Germanic Religion: History of Study

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GERMANIC RELIGION: HISTORY OF STUDY

This article concentrates on the most recent phase of the history of scholarship on Germanic religion. A 1956 study by Jan de Vries provides a detailed review of work up to the middle of the twentieth century, and 1985 reviews by Joseph Harris and John Lindow cover developments up to the early 1980s.

Scholarship to the Late Nineteenth Century

Medieval scholars of Germanic religion were divided into two camps. Euhemerists such as Snorri Sturluson (1179–1241) argued that the pagan gods were men who had migrated to Sweden from Troy but who were believed by the local inhabitants to be divine. In contrast, demonists such as the editors of the sagas about King Olaf Tryggvason (r. 995–1000) held that the pagan gods were manifestations of Satan. Knowledge of the pagan religion was never lost, as is shown by the existence of two versions of Snorri's Edda that were set down in seventeenth-century Iceland. However, the systematic study of Germanic mythology began with the publication in 1835 of Jacob Grimm's work on Teutonic mythology. Although his etymologies and interpretations are now largely rejected, his collection of materials was nonetheless a rich one and a monument to romanticism's interest in the Germanic past.

After Grimm, the nineteenth century witnessed various trends in the interpretation of myth. First were the nature interpretations, according to which the myths represented seasonal change and the gods represented phenomena such as storms, thunder, and fire. Among the general mythologists who worked with Germanic materials, Max Müller connected all myths with the cycle of the sun and Adalbert Kuhn offered meteorological interpretations. Among those specializing in Germanic religion, Wilhelm Mannhardt emphasized agricultural rites; some British scholars, such as Edward B. Tylor, postulated that the Germanic tribes were animists who believed in spirits and demons; and others, including Andrew Lang, interpreted myths as dreams. Scholars were also interested in using Germanic material to study still earlier societies: Müller, Kuhn, and Wilhelm Schwartz used comparative approaches to reconstruct proto-Germanic and Indo-European religions. This direction of research was superseded by the so-called folklore mythology, which began with Wilhelm Mannhardt's 1875 study of forest and field cults, and the use of folklore customs to interpret Germanic mythology continued for some seventy-five years. (Sir James Frazer's monumental The Golden Bough [1911–1915] is based on this line of research.)

Toward the end of the nineteenth century, monographs were devoted to major deities, including Rudolf Much's to the sky god and Vilhelm Grönbech's to religion and ethical and spiritual concepts. Germanic mythology also became of interest to philologists. Sophus Bugge questioned the originality of Germanic mythology with his revolutionary hypotheses about the origin of Germanic myths, which he held were derived entirely from Christian and classical thought. His theories were defended especially by Elard Hugo Meyer, who associated them also with the older natural-mythological interpretations, but all these views have lost acceptance. (Archaeological studies do hint at some Roman influence on the early development of the Scandinavian pantheon, and Christianity is now considered to have had an influence on Scandinavian paganism itself as well as on the textual sources, as Kaarle Krohn, Anne Holtsmark, and others have shown.) Eugen Mogk criticized the supposed reliability of Snorri's Edda and thus drew attention to the fundamental problem of the trustworthiness of Old Norse sources.

Early Twentieth Century: Formative Years

The period from around 1900 to World War II saw a consolidation of the field, and the resulting view of Germanic religion, in its basics, is that still held at the turn of the twenty-first century. Walter Baetke described the Germanic peoples' concept of the holy, their ideas about fate, and their system of values; Magnus Olsen used place-names as a new source for the research of Germanic religion; and Grönbech examined the role of religion in the lives of the Germanic people and its influence on cult and custom. Ritual activity was the focus of the interpretations of Otto Höfler, who examined the links of mythology and cult and the significance of the cult in the lives of individuals. His argument for the existence of a cult group of warriors linked with Óðinn has found objections but no real refutation. Franz Rolf Schröder used both Germanic and non-Germanic parallels and relations in his study of the the religions of the Indo-European peoples, although not all his theories are still accepted. Axel Olrik, who from 1892 to 1894 had produced a study of Saxo Grammaticus (c. 1150—after 1216) that has never been superseded, was joined by Hans Ellekilde for a still largely respected study of Scandinavian mythology that made substantial use of comparative material.

