The subtitle of this excellent study invites an elucidating comment. Hákon jarl Sigurðarson of Lade was no theologian undertaking the promotion of the pre-Christian religion of Norway, but an astute politician exploiting the celebration of pagan rites and customs as practiced in the mid-tenth century among a rural land-holding class (the farmers of our texts) in order to secure political support for his bid to rule Norway. His political opponents were early converts to Christianity. In a further deviation from what might seem prima facie authorial intent, Meylan scrutinizes the considerable body of historiographical texts in Latin and Old Norse-Icelandic not primarily to construct the most accurate possible portrait of Hákon but to determine why and how each of these histories depicts the jarl and his actions, and thereby his motives and successes, from a specific ideological perspective, entailing positive, negative, or “impartial” assessment and judgment. Snorri Sturluson will be seen to steer a distinctive middle course.
Meylan's first concern is to establish a working definition of paganism. Historically, European paganism has been characterized as the religious beliefs of the Other, those alien and distant in time and space in relation to Christians. For the North, there is a consensus on “there being a historical object, a (somewhat) coherent whole made up of beliefs and associated gestures, places, institutions, and communities. Something that...can be reconstructed philologically, historically, and archaeologically” (12). Yet the Christian authors of late Antiquity also constructed paganism, its attendant definitions and terminology, for their own writerly purposes. The “source problem” (15) is dominated by the extant literature as written by Christians for Christians in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Institutionalized bias may discredit an entire corpus for historiographical purposes, leaving mere essentially self-reflective “literature.” Focus has shifted in recent decades to memory studies, in this instance the question of how the pagan past was ascribed meaning in subsequent centuries, in a way that was “eminently political” (18). Meylan proposes to examine what were once called “sources” as “discourses,” often discordant. “[D]iscourses of paganism were actively constructed to address contemporary issues” (19).
Hákon Sigurðarson was born in about 937 at Lade in the Trøndelag region of Norway. He figures in half a dozen twelfth- and thirteenth-century histories, mainly kings’ sagas in the Norwegian and Icelandic vernacular, and in Latin, whose main point of difference in this respect is whether the earl is characterized as “Hákon the evil” or “Hákon the powerful.” Skaldic verse incorporated in the kings’ sagas has its own specific challenges to the historian or round-about biographer. Meylan considers the texts also as testimony on the contemporary question of what form the kingship should take and what role the discourses of paganism play in these projections (27). Meylan's book is organized chronologically, and each diachronic “chapter” of Hákon’s life is, in a very effective narrative pairing, accompanied by the discussion of one in a sequence of ideologically-inflected topics that all relate to paganism, the kingship, and politics. Beginning then with “Divine Kingship,” the author develops a discourse alternating between centripetal and centrifugal: Hákon is constructed as a mosaic, whose tiles are drawn from multiple sources and set in the framework of a more abstract thought-world, the first dimension of which is the concept of divine kingship. Ancestry counts for a great deal: as with the Adamic descent of King Charles III of Britain, the farther back, the better. Rival claims in Scandinavia were those of Óðinn or Freyr as ultimate forefather, the latter seen as progenitor of the Yngling dynasty of Sweden, whose claimed descendants were Hákon’s Norwegian rivals. Hákon identified himself as Óðinn's man, which lent him the luster of war and poetic art, while his very promotion of the ritual religious life of agriculturalists, the un-converted farmers, deflected charges of elitism. Like Eyvindr skáldaspillir andÞjóðólfr, the authors of the rival Háleygjatal and Ynglingatal, respectively, Hákon's historians also had divergent views on the prestige to be attached to a descent from non-Christian gods. “Divine kingship functioned not so much as a stable, phenomenological category of pre-Christian Scandinavian religion to be periodically dusted off by poets and historians, but rather as a malleable and strategic argument deployed to modify the consciousness of one’s audience” (44). We are in the realm of discourse.
