Gripla - 01.01.1975, Page 141

PAGANISM AND LITERATURE
137
It is true that most of the rural populations of Europe have been christian-
ized for more than a millenary. But they have succeeded in integrating into
their christianity a great part of their pre-christian heritage of an immemor-
ial antiquity. It would be inaccurate to believe that, for this reason, the
peasants of Europe are not Christians. / ... / When they accepted Christ-
ianity, the European peasants integrated into their new faith the cosmic
religion they had preserved since Prehistory.3
If these basic structures are either inoffensive or neutral, or may easily
be adopted (adapted) by the new religion, they are obviously of mini-
mum significance or interest to us. The present study will, accordingly,
deal only with the ‘offensive’ apparatus of Northem paganism.
Moreover, since all the Icelandic medieval texts which interest us now
were composed some two or three centuries after the christianization of
the country, and composed either by clerics or by authors who had
received a partly clerical education, we must not expect to find pagan
features directly or openly; these texts ask for a ‘second reading’, and it
is on the so to speak ‘unconscious’ level that they may be interesting. To
give an example, when, in íslendinga Saga, chapter 55, Aron Hjörleifs-
son, having just killed Rögnvaldr, takes his weapons and clothes and
throws his corpse into the sea far from the coast, we may suppose that
there is here a survival of an ancient custom of burying in the wilder-
ness, under stones (kasa, fœra í urð) or of casting into the sea the bodies
of ill-doers, sorcerers and the like. But in fact, the practice may just as
well be Christian and represent a refusal to bury a villain in the soil of
Christian Iceland!
Let us first observe that most of the ‘pagan survivals’ appear in the
kenningar of the vísur included in the samtíðarsögur, or in artistic ob-
jects such as discovered by archaeologists.4 As E. Ó. Sveinsson most
rightly says, ‘if Northern paganism seems to be still alive in the XlIIth
century, it is in first place because of the scalds’.5 In this respect,
these traces must be relevant to a kind of literary convention and we
should be right in suspecting them of being devoid of living meaning.
Accordingly, they should be treated with caution.
It is also important to keep in mind the way the Church worked, in
3 Le Sacré et le Profane, Paris, 1965, p. 138.
4 See instances in K. Eldjárn: Kuml og haugfé, Reykjavík, 1956.
5 Um íslenzkar þjóðsögur, Reykjavík, 1940, p. 66.