Abstracts and Programme
Final schedule
Wednesday 14 November, 19.30: Pre-conference pub night at Williams.
Please note that lunches and dinner are not included in the conference.
Thursday 15 November
8.30 Coffee & registration
9.00 Maths Bertell & Tommy Kuusela Introduction and welcome
9.30 Rudolf Simek The late Roman Iron Age Germanic Cult of the Matronae
10.00 Merrill Kaplan Konur vs Eddur
10.30 Eldar Heide Vǫlsa Þáttr's Vagina Dentata Alternative
11.00 Coffee
11.15 Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir On Spinning Deities and Icelandic Variants of ATU 500
11.45 Leszek Gardela Women and Miniature Weapons in the Viking Age
12.15 Lunch
13.30 Britt-Mari Näsström The Shameless Goddesses in Old Norse Mythology
14.00 Olof Sundqvist Female Cultic Leaders in Germanic and Ancient Scandinavian Sources
14.30 Charlotte Hedenstierna Jonson Active Men and Emblematic Women: a Reflection on Agency, Narrative and Interpretation in Archaeological Practice
15.00 Coffee
15.30 Luke John Murphy & Simon Nygaard Performing 'Valkyrjahood' in the late Iron Age Hall: Was the Sacred Space of Warrior Elite Religion as Masculine as We've Always Assumed.
16.00 Karen Bek-Pedersen Guðrún Ósvifrsdóttir and Cailleach Beare
17.00 Conference wine and beer reception.
Friday 16 November
9.15 Agneta Ney Wise women with a drinking horn. Female ex-warriors as a motif in literary and iconographical sources
9.45 Eila Stepanova & Frog Lamenters, Mythic Knowledge and Ritual Practice: The Question of Traditions in Late Iron Age and Medieval Scandinavia
10.15 Coffee
10.30 Catharina Raudvere Attraction and Aversion: Age and Bodily Appearance in Scandinavian Folk Legends
11.00 Frederik Wallenstein Gendered Memories in the Icelandic Saga-tradition
11.30 Kendra Willson Seiðr and Ergi noch einmal
12.00 Lunch
13.15 Henning Kure The Cunning of Frigg. On the Prose Prologue to Grímnismál
13.45 Ingunn Ásdísardottir Silly girls?
14.15 Jens Peter Schjødt The Feminine and the Masculine as semantic Categories in pre-Christian Scandinavia, especially in relation to Óðinn: Model and Reality.
14.45 Anne-Sofie Gräslund The Problem of Sex Determination of Archaeological Grave Finds
15.15 Coffee
15.45 Judy Quinn Time and the Feminine in Old Norse Mythology
16.15 Business meeting: summing up and future plans.
Saturday 17 November:
10.00 Post Conference excursion to Old Uppsala. Starts with lecture in the museum auditorium by John Ljungqvist. Topic: recent years excavations.
Abstracts
Aðalheiður Guðmundsdóttir, University of Iceland
On Spinning Deities and Icelandic Variants of ATU 500
In this paper, I will examine how traditional roles of Pre-Christian goddesses were passed on to succeeding supernatural figures like fairy tale witches, fairy godmothers, and troll women, and how the boundaries between goddesses and such beings became increasingly vague in folklore. Emphasis will be placed on stories of female entities that watch out for the welfare of young women, teaches them skills in handicraft and passes them on towards general maturity and development. In particular, I will focus on helping female figures in the fairy tale type ATU 500 ("The Name of the Supernatural Helper"), which seems to connote such memories of earlier goddesses. One of the best-known Icelandic variants of the given type is the story of Gilitrutt, which was recorded in the middle of the 19th century by the report of an old lady.
Karen Bek-Pedersen, University of Southern Denmark
Guðrún Ósvifrsdóttir and Cailleach Beare
"The life of Guðrún Ósvifrsdóttir, as portrayed in Laxdæla saga, is in many ways remarkable. She marries four times, yet never manages to marry 'the right man', and she ends her life as the first Christian nun and hermitess in Iceland. In this respect, there seem to be significant parallels between Guðrún and the Gaelic Cailleach-figure - especially Cailleach Beare. The paper explores the relationship between these two Norse-Gaelic women."
