain ways, it's complicated, but he's also hanging on a cross, wounded with a spear, getting no food, and to keep things simple, getting only a weird drink he didn't want, rather than a normal one. And fascinatingly, some passages in the New Testament prefer to use the Greek word for wood, xylon, instead of the word for cross, stavros, when talking about the cross, which causes it to be translated into tree in English sometimes, right there in the Bible. But the question has become, did Havamal borrow one of the most important moments in Othin's backstory from Christianity? Or maybe just pieces of it? Or are the similarities just a coincidence? And if some of those ideas are borrowed, who borrowed them and when? The motif itself is probably pretty old and predates conversion, almost certainly. But that doesn't mean the narrative couldn't have been influenced at some point earlier on, and it doesn't mean the way the story was told in later years couldn't have taken on a little inspiration from the story about Jesus. Even today, most modern Norse pagans either purposely or accidentally end up taking a lot of their conceptualizations about deity and their ritual practice from Abrahamic religions, simply because these are the only expressions of religion that they've ever really been exposed to, and they aren't aware that ideas such as prayer, for example, can appear in very different ways from what they've seen in the past. It certainly doesn't help that most of the details about ancient pagan praxis have been lost. It's nearly impossible to say that any person's modern take on Norse paganism isn't syncretic with some other religions ideas in at least some small way. But I don't want to upset anybody or get too far into territory I don't know as much about, so let's move off of that topic. Instead, let's talk about Snory Storelesson. As I've mentioned a bunch of times already, there are two collections of text that contain the vast majority of pre-Christian Norse mythological narratives. The first one is usually called the poetic edda, and it's a collection of poems about gods and heroes. The second one is usually called the prose edda, and traditionally we talk about its author as being this 13th century Christian chieftain and scholar from Iceland, named Snory Storelesson. Although as Hopkins would want me to remind you, we really can't prove how much of this book Snory actually wrote. But let's assume for now that he is the main author. Being a Christian, Snory wasn't interested in preserving Norse paganism, but he was interested in preserving Icelandic culture, and during his time there was a lot of cultural influence creeping into Iceland from mainland European literature and poetry. Snory sort of wanted to show that poets of his time didn't need to adopt this continental stuff, because Iceland already had a perfectly good tradition of poetry already, so he created the prose edda, essentially as a guide explaining how Scaldic poetry works. Scaldic poetry is pretty much characterized by constant obscure references to Norse mythology though, so in order to make that poetry accessible to others, he had to tell the stories that gave rise to those obscure references. The result is a book in basically three kind of major parts, although sometimes certain pieces get broken down into smaller sub-pieces, but let's keep things easy for now. The first part, which we call the prologue, gives a completely BS explanation for where the Norse gods came from. It follows the eohemuristic tradition of the time where mythological figures are reimagined as real historical characters, who migrated to Scandinavia from Troy, and then were misremembered as gods by later generations. The second part, Gylvigining, tells the story of a Swedish king named Gylvi, who visits another area in Sweden where this magical clan of Trojans has settled and meets with three wizards who tell him stories from Norse mythology. The third part, Scaldic Scopermol, takes the form of a conversation between a eohemuristic agir and a eohemuristic bragi, wherein they chat about all the different ways you can refer to basic things in poetry, and as part of that conversation, a lot of pagan poetry gets quoted. So firstly, this is a book you can read. It's not like some kind of dry, medieval textbook for school kids with a quiz at the end of every chapter or something horrendously boring that you might remember from your own days in school. It's the only source for some of our most important and famous mythological tales. It's the only source containing the binding of Fenrir, for example, and for Thor's duel with Rungnir, or his visit to Gerrod's homestead where he gets his iron gloves. It's the only full narrative for the story about Othin and his brothers killing the Yelten Emir and making the earth out of his body, and the story about Utgar the Loki, and the story where Mjolnir is created. Without the Prozetta, we wouldn't have any of that. We'd have a few obscure references to some of these stories in the poetic edda, but we'd have no idea what those references were supposed to mean. But there's post-conversion Christian influence in it somewhere, right? Yes, and most of it is in the prologue and in the epilogue at the end of Skulled Scupper Mall. I'm going to read you the first few sentences of the prologue right now to show you what it looks like. "All mighty God created heaven and earth and all things in them, and lastly two humans from whom generations are descended, Adam and Eve, and their stock multiplied and spread over all the world. But as time passed, mankind became diverse, somewhere good and orthodox in faith. But many more turned aside to follow the lusts of the world and neglected God's commandments, and so God drowned the world in a flood, together with all creatures in the world except those who were in the ark with Noah." A lot of people have heard