The Children of Ash: Cosmology and the Viking Universe

it's my very pleasant duty to welcome meal price here and we welcome all of you we've been trying to get meal over to Cornell for a number of years now so I'm delighted that this has finally worked out and very excited to hear what he will have to say to us in a few minutes and I wanted to make sure to thank first of all people who have made possible for Neil to be here so first of all the University lectures committee who has extended the invitation and also I won't read out all of the individual names but just to give you a sense of the range of units that have been involved here both faculty students and non-academic staff from English classics Medieval Studies history comparative literature the Fiske Icelandic collection religious studies and archaeology all got behind this invitation and finally managed to secure this guest for us so thank you to all that contributed in various ways and especially thank you to Neil for agreeing to come Neil seems to be one of those people whom God put on this earth to make slobs like me look lazy and feel bad he's been active for about 20 years now I guess or so and he's published more and half of that time than I would like twice that time he has to his name three books the first two published before even earned his doctorate if I remember correctly three sole authored books including the dissertation he wrote in Uppsala University the Viking way which is widely regarded as one of the most important books on pre-christian Norse religion published in the last few decades he is also responsible for many edited projects including some real dough Stoppers encyclopedias and over 60 articles and field reports and so forth Neil earned his BA in archaeology from University London from University College if I have all of my wits about me here and then went on to do postgraduate work both in York and in Uppsala where he earned his doctorate in 2002 he's been working or hopping between Sweden Norway and Britain ever since since 2007 he's been chair of archaeology at Aberdeen University where he founded the new archaeology department and just looking at the places on the globe he's actually done field work or done various kinds of works it's Rangers from Micronesia and South Africa he's associated with the University of Witwatersrand there Russia France Germany the US you name it he's been that he has a very broad range of interests including the archaeology of the opium trade recently I'm sure he doesn't actually try this on his own but an academic interest in opium in piracy no less in witchcraft and shamanism but most of his very well earned fame comes from his work on evil Scandinavia and on Vikings and since you don't want to hear me talk more about me oh but you came here to hear this fellow I think I'll turn things over to him let me just remind you that there will be a Q&A at the end so Muniz agreed to take some questions we'll have time for that and once everything is wrapped up here there's a reception happening over in the art history gallery over at end of the building on the same floor so you're welcome to join us there later and meet him face to face over to you thank you very much and thank you all I'd like to begin by echoing orange thanks and say what a very great pleasure it is for me and my wife to be here at Cornell and in Ithaca it's my first visit and I'm quite certain it won't be my last I'd also like to thank everyone involved in your very kind invitation to present the messenger lectures this fall I was deeply honored by that invitation so thank you very much to everyone involved in that and I'd particularly like to thank everyone who's been so so warm in their hospitality to my wife and I over the past few days as you know the topic for my lectures is the Viking mind but in fact I'm not the first messenger scholar to present these lectures on the subject of the Vikings all the way back in the fall of 1980 professor now Dame rosemary cramp delivered a series of talks on the Viking achievement which is a theme that dovetails rather nicely with what I want to talk about over the next three afternoons and by coincidence I met Dame Rosemarie a couple of weeks ago and mentioned those coming out here and she asked me to pass on her very very warm greetings to you all she has very special memories of Cornell she said she was quite envious of me tasting the local wines and walking up and down the gorges preferably not at the same time now 30 years ago the focus was very much on the material world of the early north whereas I'm going to be talking much more about the intangible life of the Vikings the life of the mind the human condition and what I'm really going to be talking about throughout these lectures is stories the power of stories and the role that narrative played in the life of the Vikings its influence on their perception of the world in which they understood themselves to move now I imagine that you've already heard some stories of the Vikings you'll have an image of them of some kind in your heads and I think it's true to say that the as a culture the Vikings enjoy a kind of popular name recognition common to very few others and the image you have in your heads might be something like this this is the most familiar image of the Vikings the Viking Raider pillaging the towns and countryside of Europe chasing the English frightening the clergy doing all those kinds of dreadful things you've probably heard of their paganism their worship of the gods like Odin and Thor you might have heard of their their their sacred robes and sacrifices and and their berserk rage when they went into battle and all of those things well probably the first thing to say is that that's not entirely a stereotype there's a lot of truth in that image this is not so very far from reality and the only bit of that I'm going to give you today is this map which shows you what a very very bad idea it was to live in what's now France in the ninth century this is Viking raids on the Frankish Empire what's now France every place thing in which you can't read but don't worry about that every name every date on that map is a raid in the course of about 80 years and if you get away from the image on the screen which is how we normally communicate these things and replace each name each date with a burning village and bodies by the roadside and refugees walking away and women and children sold off into slavery that is also the reality of the Viking Age and it was very brutal indeed so in all the rest of what I say over the next 3 talks don't forget that you may have heard of the Viking expansion now most often referred to as the Viking diaspora between about 750 and 1100 AD this enormous population movement out of Scandinavia did so many things it transformed the whole of the northern world and not least it created the modern nation states of Norway Sweden and Denmark and it's worth remembering just how very very many places the Vikings got to they travelled the extent of the then-known world throughout Europe in the West in the center of Europe in the east in the Mediterranean all of these modern countries on the left there the Vikings reached and many more besides they walked the streets of what's now Baghdad they were in Afghanistan in Kazakhstan possibly even in India and China and they traveled the whole width of the North Atlantic and as I'm sure you know they were the first Europeans to reach North America and of course those travels also meant that they encountered a very wide range of peoples who lived in all of those places so you look at all of those different cultures and think of them in terms of encounters of exchanges of ideas and experiences this Viking world was very very broad indeed well I talked about that transformation over the last half century or so archeology and it's related disciplines have also transformed the way we look at the Viking world from material and textual sources we now see a very cosmopolitan environment of travelers and traders crafts workers poets warriors settlers colonists all of that set against small-scale rural tribal communities on a path to eventually becoming urbanized monarchies who were very firmly in place by the end of the Viking Age on the the literate stage of Christian Europe it's quite a transformation but more or less everything I've just said although I think it's broadly accurate it's very much a kings and battles view of the Viking period it's also rather an Andhra centric view this is a very male view of the Viking Age and it also focuses on the Vikings as seen from outside largely in the record left by their victims which to put it mildly is a rather biased record as you might expect and what interests me is what animated that extraordinary cultural expansion how did the early medieval Norse see themselves and see the world that they lived in so what we need to do is take that stereotype in which there's a very large degree of truth and start to pull it apart and deconstruct it a little bit and to some extent we can do that by adding the people who aren't normally part of that stereotype what feminist scholars quite rightly call ad women and stir which doesn't tend to get us very far actually in reconstructing a whole world I think we need to do an awful lot more and I think we need to look at different Vikings all the different aspects of Viking civilization and Viking communities put them together and use archaeology and texts to try and enter that a Viking mind which is a rather difficult thing to do let's face it it's very different different from studying pottery or the typology of weapons and things like that it's it's a difficult thing to enter this Viking mind but if you're following along that journey over the next three lectures and we'll see how we do but before we start you might reasonably ask how we can possibly know any of this what sources do we have for that Viking mind principally you know I'm an archaeologist principally archaeological evidence because this comes from the time of the Vikings we can date it very securely and we can put it together to reconstruct their symbolic world their world of ideas all of these things there's also as I'm sure you know a vast array of textual sources about the Vikings though many of them come from around 200 years after the Viking Age they're from the Middle Ages many of them produced in Iceland as a as a look back at a kind of heroic Golden Age of the Vikings that was in their past and there's lots of different categories of this you'll see these epic poetry here and etic prose the editors between them are documents that bring together a series of compositions about mythology and about the heroic age partly as a kind of handbook for poets if you want to be a proper poet these are the themes you need to deal with and this is how you could construct poems both in terms of a guide to doing that that's the prose that you see there and the poems themselves many of these things almost certainly date back to the Viking Age but they're problematic sources to use though they are very rich indeed then we have third on that list skaldic poetry this is the praised poetry delivered at the courts of Kings effectively it's a thousand different ways to say oh what a good King you are well I do hope you'll be generous or if you've heard my wonderful poem and so on but the way to put those poems together is to use mythology very largely as a set of images with which to praise Kings to set them in that heroic context so for our purposes skaldic poetry is very useful and then there are the sagas the famous Icelandic sagas the stories of Icelandic families over many generations and also a more legendary genre of sagas storytelling putting that in it in rather a romantic tradition of adventures with monsters and all these kinds of things again lots and lots of information about the Viking view of the world and then we come to a very different category of source material the law codes you might wonder what that has to do with mythology but even quite late in the Viking period especially after the transition to Christianity there are laws which prohibit you from doing very specific things don't wear masks when you go into the graveyard don't sing those special songs to the dead don't talk to trees what have we told you which implies that people are actually doing this if it's serious enough to require a law forbidding it so you can use the law codes as well to reconstruct this this world of stories and then there are the documents as I mentioned before from the Vikings victims the Anglo Saxons the peoples of continental Europe that Byzantine Empire this is the successor to the Roman Empire all these different ways of approaching these foreigners from the north doing largely very bad things though sometimes trading and being peaceful as well and lastly a very interesting category of sources these are documents left by Arab travelers lot of geographers and diplomats and they've left us some really extraordinary eyewitness accounts of their encounters with Scandinavians and I'm going to be talking about one of those in particular tomorrow so this is broadly speaking how we know the kinds of things I'm going to be talking about and I told you this would be about stories I'm going to begin with one a story of cosmology the the origins of the Viking universe as you see there and I'm going to begin with the earliest story the creation story as the Vikings saw it and in Norse mythology this begins with something called genome gap it's rather difficult word to translate it means something like the yawning void the great emptiness and it's filled as well with a sort of potential for magic it's an emptiness that nonetheless contains something something is going to emerge from that nothingness and on either side of it are two contradictory realms one is very cold it's called niflheimr it means the mist world a great expanse of clouds and vapor and frost and ice and that the opposite extreme is Muspelheim ER it's very hard to translate this something like the home of the fiery end but we can argue about that never mind it's very hot that's what you need to know so if this by the way sounds contradictory or hard to explain you're completely right one of the the problems with Norse mythology is that our sources for it our contradictory they're very confused lots of things don't make sense they appear to cancel each other out sometimes and that will become very apparent as I go on but just bear with me so you have this this great emptiness the great void with on one side of it a cold place on the other side of it a hot place and the mixture of those two things creates a great vapor a sort of swirling mist and chaos in the middle of gonnago gap and that's added to by a number of rivers that flow from somewhere vague that we don't quite understand also out into that void a very strange place and out of all that churning emptiness that mist and vapor steps the very first being and he's a giant his name is Lumiere he may already be there from the start we don't know but he's the first being we have a name for at this point you'll also have realized how very hard it is to illustrate this the Vikings did not leave us pictures of their view of cosmogony of the creation of the universe so what I'm going to do instead is use a number of images that can perhaps tolet tell you a little bit about how people have taken up these stories and use them in different cultural contexts we'll see how we go with that and we'll also come back a little bit later on to the Giants I'm going to say more about them so here we have him the first being a mere in this swirling emptiness and then he's joined by the second being of Norse mythology and this is I think almost my my favorite character from all of these stories it's the cosmic cow her name is alpha moola it means the hornless one rich in milk this is a an illustration from an early modern Icelandic text where they've got the horns wrong for a start but never mind here she is wandering about in the void and her milk provides food for a mere the giant and she also as cows do she likes to lick the salty rhyme that's formed in the void there are blocks of ice covered with salt and now if our thumblr wanders about licking these these salty blocks of ice and of course don't try this at home but if you if you go around licking blocks of ice eventually the blocks of ice gets smaller and they diminish under our thumb blurs tongue and as that happens things inside the ice start to become apparent there are shapes in silent there are forms gradually taking shape under our filmless tongue and in the end these forms start to move and as the ice melts and melts they step out of it and that's the beginning of the gods they're licked out of the ice by the Great Cow and the first one is called Budi we know very