In 1955 the Icelandic author Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novel, Sjálfstætt fólk “Independent People” (1934-35), drawing his inspiration from medieval prose sagas and oralrímur “ballads.” The novel recounts the life of a poor shepherd, Guðbjartur Jónsson, on the cusp of WWI, beginning with his ancestors who first established a subsistence economy on the island that had barely changed in over a thousand years. Its setting is an isolated steading named Winterhouses for the lambing sheds once built there. It is believed to be haunted and has been abandoned and reoccupied countless times over the centuries:
How often has the bigging Albogastathir on the Moor been destroyed by
spectres? And rebuilt, in spite of spectres? Century after century the
lone worker leaves the settlements to tempt fortune on this knoll
between the lake and the cleft in the mountain, determined to
challenge the evil powers that hold his land in thrall and thirst for
his blood and the marrow in his bones. Generation after generation the
crofter raises his chant, contemptuous of the powers that lay claim to
his limbs and seek to rule his fate to his dying day. The history of
the centuries in this valley is the history of an independent man who
grapples barehanded with a spectre which bears a new and ever a newer
name. Sometimes the spectre is some half-divine fiend who lays a curse
on his land. Sometimes it breaks his bones in the guise of a norn.
Sometimes it destroys his croft in the form of a monster. And yet,
always, to all eternity, it is the same spectre assailing the same man
century after century (trans. J. A. Thompson [1946]).
As discussed in the editors' introduction (11-36) the twelve contributors to this volume explore the roots of this attitude toward nature in the literature and culture of the medieval Norse world through the prism of “environmental humanities,” a critical approach which privileges concerns about the human relationship with our natural environment and especially our impact upon it during the “Anthropocene,” an epoch variously defined, but most often on the basis of permanent changes that human societies have wrought upon the planet on which we live. The authors examine the relationship between early Scandinavian societies and the lands they came to occupy, including the Nordic diaspora into the North Atlantic islands, reaching as far as Greenland and the North American littoral to the west, and initiating the first European encounters with peoples of the First Nations there. In particular, these studies consider how the physical environments which Norse folk settled, as well as the seas they had to cross to get there, were perceived during the Viking Age (ca. 800-1100 CE) and then reimagined in the myths and sagas committed to vellum by literate Christian authors in thirteenth-century Iceland and afterwards. The authors consider how the cosmos as a whole and, in particular, the place of human beings within it, was conceived by Norse poets and storytellers, and then coordinated with biblical ideas after the introduction of Christianity to these northern regions. The editors, in the work's abstract, call this complex of representations, both those more objective and verisimilar, and those more mythological and fantastic, the “Old Norse environmental imagination.”
This constellation of images offers an emic or “in-culture” perspective, to be sure, but also one diverse and dynamic, a cultural lens constantly refocused over several centuries of contact with sharply different environmental conditions and human cultural traditions. The Nordic peoples progressively recalibrated their view of their place on earth and moment in time, their own “Anthropocene,” in which they sought to wrest a living from the world in which they found themselves. These new habitats were mostly grassy margins or lowland meadows very close to sea level where the settlers could feed their animals, converting seams of green energy into milk and meat proteins. Grass was gold to these sheep-herders and dairy farmers, who brought their herds to the highest elevations that nature would allow, some pastures high up in sheltered valleys under the glaciers which are now only desert wastelands thanks to over-grazing and subsequent climate cooling. So, just as these Norse settlers had an impact upon their subarctic habitats, these environments, too, had an impact upon the quality of life possible for these marginal communities. It is not surprising that the inhabitants of glacial island wracked by the volcanoes, earthquakes, avalanches, and landslides, might imagine the forces of nature in personified forms--as berg-risur “cliff-trolls,” hrím-þursar “frost-ogres,” or eld-jötnar “fire-giants”--the ever-present powers of nature looming over their lives.
Several of the contributors, perhaps with the wisdom of hindsight, suggest that we must learn from these ancestors’ mistakes, their short-sighted and sometimes harmful expedients, like the slash-and-burn land-clearing of woodland brush in southwestern Iceland during the 870s. At the same time, this reviewer is struck by the many successful adaptations of these Nordic folk to the challenging conditions in which they found themselves and the sustainable solutions they often discovered to survive and even prosper there. These settlers must have been doing something right, since their descendants are still with us in much greater numbers than before, evincing some of the same human frailties and shortsightedness, of course, but also many of the same virtues and capacity for intelligent adaptation in the face of uncertain and violently shifting environmental phenomena. The Norse colony in southwestern Greenland, for instance, managed to persist for almost half a millennium in a habitat at the northernmost limit of sheep-farming and cattle-rearing as a viable economy, even in protected fjords during the Medieval Climatic Optimum (tenth-thirteenth centuries) when annual temperatures were much warmer in those latitudes than even today. There are now icebergs in June in the fjord at Qassiarsuk or Brattahlíð where Eirík the Red and his descendants had a successful dairy farm for almost five centuries. The “Mini-Ice-Age” of the fifteenth century did finally put an end to the Norse colony in Greenland when the bishop of Trondheim ceased to send his annual supply ship after 1410 due to the hazards of sea ice. And of course, recent excavations have revealed considerable environmental degradation on a number of Norse farm-sites in Greenland, a process that was clearly exacerbated, if not caused, by human activity.