Yet another comparativist, Georges Dumézil, arrived at a "three-function" theory of Indo-European mythology. He considered the common Indo-European ideology to have consisted of three principles—the maintenance of cosmic and juridical order, the exercise of physical force, and the promotion of physical well-being—and he interpreted the gods of the various groups of the Indo-Europeans' descendants as representing these "functions." He saw Óðinn and Týr as co-sovereigns, each dedicated to one of the elements of the first function; Þórr represented the second function, and Njǫrðr, Freyr, and Freyja the third. Despite some reservations, such as the objection to Dumézil's identification of Þórr as a war god, this theory has gained in importance since the 1950s. In 1956 and 1957, the second edition of de Vries's magisterial two volumes on the history of Germanic religion brought this newer work together with the older scholarship of historicists such as Karl Helm, who depended on philological and archaeological evidence. De Vries also presented findings from the study of folklore and place-names. His opus is the most extensive handbook of Germanic religion and is still useful, albeit insufficiently critical of the Nordic literary sources.

Studies of Old Norse mythology experimented with the functionalist and structuralist theories of the 1940s and 1950s, but in the main—except for Dumézil's brand of structuralism—the historicist (or literary-philological or positivist) approach of the nineteenth century is still in force. This line of thinking assumes that each myth had a single "original" form and meaning that can be reconstructed and that is the primary object of study. The neohistoricist or "new philological" approach of scholars such as Thomas A. DuBois, in contrast, assumes that myths may have had different meanings for different communities at different times. The latter approach is also seen in late-twentieth- and early twenty-first-century archaeologically based studies of Germanic religion. Archaeology also supplies new primary sources for the study of Germanic religion; for example, Karl Hauck argues that the human figures on Migration Age (late fourth century–early seventh century) bracteates represent Germanic divinities. (Bracteates are Germanic medallions, probably inspired by Roman coins, that depict figures and scenes that are still not fully understood.) Although not all of his identifications have been accepted, the evidence of the bracteates is considered relevant.

Late Twentieth Century

Despite some overinterpretation, place-name studies continue to be a productive field for the study of Scandinavian paganism. For example, in a 1999 paper, Alexandra Pesch searches the kings' sagas for interpretations of the ninth-century Oseberg (near Oslo) ship burial and then examines this information in light of the archaeological and place-name evidence. The former indicates that the burial is that of a pagan seeress or priestess rather than that of a queen, and the latter suggests that Oseberg (if from Ásaberg, meaning "mountain of the gods") may, like Uppsala, have been a center for the worship of several deities. The silence of the sagas regarding a heathen cult center or sacral landscape in this part of Norway reminds us that when it comes to early Scandinavian history, the sagas are far from preserving a full account of events.

Old Norse myth and Scandinavian society

One important development in the second half of the twentieth century was the idea that the well-documented Old Norse myths should be treated separately from the poorly documented Scandinavian pagan rituals. Earlier, Frazer's view of ritual as the dramatization of myth had influenced pre–World War II scholars of Old Norse myth such as Magnus Olsen and Bertha Phillpotts and to some extent postwar scholars such as Holtsmark, Einar Haugen, and Anders Andrén. Scholars such as Margaret Clunies Ross, John Lindow, and Jens Peter Schjødt rely on the relationship between myth and ritual in non-Western societies to argue that myth and ritual are probably not as closely interrelated as Frazer and his followers thought. Following Victor Turner, such "anthropological" studies of Old Norse myth treat it as one symbolic form among the many that a society accesses during ritual performance, and following Émile Durkheim, they assume that myths express certain social and cultural realities for the people who create and use them. Drawing on semiology, these studies further consider mythology as a system of interrelated elements, and they avoid investigating myths on an individual basis.

Despite these common assumptions, scholars taking the anthropological approach have posited quite different aspects of society as central to Scandinavian mythology. Clunies Ross focuses on issues of exogamy as the source of tension between the Æsir, the Vanir, and the giants. She argues that the Æsir are unwilling to give their women in marriage to members of the other groups, as this would acknowledge that they are all of equal status, but the resulting unions between giantesses and Vanir and the various ploys to obtain Æsir women sow the seeds of the Æsir's own destruction. Lindow focuses on the social mechanism of the blood feud, which was the chief means of maintaining social stability both for the Æsir and for the Icelanders who worshiped them. The ongoing feud between the giants and the gods reflected a social reality that the Icelanders knew well, but the murder of the god Baldr, which sets brother against brother, is evidence of a fatal flaw in a strategy that is supposed to lead to resolution.

Germanic paganism and Christianity

The assumption that religions are not static but are changing and pluralistic is also productive for studies of the interaction of Germanic paganism with Christianity and other religions. For example, DuBois argues that the extensive and long-term intercultural contacts between the pagan Norse, the Sámi, and the Finns, and then between these groups and various kinds of Christianity, resulted in the continuous alteration of their religious traditions. DuBois shows that Christian notions of burial made inroads into the practices of Nordic pagans long before these people officially accepted the new religion. Concepts about the afterlife underwent transformations as well, with pagan communities adjusting their beliefs in line with Christian doctrines prior to their conversion. It is likely that Christian rites and beliefs affected traditions such as ship burial and Ragnarǫk, which rise in prominence during the late pagan era.

