Reading Response #7

This is kind of long…bear with me :)

Not being a huge history buff, I found these introductory passages helpful in giving the mythology some background. I like being able to place things in history and to know some of the context under which the stories were written and changed.

Here I’ll highlight a couple things I found interesting from the reading. First, I really liked the passage on p. 12 describing the way in which the mythology came to be as a final written product. We’ve talked about how oral tradition was very important in the Icelandic culture, and I think that it sums up the difficulty one might encounter when reading the stories. “Some speech acts were formal, others were not. But like speeches that politicians adapt for different audiences, much ancient knowledge must have been prone to change in oral transmission….we therefore cannot assume that a text recorded in a thirteenth-century source passed unchanged through centuries of oral transmission.” I think the reason I like this so much is that it explains the more fluid nature of these writings in modern terms (ie, politicians). This characteristic of the stories made them good to listen to back in the day, and an entertaining read, but at the same time, I’ll take them with a grain of salt knowing that they’ve been altered some throughout history.

Another thing that really caught my attention were the passages about Christianity. Although today, conversion to and practice of Christianity is voluntary, this has not always been the case throughout history, even with the Icelanders. Conversion to the Icelanders was more for political or social reasons instead of personal. This is an example of how good they were at adapting to different situations. We talked in class about how easily they conformed to other cultures when they traveled, and it is apparent that they were able to do the same in the switch from paganism to Christianity. While it’s impressive that they could do such a thing, in a culture today that allows for free practice of religion, it’s hard for me to imagine just “switching religions” that easily. I’d like to think that religion is an individual choice on a set of beliefs that governs how you live your life, not how your leader dictates how you live your life.

On another note, I thought it made sense that they should have a lot of gods of nature (in the pagan times), because their culture was so centered on farming and agriculture. I was recently reading about the Mayans, who sacrificed to the sun gods because the rising and setting of the sun was symbolic of the astrological calendar and of time that they found so important. Similarly, the Icelanders sacrificed at specific times of the year important to the crop yield because it was such an important aspect of their lives.

Out of all the entries, I liked the one of Midgard the best. To me, the story of the creation of Midgard seemed to vaguely parallel the creation story of the earth in Christianity. God made a place for men to live, just as the sons of Bur do—a safe place for all humans. I may be stretching for things, but I found it interesting that God created Adam in his image in the Bible and Ymir’s body is used to create Midgard…sort of a way that the gods are entwined with humans.