little about him but that's his name and he's the first of the family of gods called the ice here somehow burry produces a son that's one of the things we don't understand and this son gets together with a giant Tess and we don't know where she comes from either but as I said bear with me and from their union comes the first of the great gods this is the birth of Odin and very soon he's joined by two brothers called viele and via and together with Odin they ambush you Mir one day and kill him it's a very violent beginning of the world and they start to create the world from his flesh bear in mind they're still in the middle of this this swirling emptiness the Seas come from his blood the bowl of the heavens is the inside of his skull and so on some of the poems talk how the clouds are fashioned from his brain his hair becomes the trees and so on and now we come to the point which is the the first of the the the main points that I want to make to you in this new world very young the gods Odin and his siblings are strolling about on the seashore and washed up on the seashore they find two big blocks of driftwood and just like the ice they see something inside the driftwood inside these wooden stumps they have a potential something inside them and the gods start to bring it out they start to mold these blocks of wood with their hands they start to carve them and gradually two forms emerge a man and a woman and these are the first people the woman is named M blur and I wish I could tell you what that means but we don't know the man is called Oscar ash this is a the the name of the tree the wood so when scholars ask who the Vikings really were where they came from and so on in one sense we've always known the answer I think we've been ignoring it because we know how they perceived themselves in their own minds and that's the perspective I'm trying to take in these lectures the perspective that I think is quite often neglected the Vikings were all the children of Ashe and the children of M blur they knew exactly who they were now at this time the other worlds starts to be formed as well we don't know exactly how many there were but there are lots of them there are worlds under the found and world's up in the sky perhaps other ones under the sea as well lots and lots of them we know that the gods lived in our sky though Asgard it means the place of the ICEA the icer is one of these divine families a broad landscape dotted with mountains and lowlands with buildings and fields each God and Goddess had their own magnificent homestead a Great Hall shining with silver and gold and other ornament set in its own landscape a little can you hear me by the way sitting here listening bumble each each Hall named and described one for each God and here's one of the elements that is most baffling with Norse mythology in this landscape of Asgard there were also cult buildings and temples because the gods of the Vikings were some of the very very few in human history to have also worshipped something themselves it's just we don't know what it was how very strange so Asgard the home of the Gods has temples to something else as well and humans that's us we lived nearby in myth gather Midgard the middle of place and you may know that this is the inspiration behind Tolkien's middle-earth and Midgard seems very much to be a kind of mundane reflection of Asgard pretty much the same site kind of landscape with little settlements ranging from halls without buildings just like those homes of the gods to the more ordinary villages for ordinary people this is a replica one that's been built up in in Denmark and Midgard was connected to Asgard the home of the gods by the bridge of the rainbow called be forests so every time you see a rainbow that's the connection between our world and the world of the gods but there are also other worlds as well yurt and high mo the giant worlds this rather abstract place out in the north where the Giants lived I'll talk a bit more about Giants later on but I just note that there is in modern Norway and it's a it's an old place name a place called Jotunheim giant home this is it on the screen and it tells us a little bit I think about how this place was conceived it looked like that cold mountainous rugged inhospitable a good place for Giants to live out in the East that's so clear was due to gather out God the outer world a dark shadowy horrible place full of horrible things lots of demonic powers trolls other kinds of nastiness so you've got this zoning of of the worlds different kinds of things live in different kinds of place and underneath Midgard was hell he'll the worlds of the Dead we don't know to what degree that word is related to the Christian hell it may be connected to it it may not it was ruled by a goddess of the same name I've written here that she was goddess of the dead she was one of the goddesses of the Dead lots of people meet the dead she's described as being sort of split down the middle on one side a woman on the other a black corpse suitable to her to her role and below hell is niffle hell mist hell the nine levels of the underworld going down nine leagues into the ground rather a strange place and connecting all of these places is something you may have heard of the world tree the great ash egg drasil now you've got two pictures of it here which one is from an old manuscript the other is a sort of new age fantasy you can guess which is which and I've put them on the screen here because scholars have entertained themselves for generations trying to work out how all this that I've talked about fits together and the simple answer is we have no idea some people think that the worlds are sort of concentric disks enclosing each other rather as you see here with the the tree in the middle other people think that the worlds are stacked vertically along the trunk of the tree rather like members of vinyl singles and an old turntable rather like that other people like to propose something like this with worlds floating as rather entertaining blobs somewhere around and and we don't really know the Vikings themselves seem to have conceptualized the world tree as being inside everything rather a metaphorical view egg Dressel as a part of nature a part of everything this picture is part of a wall hanging from the Viking Age and as you can see down here you have some kind of horned animal a deer perhaps and these antlers get bigger and bigger and turn into a sort of tree and at the top is a bird which is one of the features of Agresso there are all kinds of animals all over it living in its branches there's a squirrel that runs up and down the trunk carrying insults between the animals it's quite quite strange maybe this is the closest we have to a Viking Age depiction of that tree I have to say the best image of it that I've come across is very recent perhaps from a surprising source some of you may have may have come across it it's the film Thor that came out last year in which the World Tree I think is really marvelously depicted as something in interstellar space the the cameras eye pans out and out and out from the from the world through to the solar system to all the clouds of stellar gas and the constellations and the galaxies bigger and bigger and bigger until it starts to resolve into a trunk and the branches of the world's tree spreading out across the universe perfect I think that gives you an idea of the worlds within which the Vikings located themselves unless I hope you've seen their reality because that's what we're talking about their reality was very very different from ours I also want to stress that this is not really a matter of belief today we might ask do you believe in God that's an irrelevant question in this context it's a matter of knowledge they would no more question this than they questioned the existence of the sea this is simply how it was that's something to really bear in mind in this and in the other lectures but if this was the mythological landscape of the Vikings and their mind who lived in it because it was very highly populated though besides people it was populated with an invisible population lots of different kinds of beings in all these different worlds to us all of them are more or less supernatural I'd be quite careful using that word even though you see I have up there because in fact they were highly natural there was nothing separate about them they're part of exactly the same world as