Gripla - 20.12.2008, Blaðsíða 152

GRIPLA150
were writing and recollecting some of the oldest verses, and it is only nor-
mal that over such a long period of time some kennings and/or dictional
tricks and stylistics had become obscure to later observers.
Saints’ lives offer a particularly interesting view into the state of mytho-
logical knowledge. John Lindow has shown that name replacements in
translated saints’ lives (Jupiter to Óðinn, etc.) were in fact much more than
just that: they were localizations.81 Demonological as well as euhemeristic
explanations are used, the latter emphasizing that the “gods” were only
mortal and sinful human beings. What captures our attention when the
process of localization is analyzed is that the translators, presumably cler-
ics, not only possessed mythological knowledge but apparently also found
nothing wrong with publicizing that fact. Furthermore, the use of mythol-
ogy in the saints’ lives suggests that the audiences were expected to be not
too badly versed in it either, for they would have to make use of it to fully
capture some of the arguments made. Is this the church and/or the clerics
that opposed, on religious grounds, the knowledge, transmission, and use
of mythological material? Would they have fed the common people mytho-
logical knowledge by incorporating it into saints’ lives that were presum-
ably read aloud in churches on the holy days of the saints? That would have
been a strange strategy, indeed. To the contrary, it has become increasingly
clear in recent years that the literary corpus of medieval Iceland and the
world of Norse myth belonged, to an extraordinary degree, to the same
intellectual sphere. Mythological knowledge seems to have been expected
of the readers and audiences of works of the most varied types. No scholar
has demonstrated this better than Margaret Clunies Ross in her two-
volume Prolonged Echoes, arguing for the presence of “mythic schemas”
in the literary culture of medieval Iceland (the title is descriptive).82
The circle has now tightened around a classic thesis in the field of
skaldic poetry, a thesis that exemplifies the assumption that there was a
religious collision between “Christianity” and mythological knowledge
in general, skaldic poetry in particular: For a century and a half after the
Conversion skalds shun mythologically-based kennings for religious rea-
81 John Lindow, “Norse Mythology and the Lives of the Saints,” Scandinavian Studies 73:3
(2001): 437–456.
82 Margaret Clunies Ross, Prolonged Echoes: Old Norse myths in medieval Northern society I: The
myths, II: The reception of Norse myths in medieval Iceland, The Viking Collection: Studies in
Northern Civilization 7, 10 (Odense: Odense University Press, 1994, 1998).