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E N G L I S H P O E T RY A N D
OLD NORSE MYTH
English Poetry and
Old Norse Myth
A History

H E AT H E R O ’ D O N O G H U E

1
 1
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Heather O’Donoghue 2014
The moral rights of the author have been asserted
First Edition published in 2014
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013957856
ISBN 978–0–19–956218–3
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CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
For Bernard
 Acknowledgements

This book is greatly indebted to previous scholars who have documented

the impact of Old Norse literature and culture in various periods. As will
be evident from what follows, without the work of Ethel Seaton, Frank
Farley, Margaret Clunies Ross, Margaret Omberg, and Andrew Wawn,
I could hardly have even begun my own. In addition, three young schol-
ars—Tom Birkett, Eleanor Parker, and Josie O’Donoghue—gave so gen-
erously of their expertise and time that without their help with this book
I could hardly have finished it. I am deeply grateful to them all.
 Contents

Introduction 1
Prologue—Earliest Contacts: Medieval Poetry and
Old Norse Myth 16
1. Antiquarians and Poets: The Discovery of Old Norse
Myth in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries 28
2. Preromantic Responses: Gray, Blake, and the
Northern Sublime 65
3. Parallel Romantics: The Alternative Norse-Influenced
Tradition 104
4. Paganism and Christianism: The Victorians and
Their Successors 148
Epilogue—New Images: Contemporary Poetry and
Old Norse Myth 200

Bibliography 215
Index 231
 Introduction

The primary subject of this book is the engagement of poets writing in

English with Old Norse mythology. The influence of Norse myth is evi-
dent in English poetry from the Anglo-Saxon period right up until the
present day. The reasons why a poet might be drawn to Old Norse myth
of course vary over time, and this book takes a chronological approach,
tracing both the developments in what was received as Old Norse myth—
the various texts poets had to hand—and the different ways in which
poets have responded to it. During the Anglo-Saxon period, Viking
Scandinavians were at once a terrifying enemy and at the same time rec-
ognized as an ethnically similar people. As we shall see, this chequered
relationship is mirrored throughout English literary history in attitudes
towards Old Norse myth, a subject by turns thrillingly alien and yet part
of the ancestral inheritance of English-speaking peoples.
In the context of Old Norse in general, and this book in particular,
a working definition of “myth” might be representations of pre-Christian
beliefs about the beginnings and end of creation, and stories about the gods,
and the giants and monsters associated with them. The overwhelming major-
ity of such representations are, as one would expect, literary ones: poems
and prose narratives. But it is important to bear in mind from the outset
that mythological texts make up only a proportion (though a significant
one) of Old Norse literature as a whole, which ranges far more widely over
historical, fictional, and legendary subject matters. My concern here will
be almost exclusively with mythological texts in Old Norse.
Although Old Norse language and culture persisted to some degree—
and perhaps for some centuries—in the parts of the British Isles where
Scandinavians had settled during Anglo-Saxon times, knowledge of Old
Norse literature eventually died away, and there ensued a long period dur-
ing which Old Norse literature was effectively lost to the wider European
world. But in the seventeenth century, the fact that the origins of the
English nation were traced back to the Goths, as the progenitors of both
the English and Scandinavians, meant that references to Old Norse were
loaded with positive connotations—for Parliamentarians at least—of
political liberty and the rule of law, which were believed to have been
inherited from the nation’s Gothic ancestors.
2 English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History