everybody else so bear that in mind too you can see the first on the list are the gods and the goddesses I'm not really going to say very much about them today partly because they're so numerous and this is a tiny fragment of their family tree I hope you're paying attention we'll go through this in detail there'll be questions at the end no I'm not going to do that there's an awful lot of Norse gods and goddesses and there's an awful lot of stories about them many of them are relatively well known and if you'd like to know more about them to find out more about those stories they're very accessible you can find the tales of the Norse gods in any decent bookshop and online mainly I want to talk relatively little about the Gods because I think their connection the everyday world of the Viking mind was also relatively small by comparison with their connection to the rest of that invisible population that I mentioned and it's part of redressing that imbalance that I spoke about earlier the focus on the Viking stereotype that I want to get away from the gods a little bit I think it's true to say that they've received the the overwhelming bulk of scholarly attention and also popular cultural attention over the last couple of centuries the Norse gods have been imagined and reimagined over and over and over again you've got the 19th century Victorian rather romantic views of them here all the way to comic book Norse gods today and I think it's quite an interesting comment on the impact they've made on popular consciousness that there are no less than eight completely independent comic book series about the Norse gods and they also pop up in a great many more it's it's really quite remarkable for the belief system of the people who lived a thousand years ago and you can even find them in Lego I don't want to say too much about the gods but before we move on I just want to say something about their relationship with human beings when we talk about gods we're accustomed I think to attach to that the idea of worship and the worship required by the Norse gods had nothing to do with adoration or gratitude or even approval you didn't have to like the gods or approve of what they did and in that that relationship between people and gods is utterly unlike anything we have today in the world faiths they seem to have demanded only a recognition that they existed as an unchanging fixed part of everything this this nature rather than super nature that I mentioned and that as such they had a kind of this is hard to explain they had a kind of inherent right Ness about them perhaps even a rather terrible kind of beauty and if you wanted to avoid disaster you had to come to terms with those gods and the terms would be theirs not yours and that's important because if you refuse to acknowledge them you could come to grief in all kinds of ways and as I mentioned the idea of believing in the Norse gods was rather irrelevant okay let's leave them for now the gods certainly had servants many of them animals and they they served a function as beasts of burden sometimes they pull the various vehicles of the gods or the gods rode on them and to some extent they seemed to symbolize the different divinities they were the animals of choice for their sacrifices as well we have Odin's Ravens Thor's goats Freya's cats and herb or her brother Frey also has a boar Heimdall has a ram there are many others lots and lots of animals around this world of gods in addition to these there is another category of being directly connected to the gods though not divine in themselves and I can guarantee that you've heard of them they're the Valkyrie oh the Valkyries excuse me when I take a drink their name means the choosers of the slain and there's different images of them in different texts different sources but if you put them together their function seems to have been to visit the battlefields of our world and bring the spirits of the best of the dead warriors up to Asgard to be shared between Odin and Freya you might have heard of Freya as the goddess of love she's not really she's a sort of goddess of sex actually much much earlier kind of divinity she's also a goddess of war so the Valkyries don't just bring the dead to Odin in Valhalla or Volvo Valhalla's a Victorian misspelling they also bring the warrior dead to Freya as well today we tend to see the Valkyries I think filtered either through vogner and becoming a sort of elegant heroic abstraction or more depressingly as a particularly dreary kind of male fantasy which are I'll spare you pictures of I would I would just say believe me you do not want to look up Valkyries on Google image but in the in the Viking Age if you if you go back to what they originally were the Valkyries seem to have been particularly terrifying demons of carnage they embodied everything that battle was and they certainly didn't look very much like this we don't know whether we have any Viking Age depictions of them these things don't come with labels we have to try and interpret them about the closest that we have and these are very recent discoveries the last couple of years little silver pendants like this that they're quite small they're about about this big see there and you can see this is a mounted woman there she is on a horse with weapons another woman in front of her with a shield another woman here with a helmet and a sword I'm sorry this is so dark they look very clear on my computer but I hope you can you can see them interesting that their clothes are quite mixed they have these long flowing dresses but the woman on the horseback on horse there is wearing trousers which is very very unusual for women to do in the Viking Age in fact if you wear clothes that are associated with the opposite sex trousers for women or an open-necked shirt for men this has actually grounds for divorce so this is very very unusual clothing and I think if we try and translate that into something approximating reality that's about as close as we might get to how the Vikings thought the Valkyries could have looked there's also a variety of beings who performed a kind of cosmological function they had a job the Valkyries had a job there are others that did as well and the most prominent of them are the nor neared the nornes these are three women who live at the foot of the world tree in a shining Hall they're the people who keep the world tree going they put cooling clay on its trunk they feed it from the well give it water they they keep the cosmos running if you like their names mean past present and future and you might recognize them from a number of other mythologies as well they crop up in Greek mythology Roman mythology and the different names they seem to have been in charge of the fates of humans governing the course of a person's life there are references to them throwing Lots casting Lots to decide what would happen to a person but most commonly they're depicted as weaving a person's life as a kind of tapestry making a fabric of you of what you do and at the end of a person's life they'd cut the final thread there are several descriptions of them some rather interesting details their fingernails are covered with runes for example and there's one rather interesting description that says in fact there are lots of norms for different kinds of beings so there are norms for the Dwarfs norms for the elves and the Giants even norms for the gods so everybody and everything has these women of fate to take care of their their destiny I mentioned earlier on that we were going to come back to the Giants they are a very dark giant I do apologize he's very bright on my screen alongside the gods probably they're the most important mythological beings we've seen that they play quite a role in cosmic Majnu in the creation of the universe they seem to have been viewed in some way as beings of nature representing the wilderness and the wild remember that picture of jötunheimr that mountainous giant world in a in a way kind of represent representatives of everything outside human experience they're definitely not people they're often quite aggressive quite nasty things there's a historian of religion who's put together a marvelous compendium of all the names used to describe Giants and and some condensing their meanings so I quote Dirty Harry ugly stupid and especially loud they're rarely described in detail but they're very strong they're very cunning some of them are quite wise