The editors introduce the collection with a general essay on “Combining Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies: Opportunities and Challenges,” usefully surveying recent theoretical developments in the field and explaining their ambition to apply these new ecocritical approaches to the study of Old Norse literature and culture.
Hannah Burrows surveys “Aesthetic Expressions of Nature in Skaldic Verse” (37-64), finding that while the skalds rarely celebrate the beauties of nature like later Romantic poets, they often remark on aspects of the natural world in an appreciative way, especially in their creation of kennings or poetic circumlocutions which supply striking metaphors for particular environmental features, which Burrows calls “kenning-scapes.” Of course, these kennings frequently focus on the utility of environmental resources for human purposes, but the sea, which was a fraught liminal space in the Old Norse “cultural aesthetic,” emerges as a strong provocation to skaldic metaphoric invention, since it is both all-encompassing and marginal, essential and inimical at the same time. Islanders are especially dependent on the sea for many of their needs, even though, like all humans, they cannot actually live out in the sea’s domain for long. A twelfth-century poem by Einarr Skúlason offers eight materialistic metaphors for the sea’s encirclement of islands: a baldric, band, girdle, belt, sheath, harness-strap, ring, and necklace (47-48). Even highly aesthetic responses to the natural world in Old Norse literature cannot be divorced from their utilitarian and economic aspect, but the sometimes abstruse and artificial kennings can yield much information about Norse people’s understanding of their natural environment.
Timothy Bourns focuses on “Trees in the Saga Dreamscape” (65-85), where the image of a tall, stout, and verdant tree often appears as a portent of a coming human ruler. Bourns invokes Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope,” a genre’s characteristic technique of creating metaphoric conjunctions in space and time, to convey complex meanings (80). These metaphors are not realistic, but symbolically apt, communicating in this case an organic or “greenwashed” depiction of political privilege and power invested in a single leader whose dynastic authority is “naturalized” by the deeply rooted, long-standing, and wide-branching arboreal image, a living tree sprung from the very soil of the ruler’s domain (81). Here, nature validates culture.
Jonas Koesling offers “‘Brúðir berserkja barðak í hlés eyju’ [I fought the berserks’ brides on Hlésey’]”: A Material-Ecocritical Consideration of the Role of the Sea in Myths and Rituals of Premodern Scandinavia” (87-116). The quoted verse comes from Hárbarðsljóð in the Poetic Edda. Koesling observes that eddic poems often attribute intentionality to the sea, especially in its more dangerous “moods.” In this poem, the god Thor is mocked for having fought with women, but he replies that these were not harmless girls, but hostile “she-wolves,” “wives of berserks,” who deliberately smashed his ship when he tried to bring it to shore on the island of Læsø in the Kattegat, apparently referencing the crashing waves of surf that drove him to shipwreck. Other natural phenomena, like the lightning bolts of the god Þórr “Thunder” himself, are similarly imagined as the angry expressions of an animate nature.
Elizabeth Walgenbach reviews “Legal Perspectives on Nature in Old Norse-Icelandic Lawcodes,” particularlyGrágás and Jónsbók, which cover rules for land management and access to resources like pasture, woods, driftage, and marine life with the explicit goal of ensuring sustainability (117-36). Ecclesiastical laws were similarly adapted to local concerns over protecting resources and often overrode religious strictures at odds with the long-term needs of the community, a finding that Walgenbach believes contradicts the anthropocentric arrogance often attributed to medieval Christian institutions and beliefs.