Chapter 2 addresses sacrifice. With the death of his father, Sigurðr jarl Hákonarson during the reign of Hákon the Good, Hákon jarl prepares his climb toward royal rule. The pre-Christian religion appears to have attached greater importance to rite and ritual, especially as involving public engagement by prominent leaders, than to what might today be called faith. Communion with the gods is the objective. Well known anecdotes center on a Christian king’s reluctance to eat sacrificial horse flesh and drink the broth, and even this becomes the object of political compromise, as rural support for a royal candidate or new king cannot be ignored. To be recognized as a blótmaðr “exponent of sacrifice” was a vital political asset in regional quarters. In the course of these events pagan sympathies will also be seen as consonant with a decentralized, regionally focused kingship, while affinities with the Christian religion, or outright conversion, signal centrist ambitions, in keeping with those of the Church itself. This chapter, which closes with the killing of Earl Sigurðr and his son’s succession to the earlship, offers a good example of Meylan’s method, as the position taken on this assassination is revelatory of the overall perspective of the individual histories.
The sacred kingship, the topic of Chapter 3, has long been the object of scholarly interest. Does the scant and debated evidence support a royal sacrality as an operative concept in early Norse society, later accommodated relatively easily in Christian society by claims that legitimate kings were divinely chosen? If so, the pagan ruler enjoyed supernatural favor and would have been the principal mediator between divine powers and his subjects. Public ritual celebrated this union, cementing it, since observed custom was pleasing to both gods and man. Certainly, Hákon’s overt support for the old ways was a signal of respect for regional magnates. And in a combination of auto-suggestion and wish-fulfilment, it was then held that the weather and crops did, in fact, improve under his rule. Seen against Meylan’s conception of discourses embodied in the various historical texts, these can be seen variously as favorable assessments of Hákon's rule, its utter condemnation, and finally near indifference, when the historiographer’s focus lay elsewhere. The following chapter is devoted to the more concrete but also symbolic matter of pagan temples. Hákon actively supported the maintenance and rebuilding of temples in order to confirm his status as a ruler with and for the people. The importance and impact of temples in “the economy of power” (101) is reflected at a distance in Adam of Bremen's celebrated account of the temple in Uppsala. Meylan devotes an interesting section to “Temple and Church in Free State Iceland” (88-90), followed by a review of the texts’ varying treatment of the destruction of Hákon's temple by his successor Óláfr Tryggvason. As is so often the case, the intellectual milieu of Norway at the turn of the thirteenth century is illuminated more brightly than the celebrations and religious buildings of older days.
The following chapters continue the profitable paring of the unfolding events of Hákon's campaign and major conceptual entities and institutions: gods and goddesses, conversion, myth, human sacrifice, fate, and lastly religion in its broadest conception. Meylan's composite picture, his construct, of both tenth-century Hákon's ambitions and twelfth- and thirteenth-century historiographical stances toward early Norse polytheism and essential conceptions of the kingship is successful but still tantalizing. Readers will view not a static and quasi-definitive photograph of Hákon but a film with its succession of revealing shots from varying angles that must be synthesized by the viewer. The rather dark Norse worldview, the backdrop, is not that there are good and bad kings, but that it is only a matter of time before a good king turns bad. “Put differently, the problem does not lie with the individual but with the institution” (203).
Although no criticism, Meylan’s book would have gained even more in interest had there been a summary statement on Snorri Sturluson’s careful navigation of Hákon's history as he relates to pre-Christian religion. In practical terms, and good Christian that he surely was, Snorri had competing interests. In works other than Heimskringla, he pointedly identifies the old gods as impostors, and their works as of demonic inspiration, but he celebrates the artistic achievement of pagan society in one of its most elaborated forms: skaldic verse directed to aristocratic patrons, where subject and concrete figural and lexical matter are so often mythological. Moreover, Snorri had his own political ambitions, perhaps to be governor of Iceland under Norwegian royal patronage. As a consequence, he may have viewed Hákon as a fellow-traveler, although one with a more singular objective, not high art and patronly favor but supreme rule. The volume concludes with Earl Hákon’s genealogies, a bibliography (valuable for its list of modern editions of histories treating of Hákon), secondary studies, an index of manuscripts, and index.