they're occasionally very learn it but they have very few dealings with people so like the gods they're relatively apart from the world of humans well all the different beings that I've been talking about so far they're quite powerful in different kinds of ways they have a role to play in the ordering of the universe but how much do they really have to do with people remember I mentioned that distance between the gods and humans the same is true of the Giants and the norms and the rest if we can put it very simply I don't think any Vikings thought that they would come into contact with Odin on a Saturday night these are not everyday encounters you might contact the gods under very very special and rare circumstances but there are other categories of beings that form a much more common everyday part of the Viking world and the Viking mind and among them are the dragon the de wardes quite important in the mythology they often appear in the stories of the gods we know a lot of their names more than a hundred of them from a remarkable document with an unfortunate title it's known as the catalogue of dwarfs it sounds like you so order them by mail order I don't know incidentally you might be interested to know that all of Tolkien's dwarf names come from that catalogue including the names of some beings who are not Dwarfs Gandalf's name comes from that list for example the dwarves are generally helpful occasionally devious they're often very wise their guardians of knowledge and above all they make things they make the gods tools and weapons and jewelry their vehicles all kinds of things they're very very clever and they they're their transformation of ore and metal into precious things has a kind of mystical quality that sets them apart they live underground under the mountains in their halls they're quite lecherous they sometimes demand sexual favors in return for their services especially concerning Freya and I think that there there is some evidence that they played a part in Celtic ceremonies that humans are offered to the dwarfs they could certainly interact with humans mainly in a positive way we know very little about what they look like but an interesting thing about them is that their smallness which you might think characteristic of the dwarves is a largely medieval invention there's nothing to say how big or small the dwarves were in the Viking Age then there's another category of being who play very little role in the mythology but they have an awful lot to do with humans and they're the elves the Alpha they're also today quite late survivors in folklore especially in Iceland where they're known as the hula do Falk the hidden people the people out of the way under the ground inside rocks and so on they seem to have had a lot of interaction with the gods in some surprising ways there's a rather wonderful poem called la cocina in which the the mischievous demigod loki wanders round the halls of Asgard and systematically insults each of the gods in turn and his insult for Freya is that she slept with every elf in Asgard so that tells you something about them they often had contact with humans their suggestions that they had links to Odin and they were they were sacrificed to people made them offerings of animal blood in special ceremonies in special places they're bringers of good and backed fortune they can heal the sick they can help your animals very very important things and they lived all around you in the natural environment around the homes of people then there are also rather more unpleasant beings also things that have lasted a very long time in folklore you can still find them in in folklore today in Scandinavia and these are the trolls these rather unpleasant creatures of rock and stone who you find in a great many of the tales of Norse mythology they seem to be largely a kind of embodiment of the natural world in the text they're sometimes associated with the dead sometimes associated with all kinds of deviant behavior they're described as living in the rocks in the mountains in streams and rivers or generally underground and if you look at the hole through a range of beliefs in these kinds of beings the trolls are the ones that have lasted longest down to the present day finally probably the most ubiquitous of all of these beings and powers the land vendhya the land spirits these were all the beings of stone and water and ice and earth and air all the elements that made up the world and they were absolutely everywhere anytime you went out into the world outside your home along the stream along the road wherever it is you're surrounded by the land spirits they're the embodiment of of nature itself and the sagas often talk about how important it was to respect the lands and spirits to accommodate them and of all the the terrible misfortune that could result if they were slighted and that brings us back to here in one sense what I've been talking about this afternoon is a very basic very brief kind of overview of classic Norse mythology albeit I hope with some observations about different ways to view it but the reason I've been doing that is to set the scene for what comes next in the rest of these talks and really to get some distance between the Vikings as we see them here real though they were and the Vikings as they saw themselves because everything I've been talking about was inside these people's heads and the point I really really want to get across to you very strongly is that everything I've been talking about was not mythology at all the Norse didn't know they had Smith's we've invented those for them we've taken all those tales which of course were very organic things like all stories they changed over time according to who was telling them from one place to another and we've taken their fossilized medieval form when someone finally wrote them down hundreds of years later and we put them together into books that we call the Norse myths and we sell in our book shops and we teach in our universities and so on but this kind of cannon of Norse mythology is an illusion because for them and not only them but all the people that stayed at home young and old men and women everybody in that Viking world it was just reality quite simply that it was the world in which they lived and as I've said that reality was very very different not only to our world but also to the world of most of the people with whom these guys came into contact so when we see the Vikings as depicted through the Chronicles of the anglo-saxons who mainly talk about what they've burned down this year they don't see all of that world that I've been talking about they just see this and what I want to do is get behind that to the way these people were thinking so I hope you can see the the really enormous difference between the Vikings in inverted commas and the children of Ashe and their worlds of stories even though they're the same people these are of course the ideas of the living mixed with a perception of the dead as we'll see in the coming lectures the dead have a highly active agency in the Viking world the dead are not really dead they just live differently to everyone else there's a constant interaction between the world of the dead and the world of the living and that's something that I want to bring out in this Viking mind and of course that world is not empty it's not just people with people it peopled with that invisible supernatural population and what this really concerns the the makeup of the Viking mind is the connections between all those different elements all the things I've been talking about that extraordinary richness of different kinds of beings with whom the Vikings shared their world how people got in touch with them and for what reason how do you interact with an elf what do you do if you meet a giant what do you do with your dead relatives are they still a part of your life and so on all of this mix together and importantly manifested in material culture what I've been talking about today is mainly ideas and I've emphasized that all these stories of the mythology come largely out of the texts those stories written down that's how we know about them I mentioned how difficult it was to illustrate them in the coming lectures I'm going to be looking very much at material culture things the ways the Vikings put all of this all of those interactions into practice because they certainly put them into practice they acted out on those beliefs