Lindow and John McKinnell have concentrated on the interaction of Christianity and Scandinavian paganism and on the question of Norse-Christian syncretism. Lindow argues that Norse mythology cannot be interpreted without reference to Christian influence, which may have been considerable, as the two cultures had ample opportunities to meet in an enormous number of contexts. Old myths may have been reworked in Christian forms; new versions may have emphasized certain aspects of the "original" myths for reasons related to Christian theology, or the new versions may have assimilated Christian modes of expression or imitated Christian forms. McKinnell sees the possibility of syncretism in tenth-century Norway, as archaeological and textual evidence points to an important Christian presence in Norway before the missionary efforts of King Olaf Tryggvason, and Peter Foote has pointed out the peculiarities of early Icelandic Christianity.

A different matter is the use of pagan iconography for a wholly Christian purpose, as when Christian sculptors in Viking Age England put scenes of Ragnarǫk on their crosses as a way of emphasizing the parallels between the two religions and simultaneously showing that the old religion had been replaced and surpassed by the new. Yet another aspect of the interaction between Scandinavian paganism and Christianity that has received recent scholarly attention is the learned, medieval context in which the myths are preserved. Such studies clarify the material and render less significant the gulf between pagan Scandinavia and the recording of the mythology centuries later in a Christian context.

With the exception of de Vries, whose history of the study of religion (translated into English in 1967) is widely cited, scholars of Germanic religion and Scandinavian mythology have been medievalists first and scholars of comparative religion and mythology a distant second, most likely because of the specialized skills necessary to study the primary sources. The anthropological studies of Norse myth are the most up-to-date with respect to theory, but of the internationally famous mythographers of the twentieth century, only Dumézil has had a major impact on the study of Scandinavian mythology. Claude Lévi-Strauss's ideas have been injected into Dumézil's system by Einar Haugen, and his principles have been applied to certain eddic poems, but he has not himself been concerned with Germanic materials. Similarly, the theoretical orientation of Joseph Campbell has been used by Loren Gruber to examine the role of rites of passage in the eddic poem Hávamál, but Campbell's own treatment of Germanic material has been incidental. Mircea Eliade, however, included many Norse references to Óðinn in his study of shamanism, and the Norse applications of his theories of the sacred and profane or myth of the eternal return are obvious.

Bibliography

Translated excerpts from nineteenth-century German scholarship on Germanic religion are provided by T. A. Shippey and Andreas Haarder in Beowulf: The Critical Heritage (New York, 1998). Jan de Vries's survey is found in the first volume of the second edition of his Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte (Berlin, 1956–1957), and the reviews by Joseph Harris and John Lindow appear in Old Norse—Icelandic Literature, edited by Carol Clover and John Lindow (Ithaca, N.Y., 1985). Another bibliographic resource is Lindow's Scandinavian Mythology: An Annotated Bibliography (New York, 1988). Fine examples of his recent work are "Bloodfeud and Scandinavian Mythology," Alvíssmál 4 (1994): 51–68, and Murder and Vengeance among the Gods: Baldr in Scandinavian Mythology (Helsinki, 1997). Anthropological approaches are also pursued by Margaret Clunies Ross in the two volumes of Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse Myths in Medieval Northern Society (Odense, Denmark, 1994–1998) and in the essays she edits in Old Norse Myths, Literature and Society (Odense, Denmark, 2003) as well as by Thomas A. DuBois in Nordic Religions in the Viking Age (Philadelphia, 1999). An interdisciplinary approach was the focus of a conference whose proceedings are published in Words and Objects: Towards a Dialogue between Archaeology and History of Religion (Oslo, 1986), edited by Gro Steinsland; Steinsland's own study of Norse mythology is in Det hellige bryllup og norrøn kongeideologi: En analyse av hieregami-myten i Skírnismál, Ynglingatal, Háleygjatal, og Hyndluljóð (Oslo, 1991). The foremost modern scholar of Germanic ritual is Jens Peter Schjødt; for references to his work, see his essay "Myths as Sources for Rituals—Theoretical and Practical Implications" in Clunies Ross (2003). Peter Foote's study, "Secular Attitudes in Early Iceland," appeared in Medieval Scandinavia 7 (1974): 31–44, and Alexandra Pesch's paper on the Oseberg ship burial, "Die Oseberg-'Saga' in ihrer Vielschichtigkeit," is found in Die Aktualität der Saga. Festschrift für Hans Schottmann, edited by Stig Toftgaard Andersen (Berlin, 1999), pp. 177–199. Jan de Vries's general history of the study of religion was translated into English as Perspectives in the History of Religions (Berkeley, Calif., 1967), translated and with an introduction by Kees W. Bolle.