Ecocritical approaches to medieval literatures have proliferated in recent years alongside an increase in general discussion and debate on anthropogenic climate change. Evergreen Ash serves as the first instance of a monograph-length study using explicitly ecocritical frameworks to discuss Old Norse texts. A comparative eschatological reading of Old Norse myth and the looming climatic tragedy of the Anthropocene, it provides seven chapters addressing at the broadest thematic level ecocritical approaches to Old Norse cosmogeny, eschatology, echoes in other literature, and ties between premodern, mythological, and Anthropocene sites of reading and interpretation. Written for a wider audience, the book follows the practice of providing English translations of Old Norse texts with original text citations available in the end notes; this review replaces hooked o with ö. In a slim 179 pages of body text, Evergreen Ash adroitly and at times conversationally weaves between observational, tangential, anachronistic, philological, historical, and speculative modes, sometimes within the confines of a single page.
A prologue begins with a meditation on the possible origins, meaning, consequences, and particular Englishness of the ashes to ashes expansion of Gen. 3:19 in later hymnography. Returning to ash, however, is not natural in that it forms no part of any lifecycle and indicates finality, though the mythic function of the Phoenix and Christ analogies do provide some grounds for interpretation. More pressing here is the notion of Iceland as Ashland, retrospectively viewed from relatively recent eruptions (Eyjafjallajökull) and then forward through a discussion of North Atlantic vulcanism in historical perspective. Highlights of post-870 eruptions, from literary and other observations in and outside of Iceland, reveal the Christian/pagan semiotic paradigm, e.g., volcanoes as portals to hell. Notably absent, however, are mentions of vulcanism and volcanoes in saga literature. Approaching the etymological resemblance--ash (aska) and ash tree (askr)--Abram connects their mythological, symbolic cultural functions. The experience of deforestation is culturally resonant in Iceland and today ash trees are dying in high numbers from fungal tree diseases elsewhere in Europe and North America. A textual absence of present volcanoes is balanced by the presence of absent trees in culture, literature, and myth. Bridging these motivating conceptual metaphors and symbols are “mythologized ecological concerns” (18) in the ecology of the text, culture, symbolism, and real environment that stand at the center of the book.
Chapter 1 summarizes major contributions from/to ecocriticism, particularly the author’s indebtedness to the work of Timothy Morton, and its application to medieval literatures, describing the connective tissues of chapters to come: the environmental humanities, ecocriticism, historical processes, dualistic worldviews, and the reification of cultural constructions of nature. Hesitancy in Old Norse-Icelandic (ON-I) studies to embrace theoretical criticism of any sort, indicated by the paucity of certain types of studies, is clear, but Abram makes a more important observation: ecocriticism of premodern texts exhibits a duality, a desire to escape boundaries established by the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but also for obtaining for the medievalist a relevance and immediacy otherwise lacking in scholarship less concerned with the present (22). Mythic commentary about ecology is described as an “ecopoetic project” and “literary world-making” (23), establishing opposition to a mythopoetic understanding of the project, perhaps one step closer to the ontological work involved--the creation of a new world, familiar and alien, both then and now. ON-I appears to offer a convenient window to ecocritical analysis vis-à-vis Christian epistemology and ontology: the myths and literature may reflect a pre-Christian, more ecological worldview; Norse pagan culture presents no ontological category of ‘nature’ which, according to certain perspectives in ecocritical discourse, perpetuates distancing the social from the natural; Scandinavian paganism has animistic elements, suggesting less anthropocentric relationships; texts exhibit a liminality conditioned by the supernatural (a burgeoning subfield of late); and ecological catastrophe is immanent in Icelandic literature and culture. Abram proceeds in the following chapters to dismantle some of these views, while supporting others. Finally, an apology for productive anachronism in the service of foregrounding immediate, present concerns forestalls certain criticisms such a work might elicit.
In Chapter 2, Völuspá, Vafþrúðnismál, Grímnismál serve as foils for reading Snorra edda through the older lens of types of Christian influence, allowing for a cosmogonic comparison of ostensibly pagan and Christian schemata. Instead, despite overemphasis of the role of the book of Genesis on population growth patterns, Abram productively views myth in terms of its effects, not its origins, and posits a transcorporeal system, i.e., nature as a reflection of a state of queerness and otherness, reflected among other things by the genderless representation of Ymir, and how Ymir’s murder and refashioning can be read as an intentionally anachronistic reframing of potential sites of disjuncture between worldviews (56). A discussion of the structuralist inside/outside paradigm inherent in miðgarðr and útgarðr finds parallels in the “imposition of structures” (61) in Snorri via the creation of order and various binaries. Noticing that the underlying dualistic system does not appear to be a Christian superstrate, but rather indicates an already-present, original dichotomy of Nature and Society, Abram’s most significant intervention obviates entire lines of inquiry into the state of recorded myth and replaces them with an effective ecocritical framework.
Distinguishing senses of cosmological referential topography in the earth/world paradigm--veröld, jörð/heimr--Chapter 3 is a word study with ecocrticial ramifications. Heimr and garðr are not quite oikos, but “home-making world-building” (65), a reshaping of place for inhabitation, while heimr shares not only a spatial sense but also an all-encompassing sense, a worldview. Veröld is fundamentally temporal and anthropocentric--the ‘age of men’--but also a spatial designation. Jörð can be read as fulfilling a ‘greener,’ more ecological conception of physical spatial relationships for all, i.e., including the ‘rest,’ of creation, comparison with Gaia, not just analogously but also encoded in mythological representations of the feminine dominated by a patriarchal anthropocentrism: bereft of agency, passive, and made for destruction and rebirth in the Æsir-dominated world. All terms are accordingly anthropocentric, including jörð within the context of its exploitability by the dominant structures.
