CHAPTER SIXTEEN ( 4 )

THE CREATION OF OLD

NORSE MYTHOLOGY

Margaret Clunies Ross

T

he word ‘mythology’ refers to a body of myths that form part of the intellectual
fabric of a particular human culture and is known in some form by the whole
community. In times before the present, and still in some communities today,
traditional mythic narratives about the creation of the world, supernatural beings
and the origins of human society and the natural environment formed a coherent
mythological system that served its owners as a point of reference in a variety of social,
religious and conceptual situations. This is likely to have been the case in Viking Age
Scandinavia.
There are major methodological and evidential questions concerning the study of
Viking Age mythology that can never be fully resolved. For an oral society, as Scandina-
via was for the most part at this time, its mythology poses a special problem, because
access to mythological creation at that time exists for us now largely through material
objects, datable to the Viking Age, that recorded visual images or written texts. In the
Viking Age itself Old Norse myths were accessible to people through such material
objects and through oral recitation and transmission of particular mythic narratives,
which have mostly left no trace in the historical record. To the extent that orally
transmitted Old Norse myths inspired the creation of written mythological literature
in Scandinavia during the Middle Ages, we can speak meaningfully about the creation of
Old Norse mythology, viewed retrospectively through medieval Christian eyes. What
we call ‘Old Norse mythology’ existed in Viking Age Scandinavia. The problem is how
to access it from sources available to us now, most of which date from the period after
the Viking Age, when the new religion of Christianity caused people to qualify and
sometimes reject the old traditional mythology (Clunies Ross 1994 ).
Evidence for Old Norse myths of the Viking Age is available from various con-
temporary sources: material objects, including standing stones, with or without runic
inscriptions, the poetry of the Vikings which can reliably be ascribed to the Viking Age
and, indirectly, the study of place and personal names of the Viking Age, as well as
ethnographic accounts of the religion of the Scandinavians deriving from non-
Scandinavian sources. All these kinds of sources, especially the last, must be used with
great care. The evidence they provide is often slender and frequently cannot be under-
stood except in the context of fuller narratives in much later written texts. In such cases,