Norse Symbols (and Their Unknowable Meanings)

hi i'm old norse specialist dr jackson crawford and today on my channel about norse language myth and related subjects i want to talk a little bit about a patreon requested topic which is visual and artistic symbols in old norse although really this is another one of those videos where i'm kind of talking about the absence of information [Music] now right off the top i'm going to ask you to forgive me i'm pretty close to where the airplanes fly so you may hear an airplane uh even though i think my microphone is working this time so the problem is with this question about visual and artistic symbols that yes there are visual and artistic symbols on for example runestones picture stones and other memorials of the viking age but there is nothing in the viking age that explains them right i think today we are so used to a very self-conscious culture where you can find explanations for just about anything uh and where people try to read into just about anything because uh they get bored and try to make everything about you know establishing or or deflecting one identity or another um but in a pre-modern age where people are a lot more concerned with survival uh yes they have symbolic expression but no they don't necessarily take the time to express it i mean for one thing uh for a lot of the viking age you know maybe a certain amount of people maybe even a fairly large amount of people were literate in runes but you notice that runes are never really used uh for literature right as far as we know um you just don't find uh poems and sagas actually written in runes probably the closest thing to that uh is the runestone which does have a pretty cryptic pretty long inscription that has some literary characteristics including some poetry but between that and the codex runicus from the 1300s which just contains a danish law code and one little bit from one little little ditty one little song um you know most runic writing concerns basically so and so died or i made this bridge or this is my sword pretty everyday things like that so if some kind of a symbol appears in this this pre-literary uh world well pre-pre-written literary world i mean obviously they had oral literature and poetry there's not necessarily anything to explain it so when you see a visual symbol that legitimately dates from the viking age like what today is often called the volck neuter which would mean the knot of the dead man on the battlefield not of the slain is one way of putting that um well let's let's look at this for a moment yes this does date from the viking age we do find this on viking age memorials for example we see it on the uh stuart hamish one picture stone where it appears between a man being speared or maybe thrust with a spear into a burial mound and a large bird which for many has has suggested that it might be associated with odin who's associated with large birds like eagles and ravens and with uh the spear and including perhaps even sacrifice with the spear based on stuff like his self-sacrifice and havamal or the sacrifice to him in kathrak sagan but we don't even know what the name of this symbol was in the viking age valk neutral is a modern coinage a monaco in general norse but it's still a modern coinage for the name it's possible this is the same symbol that snorri in skoda mall part of the prose edda that not many people read calls the arta the heart of roongner he says there had a heart which is famous of hard stone and pointy with three horns or corners as uh is later made a carved design that is called the rugeness yarta it certainly could be this um this this set of three triangles but uh he doesn't necessarily say that and we don't have uh snorri here to draw us out what symbol he's thinking about he also doesn't say and it means x he just calls it a carve design and we find it in all kinds of places uh the oseberg burial or or items from the osiberic burial in norway contain the symbol uh so does a ring the uh the nan river ring from england from the 700s or 800s that's from cambridgeshire which is in the dane law but the ring could even be early enough that it's actually old english and we we just can't say what this means right i mean it's just like today um you know i like all kinds of things that have uh have designs on them right um i like the um i like kind of aztec designs right sort of uh geometric patterns that are often associated with the southwest i wear shirts and rings and stuff with those things but if you ask me what they mean you know maybe it does mean some particular thing to somebody but i don't i don't know what those things are i just kind of like how they look or consider the way that sort of arbitrary symbols can actually become kind of arbitrarily symbolic of a particular group or position i mean think about the democratic donkey and the republican elephant you know what about donkeys i suggest to you the platform the democratic party what about elephants suggest to you the platform of the republican party um you know it's a it's fundamentally arbitrary it has a history behind it but there's nothing that somebody from outside the culture and outside the context of what's written in our culture or or expressed oral in our culture could look at an elephant or a donkey and say oh yeah this makes sense right and this this resto brag the carved design that people today have started to call of all canuter is one of those things yes it could be associated with odin that's possible but it's impossible to say for sure and we need to be comfortable with that uncertainty i would also draw your attention to the fact that these sets of three arranged in a similar way are maybe a broader common symbol in the viking age we see three horns arranged in a very similar way on the snow the left stone which is from the early 800s from denmark this is a somewhat common style memorial stone we've got aruna conscription and the younger food of course a fairly early form of the younger food arc that says uh gunvaldstein sonar or solheigen it just means the sun the uh stone of gunvald the son of herold who was the thuler at saul hellgatter thuler is a very mysterious word in old norse um used of apparently some kind of order who might have something to do with runes or poetry odin uses it of himself and half them all it's a