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Copyrighted images and texts are not to be reproduced, displayed, distributed, broadcast, or downloaded for other purposes without the expressed, written permission of the Center for Research Libraries. © Center for Research Libraries Scan Date: June 9,2008 Identifier: d-p-000021-f1 P-60021748 Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia Neil S. Price AUN31 Aun31 Neil S. Price The Viking Way Religion and War in Late Iron Age Scandinavia "This dissertation may not be copied.1 C CD Uppsala 2002 •| i-tv^'^ To the memory of my parents Jean Bidewell (1930-1990) Geoffrey Price (1928-1998) ABSTRACT Price, Neil S. 2002. The Viking way: religion and war in late Iron Age Scandinavia. Aun 31. Uppsala. 435 pp., 159 figs., 4 tables. ISBN 91-506-1626-9. The social role of magic is a prevalent theme of the medieval Icelandic sagas that claim to describe life several centuries earlier in the Viking Age, and indeed also saturates the Eddie poetry that is our primary source for the mythology and cosmology of the time. However, little archaeological or historical research has been done to explore what this aspect of ritual may really have meant to the men and women of late Iron Age Scandinavia. This book examines the evidence for Old Norse sorcery, looking at its meaning and function, practice and practitioners, and the complicated constructions of gender and sexual identity with which these were underpinned. In particular, it focuses on the notion of a 'supernatural empowerment of violence' - essentially the way in which the physical prosecution of warfare was supported by a structure of rituals intended to produce success in battle. At the core of this concept, it is argued, lay the extended complex of performances collectively known as seidr, a form of operative magic connected with the god OSinn and often interpreted as a form of shamanism. The thesis addresses these issues by exploring the relationship between two aspects of life in the Viking Age, namely religion and war. For early medieval Scandinavia, neither of these concepts can be exactly equated with their modern, Western equivalents. The text examines a wide range of topics relating to the above themes, including surveys of current thinking on Viking reli gion and the frameworks proposed for the study of shamanism; claims for pre-Viking shamanism in Scandinavia and Europe, especially recent work on the Migration period; the cult of OSinn and its rituals; gender boundaries and sexual concepts in Old Norse society, focusing on magic and studies of female ritual specialists; the concept of the soul; spirits and other supernatural beings; the material culture of seidr and related practices; battle magic and the ritualisation of aggression; Viking Age cultural attitudes to animals; and lycanthropic, 'totemistic' beliefs relating to warriors. The concluding section examines the overall concept of ritualised violence, as articulated by a gender-bounded caste of specialists corresponding to what might elsewhere be termed shamans, in the context of the socio-political changes taking place during the Viking period in Scandinavia. The societies of Viking Age Scandinavia spanned a complex border zone between the Germanic and circumpolar cultural spheres, and their belief systems are discussed in this light. Throughout the book, the ritual practices of the Norse are examined in relation to those of the Sami people with whom they shared much of the Scandinavian peninsular. Late Iron Age understandings of religion and war are also reviewed against the background of similar perspectives among the 'shamanic' cultures of the circumpolar region, from Siberia to the North American arctic and Greenland. Keywords: Viking Age, Vikings, Odinn, seidr, sorcery, shamanism, warfare, Norse religion, Norse mythology, Sami Neil Price Dept. of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, S:t Eriks Torg 5, SE-753 10 Uppsala, Sweden Email: Neil. Price @ arkeoloei. uu.se Cover design: Neil S. Price © Neil S. Price 2002 ISSN 0284-1347 ISBN 91-506-1626-9 Published by the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala 2002 Editor: Svante Norr Series editor: Ola Kyhlberg Distributed by the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Uppsala University, S:t Eriks torg 3, S-753 10 Uppsala, Sweden Printed by Elanders Gotab AB, Stockholm 2002 Cover illustration: a late tenth-century runestone from Aarhus, Denmark (DR 66), decorated with a face- mask in the Mammen style. In the fragmentary inscription a fallen Viking is given a classic tribute by his friends: 'Guniilf and 0got and Aslak and Hr61f set up this stone in memory of Ful, their comrade-in-arms. He found death... when kings were fighting.' Contents Contents '. 