Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature by Christopher Abram (review)

This is a difficult book to review and evaluate in a scholarly journal because it knowingly flouts the normal academic conventions whereby works of scholarship are usually evaluated. Christopher Abram knows and asserts several times in Evergreen Ash that his ecocritical presentation of Old Norse mythology is self-consciously anachronistic, as such a practice of interrogating medieval texts to see whether they measure up to modern ecocritical criteria must inevitably be. If, as he claims (p. 124), “it is the business of ecocriticism to help us prevent or simply survive the catastrophe of anthropogenic ecological collapse,” which is both a modern concept and a modern preoccupation, it follows that his primary goal in the present book must be to press Old Norse mythology into the service of literary ecocriticism rather than to undertake a study of the mythology as far as possible on its own terms, bearing in mind the caveat that any interpretation at a remove from its point of origin necessarily entails some form of bias on the part of the interpreter.

So is this book, as the blurb on the back of the dust cover promises, “the key reference point for everyone interested in how Old Norse Icelandic literature and ecocriticism might illuminate each other”? I think the answer depends on who that “everyone” is. For the ecocritic, the book’s analysis of Old Norse mythology, including accounts of the creation of the world, its peopling with classes of beings, and its ending in Ragnarǫk, will hold much of interest, especially if that reader knows relatively little of the mythology. Much of chapters 2, 3, 6, and 7 provide a largely accurate and up-to-date reading of its fundamentals. For the Old Norse specialist, however, and especially the specialist in mythology, large stretches of the book rehearse the known, or at least make use of the interpretative framework for Norse mythology established over the decades since about 1970, while plentiful references to and quotations from approved ecocritics act as a slight irritant, especially when they are given prominence over the words of Old Norse scholars who have been there before them.

Chapter 5, on the representation of the settlement of Iceland and the various sagas about the Norse discovery of North America, deviates from the centrally mythological parts of the book. It will interest postcolonialists, especially North American ones, but the author has not persuaded this reviewer that these works encode the myth of the loss of the Golden Age, nor that there is any awareness in them of the inevitability of environmental degradation, caused by the Icelanders’ felling of trees and grazing large mammals, in medieval Icelandic writings. The Paradisal images, to the extent they exist, are fleeting and are overshadowed by other, less optimistic frames of reference.

In his concluding chapter and at various other points in this book, Abram admits that the same dualism between Nature and Culture as modern ecocritics try to transcend can be found pervasively in Old Norse mythology, so that it cannot be used as a model for modern ecocritics seeking a premodern “worlding.” We cannot know, however, whether those who created and received these myths understood them in quite the same way as modern analysts do, even conceding with Abram (p. 83) that one medieval mythographer, Snorri Sturluson, “was a structuralist avant la lettre” (“structuralism” apparently being a dirty word for ecocritics because its methodology enforces the “Great Divide” between Nature and Society; see p. 134). There is no evidence either that medieval Icelanders connected the Ragnarǫk narrative directly to their own environmental history as colonists of a fragile volcanic landscape and used it to figure their society’s eventual destruction.

Although Abram is honest enough to concede that Old Norse mythology expresses a similar dualism between Nature and Culture to the one that ecocriticism abhors...