One podcast and the Wikipedia article in, and I have got way too much stuff already. I'd like to see what Brittanica has to say, and of course I have some background supporting material from my hobbyist following of the history, language, literature, and later the archaeology of the place and time. However, previous knowledge mostly just gives you more cuphooks on which to hang the new information coming in, which may be wonderful for completeness, but is hell on summarisation and detecting patterns. Ah well, we likely impose too many patterns that aren't there on our knowledge anyway. But as I wrote recently, we create categories in order to break them in our learning, but they are necessary for the initial learning of a subject.
My usual second level of research is to follow the footnotes and references of both the written and audible overviews, and my third level is to go looking for writers who think those mainstream theories are mistaken. We'll see. I suppose I could just post "Here's a podcast or two, plus read the wiki and the Britannica, I liked them," but that isn't going to help me get it organised in my own mind. And it wouldn't give all of you much incentive to comment, either.
Updates on Part Two will occur, because I haven't really said much about the topic yet. It's looking like a Part Three is also likely, and at the end I will have to have names to go with the numbers.
Pagan is something of an approximate description, toggling between a formal definition centered on polytheism and a mere epithet meaning unbeliever. I will hew closer to the first definition here. Classical Greeks and Romans were pagans. But many tribes of the world are animists and/or ancestor worshipers. Many have nothing that would qualify as a god or goddess, but have spirits, mostly dangerous and harmful, who animate springs or mountains, or that various important animals participate in the generic spirit of. The spirits cause disease of bad harvests, and sometimes diagnosis is required to figure out which spirit, or which ancestor, has been offended and needs appeasing. The Chinese have ancestor worship, and are not thought of as so much polytheistic, but Buddhist temples include offerings to local gods strewn about.
The Norse can be considered mostly polytheistic, but animism is never far beneath the surface, with dwarves, esse, elves, trolls, and the like populating the borderland between the visible and invisible. Think of The Wild Hunt, for example. Odin leads them, but is not always present when they are mentioned. Christianity since the Reformation and Enlightenment* downplays these or even ignores them, but when the creeds talk about God creating all things visible and invisible, such spiritual creatures that moved about the world was much in their minds. Christians encountering the Norse categories would have places to slot tomten, nisse, and the like right in. Gods may be more of an abstraction and strike us as a step up from animism, but apparently this is not universally acknowledged.
The Brittonic peoples who the Anglo-Saxon peoples started pushing out in the 400s (or earlier!) were more animist than the Germanic peoples. More holy springs, more burial mounds with unquiet dead in them, more wandering spirits looking to trouble the living.
At least, that is what we speculate, because the Anglo-Saxons seem to be pagans with similarity to the continental Germanic tribes. But we don't know, because the written sources are few, and we mostly say that because the few written sources we have record gods with similar names to the Norse ones. Yet we mostly know about those gods from centuries later and far away. If groups in adjoining valleys on the continent can have different legends about Odin, how much more can there be variation across, say 500 miles and 500 years? We have very little we can nail down.
*Yes, I know, I am on record as disliking both categories.
8 comments:
If doing the rituals is all-important, how much can they vary over time?
If you have to circle the village well three times as part of one rite, and you have to move to another place with two wells, I suppose the rite would have to adapt to the new environment. Or if the sacred grove burns down.
I'd not really expect language changes to change the rites. (Thinking of the example of some of the Orthodox churches here, though they have writing...)
But maybe I'm wrong, and rites have different flavors: unchangeable we-have-no-idea-what-this-means anymore ones and others that require more input from the celebrants that might change as needs change.
I'm afraid I have very little sympathy with the folks that make it up in imitation of the relics of a bunch of different cultures' rituals. There's more hubris than numinous there...
Wright pointed out that pagans honored the gods of their ancestors--so consistent modern neo-pagans should logically assemble at cathedrals.
Are you listening to the guy, Hutton, who took over from Alec Ryrie at Gresham? He's delivered several lectures on Roman and pre-Roman religion in England in the last month or so.