in the way they ordered their settlements the kinds of buildings they lived in the kinds of clothes they wore the way they buried their dead and so on so in the next lecture I'm going to be looking at ideas about the afterlife and therefore my reflection ideas about life and the Avenue I'm going to take to get in touch with that is the dead or rather the ways in which the living dealt with the dead we're going to be looking in detail at some stories burials some stories of graves and my my my colleagues tell me I tend to get carried away when I talk about Viking graves they really aren't tremendously exciting and deeply weird and I hope tomorrow I'm going to be able to give you an overview as much as I can or whatever of this extraordinary variety which is evidence not only how the Norse saw their dead but how they saw themselves in life and by extension how they formulated their ideas about their own mortality and I do hope you can join me then thank you you were talking about the the different conception of geography really in the Viking mind of terrifying things out in the East or out in the north and so on and how did that affect their perception of the real world and how they ventured out into it did they find it terrifying in the east or or whatever one of the things I find very interesting about the Vikings is that and I'm very consciousness is part of their stereotypes but it's a real part of it is that they actually went on voyages of exploration because they wanted to and this is a comparatively modern phenomenon there are very few ancient cultures that really do that who set off into something that is largely unknown to find out what's there bear in mind that we're not talking about empires wanting to extend their control and so on they really are going on expeditions and I think their perception of the North Bay mind we're talking about Scandinavia so it's the Scandinavian north is quite a realistic one in that the further north you go the harder it is to survive generally there there are exceptions for that the geography of Scandinavia is quite complicated but especially in the winter you know the North is a progressively worse and worse place to be and in fact we know that in the Viking Age the the Scandinavian population doesn't get anywhere near as far north as it does today so I think there's a practical element of that out in the East which is this is you together being the outer world in their mythology bear in mind that the texts that we have are largely Christian products they're medieval Christian tanks looking back so we have to be a bit careful about how much Christian ideas are in there but the Christian writers were trying to rationalize the Norse gods because of course they couldn't believe in them and thought that they were people originally who'd come from the east and they make all kinds of very complicated associations so I mentioned that the name of that divine family the icier and they say they came from Asia that's where the eyes if it comes from and it's all bit of a reach really but there is an element that the East is alien and different and there's one sorry it's a very long answer but there's one particular Viking expedition probably the most ambitious ever mounted it sets off in 1014 deep deep in the in the Christian period when a man called Ingvar who was nicknamed the far traveled with good reason takes a fleet of 26 ships out into Asia and he goes down the Russian River systems which is where the Vikings went quite a lot and then he somehow goes almost off the map and there's a sense that he did something that people hadn't done before and he's certainly going east and I think that the memory of England's journey and it's memorialized on lots and lots of rune stones that his I should have said by the way his his expedition ended in disaster everybody died a few made it back and told the story and there's an idea that he went into somewhere that wasn't quite real and therefore he should be especially remembered because just going to the east was a common place so I think that's the point at which we get this this view of the world that coincides with with action we don't really know how they viewed the West I mentioned that they're the first Europeans to get to North America one of the the ironies of the Viking Age is that having achieved this thing that to us seems extraordinary there's no evidence at all that they thought it was an extraordinary thing to do and they didn't know when they were either they're just islands as they saw them out in the ocean so we don't get any sense of any kind of special mythology around those Western journeys you asked me how the what kind of motivation the Vikings had for going into the Frankish Empire what's now France whether it was searching for for food or wealth or whatever almost entirely monetary gain it really is plundering that map I showed you early on with all the raids all over it this is the very beginning of the Viking Age and they're using the the river systems the great rivers of France that there are the sin the Somme in the Low Countries but it's kind of motorways into the heart of France and what they're doing is is plundering it's they're taking as much loot as they can carry in the beginning they're taking it back to Scandinavia after a while it gets to be so profitable they start to make little little bases usually on islands and easily defended places and they stay over the winter and as that goes on into the ninth century into the eight hundreds they progressively stay longer and longer until in the end they don't leave and at that point they start to become something a little bit different from those Raiders who were opportunistically going back and forth in their boats and I think at that point these Viking forces start to become a kind of state in their own right they're not a not a state based on territory but a state based on being them wherever it is they happen to be and at that point they start to get different ideas about power and expansion and you are saying and this is the point at which one of the most long-lived of the Viking conquests is formed which is Normandy on the the French coast in in the north of France and this is when what happens actually is that a particular band of Vikings is paid by the Franks to settle there in return for acting as a buffer against all the other Vikings and this goes spectacularly wrong because the first thing they do is send messages back to Scandinavia saying and they use it as a kind of bridgehead and Normandy which is initially very small gets bigger and bigger rather fast and in the end they they found a kind of Viking Kingdom and then over the next generations this transforms into being a place called Normandy no longer a Viking settlement but a place in its own right and and this is how you get this this changing relationship with with Frank here so it it goes from initially raiding through to opportunistic settlement which then turns into land taking and conquest so it's a progressive thing you asked me whether there's any geographical variation in the the mythological beliefs that I was talking about within Scandinavia yes there is it's very hard to pinpoint the detail if you look at the kinds of things I'll be I'll be looking at tomorrow burial ritual and and things like that there are certainly regional traditions one thing that I should have emphasized perhaps is is that everything to do with this the spiritual beliefs and the Viking mind is is variable I hope you saw gathered that these things are contradictory and and so on they vary from one place to another a part of the bias that we have is that most of our sources those sources that I listed on the screen are Icelandic and Iceland is quite a very specific place it's not Scandinavia it has its own environment people have speculated whether the the fiery things in Norse mythology are because of all the volcanoes in Iceland for example when you get into Scandinavia itself there are some indications of variation especially in place names the place names of Scandinavia they vary in dates but there's a level of them that are very old that certainly go back to the Viking period and among them are what's called theophoric names these are place names that include the name of a god and it's normally you have a gods name connected with a word for a kind of special place so you have Odin's lunda which means Odin grove or torch orca thor's