Representations of the Pagan Afterlife in Medieval Scandinavian Literature

7

Conclusion

Fictions are for finding things out, and they change as the needs of sense-making change. Myths are the agents of stability, fictions the agents of change: Myths call for absolute, fiction for conditional assent. Myths make sense in terms of a lost order of time, illud tempus as Eliade calls it; fictions, if successful, make sense of the here and now, hoc tempus.¹

mythological fictions: fictional mythologies?

Margaret Clunies Ross coined the term ‘mythological fictions’ to describe the extended prose narratives in Snorra Edda which take place in ‘a coherent fictional world, populated by named supernatural beings with clearly individualized properties, engaged in defined acts and events’.² A mythological fiction has a ‘special epistemological status’ between the worlds of mythical truth and fiction as defined by Kermode. Snorri’s need to pitch his narratives somewhere between myth and fiction derives from his desire to establish a framework in which the semantic values of pre-Christian myths could be preserved and expressed without transgressing the boundaries of Christian orthodoxy, the new mythological truth accepted by Snorri and his contemporaries. It is the fictionalised nature of the extended narratives within the Edda that allows Snorri and his audience to enter for a while the world of pagan mythology, safe in the knowledge that they are not themselves becoming pagans, or participating in paganism. They can find cultural significance, semantic value, and aesthetic pleasure in the worldview of their ancestors, without being ‘taken in’ (as Gylfi is) by a religion which they know to be false. Snorri’s mythological narratives, read in the context of the Prologue to the Edda and other self-reflexive elements of his framing superstructure, ‘help to construct a Christian perspective on traditional Norse concepts of cosmology, cosmogony and eschatology’.³ As we have seen in the case of the story of Hermóðr’s ride to Hel, a mythological fiction of this sort may construct this perspective partly out of ideas and motifs drawn from Christian literature, signalling on a textual level Snorri’s participation in both pagan and Christian mythological traditions.

Useful as Clunies Ross’s concept of the mythological fiction is, its application is limited to the embedded narratives of Gylfaginning and Skáldskaparmál, whereas the question of the nature of Snorri’s approach to mythology goes beyond these fictions, and encompasses both his descriptions of the pagan cosmos and the attitude towards pre-Christian religions evinced by his Ynglinga saga. Therefore, I propose that we augment the idea of the mythological fiction by introducing the concept of ‘fictional mythologies’. By this term I mean the manipulation of mythological material to fit the author’s literary design: it does not necessarily imply the invention of new myths.⁴ An example of this that arises from the foregoing study is Snorri’s descriptions of Valhll and Hel, which tacitly transfer facets of the Christian heaven and hell to traditional Norse cosmological features. There are no narratives attached to these descriptions in Gylfaginning; they are presented as mythological ‘fact’. Similarly, Snorri’s recreation of pagan Scandinavian religion and its rituals in the first part of Heimskringla is a fictional mythology, in so far as his source texts do not place the same emphasis on Óðinn and human sacrifice as he does. The narratives of Ynglinga saga take place in the world of men, which is populated by mortal men, and not supernatural beings – they cannot therefore be classified as mythological fictions – but they do not take place in what for Snorri was hoc tempus; they are not mythological texts, but for Snorri they exist in a lost, mythical, order of time, in illud tempus. Snorri does not invent the idea that Óðinn was a god associated with hanged men, for example, but the Óðinnic cult described in episodes like the story of King Aun’s sacrifices is a unique, fictionalised, application of mythology to narrative. The authors of the fornaldarsögur take a very similar approach to the mythological background against which their stylised, fabulous, tales are set: it reflects the peculiar form of antiquarianism of this genre, in which the legendary past was simultaneously glorified and held up to ridicule.

Fictionalised mythologies are not restricted to late literary reconstructions of the pagan world: the highly valorised representation of the Valhll myth-complex in the eddic praise-poems Eiríksmál and Hákonarmál is determined, according to my reading, by the genre in which they were composed. They create mythologies by association with which they can achieve the maximum glory for their subjects as individuals. They wish to make artistic use both of myth in its stable and stabilizing form – it is important that their heroes are associated with the gods – and fiction, with its ability to deal with change, because they wish their characters to be seen as having a unique position in relation to the stability of the traditional mythical structures. A fictionalised mythology is one which is created bespoke according to the needs of a particular literary situation: the cloth from which they are cut (myth, standing for illud tempus, stability) always remains the same, but the pattern is determined by the requirements of the author in relation to the unique requirements of the fiction which he is in the process of creating.

a cultural palimpsest

When we attempt, as I have done in this dissertation, to read medieval Scandinavia as a cultural text, we run into difficulties. If you will excuse the metaphor, I suggest we view Scandinavian culture as a page of manuscript, upon which is inscribed a text. The page is not, currently, in pristine condition; there are here and there holes, erasures, and everywhere there is writing in hands other than the original. The script is of all periods, and what it says is sometimes incomprehensible, and the various scribes often contradict one another. Before the Conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity, we may assume that there was an autograph original, representing pagan culture, religion, and mythology as it was really experienced by Scandinavian communities. As well as the natural wear and tear that such an artefact will be exposed to in the course of its existence, it has suffered at the hands of later owners. During the change from the old religion to the new, a good part of the text was erased so as to clear enough vellum for the new culture of Christianity to be written down. And yet we can still discern a good deal of the original, which was not entirely destroyed. It seems that medieval Scandinavians found too much of value and too much of beauty in their original text to allow it to be erased completely, as happened to a much greater extent in other Germanic cultures. (The strength and cultural importance of the orally transmitted Norse poetic tradition was undoubtedly crucial to its survival.) In places, there are lacunae and scribal errors in the text of the palimpsest, and this explains the proliferation of post-Conversion handwriting on our page. From an early period, Christians in Scandinavia (and in Iceland in particular) were interested in preserving and recovering the information about their cultural past which was still accessible to them, although it doubtless became more obscure as they became temporally more remote from the writing of the original text. They glossed, translated, reworked, underlined and emended the text with which they were confronted; they applied a reagent solution of scholarly conjecture to passages which were particularly faint. Successive generations of scribes have done this (and it is a process which continues to this day): some have tried to remove all traces of the Christian text; others have tried to reconcile the information inscribed by the two main hands. The writing of Snorri Sturluson utterly predominates on the page as it is visible to us now: his cultural glosses and commentaries are so voluminous as to threaten to obscure the original palimpsest text altogether, and yet without them we would have little idea of what it said, or what it meant.

It is impossible, in my view, that we will ever uncover entirely the original text; but we can see the process, taking place over a thousand years, by which successive generations have read medieval Scandinavian culture, interpreted it for themselves, related it to their own cultural experiences, and found meaning in it. I hope that these scribbles in a corner of the margin of the page will go some way to explaining how this process occurred.