Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 12
10 GRIPLA
Nordberg 2018 remark, that rarely presents a problem for scholars’ ap-
plication of religion to early conceptions of Christianity), and Old Norse
worshippers have values, abstractions and narratives that are even more dis-
similar still. Using a common terminology potentially highlights contrasts
between traditions as well as correspondences and can be used to better ex-
plicate the object of study, especially in tandem with an investigation of the
signification of related emic terms like siðr. Crucially for this study, it would
be confusing to utilize siðr here as a conceptual category when it is the term
being investigated.
The label morality is also used below; while less controversial in Old
Norse studies (presumably because the topic itself has been pondered less),
as an etic term its validity could be queried on the same basis as that of re-
ligion, especially as multiple potential definitions exist. Morality is applied
here, in the way that religion is, as a useful framework for analysis; follow-
ing Bernard and Joshua Gert (2017), I use it descriptively to mean “certain
codes of conduct put forward by a society or a group (such as a religion), or
accepted by an individual for her own behaviour.”
The corpus of literature attesting to Old Norse religion is fragmentary,
which is a major challenge for this study, as it was for Nordberg’s survey of
siðr’s religious connotations (and arguably is for any investigation of Old
Norse religion). Another difficulty is the extent to which that corpus has
been altered, reinterpreted and partly created by Christians (see further
and more generally McKinnell 2005, 37–49). Moreover, even within this
relatively small and problematic body of texts, only a fraction utilize the
word siðr, and the vast majority of these are by Christian authors working
centuries after the conversion of their lands – although a few may have been
composed by eleventh-century poets who grew up around the worship of
Old Norse gods.
To address these issues, I work mainly with skaldic poetry, as it is often
attributed to named poets and, comparatively speaking, more easily dated
than sources like sagas; I stray most from skaldic poetry when attempting
to widen the geographical range of the survey towards eastern Scandinavia.
Given the difficulties with the available sources, I do not expect to defini-
tively answer my research questions; nevertheless, the dearth of research on
links between morality and religion makes the questions pressing all the
same, and my hope is that even the cautious answers below are a useful step
towards elucidating both those spheres of Old Norse thought.