Charlotte Hedenstierna Jonson, Uppsala University
Active Men and Emblematizing Women: a Reflection on Agency, Narrative and Interpretations in Archaeological Practice
Graves provide one of the main sources when acquiring information about the people of past societies. In the process of collecting and documenting archaeological remains, the methods are explicit and requirements for scientific viability extensive. But when the facts have been documented and the process of interpretation begins, new approaches seem to apply. The study of a "warrior grave that turned out to be a woman" (grave Bj 581 from Birka), and the response it received, brought light to the fact that the interpretative process followed parallel frameworks depending on the gender of the buried individual. Gender became a game changer, making previously accepted interpretations no longer valid although nothing in the grave had actually changed. This paper is a reflection on how we as scholars approach the archaeological source material, the choices we make and the perspectives that influence our interpretations and narratives.
Eldar Heide, Bergen University College
Vǫlsa Þáttr's Vagina Dentata Alternative
Vǫlsa þáttr has come down to us as a story about how King Olav Haraldsson, disguised as Grímr 'the masked one', puts an end to a pagan cult involving a horse penis called Vǫlsi. In the ritual, led by the housewife, certain brúðkonur 'bridesmaids' and mǫrnir are asked to accept Vǫlsiin a sexual way, but when the ritual approaches its climax, Grímr instead throws the penis to the dog, who eats it, and the king converts the household to Christianity. Most historians of religion believe that the surviving version originates from a genuine account of a pre-Christian phallic ritual, where King Olav has replaced Óðinn, who often appeared in disguise, sometimes under the name Grímr, and who opposed fertility cult. Steinsland and Vogt have argued that mǫrniris the plural of mǫrn, which always refers to giantesses, sometimes to Skaði. In my opinion, this must be right, although it is hard to find other clear examples of what we understand as a cult of giantesses.
But this is only part of the picture. I will argue that the jaws of the female dog is not just a sad end of the would-be sacrifice Vǫlsi, but should be understood as a grotesque mirror-image of the desired brúðkonur / mǫrnir. The reason is that the bitch is described as a nymphomaniac she-wolf, which is a common caricature of women in Old Norse literature. This partly parallels Skáldskaparmál 3, where Skaði agrees to marry Njǫrðr after a tugging-contest where Loki ties a rope around his genitals and the other end around the beard of a she-goat, and both pull until Loki falls onto Skaði's lap. Sitting in someone's lap in Old Norse literature alludes to sex, whereas the goat, which in this case is close to castrating Loki, in Old Norse literature also represents the female nymphomaniac caricature. A further parallel may be found in the little known Eddic poem Fjǫlsvinnsmál. The hero tries to access the giantess whom he loves, Menglǫð, who resides in a well-guarded fortress. When he presents himself under the false name Vindkaldr'Wind-Cold', the guard probably tells him (the text is partly corrupt) to throw the world-tree rooster's genitals to the watchdogs Gífr 'ogress' and Geri 'wolf', but this leads to destruction. Then, when he presents himself under his true name, Svipdagr 'Swift-Day', sun of Sólbjartr'Sun-Bright', he is allowed to enter unhindered and lie down in the arms of the giantess surrounded by her maidens, who, it says, accept sacrifices from people (the verb blóta). From the context, this sacrifice seems to be sexual union. Another analogue may be Hávamál 97-101, where Óðinn loves a giantess, but is kept away by guards and finds a bitch in her bed instead.
According to a view common among scholars today, there is no opposition as such between gods and giants, but rather a relationship of mutual dependence, where the gods exploit the giants in a way that eventually leads to their own destruction. It is this idea, I believe, that we meet in the stories where sexual relationships with giantesses have two opposing alternatives: sexual union or destruction. In some cases, these alternatives are kept separate; in others, they are combined.
Ingunn Ásdísardóttir, University of Iceland
Silly Girls?
