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tors have contributed to the decline of these two traditions, but the one to
cast our eyes on here is the growing emphasis on distinguishing clearly and
properly between mythology and religion.7 It has become increasingly clear
that the aforementioned assumption was born rather of what modern schol-
ars felt must have been than of what the medieval sources suggest actually
was. There are no medieval sources that either suggest or support the idea
that Christian medieval Icelanders drew any connection whatsoever between
their own knowledge, transmission, and use of mythological material, on the
one hand, and of pagan sentiment, on the other. There is nothing to suggest
that they understood such undertakings to be immanently religious in any
real sense. And that statement may stand as the thesis of the present study.
However, it is not so much that there are many Kuhnians around
today – few if any still suggest that Snorri was possibly a crypto-pagan
who dressed his religious or religiously related undertakings in the Edda
in the disguise of the Prologue. Rather, it is the curious, and essentially
contradictory, fact that much modern scholarship still seems to accept
some of the fundamental implications of the second problem, and bends
itself accordingly. More specifically: modern scholarship is still quite
unwilling to abandon the idea that the knowledge, transmission, and use
of mythology by Christian medieval Icelanders must have rested on some
sort of “justification.” It still finds, to various degrees, pagan mythology in
Christian society somewhat out of place, and religiously suspect.
If we speak in this context of justification of one sort or another then
it must follow that someone was against or had quibbles about the appro-
priateness of that which was being justified. And the onus probandi must
as Ritual: Odin and his Masks,” Edda: A Collection of Essays, eds. Robert J. Glendinning
and Haraldur Bessason, The University of Manitoba Icelandic Studies 4 (Manitoba:
University of Manitoba Press, 1983): 3–24; arguing for more indirect relations of rituals
and preserved texts is, e.g., John Stanley Martin, Ragnarǫk: An Investigation into Old Norse
Concepts of the Fate of the Gods, Melbourne Monographs in Germanic Studies 3 (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1972); on the use of myths as reflections of ancient Germanic cult and religion, see
Otto Höfler, Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen I (Frankfurt am Main: M. Diesterweg,
1934), and Otto Höfler, Verwandlungskulte, Volkssagen und Mythen, Sitzungsberichte der
Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Philologisch-historische Klasse 279:2
(Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1973).
7 cf. John Lindow, “Mythology and Mythography,” Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical
Guide, eds. John Lindow and Carol J. Clover, Islandica 45 (Ithaca, et al.: Cornell University
Press, 1985): 48: “myths are not identical with religion and may flourish outside of a re-
ligious context.”