1 - Introduction

Summary

Omnia agentia necesse est agere propter finem.

‘Everything that is done must be done for some purpose.’

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I.2, art. 2

1. What was Old Norse mythological poetry for?

Since most of this book will be concerned with Old Norse narrative on mythological and legendary subjects, I shall begin with a simplistic question: in the society of its composers and first audiences, what was such literature for?

If the same question were posed about other literary genres in Old Norse, it would be possible to give some fairly convincing answers. Skaldic poetry was usually either a bargain between the poet and his lord, in which the poet sought to immortalise the lord's reputation in return for reward and preferment, or an attempt to secure the posthumous reputation of the poet himself. Early historical writing often seems concerned to consolidate the political power and self-image of the Icelandic aristocracy. Landnámabók justifies existing patterns of land-ownership and clarifies family relationships so that land-owning families could arrange religiously acceptable marriages. Family sagas served to enhance social cohesion while people worked together in a confined indoor space.4 Such answers may sometimes tell us only what is obvious, and they may be amplified or modified by further study, but they seem unlikely to be contradicted by it.

The traditional answer to the same question as applied to Old Norse mythological poetry would be that it reflected the mythological system which was an essential part of pre-Christian Norse religion. Certainly, the author of Snorra Edda uses eddic and skaldic verse to provide a ‘true’ picture of the pre-Christian mythology that a successful skaldic poet needed to know.

Unfortunately, this answer raises some problems.

It assumes that by Snorri's time there was a definable ‘canon’ of mythological poetry. This presupposes a clear generic division between mythological and legendary verse, and this is questionable (see Chapter 3). Such a ‘canon’ may in fact be a construct of the Christian period, perhaps influenced by the division of the Bible into Old and New Testaments.