In Britain in the eighteenth century, a craze for Scandinavian and

Celtic “ancient” poetry, and a taste for sublimity in literature, fuelled
keen interest in Old Norse mythological poetry, though contemporary
critics were slow to warm to what they regarded as its wildness. In sub-
sequent decades, Victorian mythographers sought what they believed to
be the real, hidden meanings of Old Norse myth, and saw in the Norse
gods, especially Odin and Baldr, figures comparable with or analogous
to Christian divinities. And finally, the advent of Old Norse as an aca-
demic subject, especially in the literature degrees studied by so many
twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets, together with a new interest in
the Scandinavian settlement (as opposed to Viking ravaging) of the British
Isles and Ireland, have provoked a fresh response to Old Norse myth as a
poetic subject.
Individual poets have also had their own particular motivations for
turning to Old Norse myth: the antiquarian and scholarly leanings of
Thomas Gray, or Walter Scott; William Morris’s politicized medievalism;
the deep concern for the religious element in all myths shown by David
Jones; Hugh MacDiarmid’s double fascination with both the disputed
ethnicity of the Scots and the modernist mythic symbol; Paul Muldoon’s
and Don Paterson’s post-modernist playfulness with Old Norse mythic
motifs, and the latter’s reaching-out for cosmic symbols in his more som-
bre elegiac poetry.
Many of the poets discussed in this book are canonical names in the
history of poetry in English, but by no means all of them. The quality of
poetry influenced by Old Norse myth is extremely variable. Nevertheless,
I think it can be demonstrated that so-called “minor poetry” is just as
fascinating as the work of more major writers in the way its authors use
Old Norse myth. This book cannot, of course, hope to be exhaustive in its
coverage of the influence of Old Norse mythological material on poetry
in English. The four chapters, together with the prologue and epilogue,
might easily have been expanded to fill six whole volumes. I have lim-
ited myself to myth on the one hand, and poetry on the other, not only
for reasons of scale, but also because it seems to me that the imaginative
potential of poetry responds particularly well to the metaphysicality of
myth—which is perhaps why so much Old Norse myth was originally
transmitted in poetic form. It is my hope that for both major and minor
poets, Old Norse myth will be shown to have been a surprisingly wide-
spread, sustained, and fundamental influence in English literary history.
Finally, how evident the debt to Old Norse myth is also varies consid-
erably. Sometimes a reference, or source, is explicitly acknowledged, and
relatively easy to identify. More often, the Norse material is transformed or
disguised: perhaps naturalized to conform to the poetic conventions of the
 Introduction 3

time, or presented in a playfully oblique manner, or reduced to an arcane

allusion. Indeed, the more creative the poet has been with the material, or
the more fruitful the engagement with it, the more difficult it is to identify
the source. Such references have often been overlooked or misunderstood
by scholars and critics, and the full significance of even explicitly identi-
fied Norse allusion is not always appreciated. Some allusions must remain
speculative, a matter of critical opinion.
Myth itself is always a representation, usually in literary or sometimes
in visual or ritual form, of an unreachable antecedent. An original, unitary
body of material, coherent and systematic—what we might assume “Old
Norse myth” to designate—simply does not exist, and never did. What
we are dealing with is a diverse collection of literary texts, in different
forms and genres, and from different times and places. There have been
any number of attempts—from the earliest medieval scholars in Iceland to
contemporary mythographers—to reconstruct some hypothetical original
mythology. But this is very far from being my concern here, not least
because the focus of this book is on the actual textual materials—however
inauthentic, or derivative, or mistaken—with which poets engaged, and
most of all, with what was made of them. Nevertheless, it will be useful to
offer a brief account of the origins of the literature which is the vehicle for
Old Norse myth.
In the year 870 AD, the year before Alfred the Great came to the throne
in Anglo-Saxon England, and a year after the death of King Edmund of
East Anglia at the hands of Viking invaders (a particularly horrible death,
as later tradition had it), the first Norwegians set sail for Iceland, then
uninhabited apart from a few Irish monks on retreat for the summer
months. The Norwegians’ aim was to make a new life there as settlers.
Many more Norwegians followed them, and they were joined by other
migrants, largely Scandinavians who had settled first in the Western Isles
of Scotland, and in Ireland, and intermarried there. Just over half a cen-
tury later—by the year 930 AD, according to early Icelandic sources—
Iceland was fully settled: albyggt.
There are many theories as to the causes of this swift and substantial
migration. Lack of farmable land at home, an autocratic king of Norway
(King Haraldr Finehair, nicknamed thus after the successful completion
of a vow not to cut or comb his hair until he had brought the whole
of Norway under his rule), the threat of a northward expansion of the
Emperor Charlemagne’s Frankish empire, and sheer pioneering spirit have
all seemed good reasons to historians both medieval and modern. But
whatever the causes of their move, once in Iceland the settlers set about
creating a unified, cohesive new nation. This was not a scattered colony of
subsistence farmers, but a tightly knit community with a strong sense of
4 English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History

independent identity, its own laws, and a precocious parliament; it was a

remarkable, almost democratic, republic. When Iceland was converted to
Christianity around the year 1000 AD, the change of faith was debated in
the national parliament, the Althing (literally, the meeting for everyone, or
General Assembly), and the clinching argument was not theological, but
political: that Iceland as a nation would not survive division, and that all
Icelanders must therefore share the same laws and, thus, the same religion.
No doubt there is an element of simplification and understand-
able national pride in this version of events. Iceland’s conversion is rep-
resented as the outcome of rational debate and collective compromise,
utterly unlike the “top-down” conversions imposed by kings elsewhere
in Europe, especially in Anglo-Saxon England. But it is how Icelanders
themselves remembered and recorded the fundamental shift from pagan-
ism to Christianity, a shift which most importantly ushered in the transi-
tion from orality to literacy, for Christianity is a religion of the book. At
first, Icelanders put their new literacy to Christian purposes, and from the
very beginning, their concern was with the vernacular: they translated the
Bible, the lives of saints, the exegetical works of the church fathers and
sermons, and with the help of foreign scholars, especially Anglo-Saxons,
adapted the Roman alphabet to accommodate the sounds of the Icelandic
language—the language now commonly referred to as Old Norse. Around
the middle of the twelfth century, an Icelandic linguistician set out a com-
plete spelling system “for us Icelanders” and detailed all the texts which
were being translated, composed, or written down in the vernacular at that
time: history, laws, genealogies, and Christian exegesis.
A Latinate faith never came to dominate the native literary culture.
The range of learned texts recorded on vellum broadened dramatically to
include imaginative literature: poems—eddic and skaldic—and fictional
prose narratives of all kinds, including one completely new and unique lit-
erary form, the Icelandic family saga. What unites this wide-ranging body
of material is that in their different ways the texts present us with images of
the past—and, crucially, the mostly pre-Christian past. Either because the
texts themselves originated in this pre-Christian period, and were written
down later, or because their authors were recreating a pre-Christian past
they knew about, or could invent or elaborate on the basis of oral tradi-
tions, this substantial body of material, in all its variety, provides us with
the primary literary sources of Old Norse myth.
This raises an immediate difficulty. With a few dramatic exceptions—
for instance, Viking age picture stones in Sweden and Viking age sculp-
ture in Britain which may illustrate mythic scenes, or the stanza of skaldic
poetry inscribed on a stone in Sweden—the primary surviving represen-
tations of Norse myth derive from literary texts written down in Iceland
 Introduction 5

by Christians. The difficulty of distinguishing originally oral material

from the rewriting, elaboration, and transformation which inevitably
accompanies the “recording” of oral texts is widely recognized. But one
might expect this to be especially difficult in the case of Christian writers
transmitting texts dealing with pagans, and their beliefs and traditions.
Would not the pagan material have been diminished, treated cursorily,
been recounted with an ironic, scornful, or dismissive gloss, or intrusively
moralized? Might we not be left with a threadbare and distorted record,
something for patient scholars to restore, patch, and reconstruct?
In fact, the ingrained and dominant nativism of Icelandic authors seems
to have resulted in a correspondingly less dominant clerical culture, and
a much more tolerant attitude to pre-Christian material, and the depic-
tion of pre-Christian forebears, than was the case elsewhere in Christian
Europe. Of course we cannot assume that what has survived is a completely
authentic version or representation of what existed before conversion. But
the special circumstances of Icelandic literary culture have resulted in two
very striking features of Old Norse mythic literature. The first is the large
quantity of such literature: there is simply a very great deal of surviving
mythological material by or about pagans in Old Norse. The second is the
high literary artistry of that surviving Old Norse mythological literature.
We are not dealing with scraps and shadows, with tired re-tellings or pale
derivatives. We are dealing with authors at the height of their imaginative
and technical abilities, with the dramatic narrative poems of the Edda; the
dense and intricate verbal imagery of skaldic verse; and prose fictions and
chronicles—sagas—of great power and authority. This is crucial because
the influence of Norse myth on later poets proved to be so strong not only
because of the inherent attraction of the subject matter—the drama of
the myths themselves—or because of the mythology’s profound cultural
and political significances for those writing in English (though these two
factors were of course very potent), but also because the literature which
encodes the mythic material is so compelling.
The major literary sources of Old Norse myth are four kinds of
text: eddic poems, skaldic stanzas, sagas, and Snorri Sturluson’s Prose
Edda. These texts are very different in literary form, and vary widely in
how authentically they may transmit pagan material, or reliable accounts
of pagan beliefs and attitudes. But it is not their authenticity or relia-
bility, but rather the subsequent reception history of the mythological
elements in these texts, which will concern us in the main body of this
book. Sometimes the most inauthentic material was the most influen-
tial. And very few English-language poets encountered the primary texts
in their original Icelandic: the earliest post-Reformation poets in English
knew their Norse literature in Latin translation—or paraphrase—at best.
6 English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History

