Presentation
Today, the Norse myths can be found collected into handy volumes in most good bookshops, translated into many of the world's languages. They have become justly famous, and their lead protagonists - gods and goddesses, valkyries, giants, elves, and dwarves - are known throughout the globe, not only in their own right but also through reworkings from Tolkien to Marvel. Alongside these, we find more politicised misappropriations that have developed over centuries. Curiously, however, there is less understanding, even among scholars, that the Norse themselves did not know anything of 'Norse mythology': what goes by that name today is in fact an artificial product of the Christian Middle Ages, when what had once been an organic world of oral stories was fossilised into fixed, and perhaps very partial, forms through writing. That story-world formed the foundation of the Norse imaginary, an interface with nature and experience, in fact nothing less than a perception of reality itself.
Over more than thirty years, my research has focussed on the thought-world and spiritual beliefs of the Viking-Age Scandinavians. In my doctoral thesis, The Viking Way (2002), I tried to illuminate the tangled but central role played by sorcery and magic in Norse societies, and above all the contexts in which the mythological tales were activated in the settings of everyday life. I have continued to work with these themes repeatedly in later decades, exploring issues of situated expectation and meaning, not least in the enormously varied range of ritual practices that can be identified in the archaeology - something that hints at the diversity of narratives, perhaps even performances, that originally lay behind the corpus of myths that we have. Related questions include how Viking-Age people dealt with the mind under stress, with outlets of release and the perceived supernatural or divine influences on those processes: in essence, seeking to understand how past peoples understood what we might call mental health in the context of religious expression. The cult of Óðinn is particularly relevant here, at the ecstatic intersections of war, power, poetry and the mind.
In exploring the intricacies of their imaginarium, which was very complex indeed, it becomes clear just how fluid and slippery the Norse concept of the human really was. The borders separating them from other bodies, species and beings were permeable indeed. This has interesting implications for how the Viking-Age Scandinavians saw the world, and interacted with the many other cultures that they encountered as a Norse diaspora developed across much of Eurasia - a sequence of historical events with deeper, long-term impacts. It seems appropriate now to draw these strands together in four lectures exploring different aspects of the Norse imaginary. The 'Viking world' was as much a perception of reality as it was a manifestation of politics, ambition, necessity, and opportunity.