about the Prozetta and how it's a book about Norse mythology, and then they come across it in a bookstore, pick it up and start reading, and get very confused, as you can imagine. But the purpose of the prologue is to deliver a Christianity inspired allegedly historical origin to where Norse mythology came from. It explains how people across the world forgot that the true God existed and began worshiping other things instead. It sets up Thor as a prince from Thrace, which is an area sort of between Greece, Turkey, and Bulgaria, who overthrows his foster father to inherit the kingdom, and becomes the progenitor to a line of kings that includes Othin many generations later. None of it is historically accurate in the slightest, and more importantly, the Christian influence here and the fake history are not hidden. They are obvious and right in your face, and there's no risk of you accidentally internalizing them as part of the mythology. As you read the prologue, you start to think to yourself things like, hmm, this whole section seems like it's a caveat explaining that this is actually a Christian book so that it doesn't get blacklisted or something. It's not trying to trick you. It's an author saying essentially, "I'm about to tell a whole bunch of pagan stories, but before I do, I want you to know what I think is the truth first." And the epilogue in Scold's Gapernaul even goes so far as to explicitly tell you not to believe the rest of what's in the book. Here's a quote from there. "Yet Christian people must not believe in heathen gods, nor in the truth of this account, in any other way, than that in which it is presented at the beginning of this book, where it is told what happened when mankind went astray from the true faith, and after that about the Turks, how the people of Asia, known as Asyr, distorted the accounts of the events that took place in Troy so that the people of the country would believe that they were gods." So the message is simple. This book is full of all kinds of pagan information that you should not believe in at all, except for the fake historical explanations about where it all came from. As another example of that fake history, here's what the prologue has to say about Othin in particular. Quote, "Odin had the gift of prophecy, and so did his wife, and from this science he discovered that his name would be remembered in the northern part of the world and honored above all kings. For this reason, he became eager to set off from Turkey and took with him a great following, young people and old, men and women, and they took with them many precious things. And whatever countries they passed through, great glory was spoken of them, so that they seemed more like gods than men. And they did not halt their journey until they came north to the country that is now called Saxony. Othin stayed there a long while and gained possession of large parts of that land, and now I'm skipping over a paragraph about some of Othin's descendants in continental Germanic territory." After that, Othin went north to what is now called Sweden. There was there a king whose name was Gilvy, and when he learned of the arrival of the men of Asia, who were called Asir, he went to meet them and offered Othin as much power in his realm as he wished himself. And such was the success that attended their travels, that in whatever country they stopped, there was then prosperity and good peace there, and everyone believed that they were responsible for it, because the people who had power saw that they were unlike other people that they had seen in beauty and wisdom. I hope I'm getting the point across well. All this stuff is mainly just condensed into the prologue and epilogue, which makes it very obvious that the rest of the book is not trying to deliver corrupted Norse mythology. When we get into the next section that falls just after the prologue, Gilvyginning, this same king who was just mentioned in the prologue, puts on a disguise and goes to visit these new magical settlers from Asia to see where their magic comes from, and he meets these three wizards who start explaining this pagan information to him. In this part of the book, the author's goals have shifted. He no longer needs to prove to you that he's a Christian historian. Now he needs to explain to you the stories that are referenced in Schaldic poetry, so the nature of the writing changes dramatically. We start to get stuff like this. Quote. Soak Third. Just as from Niffleheim there arose coldness and all things grim, so what was facing close to Muspel was hot and bright, but Genungagap was as mild as a windless sky. And when the rhyme and the blowing of the warmth met so that it thawed and dripped, there was a quickening from these flowing drops due to the power of the source of the heat, and it became the form of a man, and he was given the name Emir. But the Frost Giants call him "Augul Mir." And from him are descended the generations of Frost Giants, as it says in the shorter volaspa, end quote, and then he goes on to quote a pagan poem as his source. So you can see pretty easily that the author is not trying to ruin or corrupt the mythology with Christian ideas. But he still faces the problem that he is about 200 years removed from Norse paganism, and even though he has access to a lot of poetry, he doesn't have all the answers, and just like any modern person would, sometimes he seems to accidentally interpret things in the way an average person of his time probably would. Let's look at an instance that I think is probably a great example of this. This is from just a few paragraphs earlier in Guilvigining, talking about Oathen. Quote, "Then spoke just as high. He made heaven and earth in the skies and everything in them. Then spoke third, but his greatest work is that he made man and gave him a soul that shall live and never perish though the body decay to dust or burn to ashes. And all men who are righteous shall live and dwell with him himself in the place called Gimla or Vingolf, but wicked men go to hell and on to Niflhell. That is down in the ninth world. Then spoke Gunglitty. What was he doing before heaven and earth were made? Then high replied. Then he was among the Frost Giants." If you've had any prolonged exposure to Christianity at all, it's nearly impossible to read this passage and not immediately catch a familiar Christian vibe. You've got the everlasting soul that lives on forever and the souls of the righteous being separated from the souls of the wicked to dwell with their God in some special place in the afterlife. The wicked, of course, end up in this place called hell. But it's possible you're not all that familiar with how Christianity sounds when it pops up in conversation. So isn't there still a risk that the prosetta might have corrupted your idea of mythology with this line? Well, maybe. But only if you don't bother to read the rest of it. Because not long after this, we're given information that completely contradicts it. For example, there's the quote that "all those men that have fallen in battle since the beginning of the world have now come to Odin and Valhalla." Do we suppose that everyone who ever fell in battle was righteous and none of them were wicked? And there's this quote as well that Othin threw hell into Niflhimmer and gave her authority over nine worlds such that she has to administer bored and lodging to those sent to her, and that is those who die of sickness or old age. So which is it? What we have here is one quote that sounds a bit Christian, disagreeing with two other quotes in different places in the same book that agree with each other and don't sound Christian. If we believe that Snory is trying to infuse Christian ideas into mythology, then we have to ask ourselves why he contradicts himself multiple times on exactly those points. The answer could be that we're actually dealing with multiple different authors here, or it could be that medieval scholarship just can't be held to the same standard of rigor as we expect out of modern scholarship. And the truth is, there is no 13th century source that's immune from this kind of thing, not even the poetic edda. I've mentioned before that there are a couple different versions of the poem Volusbaugh. One comes from a manuscript called the Codex Regius, and another comes from a manuscript called Halkspoke. And depending on whose translation you choose to read, you might get one or the other, or a merger between the two, or in the case of Larrington's second edition, which I quote from on almost every episode of this show, both are included. As I've talked about in past episodes, in Halkspoke, there's an extra stanza right near the end of the poem talking about how the world will be right after Ragnarok. The stanza says quote, "Then comes the mighty one to the judgment of the powers, full of strength from above, he who rules over all." Can you think of anyone who 14th century Icelanders would have believed in that comes from above full of strength and rules over everything after the end of the world? It's been speculated that this could be a reference to Baldur coming back from hell, but I think Jesus is a much more obvious answer. Either way, the more important point is that we often can't be completely sure whether or not some point showing up in our sources really is Christian influence, even among scholars. I read the stanza in Halkspoke and immediately detect a Christian vibe, and so do many other scholars, but there are also some who aren't so quick to rush to that conclusion. And so the truth is, whether you're reading the prosetta or the poeticetta, or any other Norse mythological source, if the Christian influence is obvious, which it often is, then you'll catch it pretty easily. If it's not obvious, then you won't be any more in the dark than most of the rest of us. Scholars will probably be arguing about it, and if you wanted to keep yourself completely isolated from any possible Christian influence, there would be nothing left for you to read. What would be an even worse thing to do in this case would be to avoid reading the source material entirely and choose to trust some modern author to give you a pure non-corrupted version of things in their own book of retellings. The prosetta author, or authors, may be overtly Christian, but they're at least motivated to get the mythological details right. Modern authors, on the other hand, often feel completely comfortable with making things up purely for entertainment purposes. On the other hand, we could choose to accept the fact that we don't have access to pure Norse mythology, because for one, there's no such thing. And even if you wanted to define such a thing by your own parameters, whatever that thing is you've defined probably hasn't survived into the modern world. Hopkins pointed out that myths are allowed to evolve to fit their audience. So if we're okay with any modern author's embellishments, then there's literally no reason to be upset about Snory Sturluson's embellishments. Please do not disregard the prosetta because somebody told you it contains Christian influence. Instead, join me again next time, when we will actively disregard all modern retellings, but choose to be completely fine with Snory Sturluson's medieval ones on Norse mythology, the unofficial guide. Sources for this episode include Dictionary of Northern Mythology by Rudolph Zimic, 2007, Nemeer, Two Myths or One by Jacqueline Simpson, 1965. The conversion of Scandinavia, Vikings, merchants, and missionaries in the remaking of Northern Europe by Anders Wyn Roth, 2012. The King, the Champion and the Sorcerer by Lottie Mott's 1996, poetic eddab translated by Caroline Larrington, 2014, and the prosetta translated by Anthony Falk's 1995. [BLANK_AUDIO]