Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 11

S I Ð R , RELIGION AND MORALITY 9
• The juxtaposition of siðr and religion tends to privilege
Christianity by comparing Christian theology with non-theo-
logical elements of non-Christian traditions.
Even so, few of the articles cited above or in the work of Lindberg or
Nordberg use siðr without recognizing the gulf between their conceptions
of the world and that of a ninth-century worshipper of Freyja, and the
specific term employed (siðr, religion, or another such as lived or popular
religion) is surely less important than researchers’ self-consciousness of its
being provisional, their inherent biases, and the imposition that any term
places on the model of history being built.
For this article, I have nevertheless chosen to favour Lindberg and
Nordberg’s reasoning and employ religion. As Nordberg argues in his first
contribution (2012, 120–22), the term may be used if there is a recognition
that it is a construction, not identical with an ever-changing reality but
through which reality can be better apprehended and studied, despite the
potential for souring analyses by basing them in a modern – potentially
WEIRD (i.e. Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)
– categorization of behaviour and outlook. Religion is a culturally inflected
label, but whether I used it or siðr, my own biases will inevitably influence
my perspective on Old Norse material; as any modern observer unavoid-
ably does, I already come to that material with certain categories both con-
sciously and unconsciously in mind, and while my sources may challenge
those categories, they will also be contorted and twisted by them. Using an
etic terminology appears to me the most candid response to this problem.
Furthermore, employing religion should not imply a belief that all tradi-
tions are the same (nor that the moralities of different cultures are). While
two as dissimilar as the Old Norse and Abrahamic traditions do emerge
from the same ordinary cognitive capacities (cf. White 2021), that cognition
is expressed according to disparate cultural, physical, social, and techno-
logical environments. A nominally singular religion like Roman Catholicism
might find its mythology and doctrines interpreted quite differently in, say,
parts of twenty-first-century Spain and Ireland with practical consequences
for everyday life; modern and medieval Catholicisms are at further removes
from either of these modern counterparts (although, as Lindberg 2009 and
are mentioned in this article, Iceland’s most frequently. That is supposed to have occurred in
999 or 1000 CE. On that event, see further Orri Vésteinsson 2001; for a general overview of
conversion and Christianization in what is now Scandinavia, see Brink 2008b.