it's a mysterious word in of itself but here we've got this this three horn symbol that which reminds me pretty profoundly actually of the symbol called the balkan neuter has its three elements arranged together in a similar way and maybe it's just that kind of triskel design that is itself visually appealing to people in the viking age in the same way that like aztec's type design might be appealing to me so essentially what i'm telling you and this will always disappoint people is you know it's interesting and useful to acknowledge what visual symbols actually originate in the viking age but it's useless for an understanding of their history and beliefs and lore to pretend that we know what it was what it meant or what it was even called you can construct what you want around it i guess for your modern uses but be aware that that's what's being done that it's being constructed you know nowhere in the process of getting a phd in scandinavian studies that any of my professors impart to me any psychic powers and they haven't suddenly manifested me any any later on the process of teaching or researching the stuff and nobody else has the psychic powers either so just be aware that we're kind of in the dark here now in a moment i'm going to talk about a couple other potential visual symbols of the viking age that at least are associated with it by people today [Music] now one visual symbol from the viking age that i wouldn't discount the importance of is the thor's hammer obviously this had some symbolic meaning to people at the time because we find hundreds of these uh in amulets often uh buried with people now this could have arisen as a response to the crucifix worn by christians that's possible it could also have been something motivated from from within the culture hard to say but it's difficult to deny that that has some kind of symbolic meaning it's also interesting to note that many of these actually have bird or other animal heads for example there's the bird and the famous skull and the hammer and the wolf and the icelandic hammer if that's what it is it could also be a cross or it could be intended to be both um so maybe those animals have some kind of symbolic association too i mean obviously we see that animals have a great importance in norse mythology especially wolves ravens horses and snakes and eagles and horses did i say horses but one kind of symbol that i think is over associated with the viking age especially in trying to draw deeper meanings out of it are the so-called galdrastavi or magical staves which originate from early modern or at oldest late medieval manuscripts now i have a whole video about the most famous of these the ies yamler which i'll link to a video in the top right if you're on youtube in 2020 or thereabouts you can look at that but there's many others such as the vague v-series which is kind of similar looking it's kind of like agassi homer but not as symmetrical and in the manuscript the hooled manuscript on page 26v we see this symbol and we see the description perry and if you're one of the 10 people who pays attention to my pronunciation for a reason other than calling me names about it you'll notice that the very way this is spelled leads me to pronounce it more like modern icelandic because it's very close to modern icelandic this is early modern and it just says if a man carries these symbols on himself he will not get lost in storms nor bad weather even though he is in an unfamiliar place is more or less the just this now there's a lot of other less well-known magical staves than that and other manuscripts as well though there is no evidence that any of them go back to pre-christian times in fact these symbols are not really that different as i pointed out in my video about is younger two magical staves that are in all kinds of other texts from all around the christian european world there's no real reason to say that these have uh to to speculate that these have some kind of pre-christian norse origin and there's especially no reason to speculate about their meaning in a pre-christian nor society where we don't even see them used yes they could have been but we don't know they were i also need to point out that runes and bind runes are no different don't have meanings in themselves of a symbolic kind that we can confidently date back to the viking age or pre-christian times yes modern uh readers and occult writers and i'm when i say modern i'm going all the way back to early modern times 1600 1700s do speculate about and write about and often a lot of ink and a lot of uh blog space have been spilled about the symbolic meanings you know you carve this rune and you're evoking this power you carve these two runes together and their combined powers and this bind rune or this or that but from the viking age from the actual pre-christian period when the elder futhark and later the younger foodlark were used in scandinavia we know only that these were used as letters and an alphabet not as symbols yes there are some inscriptions that we don't necessarily know um the meaning of that don't seem to have alphabetic meaning but can we jump to the conclusion that that's supposed to mean what somebody in the 20th century arbitrarily speculates as the magical meaning of that rune i'm skeptical i think we need to maintain an attitude that clearly distinctly separates what we know from what is built as an edifice in modern times on top of what we actually know and to resist the temptation to over explain from our imaginations when the facts will probably just never be known to us right well with a raven loudly echoing in the mountains around me uh i'm going to conclude this video probably having thoroughly disappointed the people who wanted this topic but this is the thing i'm never going to uh knowingly willingly step off of the cliff of fact and into the fantasy lands of speculation not my own and not anybody else's so for now beautiful colorado let me wish you good times good skepticism and all the best you

Channel: Jackson Crawford

Views: 58,797

Keywords: education, norse, old, old norse, norse myth, norse mythology, odin, Óðinn, edda, havamal, hávamál, wanderer's havamal, wanderer's hávamál, viking, vikings, norse god, gods

Id: lHbD8ko-tU0

Length: 15min 51sec (951 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 02 2020