I JUST LOST the long post I was writing updating my semi-annual poke at the accusation that those mean old Christians stole Yule from those poor, gentle, nature-loving folk, the pagans of Northern Europe. You know, the ones who practiced human, especially, female slave sacrifice as documented in at least one eye-witness account and in excavations of chieftain burials. I lost it in the electricity flickering during the awful ice storm we're having - thank you global warming - so I'll keep this short.
Looking for new material to add to the picture of that Osburg tapestry showing a pagan ceremonial sacrifice, including humans and animals, I found a fascinating paper by Eirik Storesund, a scholar of Old Norse and its litereature that says that the modern myth that the Norse Yule had anything to do with the winter solstice is totally unsupported in the Saga and other literature and so the whole modern conception of it - a conception shared with those big fat lovers of Norse paganism, the Nazis - is a big fat lie.
Take a moment to take a long, hard stare at the sun (proverbially of course). Is it not radiant? The tempting assumption that the solstices (and equinoxes) formed the basis of pre-Christian Scandinavian religious feasts, is prevalent not only in modern Heathenry and Ásatrú, but is also reproduced in countless popular media articles on the ancient origins (no pun intended) of Yule in Northern Europe. This view was also widely held by scholars of the field up until the turn of the last century, and though fewer think so today, it has somehow stuck. Even if many have changed their opinion in recent years, this has hardly seeped into the public consciousness.
It doesn't seem too idiotic at face value: The Nordic area can be a dang cold and harsh place. It's not exactly the fertile crescent. We'll take all the sunshine we can have. The old idea that Viking Age Scandinavians celebrated jól on the winter solstice as a sort of solar adoration, is among the most prevalent yuletide claims you'll see presented on the internet (or wherever) this year. It would seem intuitive that Viking Age Scandinavians greatly missed the sun at winter, and if jól was celebrated around the solstice, close to Christmas, it seems to explain how Christianity could simply just walk into Scandinavia and appropriate the heck out of our gluttonous solar feast.
As you must have guessed by now, it's quite more complicated than that, and it rests on a massive jump to conclusions with no direct support in any of the primary sources. And it’s not as if Old Norse texts never said anything about exactly when the yuletide sacrifices should commence, because they totally do, and it coincides with the astronomical winter solstice in exactly no source whatsoever. But that’s good news, because if you are like me, that’s a good excuse to celebrate the season not one or two, but three times properly.
None the less, you will find no shortage people who insist that the opposite is true, refusing to let the evidence speak for itself. To paraphrase the Swedish archaeologist Andreas Nordberg (cf. 2006: 102): Those who insist on refering to jól as the solstice, must be more interested in the solstice itself, than they are in sources for Norse religion.
Do go read it and look at the higher resolution picture of the sacrifice tapestry than I've had access to post in the past. I might write more about this later if the electricity doesn't go again. Modern life has a lot to answer for, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment