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discuss the apparent survivals we do have of myth and legend. for what
folklorists know and have always known is that the amount of material is
vast – in some cases almost too vast to contemplate, as I just said – and
that the variation within this material is endless. this is a lesson I learned
when I innocently set out to prepare a lecture comparing old Scandinavian
mythology with the mythology in Kalevala-style poetry from finland and
elsewhere. I was first drawn to the project by some obvious similarities of
structure and style, which I conjectured might have presupposed bilinguals
around the Baltic Sea influencing each other’s verse. I duly toted up such
similarities in my lecture, but what I took away from that piece of research
is that most of us working in old Scandinavian myth and religion have
simply no idea of how large the scale of narrative materials can be in oral
tradition. the corpus of mythological poetry published by the finnish
Literary Society, Suomen kansan vanhat runot [old runic songs of the
finnish people] fills dozens of thick volumes. areas of distribution include
Finland, Karelia, Ingria, and Estonia. Having also seen the amount of ma-
terial in the Parry-Lord collection at Harvard, and a few other large folk-
lore databases, I am firmly convinced that modern collecting techniques
over, let us say, the last 200 years of the Viking age, would have yielded
a corpus of something like the size of materials we find for Kalevala-style
mythological poetry: dozens of thick volumes instead of a few thin ones.
Based on this assumption, a pessimist might be tempted to say that
our extant materials are simply too scanty to make us very confident in
our reconstructions of pre-Christian religion of the north. I would argue
instead that it makes our job easier, since apparently contradictory data are
precisely what we would expect. If we consider the large corpus that surely
underlay the few texts and other sources that have come down to us, we
must say: Of course Þórr fishes up the world serpent alone in the boat in
some versions and with a companion in the boat in others. Of course Þórr
kills the world serpent in some recorded versions of the myth but not in
others. Of course Þórr fights the serpent at ragnarøk, even if he previously
killed it when he fished it up. Large oral corpora must show variation,
some of it considerable.
But – and this is the takeaway – within all this variation there are con-
stants. Þórr battles the world serpent, just as he battles other powerful cha-
os beings. Knowledge of that constant, part of what in the Pre-Christian
FOLKLORISTICS, MYTH, AND RELIGION