In “Imagining a Viking Age Risk Society: Environmental Threats, Risks, and Manufactured Uncertainties in the Sagas of Icelanders,” Reinhard Hennig tests the sociologist Ulrich Beck’s description of “risk societies” (1986) using the corpus of the Íslendingasögur as his archive (137-63). Ulrich distinguishes between the ways people perceive threats from two different sources: random natural disasters and intentional supernatural interventions often inflicted through natural disasters, a distinction that remains ambiguous in these family sagas. However, Hennig sees a third kind of threat in these narratives that he calls “manufactured uncertainties.” These are dangers that have arisen in the modern world from nuclear radiation and climate change, society-generated threats whose long-term consequences are difficult to predict, control, or avoid by individuals. Hennig finds an analogy to this anthropogenic uncertainty in a special kind of threat dramatized in the sagas, hauntings by undead pagan revenants who represent persistent but enigmatic threats to the newly Christian communities, which are difficult to fathom or fend off. These preternatural visitations, Hennig believes, reveal a deeper anxiety over the country’s abandonment of its traditional beliefs, a “return of the repressed” in Freudian terms, or an existential unease about a future in which the changes underway are profound, persistent, and unpredictable in their results.
Tiffany Nicole White, in “Out of the Garden and into the Forest: The Corruption of the Natural World in Old Icelandic Literature” (165-99), explores how biblical imagery of the Fall of Man and Expulsion from the Garden of Eden was reimagined in the often-treeless environment of the northern world, a subject Sabine Heidi Walther addresses more specifically in “Askr and Embla: The Creation of Man from Trees” (201-22). Walther challenges the assumption that a pre-Christian pagan myth lies behind the account preserved in Völuspá “The Sybil’s Vision,” where the first man and woman are shaped from logs of driftwood discovered by Óðinn and his brothers as they patrol the shores of their new world Miðgarðr after slaying their great-grandfather Ymir. Instead, Walther find this myth to be consistent with the tree imagery in medieval Christian texts like the Origo crucis or Kross saga “Tale of the Cross” (ca. 1300-25), as well as later depictions of the human body as an arbor inversa “upside-down tree,” noting that the names Askr and Embla also chime suggestively with Adam and Eve. Her interpretatio Christiana suggests a typological anticipation of the wooden Cross upon which the “last Adam,” Christ, will redeem humankind according to St. Paul (1 Corinthians 15:45). Walther feels that this use of tree symbolism, following Walgenbach, qualifies the supposed anthropocentric bias of Christian sacred history, observing that in both biblical and native Norse traditions humankind is created from “natural ingredients” that are part our terrestrial world, fromadama “earth, dust, clay” in Hebrew (Genesis 2:7) or from driftwood in Norse mythology, though here these shore-driven logs are imagined as the fallen hair follicles of the giant Ymir washed up from the sea of his blood.
Stefka G. Eriksen writes on “The Establishment of Niðaróss: The Nexus between Urban, Environmental, Political, and Salvation History” (224-45) in Óláfs saga Tryggvasonar and Óláfs saga helga in Snorri Sturluson’s Heimskringla (ca. 1230). In these kings’ sagas the interdependence between urban and rural environments is celebrated as essential to a healthy Christian polity. Royal power and spiritual leadership are projected from the city’s center, but are reliant upon and validated by the positive response of the surrounding population living on the land. This symbiosis is a temporal anticipation of the ultimate redemption of both humankind and the natural world at the end of time, culminating in “a new heaven and a new earth” (Revelation 21:1).
Philip Lavender offers “Imagining Trees in Mágus saga jarls” (247-68), one of the fourteenth-centuryriddarasögur “knights’ sagas,” insular adaptations of French chansons de geste and Arthurian romance. The saga-writer uses arboreal and forest imagery to represent both individual protagonists and society as a whole, but also hopes, Lavender contends, to introduce readers to the possibility that “the driftwood they saw floating on the water and the trees arrayed in the landscape might house hidden spaces and hidden purposes” (263-64).
Juliane Egerer ventures into “postcolonial ecocriticism” with “Son of the Soil and Son of Óðinn: Unveiling a Farmer’s Eddic Poetry (1920) and Colonial Germanic Concepts of Nature in South West Africa, Now Namibia” (269-99). This effort at “decolonizing ecocriticism” considers the case of an early twentieth-century German settler and writer, Wilhelm Ludwig Geverhard Elmenhorst, who established a farm in present-day Namibia. Elmenhorst recruited eddic poetry to express what he saw as a special rapport with the natural world among Germanic-speaking peoples in order to justify their colonization of new lands in Africa. However, his idealization of country life was far more dependent on nineteenth-century Romantic poetry than thirteenth-century Old Norse eddas, a pastoral view of nature very different from its stark demonization in the mind of an Icelandic crofter as imagined in the novel by Laxness quoted above.
Much work still needs to be done in sorting out the complex roots and legacies of attitudes toward the environment expressed in Old Norse literary texts and their descendants, but this volume of studies has “broken the ice” for that enterprise and broken new ground for unearthing insights to be garnered from an ecocritical approach to Old Norse literature and culture.