In our continuous efforts to bring in experts and academicians from around the world, we bring you an interview with Dr. Karl E. H. Seigfried, a Norse Mythologist and a writer on mythology and religion. In this interview, with Utkarsh Patel, he speaks on various aspects of Norse Mythology and compares the same with different myths from across the world.
Myth and symbolism in a Nordic world
The pandemic and its ongoing disruption in our lives has led many to question the meaning of life, to look beyond the routine humdrum of existence that we are all used to. Over time and across the world, this has been the role that mythology has played—stitching together a quilt of beliefs, traditions and stories to reveal big ideas and complex patterns. In this interview with Utkarsh Patel, Dr Karl E. H. Seigfried, Norse Mythologist, writer and blogger on mythology and religion tells us just how important a part mythology plays in our lives and how it deepens our understanding of religious meaning.
On traditional tales and cultural context
Myths are traditional tales told within a religious culture that express that culture’s worldview and/or explain beliefs, practices, and the natural world. There are Christian and Jewish myths just as there are Norse and Hindu myths. In the past, before northern Europe was converted to Christianity and when Germanic polytheism was a living set of religions throughout a very large region for a very long time, the myths functioned as do the myths of any religion.
To understand the significance of the myths, we need to understand the parent culture to the best of our ability. To divorce myth from culture – as do some widely read theories of the “hero’s journey” and so on – may be a meaningful literary exercise, but it tells us little of religious meaning.
The first step is to place the myths in cultural context, to place them in dialogue with what we know from history, archaeology, and other written sources of the time period. Without doing this, the myths become nursery tales that float free from any cultural weight.
There are elements in the Norse myths that tie directly to what we know of real-world practice. For example, Thor shrinks his hammer and wears it inside his shirt just as northern European pagans wore small amulets of Thor’s hammer around their necks.
As in the oldest Sanskrit layers of Indian mythology, the Norse myths discuss the sacrificial act. They tell of the god Odin sacrificing himself to himself in a double ritual – both stabbing and hanging – that we have evidence of as actual sacrificial practice.
Those of us who today practice the modern form of Norse religion known as Ásatrú (Icelandic for “Æsir faith,” referring to the main tribe of Norse gods) face the task of incorporating myths of long ago into our modern lives and finding meaning within them.
In India, there are not only vast numbers of myths and legends, but there are also many long centuries of theological writings that discuss interpretations of the old stories. In Ásatrú, we are faced with a relatively tiny number of myths and no surviving second-order theological discourse by the practitioners of long ago – that is, no reflection upon the meaning of the myths in the context of a living practice.
Engaging in this type of theological discourse now, I always come back to the idea of the French philosopher Paul Ricœur that mythology is “a species of symbols” and myths are “symbols developed in the form of narrations.”
On symbolism
We must ask: what does Thor’s hammer symbolize? If we dig into our sources and understand that it is a symbol of protecting the community from all harm, then we must ask: what do those the hammer is raised against symbolize? Following the chain of questions and answers can help us to understand not only meaning in the myths, but also what meaning they have for us now.
Following this line, we can ask: how do we define “community” today? What harm does this community face, and what can we do to protect it? The broader the questions become, the wider the field of possible answers. The choices of interpretation that we make say much about our own values and how we relate to the world around us.
We are not bound to accept the ancient significance of the myths – we no longer make human sacrifices to Odin for that matter – but I do believe that it is important to ground our modern understandings in a study of what Icelanders long ago called forn siðr, the Old Way.
Without grounding in an understanding of the past, there is always a danger of our own creations of meaning simply floating away, untethered to any tradition whatsoever.
To be continued………
