Gripla - 01.01.1990, Page 255

FREDERIC AMORY
NORSE-CHRISTIAN SYNCRETISM
AND INTERPRETA TIO CHRISTIANA
IN SÓLARLJÓÐ
And if we can never be right, it is better
that we should from time to time change
our way of being wrong.
- T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare
Onthe subject of syncretism, one would have thought, from Wolfgang
Lange’s thorough discussion of the term and the concept,1 that Norse-
Christian syncretism would have been at least a known phenomenon
on the northern horizons after the year 1000, but Peter Foote in one of
his lately collected papers2 has sought to discredit almost every in-
stance of it that could be adduced from Icelandic medieval history and
saga, concluding that ‘we have little reason to include any active pagan
remnants on the one side or any influential Christian speculation on
the other - and no positive syncretism at the conceptual level in the
middle either.’3 This resounding conclusion need not deter us, how-
ever, from looking for syncretism in a poetic text which Foote has dis-
regarded, where Christian mysticism and Scandinavian mythology
seem in idea to embrace each other.
It is to be sure partly a matter of definition as to what we shall de-
clare ‘syncretic’ in Sólarljóð, but this matter will not be helped by ac-
ceding to Foote’s prime desideratum for the use of the term ‘syn-
cretism,’ namely, ‘to restrict it to the positive and respectful union of
elements from different religions that are or have been of peculiar sig-
1 ‘Studien zur christlichen Dichtung der Nordgermanen 1000-1200,’ in Palaestra 222,
Göttingen 1958, pp. 17-25 - the ‘djuptplöyande innleiing til boka’ praised by Bjarne Fid-
jcstol in his edition of Sólarljóð, Bergen 1979, p. 11. One minuscule orthographic correc-
tion to these pages: ouvxpriTiapós should have been written auyxor|Tiopós throughout.
2 ‘Observations on ‘syncretism’ in early Icelandic Christianity’ (1974), as in Aur-
vandilstá, Odense 1984, pp. 84-100, with postscript.
3 Ibid., p. 99.