5 Lists of figures and tables 8 Abbreviations 11 Preface and acknowledgements 13 A note on language 22 Anoteon'seid' 23 1. Different Vikings? Towards a cognitive archaeology of the later Iron Age 25 A beginning at Birka 25 Textual archaeology and the Iron Age 27 The Vikings in (pre)history 29 The materiality of text 32 Annaliste archaeology and a historical anthropology of the Vikings 35 The Other and the Odd 37 Conflict in the archaeology of cognition 38 Meeting the Other? 41 Fourth World archaeology and the Vikings 43 An archaeology of the Viking mind? 47 2 Problems and paradigms in the study of Old Norse sorcery 49 Entering the mythology 49 Research perspectives on Scandinavian pre-Christian religion 53 Philology and comparative theology 53 Gods and monsters, worship and superstition' , 54 Religion and belief 54 The invisible population 55 The shape of Old Norse religion 60 The double world: seidr and the problem of Old Norse 'magic' 63 The other magics: galdr, gandr and 'Odinnic sorcery' 65 Seidr in the sources 67 Skaldic poetry 68 Eddie poetry 68 The sagas of the kings 69 The sagas of Icelanders (the 'family sagas') 71 The fornaldarsQgur ('sagas of ancient times', 'heroic sagas') 74 The Bishop's sagas (Biskupasogur) 74 The early medieval Scandinavian law codes 74 Non-Scandinavian sources 75 Seidr in research 76 3. Seidr 91 O6inn 91 O6inn the sorcerer 93 O5inn's names 100 Freyja and the magic of the Vanir 108 Seidr and Old Norse cosmology 109 The performers • Ill Witches, seeresses and wise women 112 Women and the witch-ride 119 Men and magic 122 The assistants 124 Towards a terminology of Nordic sorcerers 125 The performers in death? 127 The performance 162 Ritual architecture and space 162 The clothing of sorcery 169 Masks, veils and head-coverings 171 Drums, tub-lids and shields 174 Staffs and wands 175 Staffs from archaeological contexts 181 Narcotics and intoxicants 205 Charms 206 Songs and chants 207 The problem of trance and ecstasy 208 Engendering seidr 210 Ergi, nid and witchcraft 210 Sexual performance and eroticism in seidr 216 Seidr and the concept of the soul 224 Helping spirits in seidr 224 The domestic sphere of seidr 227 Divination and revealing the hidden 227 Hunting and weather magic 230 The role of the healer 231 Seidr contextualised 232 4. Noaidevuohta 233 Seidr and the Sami 233 Sami-Norse relations in the Viking Age 235 Sami religion and the Drum-Time 239 The world of the gods 241 Spirits and Rulers in the Sami cognitive landscape 243 Names, souls and sacrifice 247 Noaidevuohta and the noaidi 249 Rydving's terminology of noaidevuohta 250 Specialist noaidi , 252 Diviners, sorcerers and other magic-workers 254 The sights and sounds of trance 255 'Invisible power' and secret sorcery 256 Women and noaidevuohta 257 Sources for female sorcery 257 Assistants andyq/feA--choirs 259 Women, ritual and drum-magic 260 Female diviners and healers in Sami society 262 Animals and the natural world 263 The female noaidii 264 The rituals of noaidevuohta 265 The role of jojk 266 The material culture of noaidevuohta 267 An early medieval noaidtl The man from Vivallen 271 Sexuality and eroticism in noaidevuohta 273 Offence and defence in noaidevuohta 273 The functions of noaidevuohta 275 The ethnicity of religious context in Viking Age Scandinavia 275 5. Circumpolar religion and the question of Old Norse shamanism 279 The circumpolar cultures and the invention of shamanism 279 The shamanic encounter 280 The early ethnographies: shamanic research in Russia and beyond 283 Shamanism in anthropological perspective 285 The shamanic world-view 290 The World Pillar: shamanism and circumpolar cosmology 290 The ensouled world 293 The shamanic vocation 296 Gender and sexual identity 301 Eroticism and sexual performance 304 Aggressive sorcery for offence and defence , ; 306 Shamanism in Scandinavia 312 From the art of the hunters to the age of bronze 312 Seidr before the Vikings? 315 Landscapes of the mind 318 The eight-legged horse 320 Tricksters and trickery 323 Seidr and circumpolar shamanism 324 Two analogies on the functions of the se/dr-staff , 325 The shamanic motivation
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