Where he crosses with Jackson Crawford on the early Germanic/Anglo-Saxon/Norse mythology they are pretty much in agreement with your analysis that we can say little for certain because the folks in the time period weren't literate and our sources are often coming well after Christianization. I did get the feeling that Hutton thinks the stories preserved in the Ettas were more influenced by Christianity than Crawford, primarily because he briefly discussed the stanza in Havamal that describes Odin hanging to receive the runes and its similarity to the Crucifixion. My sense from Crawford is that he thinks it has less influence because its a strangulation, and the similarity is most because these are common motifs. Our ideas about how the Norse gods were organized also seem very influenced by the better recorded Greek and Roman gods.
I have not listened to that, but it sounds like good stuff.
Snorri Sturluson comes up quickly in the next section, and your comment was a good introduction to the problem of figuring out exactly what was what.
"f groups in adjoining valleys on the continent can have different legends about Odin, how much more can there be variation across, say 500 miles and 500 years? We have very little we can nail down."
A very good point; but I notice an alignment with the work on linguistics we do respect. We regularly posit things about Indo-European or even proto-Indo-European based on similarities and differences very much like the ones you are noticing in stories about gods. The god may have different aspects or stories here versus there; or they may look a WHOLE LOT like another god with a different name from a nearby culture or two (e.g., Thor looks a lot like both a Celtic God and a Russian one, yet they have different names and stories).
The assumption in linguistics is that there presumably is an earlier truth that grounds the later dis/similarities. A parallel assumption here would seem to be that there must be an origin point that is real, in the same way we think proto-Indo-European was real. The later stories are quite diverse, but somewhere there should be a origin god if we could find him, just as we succeed in inferring pIE root words.
It's a good analogy. Oðin, Odin, and Woden are clearly related in some way, and have a shared origin point. But what that means in other contexts can still hold surprises, in the same way that German salig and English silly have diverged. "Silly" has even diverged from its earlier self in English, meaning blessed.
There are a couple of other points that suggest the Anglo-Saxons might be a bit different as well, which I will get to eventually. Unless everyone else keeps making my good points and better for me.
Sounds very evolutionary: monkeys and men have many similarities, so they must have had a common ancestor.
It's generally starting from a much closer set of observations than monkeys and men; it's usually more like (as AVI said) Oðin, Odin, and Woden. The language similarities between Old English and Friesian are close enough that a student of Old English can actually go and talk to a modern Frisian.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZY7iF4Wc9I
There are then further-afield stories that might or might not be related. Tacitus says that Woden is the Germanic version of Mercury, who was of course the Roman version of Hermes. I've always thought that was an error on his part, and that Odin/Woden has a lot more similarity to Dionysus/Bacchus than to Hermes. You can see Tacitus' point: Odin is a god of magic and wisdom and has some role in the migration of souls to at least one of the lands of the dead. Yet Odin is also the god of ecstatic translation and frenzy, associated with wine (Snorri says he spoke only in poetry, and drank nothing but wine) and mead (itself a symbol of ecstatic transportation that would allow you to speak in verse).
So maybe there's a common ancestor there, and maybe not. You could certainly come up with an alternative suggestion at that point.
Re: visible and invisible, this also is a Tolkien borrowing. Regarding Glorfindel, depicted as almost angelic:
'… And here in Rivendell there live still some of his chief foes: the Elven-wise, lords of the Eldar from beyond the furthest seas. They do not fear the Ringwraiths, for those who have dwelt in the Blessed Realm live at once in both worlds, and against both the Seen and the Unseen they have great power.'
'I thought that I saw a white figure that shone and did not grow dim like the others. Was that Glorfindel then?'
'Yes, you saw him for a moment as he is upon the other side: one of the mighty of the Firstborn. He is an Elf-lord of a house of princes. Indeed there is a power in Rivendell to withstand the might of Mordor, for a while: and elsewhere other powers still dwell.'
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