Gripla - 01.01.2003, Page 53

SIX NOTES ON THE INTERPRETATION OF HYMISKVIÐA
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gálkn, but it may help us to discover the old word’s meaning. There are ob-
vious differences between the usages of the two words: gálkn is, in all four
instances, plural; finngálkn is always singular, but characteristically multi-
form, a freakish blend of e.g. man, beast and dragon.11 Gálkn is plural, no
doubt because it relates not to single combats, but to a plurality of ‘destroyers’
(as to a plurality of defences, cf. hlífar). This reflects the nature of corporeal
human battle, but, if it were in a shamanic context, gálkn could relate to the
spirit battles of shamanic clans, as these are recorded of the Evenks of central
Siberia:12 a clan’s shamans, wishing to attack a hostile shaman clan, would
call up their ‘clan shamanistic spirit-helpers’ and send them to the other clan,
‘to bring to its people disease and death. The spirits sent by the shaman
penetrated into the territory of a given clan and began to eat the souls of the
articles of Clive Tolley/The Shamanic séance in the Historía Norvegiae. Shaman'. Vol. 2.
No. 2, 1994; ‘Vgrðr and Gandr: Helping Spirits in Norse Magic’, Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi
Vol. 110, 1995; ‘Sources for Snorri 's depiction of Oðinn in Ynglinga saga: Lappish shaman-
ism and the Historia Norvegiae’, Maal og Minne 1996,67-79, and the further references they
include. On the dating of the Historia Norvegiae see G. Turville-Petre, Origins oflceiandic
Literature, Oxford, 1953, 174 f.
11 There is no evidence, I believe, that multiform monsters, such as the finngálkn, played any
part in Lappish tradition, though tales of the shaman’s spirit adventures in divers animal
forms might have contributed to that popular Norse image. The finngálkn now on record
belong to the Norse literary and leamed world, far removed from the living shamanic.
12 See 'The Shamanic séance’, cited in note 10 above, 142-143. Dr. Tolley has kindly sent me
the following note to explain some of the problems that are involved in an attempt to use
Lappish material for the elucidation of Norse texts;
Lappish shamanism is not very well recorded, as it died out before the nineteenth-century
ethnographers could describe it. As far as I know, it cannot unequivocally be demonstrated
that the Lapps had clan areas defended by speciftc shamans and their spirit-helpers, but such
a concept is fairly common in Siberian shamanism; the Evenks perhaps had the most
developed form of this, which is well recorded. The Historia Non’egiae (HN) demonstrates,
upon close examination, that the Lapps had a more detailed and developed form of
shamanism in the twelfth century than is recorded in the eighteenth-century accounts, as I
have shown in my article on it in 1994, and many of these features can only be understood by
reference to other shamanisms such as the Evenks’. The HN account is shamanism as seen
through a Norseman’s eyes, and he would not have been aware of many important features.
Among these would certainly have been the social stracture within which shamans worked:
it is more than likely that the individualist shamans of the HN account were actually
representatives of their clans, as is typical of shamanism elsewhere, and that the contest
represented clan or at least partisan rivalry undertaken in the spirit realm. The conversion of
a shaman into sharp stakes (HN) is particularly reminiscent of the marylya fence of the
Evenks, acting as a prohibitive boundary. The gálkn could be the protective spirit of the clan
or his spirit-helpers, perceived perhaps in transformed shapes, to suit their purposes. (C.T.).