Gripla - 20.12.2009, Qupperneq 269

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change that made ‘saga’ a kind of ‘historical novel’ and so an analogue of
the literary phenomenon known since the Romantic period (Harris 1986).
Today, though, I would like to ask whether anything can be learned about
cultural change in the early viking Age through one of its failures. the
Rök Stone continues to be my example.
In her article on the social background of Rök, Gun Widmark pointed
out that Varinn’s lifetime was the flourishing time of the Swedish trading
town of Birka and that the Carolingian missionary Ansgar, who preached
in Birka and ministered to its Christian population, was Varinn’s contem­
porary (Widmark 1997). Widmark imagined Varinn as fearing that a new
age was at hand which would espouse different ideals and that soon enough
many of his countrymen would lose interest in the ancient local traditions
he saw it as his duty to pass on, and Rök was his solution to this anxiety.
In short, her Varinn saw his early ninth century as a time of cultural crisis
when influences from the South seemed to threaten the Little Tradition.
normally I might have applauded this hypothesis of resistance, but I read
Widmark while engaged in completing a study focused, partly, on the
West Germanic elements – frankish, frisian, and english – in Rök, a
study which envisions Varinn rather as a man ahead of his time. Let me
summarize the elements that contrast with Widmark’s fearful, conserva­
tive varinn (Harris 2009).
Old English sources offer a few striking artistic analogues of the stone’s
multi­stranded, anthology­like lay­out, notably in the franks Casket (c.
700) and the (probably) early oe poems Deor and Widsith. though all
may be regarded as examples of ‘panel structure,’ the arrangements are not
mechanical; in Rök, as in the English works, subject matter may not be
fully contained within its ‘panel.’ For the Anglo-Saxonist, Rök’s triadic
progression within a two-part structure echoes Beowulf; more generally
the idea of the ordered collection (as in the Beowulf manuscript) has a
familiar feel. But on also has its mythic­heroic order in the Codex Regius
of the elder edda and such order literally arranged in panels in the
Gotlandic picture stones, and aesthetic patterns probably convince few
readers of cultural affiliations. the ultimately West Germanic source of
the narrative material of the Theoderic section is, however, hardly in dis­
pute in the broad sense that information about the master of Italy from
493 to 526 will have entered Scandinavia via the West. The Hreiðgotar are
PHILoLoGy, eLeGy, AnD CuLtuRAL CHAnGe