In this paper I propose a new interpretation of the sts 14-23 in Hárbarðsljóð. I suggest that this section is one whole, relating of Óðinn's dwelling among jǫtnarand jǫtunn-women and instead of idle warring and womanizing, he has come there for acquisition of knowledge in which jǫtunn-women play a decisive part. Scholars have focused more on the poem's form or formlessness than its content and mostly deemed it a simple demonstration of a stupid and clumsy Þórr posed against a sly and clever Óðinn. In my view, the poem reaches far deeper than describing such a situation. In its content it gives an interesting view of the interchange between the gods and the jǫtnarand jǫtunn-women and is in its references to the jǫtnara more coherent entity than has hitherto been acknowledged.
Merrill Kaplan, The Ohio State University
Konur vs Eddur
When I began teaching Norse myth to undergrads, I structured the material as I had learned it, starting with Odin, taking Thor next, then Frey, the rest of the gods in order of increasing obscurity, moving onto the goddesses and ending with the usually nameless and always female dísir, valkyrjur, nornir, and vǫlur. Mythographers since Snorri have put the Big Two up front and the shadowy females at the end, but this organization occludes the way the Æsir are subject to rather than masters of fate and death. Here I'll suggest some benefits for flipping syllabi around and putting ladies first.
Leszek Gardeła, University of Bonn and University of Bergen
Women and Miniature Weapons in the Viking Age
Miniaturisation is a popular global phenomenon with prehistoric roots. The idea of making small-scale reproductions of various objects also reached Scandinavia and was particularly common in the Viking Age. In recent years, as a result of professional excavations and amateur metal detecting, the corpus of miniature items dating from the ninth to eleventh centuries has increased dramatically, especially in Denmark, Sweden and the British Isles. Many of these curious finds have the form of weapons, such as shields, axes, spears and swords, or depict female-looking figures carrying arms. When objects of this kind are found in graves, they are typically associated with women. Using comparative archaeological materials and textual sources, the present paper will seek to explore what these miniatures meant for the people of the Viking Age.
Anne-Sofie Gräslund, Uppsala University
The Problem of Sex Determination of Archaeological Grave Finds
Sex determination of grave finds has traditionally had mainly two possibilities: archaeological or osteological sex determination. Now DNA-analyses are becoming more common, but they are still expensive and time-consuming.
I will discuss this with examples from the Valsgärde cemetery, where some cremation graves give an archaeological sex determination for the buried persons as women while the result of the osteological analysis points out them as men. There may be various explanations why a person could have a different/deviant gender - an individual might have had different gender roles in different phases of life or could have been queer and/or transvestites, both cases mentioned in the Old Norse literature.
Henning Kure
The Cunning of Frigg. On the Prose Prologue to Grímnismál
The prose introduction to the mythological poem Grímnismál apparently paints a far from flattering portrait of the goddess Frigg as a stereotypical spiteful wife, who is willing to use deceit and cause humiliation and suffering to her husband, Óðinn, in order to win an argument she knows is a lie. The myth is recognizable as a variant of what may be the earliest preserved written record of an 'Old Norse' mythic narrative in Origio gentis Langobardorum(ca. AD 680) about Frea/Frigg's successful manipulation of Godan/Óðinn in favor of her champions against his. The outcome of both myths is an irreversible change in the lives of their human protégés, which - along with other elements of the myth - brings the semantic field of initiation to mind. However, the relation between women and men seems to be at the heart of the story, so is it really just about a dirty war of sexes? And - as a myth - does it tell us anything about the role of genders in a possible pre-Christian worldview?
Luke John Murphy and Simon Nygaard, Aarhus University
Performing 'Valkyrjahood' in the late Iron Age Hall: Was the Sacral Space of Warrior Elite Religion as Masculine as We've Always Assumed?
The religion of the hall-based, martial elite of the late Iron Age has traditionally been regarded as intensely masculine, although whether this is an accurate understanding of the past due to, for instance, strict gender roles in the Iron Age - or is rather due to the elite Christian provenance of our extant sources or modern scholarly bias - remains unclear. This paper seeks to interrogate the hall as a cultic space, asking whether these spaces provided, allowed, or even required the active participation of the female elite. It uses ritual and spatial theory to examine a discourse based on a combination of Old Norse poetry and prose, arguing that some late Iron Age women may have actively performed a valkyric role within the imagined space of the hall, and that a similar role may have been projected onto women by men in other spaces - notably the battlefield. We therefore propose that the traditional view of hall-based, martial elite cult as predominantly masculine is an oversimplification that overlooks the prominent role of women in establishing the boundaries of sacral space in the late Iron Age.