Nevertheless, for the sake of completeness at least I will sketch out a brief
account of the earliest forms of this literature.
Almost all skaldic verse—so-called after the Icelandic word for poet,
skald—survives as quotation in prose narrative. The earliest skalds (the
first whose poetry survives, Bragi, seems to have lived in the ninth century)
were Norwegian court poets, pagans employed by pagan Scandinavian
kings and earls to produce praise poetry for living and, where politically
appropriate, dead rulers. Icelandic poets soon established a reputation at
Norwegian courts, and came to dominate the poetry associated with them.
The form of skaldic verse has led most scholars to believe that it changed
little in the period between its composition and its quotation in later
written prose narratives. Its distinctive metre—dróttkvætt, or “court(ly)
metre”—is extraordinarily intricate, involving not only patterns of stress
and alliteration, in common with other forms of Germanic poetry, but
also syllable counting and internal full and half rhyme in the eight short
lines of each stanza. This renders it unusually (if not completely) resistant
to corruption or purposeful tinkering, and so the earliest skaldic verse is
usually held to transmit the pagan beliefs of its practitioners and recipients
with very little alteration, even if it was not written down until much later
than its original composition.
The poetic diction of skaldic verse, drawing on a lexis exceptionally
rich in synonyms, is characterized by the use of kennings; that is, cryptic
poetic circumlocutions consisting of a sequence of two or more nouns in
which the first—a so-called “base word”—is then successively re-defined
by the next—the “determinant”—in a string which may extend to four or
five elements. Thus, in a simple warrior kenning, “tree of battle”, the base
word, “tree”, seems to have only the slightest connexion with its ultimate
referent, “warrior”. The listener must first extend the possible referent of
“tree” to any organic, upright object, and then re-define it according to the
determinant term “battle”. The mental process frames the question “What
organic, upright object is associated with battle?”, and the answer is “war-
rior”. If the poet extends his kenning further, so that “battle” is itself desig-
nated by a kenning—let’s say, “storm of Odin”—the poetic image created
by the three-element kenning “tree of the storm of Odin” is a strikingly
rich and vivid one, as we imagine trees battered and bent in a storm, and
spears falling on the enemy showering down like piercing rain.
I have spent some time analyzing the workings of the skaldic ken-
ning for two reasons. Firstly, in building a kenning, poets often drew
on mythological stories or alluded to mythological figures—calling bat-
tle “the storm of Odin” is one very simple example of this. Some ken-
nings require a detailed knowledge of Norse myth, since they contain
allusions to specific stories, and some remain a puzzle. There are some
 Introduction 7

sequences of skaldic stanzas which might be described as mythological

poems in themselves, and the praise of a pagan aristocrat may involve
associating or even identifying him with a pagan deity. However, it is
the mass of mythological allusions in skaldic kennings—continuing
as a literary technique, though somewhat abated, in the work of later,
Christian skalds—which contributes so very much to our knowledge
of Norse myth. Secondly, although the intricate metre and cryptic ken-
nings may have helped stanzas to survive a period of oral transmission,
and thus helped to preserve authentic mythological material, the very
difficultness of the stanzas has been an important factor in the way they
have been received by post-medieval readers: sometimes the translation
has been little more than loose paraphrase; sometimes the kennings have
been misconstrued. What modern readers may take as fundamental
aspects of Norse myth are sometimes actually the result of early mis-
translations or misconceptions.
Eddic verse is almost always defined in contradistinction to skaldic
poetry: it is much looser in metre and contains comparatively few ken-
nings; it is anonymous and hard to date; and it is mostly preserved as
discrete poems in a thirteenth-century anthology, now known as the
Poetic Edda, in a manuscript known as the Codex Regius, or in Icelandic,
Konungsbók. The compiler of this collection of poems carefully arranged
them into two sections, mythological poems and heroic ones, and it is in
these poems—and a small number of others found in other manuscripts
but similar in form and type of content—that much of the sustained
mythical material in Old Norse is preserved. The Codex Regius opens,
for example, with the magnificent poem Völuspá, in which a powerful
prophetess, summoned by Odin, relates the creation of the cosmos, and
looks ahead to the final apocalypse, Ragnarök, which will mean the end
of the gods and the world as we know it, though as in the poem’s biblical
counterpart, the account of apocalypse in the book of Revelation, a new
world is predicted which will replace the old one. Following Völuspá in
the Codex Regius is a poem entitled Hávamál—the words of the High
One—which consists of various pieces of Odinic wisdom, some purport-
ing to be spoken in the voice of the god Odin himself. There follow poems
in which Odin and a giant engage in a wisdom contest, each trying to ask
a question the other cannot answer, and narrative poems—some comic,
some serious—concerning the Norse gods and their continual struggles
against the old enemy, the giants.
The heroic poems in the Poetic Edda concern the exploits of the heroes
of the Völsung dynasty—notably Sigurðr the Dragon-Slayer (Wagner’s
Siegfried), and his wife Guðrún, who, after Sigurðr is murdered by her
brothers, goes on to marry first Attila the Hun, and then (having killed
8 English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History

him) a king called Jónakr, whose sons by him she sends off to the Gothic
king Jörmunrekkr and certain death to avenge the killing of her daugh-
ter by Sigurðr. These poems have an oblique but undeniable relation to
what historians can piece together about the Germanic heroic age, long
before Iceland was settled, and even before the Anglo-Saxons left conti-
nental Europe for Britain, a time when Goths, in fragile alliances with
Burgundians, fought Huns, and their leaders died violent or mysterious
deaths. The savage perpetrators and tragic victims of these extraordinary
events are presented in the poetry not only as encountering supernatural
creatures such as valkyries or shape-shifting giants, but also as sometimes
rubbing shoulders with the gods themselves: the activities of the Völsungs,
for instance, are closely monitored by the god Odin, who on occasion
intervenes, in disguise, in the human world. Both the mythological and
the heroic poems of the Edda sustain a substantial body of traditional
pagan material in highly dramatic and accomplished literary form, and
were to prove enormously influential in the hands of later poets in English,
especially in the eighteenth century.
The word saga is related to the Norse word segja, “to say”, and is used
of very many kinds of prose narratives in Old Icelandic: saints’ lives, royal
biographies, geographical treatises and translated continental romances, as
well as for what is perhaps the most celebrated kind of saga—the Icelandic
family saga, or, in Icelandic, the Íslendingasaga, or saga of Icelanders. The
family sagas are not mythological texts. Rather, they are naturalistic prose
narratives which detail the lives of the first settlers in Iceland and the gen-
erations succeeding them. Since the earliest generations of settlers were
pagan, the family sagas do to some extent represent customs and beliefs
relating to Norse myth, although in fact saga authors tend not to dwell on
the religious aspects of early Icelandic life. However, the Icelandic fornal-
darsögur, or legendary heroic sagas (the term means “sagas of olden times”),
are quite different from the family sagas, for they are freely fictional, even
fantastic, in their narratives, which are packed with magic, sensational
event, and the supernatural, and most take place in Scandinavia, at some
unspecified historical period before the settlement of Iceland. The most
celebrated of the fornaldarsögur is Völsunga saga—the story of the Völsung
dynasty, based on the heroic poems of the Poetic Edda, and many fornal-
darsögur contain eddic poetry. Ironically, the earliest Scandinavian histori-
ans took fornaldarsögur as valuable sources for the ancient history of their
own nations. For this reason, such sagas, in scholarly Latin editions, were
amongst the first Icelandic texts to reach a wider European public, and
their quoted verses especially were very influential in forming a taste for
extravagant supernatural incident and heroic action thought to be charac-
teristic of Icelandic tradition.
 Introduction 9

