Gripla - 2023, Page 26

24 GRIPLA
of the small extant corpus). Above, I gave the caveat that lexical variation
between West and East Norse (and Old Gnutish) is understudied in com-
parison to, for instance, phonological deviations; nevertheless, semantic
consistency does seem more likely to persist from the Viking Age than
arise from later influence of West Norse on eastern languages. Indeed,
influence probably travelled in the other direction, especially from the
fourteenth century onwards (Herbert 2007). As I also noted above, the
more pronounced “moral” denotation of the word is not far from the con-
notations of judgement, based on the fulfilment of social expectations,
already prominent in siðr in the tenth-century work of Þórarinn loftunga
and Hallfreðr vandræðaskáld (and one of its possible etymologies; see fn.
2). When set alongside the geographical range across which siðr “moral” is
found, this early date suggests that the term could denote the concept of
morality in the Viking Age.
Both poems are addressed to Christian kings and so may have been
influenced by how the term was used by Christians. However, Hallfreðr,
at least, was brought up as a worshipper of Old Norse gods, and that reli-
gion was not immediately extinguished with the conversion of Iceland, so
Christian influence is not a better explanation for siðr’s meaning in these
poems. That meaning could also reflect earlier Christian contact, as many
other concepts of Old Norse religion might; unadulterated, homogenous
Old Norse religion existed no more than unadulterated, homogeneous
Christianity ever has. Whether this is a concern matters only to research-
ers for whom the (less answerable) question of origins is more important
than the relevance of the concept and word to worshippers of Old Norse
gods.
Norms and Flexibility
Morality is not much easier to separate from religion than from custom
and practice in the extant usage of siðr. When the anonymous poet of
Líknarbraut describes their god as siðskjótr “siðr-quick” (st. 6), are they
praising values that are moral or religious? At times, this ignorance indi-
cates how little context a twenty-first-century researcher has for under-
standing a word’s significance in skaldic poetry; at others, however, it can
reflect how morals proceed from Christianity for many of the poets who