Gripla - 01.01.1990, Blaðsíða 261

NORSE-CHRISTIAN SYNCRETISM
257
affecting the poem, inasmuch as the seer must then be genuflecting to
the West; but as a Christ symbol the sun does not go down in stanza
39, it merely ‘droops’ with sorrow (cf. st. 44), presumably at the
dreadful spectacle of Hell, which the clangorous gates of Death are
unfolding, or at the imminent death of the seer.26 Otherwise as the
heavenly body it sparkles so brightly (st. 42) that the seer momentarily
loses consciousness. We are not told in what quarter of the sky the sun
is located, but one would say that it is in the ascendant rather than in
decline - ‘Máttug hón leizk / á marga vegu / frá því er fyrri var’ (st.
40). Wherever its exact location overhead, it is not invalidated reli-
giously as a syncretic object of worship for the seer.
This trace of syncretism is instructive for what it betrays of the con-
ditions under which religions will or will not mix together. Sun-wor-
ship was not objectionable to Icelandic Christianity, which was re-
markably tolerant of double-faith modes of observance,27 whereas in
the Roman Church of late Antiquity it had been suspect before it was
absorbed into the Church’s regular devotions and exegetically ratio-
nalized. The unobjectionable combination of sun-worship and Chris-
tian prayer in medieval Iceland is exceptional not only in the Church
missions to northern Europe but also in the Church’s own struggles
with Graeco-Roman paganism in the Mediterranean sphere. To speak
here of ‘the positive and respectful union of elements from different
religions,’ as between Norse paganism and northern European Chris-
tianity, would be to miss the point to this syncretism, in which the bad
Christian associations with sun worship have been conveniently forgot-
ten.
Another likely bit of syncretism in Sólarljóð is to hand in the first
26 Cf. the ambiguous lines in stanza 43, ‘Sól ek sá / á sjónum skjálfandi . . .,’ which
mean either ‘I saw the sun with faltering eyes,’ or ‘I saw the sun trembling visibly,’ but
hardly T saw tlje sun trembling on the sea’ (so Björn M. Ólsen, Sljð. II, p. 43). It might
be most logical that the eyes of the seer should falter, but in a verse from the saga of
Hrafn Sveinbjarnarson (Membrana Regia Deperdita, ed. A. Loth, in Editiones Arna-
magnœanœ ser. A. 5, Copenhagen 1960, p. 219) even the natural sun ‘shudders’ while
the souls of men are being devoured by the serpent, Satan - ‘skelfr ramr rpðull’ (quoted
by Falk, Sljð. I, p. 23). Baumgartner’s German translation of stanza 39 has misled Döl-
ger at p. 386 of Sol Salutis to view the sun as setting.
27 On the borderline believers in Iceland and elsewhere, see Walter Baetke’s article,
‘Stufen und Typen in der Germanenbekehrung’ (1939), as in Vom Geist und Erbe
Thules, Göttingen 1944, pp. 131-33.