A Brief History of the Vikings Read Online Free Page B

their lives, supposedly without fear or favour but in reality with an armed focus group who had recently set fire to a church in the vicinity. Snorri himself was able to present a mitigating argument, that since the recitations were often before crowds that comprised the people mentioned and their colleagues, this would itself serve as some form of editorial rein on hyperbole. That, however, cannot save us from the
kenning
, the Viking habit of replacing solid terms with poetic metaphors in the purplest of vocabulary.
    If there is a ‘solid’ form of evidence for our studies of the Vikings, it lies in archaeology. But even then, we are hostages to chance – a single find can transform our previous understanding of Viking culture and deeds, and even scientists cannot agree on all of the evidence presented. Accordingly, there are several parts of this book that deal in some detail with the history of
our
history of the Vikings, outlining some of the controversies that continue to this day. One of them concerns the subject of this chapter – what the Vikings
believed
.
    During the twentieth century, the Jungian tradition encouraged attempts at universality, with its sense that human beings share common traumas and psychological experiences, relived through their gods and beliefs. However, linguistic evidence from other cultures, and confusions within Scandinavian mythology itself, present a very different picture of the Norseworld. The Norse myths are trying to tell us something, and much of it may be astronomical. The priceless missing piece of the Viking puzzle is a quantifiable knowledge of their astronomy. They did not use the Babylonian constellations common to western European culture, but certainly still paid attention to the stars. To the proto-Vikings, they might have been of relatively small consequence, but as the population spread out across the western hemisphere, on long voyages with few means of reliable navigation, the stars above must have gained vital importance. Vikings from Vinland to Baghdad would have looked up and seen the same stars in the sky, the same five visible planets, the same recurring phenomena, and some of this must have rubbed off on to their mythology. All that we have today are occasional mentions in myths of entities ‘thrown into the sky’, and a few contradictory stories associated with the evening star. Other sources, particularly the
Grimnismal
in Snorri’s
Poetic Edda
, are strange enough to be garbled references to cycles of the heavens, but until such time as a physical representation can be matched with a poetic one, we are left with little but conjecture.
    If only we knew the constellations of the Vikings, or which of their rock carvings might not be mere pictures, but star maps, then we should understand much more about their myths, many of which may be mnemonic devices designed to fix the patterns in the sky. Some names may have changed over time, such as which gods were great enough to be identified with a planet, but others may have remained constant throughout the Viking Age. Somewhere in the night sky, the Vikings saw a World Tree, three sisters, a one-armed god, a god with one bright eye, perhaps in a chariot, perhaps hanging from a tree, a hound, twin brothers, a pair of goats, a squirrel, an eagle, a small snake, a much bigger serpent and many other figures familiar from the sagas. If any researcher can crack thiscode, then it could become the Rosetta Stone of the Viking mind. 1 The answer lies somewhere on an obscure rune stone, or drawn on the shamanic drumskin of a Sámi sorcerer. Until the day it is found, we are left with confusions, dead ends and folklore, retold chiefly by non-believers. Snorri, a leading source for many of the tales of Viking mythology, seemed keen to force some order on the chaotic world of his forefathers, introducing quaint notions of a family of twelve gods and goddesses, seemingly modelled on the pantheons of ancient Greece and Rome. Such