Old Norse Mythology—Comparative Perspectives ed. by Pernille Hermann, Stephen A. Mitchell, and Jens Peter Schjødt, with Amber J. Rose (review)

As indicated by the title, the starting point of the anthology Old Norse Mythology—Comparative Perspectives is the religion of Viking Age Scandinavia, but the contributions cover an enormous geographic field and time period and embody many different comparative approaches and methods. According to the editors, the study of Old Norse mythology can benefit from "comparativisms of different sorts, that is, comparative with respect to theories as well as tradition areas" (p. xiii). The goal is to study the essence of the mythology; the rationale is that in order to understand phenomena of Old Norse mythology, it should be compared to various expressions of similar phenomena in different cultures, in different times, and in different places. The idea is not to revivify the comparative approach to mythology attempted by nineteenth century scholars, whose approach to mythology was related to Orientalism and the Romantic paradigm of the time, the upcoming field of Indo-European linguistics, and Friedrich von Schelling's Naturphilosophie. Instead, comparativism is viewed in a much broader perspective, both within the Old Norse area itself (acknowledging that people in that area probably told different versions of myths and did not necessarily share the same world view) and with mythologies further afield. Accordingly, the study of different textual versions of one myth is, for example, defined as comparativism along with the comparison of written versions "with what may have constituted oral versions" (p. xvi). The different contributions thus study myths of Old Norse mythology in the Nordic area itself, in texts; compare them to archeological finds, myths in the Balto-Finnic area, India, and China; and search for origins of myths in Christian Medieval culture, in natural phenomena, and Indo-European mythology—and beyond.

The anthology consists of fifteen articles and is divided into three parts: Part 1: "Theoretical and Conceptual Comparisons"; Part 2: "Local and Neighboring Traditions"; Part 3: "Global Traditions." There are two forewords—a Series Forword (by David Elmer, Casey Dué, Gregory Nagy, and Stephen Mitchell) and a Foreword by Jospeph Harris—and a Preface in which the editors outline the scope and goal of the anthology. In the first article of the volume, "Pre-Christian Religions of the North and the Need for Comparativism," Jens Peter Schjødt argues that a comparative method is unavoidable if scholars intend to reconstruct an authentic pre-Christian religion of the North, and that structures or models based on comparative studies may be more important for the study of Old Norse religion than source criticism. Using Bellah's 2011 monograph Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, he forwards the hypothesis that "cultures which are more or less on the same technological and political levels will tend to develop parallel religious traits and structures" (p. 22), and that historians of religion applying a comparative approach are able to reconstruct basic structures of a mythology. In the following article, "Methodological Challenges to the Study of Old Norse Myths," Pernille Hermann gives an overview of emerging tendencies in current scholarship about mythology with a focus on the discussion about orality and literacy, discussing the transmission of myths in different media—oral, written, and pictorial—and she argues that the coexistence of a number of equally authentic myths makes tracing origins problematic. In "Framing the Hero: Medium and Metalepsis in Old Norse Heroic Narrative," Kate Heslop discusses the frame in codices and on rune stones, that is, the primary sources' self-conception of their historicity. Her focus is the Codex Regius of the eddic poems and Rökstenen, and she shows that there is a difference in attitude toward the narrative material in the manuscript: "A striking characteristic of the prose frame of the heroic part is its insistent reference to the...