hamr, hamrammr. In eddic poetry there is mention of various night-riders, apparently
women, who were seen flying through the air. These riður can best be understood as
‘night hags’ moving in a temporary body.
Another chapter of Ynglinga saga describes the prowess of Óðinn’s personal warriors,
who were said to be as strong as bears or bulls, and could fight without coats of mail
while holding their shields between their teeth, appearing like a pack of maddened
dogs. One particular group of shapeshifters appear in the fantastic sagas about ancient
times (fornaldarso ̨gur) where they are given appellations indicative of their character,
appellations such as berserkr (‘bear shirt’) and ulfheðnar (‘wolf coat’).
CONCLUDING REMARKSAntiquarian religions too often share the fate of being reduced to mythological systems,
a structuralist legacy in the history of the discipline. Most information about Old Norse
popular religion is to be found in mythological narratives and in prose and poetry –
including skaldic poetry – that employ characters, symbols and stories from mythology
in order to construct intricate metaphors. The paucity of information in these literatures
regarding the performance of ritual, however, is strikingly apparent.
The medieval traces of the Viking Age, which serve as the primary resource when-
ever an attempt is made to analyse pre-Christian religion, most certainly do not come
from strata that were popular at the time, that is, common in an ordinary sense. Com-
parative research indicates that each strata of Viking society maintained its own focus
of interest: farmers were interested in prosperity, chieftains in warrior ideology. In
balance, however, one must also mention the fact that most Viking settlements
were close-knit communities comprised of individuals who were wholly dependent
upon one another for the maintenance of social accord and the attainment of life’s basic
needs.
However one sees it, one thing is clear: the enterprise of separating high from popular
religion is fraught with valuational assumptions that require the designation of one
division as advanced and sophisticated, and the other as backward and primitive. This
sort of approach almost always ends in giving preferential interpretation to the former,
thus making it difficult to observe the beliefs that both high and popular segments of
Viking society held in common.
BIBLIOGRAPHYAcker, P. ( 2002 ) ‘Dwarf-lore in Alvíssmál’, in P. Acker and C. Larrington (eds) The Poetic Edda.
Essays on Old Norse Mythology, London: Routledge.
Boberg, I.M. ( 1966 ) Motif-Index of Early Icelandic Literature (Bibliotheca Arnamagnaeana 27 ),
Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
Clunies Ross, M. ( 1994 ) Prolonged Echoes. Old Norse Myths in Northern Society, vol. 1 : The Myths
(Viking Collection 7 ), Odense: Odense University Press.
DuBois, Th. ( 1999 ) Nordic Religions in the Viking Age, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press.
Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ed. Sigurður Nordal (Íslenzk fornrit 2 ), Reykjavík: Hið íslenzka
fornritafélag, 1933. (In trans. by B. Scudder in The Complete Sagas of the Icelanders, vol. 1 ,
Reykjavík: Leifur Eiríksson Publishing, 1997 .)
–– Catharina Raudvere––