Chapter 4, concerning tree-people and people-trees, presents Yggdrasil as a model of transcorporeal relationships and non-hierarchical associations between living things, including in the face of actual Icelanders’ “ecocide” of their trees (85). The world-tree stands beyond/outside anthropological scales of space and time, discussed in a longer exegetical passage on Yggdrasil’s many potential readings and functions. This arboreality in texts “[...]suggests that Norse worldviews did indeed perceive the plant kingdom as existing on an ontological plane much closer to that of humanity than we are accustomed to allow” (94). Skaldic kennings with tree elements are also held to indicate a fundamental treeness in the Norse ontology of humanity, but the present reviewer wonders if this can be disentangled from the realization of formal conventions with a certain horizon of poetics. Nevertheless, skaldic poetry expresses thematically in some texts, here Sonnatorrek, a reflection of longing for lost Norwegian wooded landscapes and lamentation in “coming to terms with deforestation” (102).
Turning to that deforestation on an island that transitioned from an actual forest-covered state to the construction of forestscapes via literary nostalgia a few scant centuries later, Chapter 5 challenges that nostalgia as a discourse recapitulating the culture-nature dichotomy. Ecomythologizing the North Atlantic is extended to Vínland and its descriptions, a paradise disconnected from any actual settlement-historical experiences as recorded in the literary and archeological record. Interactions with skrælingar can be read as commentary on primitivism as masking a fear of an inability to exploit the land as customary. In this framework, landnám therefore need not refer to taking something from someone, but “appropriating” (121) space and ordering it according to culture and its structures; Vínland stands outside of Norse expectations and models, a new ‘natureculture’ to which would-be settlers cannot adapt, and whose reflections in golden-age narrative reveal more about the later period of decline and loss, when things have fallen and continue to fall apart.
Chapter 6 compares Ragnarök and the Anthropocene, claiming that the Æsir are much like us, clinging to systems and approaches to order that are causing the very collapse against which they struggle. Abram dissects Völuspá in terms of its model of the veröld, reading ecological disaster as the end of the man-age. Disaster and catastrophe are not the eschaton, but an inflection point after which concepts of world and the relation and ontological status of entities within it inevitably must change. The gods create ‘nature’ as humans have long done, as an out-category, subsequently prized in golden-age thinking, exploited, used to advance technologies, and providing the object of purification in the Latourian sense, which posits humans’ need to maintain strictly the society/nature dichotomy. Hybridization as the embodiment of “Anthropocene modernity and its contradictions” (143) sets the stage for the final chapter on the interconnectedness of social and natural catastrophe, feedback loops that coalesce into a maelstrom of hopelessly distorted nature-society boundaries.
In Chapter 7 the cyclical nature of mythic ecology is revealed in the acceleration in Völuspá that leads to an end which is not the end. A subsequent vision of the renewed, green earth is bracketed by a return of the gods and a re-peopling of the new world much in the same fashion as the old. Abram analogizes the Ragnarök-Anthropocene along six comparative axes: 1) we desire to make sense of complex phenomena; 2) these events have an unknown beginning (no obvious tipping point); 3) our current place in the chronology of catastrophe is unclear; 4) ‘modernity’ in the guise of maintaining the incompatible, non-overlapping magisteria of nature and society is implicated in both; 5) blame, blameworthiness, and blamelessness as perennial topics indicate personal and group crises of epistemology and identity; and 6) patriarchy and its attendant ideological structures is ubiquitous, gendering ecological catastrophe. In a section on preventing Ragnarök, several theorists are marshalled to support what is in essence a single point: a removal of ontological barriers must occur if we are to escape the perpetuation of ecological catastrophe as a function of the dualistic worldview. For the gods, a refusal to erect miðgarðr and separate themselves from the giants would have been one step on the path to avoiding the sort of originary, cosmic violence that maintains certain types of order, including the categorial constellation of monotheism, monarchy, capitalism, and patriarchy. Abram’s own arguments about Christian and pagan dualism seem to obscure the directness of some of these claims (e.g., polytheism seems no more aligned with ecological thinking than monotheism by the very thesis presented here), but the conclusion rightly challenges a more ecologically focused study of the premodern, pre-Christian mythic world, which should not serve merely as a method for untangling Christian influence. On the contrary, Evergreen Ash shows that a type of dualism undergirds the entire system regardless of source-critical findings. The goal of ecocriticism as described is “to help us transcend this modernistic imaginary” (178) of a fictitious, constructed Golden Age to which we can never return. The stakes are immediate and potentially permanent: Yggdrasil endures while the gods vanish.
Admonitory and appropriately grim, yet hopeful in some ways, Evergreen Ash reveals the immanence of Anthropocentrism and the omnipresence of dualistic nature conceptions as an attempt to rethink the value of premodern texts for living through the present ecological catastrophe. That Ernst Haeckl, who coined the term ecology, was himself a symbol of the excesses and ultimately horrors produced by the very modernistic worldview responsible for the catastrophe should not be a lost irony. As Abram notes, the answers cannot lie in the direction of seeking a Green Middle Ages that never existed, but perhaps in uncovering the outlines of its construction that parallel our own worldviews.