Agneta Ney, Uppsala University
Wise Women with a Drinking Horn. Female Ex-Warriors as a Motif in Literary and Iconographical Sources
Male warriors live their eternal lives in Valhalla, at least some of them, others die of age or get killed in their marital beds. What about female ex-warriors? The question will be further discussed in my paper, but it seems, according to well-known examples from the Old Norse Literature, as if the expectancy for a former shield-maiden or Valkyrie is marriage and a life more or less devoted to embroidery. However, some unmarried female ex-warriors are connected with wisdom and a mythological-heroic mead tradition. The aim of my paper is mainly to present an analysis of the drinking-horn motif as a ceremonial performance in different sources.
Britt-Mari Näsström, Gothenburg University
The Shameless Goddesses in Old Norse Mythology
The goddesses of the Old Norse mythology are described in our remaining sources as naturally immoral. Such description suits well with their functions as fertility goddesses, but the myths rather declare their behavior as indecent and sometimes inspired by the devil. As heathen divinities they represent an unwelcoming domain, but why did the Christian authors contempt their fertility? The monotheistic view provides a broader answer, but why and when did fertility goddess became a symbol of evil in the heathen mythology? Their perfidy was reiterated and their thirst for gold unfulfilled. My lecture aims to present an origin of the negative portrayal of the Old Norse Goddesses in the sources.
Judy Quinn, Cambridge University
Time and the Feminine in Old Norse Mythology
One of the most striking distinctions between male and female patterns of behaviour in Old Norse mythology is the relationship of beings to time. Specifically, the knowledge of female beings appear to be less time-bound than the knowledge of male figures. The völvain Völuspá, for instance, has a memory that stretches back way beyond a human life-span and she and other female mythological figures are represented as having access to detailed knowledge about events of the future, up to and occasionally beyond ragnarök. In my paper I'll explore some of the implications of this, including the sense that the mythological female mind is less bound to her mortal body than the masculine mind might be.
Catharina Raudvere, University of Copenhagen
Attraction and Aversion. Age and Bodily Appearance in Scandinavian Folk Legends
The bodily aspects of the beings appearing in the Scandinavian folk legends tend to be either very physical or almost ghost-like. This paper intends to add age as well as animal shape into the discussion about the tactile aspects of folk-belief imaginaries.
Narratives of both the lure and the repulsion of the cloven-hoofed, the hairy and the bogey-bodied are not only entertaining testimonies of belief in otherworldly beings, but also provide glimpses of morals and aesthetics as well as indications of a creative zone of shared conceptions between popular narratives and Christian dogma.
Jens Peter Schjødt, Aarhus University
The Feminine and the Masculine as semantic Categories in pre-Christian Scandinavia, especially in relation to Óðinn: Model and Reality
This paper aims at discussing the semantic categories feminine and masculine, especially in connection with the so-called feminine characteristics by the god Óðinn. I shall begin by discussing some elements in the recent research situation, primarily in the approaches which may, in a broad sense, be labelled 'feministic' or 'queer theoretical'. It will be argued that part of the argument within these branches confuses descriptive and normative arguments, and therefore appears somewhat anachronistic. The main example, as mentioned, will be some recent view points in the discussion about Óðinn concerning his role and function within the pre-Christian world view, where it is argued that the idea of Óðinn as a third gender figure is purely a modern construction without any support in the mythological sources.
Rudolf Simek, University of Bonn
The late Roman Iron Age Germanic Cult of the Matronae
The deities named on inscription stones (Votiv altars) in the Roman provinces of Germania inferiorand Britannia are the oldest undoubtedly Germanic gods and goddesses we know of. The etymologies and meanings of their names as well as the names of the dedicators are Germanic, so there is no doubt we have here the remnants of a cult of - mainly female - Germanic deities. The cult is testified to between the 2nd and 5th centuries and seemed to have come to an end with the Christianization of Frankish and other Germanic gentes. The triad of female deities, which is well testified in these centuries by a huge variety of names, accompanied by a quite rich iconography on many of the ca. 1600 wholly or partially preserved stones, is only rarely answered by triadic female deities in later Scandinavian sources, where not even the names of such deities are recorded. Thus, it hast to be asked in which form these deities can be found in later sources and what their functions would have been in the Middle Ages.
Eila Stepanova, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies and Frog, University of Helsinki
Lamenters, Mythic Knowledge and Ritual Practice: The Question of Traditions in Late Iron Age and Medieval Scandinavia
This paper explores, from the perspective of folklore studies, evidence of lament as a genre of performance practice in Late Iron Age and Medieval Scandinavia. Evidence consided includes eddic poetry, saga literature, uses of skaldic verse, a runic inscription, 19th-century ethnographic information from Norway and Sweden, comparative evidence from other Old Germanic cultures, and contextualization in more recent evidence of the Circum-Baltic tradition area. We argue that the diverse evidence supports the view of lament as a women's practice that was current in Scandinavia by the Viking Age, presumably already with long-term continuities. The implications of such practice will be discussed in terms of ritual roles and mythic knowledge associated with them, and how the sources available may reshape their representation according to their respective generic conventions.
Olof Sundqvist, Stockholm University
Female Cultic Leaders in Germanic and Ancient Scandinavian Sources
Old Norse sources report that both males and females could be in charge of religious and magical practice in pre-Christian Scandinavia. Somewhat stressed, one can say that previous researchers often has construed a kind of dichotomous stereotype in their description of them. The males appeared in the public cult at the aristocratic halls located at central places. There they devoted themselves to worshiping the warlike Æsir-deities, such as Óðinn and Þórr. The women, on the other hand, performed rituals in considerably more limited social environments, that is, in the private and local cult of simpler sanctuaries. If they sacrificed publicly, it was exclusively in a fertility cult aimed at the deities called Vanir, i.e. Frey and Freyja. The main ritual activity for females was magic. That kind of rites was often questioned by the elite and ill-fitting for men. In my opinion there is a certain imbalance between this binary modelconstrued by scholars and the actual information provided about the cultic leaders in the original sources. This anomaly will be discussed in my paper.
Frederik Wallenstein, Stockholm University
Gendered Memories in the Icelandic Saga-tradition
The theory of "Cultural memory", developed by Jan and Aleida Assmann, has made quite an impact on Old Norse studies in the last 10 or 15 years, resulting in a wide array of interesting and fruitful studies. Since the theory mainly focuses on textual and material sources it has mainly been the concern of literary scholars and archaeologists and the theory has met lesser enthusiasm from historians of religion. An effect of this (in turn an effect of the nature of the Old Norse sources) has been that in Old Norse studies the focus on diachronic tradition over vast periods of time so central in the work of Jan Assmann hasn't really taken root.
I will briefly discuss the possibility of using cultural memory studies as a way of tracing aspects of the Old Norse oral saga-tradition (the theory does need some amendments for this to work) and then move on to the question of gendered memories as a kind of smaller memory-spaces within the larger tradition, perhaps functioning as spaces for counter-memories and counter-narratives balancing the more dominant (male) modes of narration. If we allow ourselves to speculate perhaps there are even some faint traces of such traditions in the written sagas.
Kendra Willson, University of Turku
Seiðr and Ergi noch einmal
A wide variety of explanations have been proposed for the statement in Ynglinga saga chapter 7 that the seiðr magic counted among Óðinn's skills was attended by such ergi (catastrophic unmanliness) that it was considered unsuitable for men. Many of these proposals draw on the similarly disputed identification of seiðr as a type of shamanism and/or a cultural borrowing from the Sámi. Some seem to reflect the gender discourse of the scholars' own time in ways that are not fully supported by the sources. I will review these theories and suggest that the ergi of seiðr is connected to metaphorical and metonymical projections between the domestic and external spheres, on the one hand, and on the other, between the spatial and temporal axes of Norse cosmology.