The high latitudes of the world have enjoyed a renewed cultural and academic focus in recent years--from explorations of circumpolar darkness, light, and cold, to the Idea of North, True North, the Global North, and beyond. This stimulating collection presents work undertaken within the Creating the New North research group, based in Tromsø but with partnerships in other institutions, pursuing a focus that has become quite representative of work in this field--a regional emphasis on northern Fennoscandia and a concern for its particular manifestations of ritual, belief and practice. Clearly, the North has long held a grip on the imagination (and still does today)--Iceland in particular has recently seen several interesting studies of its folklore and spiritual ecologies--and there is a sense in which this volume is the latest in a series that deal with these magical qualities.
The research group, and this volume, unite around an objective clearly set out in the introduction, namely “to develop a new understanding of how the most northerly areas of Europe grew from a situation of open interaction between different ethnic groups in the early Middle Ages to one which saw them become northern peripheries subject to emerging national states with administrative centres further south.” It is worth quoting that long sentence (and this is only a third of it) because here lies the core of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. As the editors and authors obviously understand, this othering of a marginalised and liminal zone of extremes has now been deconstructed many times, and yet their chosen subtitle--“a region on the edge of Europe”--in a sense perpetuates it. The editors critique the “long tradition in European culture of treating it [the North] as a place with special attributes” (12) and yet essentially do precisely that in ways that no amount of admirably nuanced discussion really alleviates. Perhaps a really bold approach to the North would be to reject such a directional, locational definition entirely, or else to fully embrace the fact that it ultimately does have meaning?
In terms of the book’s theme, I also admit to growing increasingly wary of employing a vocabulary of myths and mythology at all (which is central in this work), since almost by definition a “myth” is something that never really connected with any version of reality and is now properly relegated to a dubious status as research object. It is no accident that we do not often write of “Christian mythology”--unlike, say, Norse and Sámi spiritual narratives--and yet in making this distinction we are surely losing the essence of what Northern world views were. As I have written several times about the Norse, they never knew they had “Norse myths,” because that handily packaged collation sold in our bookshops is simply a medieval fossilisation of something that was once a living and intensely varied, organic world of stories and lived understandings: there never was a Norse “mythology.” As with the peripheral language above, although the authors engage with these themes several times, I’m not wholly convinced that this fits with the subtitle’s “realities and representations.”
Those caveats aside, there is much to enjoy here. An editorial introduction is followed by a sort of keynote paper by one of them, Miriam Tveit, on medieval images of the Far North. Tracing an intellectual trajectory from Classical writers, she shows concisely how the archetypes of a “Northern” (super)natural world and the kinds of monstrous things that were supposed to live there came into being during the Middle Ages. This sets the scene for two sections of papers, treating respectively “Myth, Magic, and Rituals in the Nordic World” (with six contributions) and “Myths and Representations in the Political Consolidation of the North” (with four).
The first section begins with Lars Ivar Hansen’s analysis of the Northern “other” as filtered through the Historia Norvegiae, an interesting essay (especially in its observations on the influence of Adam of Bremen) that nonetheless sits a little oddly as an opening paper in that a footnote makes it clear this is an English translation of something originally published in Denmark twenty years ago. Eleanor Barraclough then gets to grips with the Far North as seen in the sagas, focusing on myths of origin, the giants, and the pervasive presence of the wild arctic cold. It’s an excellent piece, with a brisk liveliness that credits the tales as products of original and creative minds. As she puts it, “in the cultural imagination of the medieval Nordic world, where human beings could not survive, inhuman beings thrived.” I also enjoyed Peter Snekkestad’s study of “fishermen in trouble,” a careful long-form unpacking of an unusual set of stories about supernatural islands, exactly the kind of weird byway in which this book excels. Marte Spangen turns to the Sámi, building on her 2016 doctoral thesis to critically explore how perceptions of ancient monuments linked to their supposed ritual function inform notions of heritage today. A very different case study is presented by Rune Blix Hagen, with a deep dive into the testimony given at a fourteenth-century witchcraft trial, and its synchronic links between “Norse” and Sámi magical practices. The first section closes out with Karoline Kjesrud’s paper on ale rituals, contextualised in the political setting of late Viking-Age northern Norway, with resonances further afield. The “meaning of ale--to quote the title--is often explored in the context of ecstatic ritual, intoxication, hall-based hospitality and so on, and this is a refreshing (sorry) and wide-ranging analysis that goes in new directions.
The second section is more compact, but I especially liked the way these four contributions treat the North as a palimpsest of layered constructions, with new stories (or as they have it, myths) and interpretations being created by medieval people as a gloss on their pre-Christian past, in a process that ultimately continues today. The essays collected in this section are very good on exploring how the idea of the North, indeed its ongoing reinvention, informed not only how the emerging polities of the region were conceived, but also how their meanings were negotiated over time. Thus Yassin Nyang Karoliussen examines the textual reflections of north Norwegian political and ethnic divisions in Hálogaland and Finnmǫrk (and to a degree, the archaeological equivalent, not least in the courtyard sites); Ben Allport proposes a mythography of Háleygr identity; editor Richard Holt explores a possible “counter-narrative” as an alternative reading of the national foundation story of Norwegian state formation (I would have liked to have seen more consideration of archaeological voices here). The book concludes with editor Stefan Figenschow mirroring the opening chapter and exploring the mythologised “other” in the context of Norwegian expansion into the far north of the peninsula. These papers are proactively deconstructive, pushing at the boundaries of accepted thinking and undermining its certainties--all to the good, especially the final chapter with an admirably nuanced exploration of what othering can really mean in the long historical context of Scandinavian/Northern thought.
The book’s production values are of high quality, with some exceptionally clear maps and a few well-chosen illustrations, all in colour. There is also a useful index of people and places, in addition to the general listing. As with so many new edited collections from Brepols, Brill, and their publishing peers, one really has to wonder about the cover price. In this case, €75.00 is actually relatively cheap by comparison with many others, but surely makes it only viable as a library purchase. This is a pity, as the studies collected here are thought-provoking, original, and open up exciting new paths into the editors’ New North. Recommended reading for anyone interested in this vanished world.