Gripla - 2023, Blaðsíða 29

S I Ð R , RELIGION AND MORALITY 27
Íslendingabók’s testimony makes it difficult to say if non-Christians felt
the same. Nonetheless, the awkwardness of the events as they are told in
Íslendingabók may hint that a kernel of fact is at the heart of the narrative; a
compromise followed by later abolition is bad storytelling, intimating that
Icelandic siðr around the Conversion was flexible enough to be separated
from law until Christianity attained dominance. In this it is supported
by hints from elsewhere that the practice of Old Norse religion was not
exclusive of Christianity (Dubois 1999 surveys signs of both co-existence
and conflict). Yet the situation likely varied or was more circumstantial
than these tendrils of evidence allow for: without looking farther than
Íslendingabók, one can find a penalty for blasphemy against the Old Norse
gods (p. 17),17 and even if Christianity is the social disrupter bringing legal
change in Iceland, the narrative allots considerable resistance to adherents
of Old Norse gods as well. Likely there were connections between reli-
gion, law, and governance before Christianity began to exert pressure (for
examples, see Taggart 2022a; Nygaard 2021; and above all Brink 2002),
and in general siðaskipti potentially had serious costs for a worshipper of an
Old Norse god, alongside alienation from their in-group. Conversion for
Hallfreðr, according to his lausavísur, meant renouncing sacrifice (lausa-
vísur 6, 10) but also the gods’ love and favour (lausavísur 7, 9), support
(lausavísur 7, 8), good luck (lausavísa 6), skaldic tradition (lausavísa 7;
see Males 2017 for this in action), and the skǫp of the nornir (see fn. 10).
(Further consequences should be expected that were not directly relevant
to his poetry.)
Therefore, the flexibility of Old Norse siðr is probably sometimes il-
lusory – both as a function of its being reported in later Christian texts and
because its praxis was not seriously tested until Christianization began in
earnest – and sometimes a sign of individual, circumstantial, or commu-
nal variety. The situation remains ambiguous, given the lack of evidence
(and the late dating of instances of siðr), but certainly there is evidence to
suggest that a siðr in the Viking Age could embrace a very large sphere of
meaning, incorporating an array of norms as well as religion, as much for
non-Christians as for Christians, and probably reflecting the links between
17 While Íslendingabók does say goðgá “blasphemy,” Grønlie 2006, 24 nevertheless suggests it
may have been for slander. Parallels are so lacking that it is impossible to discount either
possibility.