Quotes from John Lindow

The death of Baldr is one of the most important moments in the mythology.

Thor was probably the most important god of late paganism, as is suggested by the presentation in medieval Scandinavian sources of the conversion as a struggle between Thor and Christ.

When most of us use the word "myth" in conversation, we refer to something that is not true. When historians of religion use it, they generally refer to a representation of the sacred in words. When anthropologists use it, they often refer to narratives that tell about the formation of some social institution or behavior. None of the definitions, however, will hold directly for the characters and stories this book treats.

This is medieval speculation on the origin of paganism, and it ascribes to pagans a kind of natural religion, one based on unenlightened observation of the environment.

the "noble heathen" is a stock character. All that conversion required, according to this theory of natural religion, was for Icelanders to regain sight of God. Unlike the pagans whom Icelanders learned about when they translated and read the lives of the early saints of the Christian church, Nordic pagans were not doomed souls in league with Satan. They were merely sheep who had lost their way.

Snorri sets Thor in that environment; that is, he tells us that there was a historical figure whom the Nordic peoples called Thor who lived before Christ was born and who performed historical acts (it is important to remember that berserks and dragons were not as fantastic to medieval historians as they seem to us) that look very much like some of the myths about Thor that later were to be told by the Nordic peoples.

Although Adalbert Kuhn was an important early adherent of nature mythology, the person most closely associated with it today is Max Müller, a German Indo-Europeanist resident in England who was widely read and very influential for the entire second half of the nineteenth century.

Müller's theory of myth was actually based on the notion of a "disease of language," the idea that language itself was inadequate to express everything it had to and therefore was a major contributor to the development of gods and myths, which grew out of linguistic confusion.

The indiscriminate aligning of narrative elements to natural phenomena led to the eventual discrediting of comparative mythology, not least when Andrew Lang, a critic of Max Müller, demonstrated that Müller himself was a solar myth.

It is not difficult to imagine that Gylfaginning represents the first encounter between Gylfi and the Asia-men and that Gylfi's delusion was in accepting that the stories told to him by Hár, Jafnhár, and Thridi were about gods. In other words, it is easy to believe that Snorri wishes us to believe that Gylfi's meeting with the æsir contributed to their euhemerization.

Most historians accept that Sweden was fully Christian by the beginning of the twelfth century at the latest.

Thus Scandinavian mythology was, with virtually no exception, written down by Christians, and there is no reason to believe that Christianity in Iceland was any different from Christianity anywhere else in western Europe during the High Middle Ages.

Some lay persons of higher status were also apparently literate, at least in Icelandic, but all writing, whether in the international language of the church or in the vernacular, was the result of the conversion to Christianity, which brought with it the technology of manuscript writing.

It is important to stress that carving on wood or stone is a fairly laborious process and that the kinds of things recorded using the runic alphabets tended to be short and of a different nature from texts that can be easily written only in manuscripts.

Most runic inscriptions are utilitarian, and despite popular conceptions, they have little to say about mythology or magic.

Of the approximately 4,000 runic inscriptions, most are from the Viking Age; most of these are from Sweden; and most of these are from the provinces around Lake Mälaren, especially Uppland. Most are memorial: They explain who erected the stone, whose death is memorialized, and what the relationship was between the two.

Scandinavia through the Viking Age was for all intents and purposes an oral society, one in which nearly all information was encoded in mortal memory—rather than in books that could be stored—and passed from one memory to another through speech acts.

Without the authority of a written document, there was no way to compare the versions of a text, and we therefore cannot assume that a text recorded in a thirteenth-century source passed unchanged through centuries of oral transmission. This fact makes it extremely difficult to discuss with any authority the time or place of origin of many of the texts of Scandinavian mythology, especially eddic poetry.

The term "eddic" is a misnomer: Most of these poems are in a single manuscript, and when the learned bishop Brynjólfur Sveinsson first saw this manuscript in the seventeenth century, he perceived a similarity to the book called Edda by Snorri Sturluson and imagined that this manuscript, another "Edda," had been composed by Sæmund Sigfússon the Learned, a priest who flourished in the years around 1100

In a cyclical system, however, such a linear progression repeats itself endlessly; each end is followed by a new beginning. Determining the time system of Scandinavian mythology presents special challenges because many of the sources were recorded by Christians, whose notion of time was linear and whose notion of history called for an essentially clear chronology.

For the Christians of the Scandinavian Middle Ages, the gods would have had a place in historical time both through their euhemerization and through their presence in some of the lives of the saints translated from Latin into Icelandic. According to the notion of the euhemerization that prevailed in medieval Iceland, the gods were originally human beings who had emigrated from the Middle East (Tyrkland) to Scandinavia long ago.

In Gylfaginning Snorri uses and expands on these sources, adding, among other things, that the einherjar are "all those men who have fallen in battle since the beginning of the world." He also sends the einherjar out against the forces of chaos at the last battle but gives no details of their fights and fates.