Royal Ideology in Early Scandinavia: A Theory Versus the Texts

Introduction: The Theory

In 1989 the Norwegian historian of religion, Gro Steinsland, successfully defended her doctoral dissertation at the University of Oslo, and in 1991 published it as a book, with the title Det hellige bryllup og norrøn kongeideologi (The Sacred Marriage and Norse Royal Ideology)¹. When they were first published, Steinsland’s arguments received considerable largely positive attention,² and she has continued to promote them up to the present time in numerous publications and lectures, the latest presentation being her plenary lecture to the Fifteenth International Saga Conference in Aarhus in August 2012.³ In fact, with the passage of time, a number of her arguments have grown bolder and less nuanced. For the most part, scholars appear to have accepted the validity of her theories, and there have been few who have gainsaid them or offered detailed critiques of them.⁴ More than twenty years after its first publication, the present article seeks to examine the textual bases of Steinsland’s hypothesis in some detail, grounding itself upon some of the new resources made available by major contemporary research projects that have as their objectives the better understanding of Old Norse poetry, which is the foundation upon which her arguments are based. Chief among these new resources are the extensive set of commentaries to the poems of the Poetic Edda now almost completed by a research team at the University of Frankfurt and the new edition of skaldic poetry being published in hard copy by Brepols from 2007 and online by the editors.⁵

Available resources for the study of pre-Christian modes of thought among the early Nordic peoples are largely confined to early vernacular texts, usually in poetic form, together with material objects like standing stones and archaeological finds of various kinds, which are considerable and growing in number all the time, thanks to the vigor of contemporary archaeology. Both material objects and texts require interpretation and understanding. The early texts are methodologically problematic, because for the most part they were recorded in writing long after they were allegedly composed, and by people who were Christian. Although certain properties of early Norse poetry, like metre, rhyme, and alliteration, may offer some guarantee of authenticity, its evidentiary value as witness to earlier cultural ways of thinking and behaving must be carefully assessed. The context in which this poetry has been preserved or used is also something that requires careful evaluation. As is well known, much skaldic poetry is recorded in prose texts of a later period, whether in historical sources in which the poetry is quoted as support for the prose author’s narrative, or in sagas with mixed historical and entertainment objectives. Very frequently, what were probably original long poems were chopped up by later historians in order to provide quotable quotes for their narratives. Further, the major part of our extant textual material was written down in Iceland by Icelanders and not in Norway, Sweden, or Denmark, where some of the events represented took place and the poets who composed a good many of the verses came from. There is good reason, then, to be very circumspect in the use of poetic resources for the interpretation of modes of thought of the preliterate period. This makes it all the more important that a theory, such as Gro Steinsland’s, based on a holistic analysis of early Nordic poems as mythical structures, is also able to stand up to detailed textual analysis in such a way as to provide sufficient internal evidence for the theory itself.

The textual material upon which Steinsland’s arguments are based includes two poems in eddic metres, Skírnismál (The speech of Skírnir) and Hyndluljóð (The song of Hyndla)⁶ and two genealogical poems in the skaldic metre kviðuháttr, namely Ynglingatal (Enumeration of the Ynglingar) and Háleygjatal (Enumeration of the Háleygir).⁷ While the two eddic poems are anonymous and difficult to date, the two skaldic poems are attributed to the late ninth- or early tenth-century skald Þjóðólfr ór Hvini (Ynglingatal...