Gripla - 01.01.1990, Side 259

NORSE-CHRISTIAN SYNCRETISM
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the seer has before his eyes in the hour of death, the thing he is really
‘seeing,’ since he cannot be staring at the sun itself, is the image of
Christ as ‘the sun of righteousness’ in Malachi IV, 2, which has had a
lengthy exegetical history in western Christianity.15 But was the sym-
bolic sun also a former pagan object of worship, a deified life force,
which can still sway the seer? The historic scene at the death of the
‘noble pagan,’ Þorkell máni, in Landnámabók, S/H9, is often coupled
with Sólarljóð, st. 41, in answer to this question, because Þorkell acted
not unlike the seer and had himself taken out into the sunshine in his
dying hour, ‘ok fal sik á hendi þeim guði, er sólina hafði skapat.’16
Though the death scene has been somewhat Christianized, Wolfgang
Lange has argued that together with the mass of pre-Christian literary
and historical testimony to pagan Scandinavian cult practices it points
to some kind of sun worship among the early Icelandic settlers, which,
during their conversion to Christianity, lay dormant, to spring up
again sporadically in the Christianized culture of medieval Iceland, as
in Sólarljóð, st. 41.17
Paradoxically, there is an even better reason in Christianity itself for
finding the seer’s obeisance syncretic. As Franz Dölger demonstrated
in his monograph of 1925, Sol salutis,18 Jewish and Christian genuflec-
tion to the East, where the sun rose, was originally an ancient Indian
and subsequently a Graeco-Roman rite, which in late Antiquity sa-
vored unpleasantly of heathenism to both Jews and Christians, despite
their adoption of the same.19 By the age of Charlemagne, however, the
eastward orientation of Christian prayer was ensconced in the Roman
15 See the fundamental monograph of Franz J. Dölger, Sol salutis: Gebet und Ge-
sang im christlichen Altertum, Miinster 1925, pp. 381 ff. The biblical phrase ‘sol iustitiae’
(Mal. IV, 2) was translated into Old Icelandic in the Stockholm Homily Book, ed.
Theodor Wisén, Lund 1872, pp. 14, 47, 75, as ‘réttlætis sól’ or ‘sunna,’ cited by Falk,
Sljð. I, p. 22. (I have corroborated all references given to Wisén’s untrustworthy edition
with the facsimile ms. published by Paasche in the Corpus Codicum Islandicorum Medii
Aevi VIII, Copenhagen 1935.) Cf. Ian J. Kirby, Biblical Quotation in Old Icelandic-
Norwegian Religious Literature, Reykjavík 1976, p. 117.
16 As in íslenzk fornrit I, ed. Jakob Benediktsson, Reykjavík 1968, i, 46.
17 Studien, pp. 188, 243-45; cf. the Norse references to sun worship of Falk, Sljð. I,
p. 24.
18 See especially chs. 2 and 4.
19 See, e.g., sermon 27 of the fifth-century pope, Leo I, in Abbé Migne’s Patrologia
Latina (abbreviated hereafter MPL), LIV, col. 219A, which Dölger quotes, p. 3, fn. 1: