(no subject)

[lwood]

Uh.

Y'all heathen guys?

I found a thing...

THE THIRTEENTH INTERNATIONAL SAGA CONFERENCE

Durham and York, 6th-12th August, 2006

Major Theme: The Fantastic in Old Norse / Icelandic
Literature

Secondary Theme: Sagas and the British Isles, especially
Northumbria

Sponsored by: The Viking Society for Northern Research

The British Academy

The Royal Norwegian Embassy, Moscow

http://www.dur.ac.uk/medieval.www/

They've got a few fascinating papers kicking around there and here's a few:

Snorri’s Invention of Hermóðr’s helreið
Are the Spinning Nornir just a Yarn?
Riding the Tree
Land-spirits and Iceland’s Fantastic Pre-conversion Landscape
I'm just starting to go through these, but I think my favorite so far is: "How Elvish Were The Álfar?"


This is probably because it has a killer paragraph like this:

As anyone with any knowledge of archaeology or Nordic and Celtic folklore knows, the idea that there was ever one basic Nordic religion, or one Nordic mythology accepted and known by all of those living across the Nordic (and even Germanic) world is patently absurd. Religious ideas and beliefs in these areas have always varied by time and place, by fashion, by cultural and social environment, and by the general demands of society. Snorri’s suggestion that Óðinn was the accepted leader of the Nordic pantheon is seriously questioned by place name evidence in Norway and Sweden, and by the simple facts that Freyr is called Freyr (‘Lord’); that Þórr has pride of place amongst the gods in both Uppsala (Adam of Bremen) and Mære (Snorri Sturluson 1941-1951: I, 317); and that Óðinn is totally unmentioned in Landnámabók. The idea that there was one idea of the world being created from Ymir (given in Vm. st. 21 and Gylfaginning ch. VII-VIII) seems conflicted by the statement in Vsp. st. 4 that the earth rose from the sea (deftly avoided by Snorri). As John McKinnell has effectively demonstrated in Both One and Many (1994), there were clearly several different images of Loki over time, and a variety of different accounts about Þórr’s fishing trip (some of which ended with him killing the serpent long before Ragnarök).The range of conflicting myths that must have been in existence within the wonderful multicultural gathering of peoples that settled in Iceland in the late ninth century is particularly evident in Snorri’s desperate attempts to construct one image of Nordic cosmology in the Prose Edda, and in the words of the Icelandic editor of the Sigurðr poems in the Codex Regius as he attempts to explain how Sigurðr died (Frá dauða Sigurðar). Written history wants facts. The oral culture, on the other hand, is and has always been happy with variation which is the name of the game in folkloristics.
It is quite clear that if Snorra Edda had been written in northern Norway or south-eastern Sweden, it would have been a very different work. It is also quite possible that the worldview reflected in different Eddic poems is very different. (Compare, for example, Grm. to Vsp. or Skm.) Putting all of these poems together to try to recreate a single cosmology is a questionable process. As both Neil Price and Thomas DuBois have argued, it is time we ceased using Snorra Edda as a starting point for neat structural analyses of a set Nordic cosmology (where whole ideas are sometimes based on a single reference) and start thinking instead of broad, ever-changing ‘belief systems’ (see Price 2002: 26 and 54-55; and DuBois 1999: 7-8; and 10-12; on the untrustworthiness of Snorri, see Hall 2004: 53 and Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson 1988: 129 and 131-132).

Am I going to agree with everything in here? Of course not. But passionate inquiry and discussion of ideas are what keeps heathenry--or any faith!--strong, vibrant, and alive. Some stability is necessary, of course, but not stagnation.

I seek equilibrium...and it's necessarily a dynamic state; dancing on a spearpoint.

Oh, and one more title to tease people:

Spirits Through Respiratory Passages Yes. Exactly what it sounds like.

*swoon*

Now--back to work; that paper won't write itself...

-- Lorrie

Comments

[hagazusa.livejournal.com]

Thanks, Lorrie!