Gripla - 20.12.2018, Side 316

GRIPLA316
ties, complex chiefdoms, and the tribal societies … gods, powerful beings,
ancestors, and humans exist on a continuum – there are no absolute breaks
between these categories.”9 our sources, despite their Christian world
view, comfortably support the lack of an absolute break between human
and divine. Humans derived from gods (think Rígsþula, not to mention the
so-called Learned Prehistory); gods and humans interact (think Starkaðr);
humans could apparently ascend to the status of gods (think King Eiríkr
of Sweden); and the gods themselves are, like humans, mortal (think Baldr
and ragnarøk).
although the Poetic Edda seems to separate gods from humans, that
separation could be the result of the Christian point of view of the redac-
tor, or it may, in fact, just be the result of a medieval historical viewpoint:
Óðinn and Þórr lived farther back in time than Helgi Hundingsbani,
Sigurðr, Hamðir, and Sǫrli. the same meters were used for all the poems,
and the picture stones, too, offer evidence not of separation of gods and
heroes but rather of intermingling. a lack of cultural competence could
easily lead medieval authors astray. for example, the Christian Snorri
Sturluson lacked the cultural competence to see the permeable boundaries
among gods, powerful beings, ancestors, and humans, and so he worked
with the idea of two separate figures named Bragi, a human poet and a god
of poetry. they were one and the same.
I will let the example of the permeable boundaries between gods and
humans – and in-between – stand in for the entire notion of cultural com-
petence as it applies to the study of pre-Christian religion of the north. In
the time that remains to me, I wish to turn to another point where folklor-
istics intersects with that study.
From the very beginning of the Pre-Christian Religions of the North
project, my co-editors and I have been guided by the fact that there is absolute-
ly no evidence anywhere in the voluminous record of pre-Christian nordic
religion of a canon of sacred texts, like the Bible or Quran. the pre-Christian
religious traditions of the north therefore comprised a so-called primary reli-
gion, not a secondary religion, according to the valuable distinction put forth
by the Egyptologist Jan assmann. although canons can exist in primarily oral
societies, such as those of ancient Egypt or India, most primary religions exist
9 Robert N. Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age
(Cambridge and London: the Belknap Press of Harvard university Press, 2011).