Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 150

GRIPLA148
rather unattractive and illogical thesis. Should that nonetheless have been
the case then would the latter extensions be new extensions (non-pagan
then) or the reattachment of an older set(s)? If the latter, then how were
these genealogical bits transmitted over the chronological gap, by whom,
and why? The more one pushes the thesis the less attractive it becomes.
Besides, the genealogical writings at hand bear close affinity to classical
and medieval learned traditions, and are to be seen first and foremost as
products of Christian European culture. Euhemeristic genealogies appear
in Jordanes, Bede, and other Late Antique and medieval auctores.79
Euhemerism and natural religion were developed as conceptual tools
when Christianity was in its infancy and youth, when the pagan past
impinged upon the new intellectual and religious landscape that was gradu-
ally forming in the transformative period of later-Roman and post-Roman
Europe, and when the issue of proper Christian attitude towards the pagan
past – cultural, religious, intellectual – was fresh, open to debate, and
without a venerable tradition to consult. Centuries later, when Christianity
reached Iceland, a venerable tradition existed. Christian culture had come
to terms with the past in the sense that it had incorporated conceptual cat-
egories for understanding the pagan past in terms of the Christian present
and future. Subjects that might previously have been taboos, and in need
of excuse or justification of some sort to become suitable topics of discus-
sion, fell from the list of suspects. When Christianity, in its religious and
cultural totality, reached Iceland it enabled medieval Icelanders to apply a
learned understanding to their pagan past and some of the most important
surviving cultural aspects of it. Depicting Christianity simultaneously tak-
ing a stand against the knowledge, transmission, and use of mythological
material offers a contradiction ill-supported by the sources.
V. Mythological Knowledge – the Question of Religious
Interpretation of Skaldic Development
The notion of justification or excuse in the context of mythological knowl-
edge and its use in early Christian Iceland inevitably begs the funda-
mental question: Who exactly was against it? The answer offered never
really extends beyond the vague assumption of “the church” and/or
79 cf. Faulkes, “Descent from the gods”: 93.