field things like that and you have lots and lots of different gods names as part of these these things names for islands and trees and all kinds of things and there's certainly geographical variation in which gods names you find where so there's lots of Odin names in in Denmark for example and Sweden very few of them in Norway and several people have argued perfectly reasonably that this is variation that they worship Odin lot over there and not down there and and actually it's a different God that's popular here and so on and that might be the case but one thing I've wondered about and this is a modern comparison but if you if you go to Latin American countries think how often it is or how how common it is to find the mail personal name cases and I don't know a single European man called Jesus but that doesn't mean that there's no Christians in Europe and so there are there are different naming customs which don't necessarily reflect beliefs and I wonder if that might be going on as well also the further north you go in Scandinavia you start to get deeper and deeper into the territory of a people I haven't mentioned at all today the saw me there used to be known as the Lapps they're not themselves these are a nomadic people largely living in the north of Scandinavia but also in the areas where the Vikings lived as well and as you get further to the north you find a blending of Sami mythology and Norse mythology so you get some of the Norse gods pop up in Sami tales and vice-versa and there's particularly when you get into something that I haven't mentioned today but I'll be talking about it on Thursday which is magic and sorcery you get lots of Sami elements in that so yes there is a variation sorry a long answer to a question you asked me whether aggressive the the world tree was conceptualized as permeating everything or as a connect between different different worlds it's certainly a connector in the mythology you can travel along the branches and the roots of the tree between the different worlds and it's part of the game of reconstructing a dress so how you get that to work it's very difficult and you can use special means to travel along those branches there's a sense that you travel between the things you've traveled between the worlds or between planes of existence you can do this using a special kind of magic to send out some part of yourself or you can ride particular animals that will take you there and so on whether it permeates everything it is an interesting question I suspect that it does I also think we we shouldn't try to overly define something that probably never had a very rigid definition to begin with if you take the the modern faiths and ask a Christian or a Muslim or or a Jew or or a member of any any faith how much they really know about the detailed theology of their faith most people don't know that much you really go into it and I think the same is true for the Vikings especially as as their their set of beliefs is not an orthodoxy this is not a religion of a book with a consistent picture of it it's very vague and I think probably people negotiated this in their own way what this is what you thought there and what they do over there well we don't know there are you know this I think it's a very regional world there's also that the problem of Yggdrasil is named it relates to one of the names of Odin Odin has nearly two hundred names and the the beginning of that word Iger where means the the the terrible one and so it Drusilla is the steed of the terrible one and there's an idea that the tree is something along which Odin travels to go to the different worlds so it's certainly a connector perhaps a part of everything it's very hard to find depictions of it in Viking Age art I showed you that tapestry there are a few others like that where something resembling a tree is growing out of something else so I suspect that they saw that in everything in the same way as you might a Christian might see God in the natural world that kind of transference your question was is there a moral component of this this world that I've described in the same way as there is in for example Christianity and if there is how did that play out in the Vikings attitudes to everybody else that's actually a I think it's a question that that feeds in very well to what I'm talking about because the answer is no there is no moral component in the Viking view of the world as expressed through the mythology there's no sense in which your behavior in life influences where you go after death for example there are a number of different destinations for the dead and they're very very complicated I'll talk a bit about them tomorrow on on Thursday but there's no idea of a good behavior in in a religious sense one thing that I'll I'll come back to near the end of this this series is the idea of predestination that your fate is fixed and there's nothing you can do to alter it so you can't your fate is fixed by the norms when you're born and they know where you're going you don't know it but they do and what's important and this is where morality does come into it but not as a result of religious ideas really what's important is the manner of your conduct as you go to meet that fate that you can't change so there are certain ideas about for example hospitality is very important you should be good to your guests among these poems that I mentioned there's some lists of good advice and you can find them today published as kind of Viking words of wisdom there's some great things in there things like the stupid man does best to keep silent because nobody will know how stupid he is if he doesn't say anything things like that so there's there's these kinds of so there's sort of guidelines for how you should behave but not that that sort of detailed morality and in terms of how that plays out in the Vikings actions one of the things that their victims go on about again and again is that these people don't see the world the way we do so when they one of the things that really upsets the anglo-saxons is how much they attack monasteries they destroy they of the shrines and they take the relics and so on and there's no evidence that this means anything at all to the Vikings they're just stuff to do and there is a kind of sense in which sorry it's another long answer I do apologize but it's it's linked to this and you know help today when people describe often criminals they they talk about them using metaphors of animals someone behaves like a beast this is you know this is a despicable way to behave it is you know this person's an animal the Vikings and that's quite common you find this in a lot of cultures the Vikings seem to subvert that and when they talk about their own raiding and they're all this pillaging and so on that you mentioned they talk about themselves as animals and they convert their victims as the prey that it's quite legitimate for those animals to feed on a very different way of viewing yourself you turn yourself into that thing that usually the object of contempt and I think that's also a kind of moral a thread that runs through those those actions and your question was looking at the the genetic and DNA studies in Britain mapping the possible ethnic origins of different areas of the country Angles and Saxons and so on and asking whether similar work has been done in terms of Viking genetic traces either in the places they went or back in the places they came from with the the slaves that they they took the answer is yes quite a lot of work before I say anything about that I think we need to be very cautious about putting ethnic identity onto genetic material we're a lot more complicated than our genes that said that there there are some very clear patterns that emerge and there are certainly genetic markers that are very common in for example the Norwegian population or the Swedes and so on the trace is clearest back in Scandinavia and in places that the Vikings colonized that didn't have an existing population and the main one is Iceland Iceland is a kind of laboratory for all of these things because there's nobody there when the Vikings get there there are a few Irish priests but we're talking a dozen people maybe very very few so the population that the Vikings bring to Iceland has come from somewhere else and there's been a lot of genetic studies there and it looks as if the the male population of the early Icelanders is almost entirely from Scandinavia mainly from Norway and the female population is very largely from what's now Scotland and Ireland which certainly implies not necessarily slaving though probably but certainly intermarriage with local people and the intermarriage of outsider men with local women it doesn't go both ways there's also suggesting there's got a few zombies in Iceland the I don't think the raids leave a great deal of genetic trace in the places that they hid but when you start getting more permanent Scandinavian settlements that does start to introduce a lot of getting material into the population and there is broadly speaking a greater degree of Danish and Norwegian genetic signatures in the East and the northern part of England which is what you'd expect it's where we know that they they settled and in the the late 9th century there's a kind of frontier that's drawn up very formally through England and that is reflected in the genetic traces one one thing I should add as well is that there's been some surprising things done with the isotopes in teeth when you're when you're a child after about up to your teens your teeth as the enamel builds up they absorb oxygen isotopes which are geographically specific to particular places and these things are preserved inside your teeth for the rest of your life so what you can do is study the teeth of adults from graves for example and you can unlock those geographical signatures in the isotopes and find out where they come from and often where you find them is very different to where they came from and you can see that where we have large samples of Viking populations there from all over the place these were very very mixed groups of people from all over Scandinavia from the High Arctic to the far south and sometimes especially we have traces of organised Viking groups they include people who we wouldn't think of as Vikings at all so people from what's now Germany the Baltic States Finland I think Viking is an activity just as much as it's an identity it's a good question whether it be all this variety and the personification of different aspects of nature and life in the gods and the different beings is possibly a projection of greco-roman mythology coming through the Christian sources that we have on the Viking Age one of the the things that I think mitigates against that is that unlike most of the greco-roman divinities the Norse gods are not really gods of something they're gods of lots of things so you sometimes say that Thor described as a God of War and he is but he's a God of a certain aspect of war he's a God of brute fighting basically Odin is also a God of War but he's a God of the mind and one of the things you see in poetic descriptions of fighting in the Viking period is a tremendous focus on being clear in your mind people don't have uniforms it's a tremendously chaotic thing with noise and all kinds of things you have to be very clear about who's in front of you who's behind you what you're doing and Odin is the god of that in war and there and there are other things like this so the the pattern of the Norse gods is quite different to greco-roman mythology having said that there's clearly an element of sentient nature want of a better word that might be coming from the greco-roman world and in any case we know that the Roman Empire had an enormous influence on the peoples and the territories across its borders especially in the north Scandinavia was never occupied by the Romans but we certainly find in the centuries before the Viking Age lots of Roman material particularly to do with things like fashion so some people were drinking wine rather than beer and Mead and they were drinking out of Roman glass because that was a good thing to do and you can see it in weapons and jewelry and all kinds of things and you can also see jewelry in the Viking Age very much in Viking art styles the depictions of Odin and things like this but you can trace the design of them back centuries to Roman models so in some way there's an idea of imitation what's going on down in the south and that great Empire is worth thinking about and worth acting on and that idea carries on into the Viking and I think it probably does so in the mythology as well whether much of it comes through the Christian writers in Iceland for example who are writing about this I don't know because they're they're even more remote from that world of course they are following a Catholic faith which is ultimately based down in Rome just sorry I'm very conscious my answers visions of long and rambling I do apologize but we should also remember that Rome in a different sense was very powerful in the Viking Age as Christian Rome and I mentioned the the the voyages that brought the first Europeans Scandinavians to North America one of the the women who made those journeys a woman called gu3 in the course of her life she this really typifies the amazing range of their travels she met Native Americans in in what's now Newfoundland and she also met the Pope she made a pilgrimage to Rome so this idea of the papal world of Rome was very much in their minds and there's even ideas that things like the description of Valhalla this is Odin's Hall I'll talk a bit about that tomorrow or Thursday remember Bald Hill has many many doors I think it's 540 doors it's like a mega hall and out of these doors lots of warriors pour forth to to fight and there's been a suggestion that it's the Colosseum if you think of the Colosseum with lots of little openings in it and what happens in there lots of people come out of them and fight there's an idea that maybe it's a memory that someone has been down in Rome and seen this and come back and it's the biggest building they've ever seen cetera et cetera so they may be influences like that coming through as well you were talking about definitions how what is a Viking as opposed to someone who's not that's also it's a difficult one to answer Viking in the English language tends to be sort of anybody who lived over there at that time but in the Scandinavian languages even today Viking is much more specific it's those people I showed you at the beginning who go to go out and do all the raiding and things like that there's an idea that being a Viking in that specific sense is it's almost a job it's a career choice you can do that and then you can stop doing that and do something else and you can go back to it if you want and you also don't necessarily have to come from what's now Scandinavia so there's people from all over Europe doing this though most of them aren't a Scandinavians in terms of a cultural connection at the beginning of the Viking Age Scandinavia is a series of small tribal communities there are no nation-states there are no Swedes and Danes and Norwegians that process of building that is what happens during the Viking Age partly as a result of all this raiding and so on which brings a lot of money that fuels these kinds of attempts to build Thrones and and small kingdoms and so on and you have this process of gradual consolidation of of social groupings that get bigger and bigger with more and more powerful Kings and in our sense that's what eventually makes you a Viking but there's also the geographical boundaries are much more flexible so Sweden what we would think of as a Swedish influence in the Viking Age certainly extends very far into what's now Finland Denmark goes into what's now southern Sweden and what's now northern Germany and so on there is evidence that certainly by the end of the Viking period people are starting to differentiate themselves so there was an idea of being a Dane which is different from being that and being an Icelander is different from being a Norwegian even though your grandparents were probably Norwegians and so on so that this this is a period when those identities are first very fluid and then start to get more and more rigid so being a Viking is something that evolves during this period but it is centered on Scandinavia wonderful I hear the bells tolling for us so I think it's time to give needle a chance to rest you

Channel: Cornell University

Views: 894,957

Keywords: archaeology, medieval, vikings, rituals

Id: nJZBqmGLHQ8

Length: 82min 10sec (4930 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 11 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/FreyaShadowbreeze]

Thank you so much for sharing! <3 Watched 2 of the videos already, I'm absolutely loving it!