In Iceland, by the middle of the thirteenth century, a major project

to collect, preserve, order, and interpret Old Norse myth had been com-
pleted. The Icelandic historian and antiquarian Snorri Sturluson composed
a great cycle of biographies of Norwegian kings, Heimskringla, beginning
with the earliest pagan rulers, and quoting in his prose very many skaldic
stanzas attributed to the court poets of both these early pagan rulers, and
later Christian kings, and thus a substantial amount of mythological mate-
rial, including some extended sequences of skaldic stanzas. Snorri may also
have composed the saga about Egill Skalla-Grímsson, an Icelandic Viking
poet whose pagan beliefs, expressed vividly in his poetry, quoted copiously
in the saga prose, mark him out as a distinctively Odinic hero. But Snorri’s
key role in the dissemination of Old Norse myth was his authorship of
what is now known as the Prose Edda, or Snorra Edda (“Snorri’s Edda”), a
bipartite treatise on myth and on skaldic diction, followed by the Háttatal
or “List of metres”, a demonstration of 101 varieties of dróttkvætt in the
form of a sequence of skaldic stanzas each exemplifying a different metri-
cal variation.
The first section of the treatise, Gylfaginning, is set in a narrative frame-
work whereby a Swedish king called Gylfi determines to find out more
about a mysterious and powerful race of people called the Æsir—the name
of the Norse gods. Arriving at their court in Asgard—in mythic texts, the
name of the gods’ stronghold—he begins his questioning of a strange trin-
ity of throned figures: High, Just-as-High, and Third. This sets the stage for
a lengthy interrogation which Snorri uses as the basis of a carefully ordered
exposition of Norse myth. Gylfi’s questions move logically and cogently
through Norse mythological lore. He asks about creation and cosmology,
and the answers he is given are based largely on Völuspá, the first poem
in the Poetic Edda, supplemented by information taken from other eddic
poems. He asks about the Norse gods, their relationships, attributes, and
exploits, and finally about Ragnarök, the end of the world and the gods
themselves. The answers to his questions often include relevant quotations
from eddic poems, and Snorri’s considerable story-telling skills are well
demonstrated in the fluent, detailed, and lengthy speeches he puts into
the mouth of his Æsir trinity. Gylfaginning is a brilliantly realized account
of Norse mythology, based largely, but not completely, on eddic verse. The
potential embarrassment for a Christian author in re-telling pagan myth is
elegantly avoided by the device of having not Snorri himself, but ostensi-
bly, in the fictional frame, the Æsir, recounting the material.
Skáldskaparmál—“the art of poetic language”—is the second part of
Snorri’s Edda, and it too takes the form of a dialogue initiated by a visitor
to Asgard; this time a figure called Ægir questions Bragi, the god of poetry.
These questions prompt replies which together set out a comprehensive
10 English Poetry and Old Norse Myth: A History

account of the Norse myth of the origin of poetry, and move on to explain
skaldic kennings, thickly illustrated from skaldic sources. Sometimes
the narrative is no more than a list of poetic quotations: for instance, in
response to the question “How can Thor be designated?” there are sixteen
examples of kennings referring to Thor, with quotations from almost as
many different skalds. But at other times, the sheer force of the narrative
takes over, and there are long stretches of continuous narrative telling the
mythological stories which lie behind kennings. So Snorri’s Skáldskaparmál
is a rich source of skaldic quotation and related mythological stories, just
as Gylfaginning re-tells and quotes (though to a lesser extent) mythologi-
cal and heroic material from the Poetic Edda. Together with the skaldic
praise poetry quoted in Heimskringla, and the possibility that Snorri was
the author of the saga about the Viking poet Egill, with its many verses,
our total knowledge of Norse mythology is overwhelmingly due to his
antiquarian scholarship. Snorri’s Edda, in one of its many translations,
together with the eddic poetry Snorri quotes, was the vivid and compel-
ling form in which most poets in English have known Norse myth.
I will conclude this introduction with a brief account of the individual
chapters in this book.
Although Anglo-Saxon authors, working in the centuries before Old
Norse myth was written down, could not have had access to Old Norse
myths in written form, there are, as we shall see, traces of what looks like
Old Norse myth in certain early medieval English texts. There are two ways
in which such mythic elements might have been available to Anglo-Saxon
authors, and both are problematic in their way. Firstly, it may be that
some of the ancient pre-Christian beliefs of the first Anglo-Saxons were
similar to those carried to Iceland by its first settlers. In fact, the common
assumption that the earliest Anglo-Saxon and Icelandic settlers shared the
same ancestral—that is, continental Germanic—pagan beliefs must be at
the least a major simplification, and the passage of time would in any case
have dimmed similarities. However, just as Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse
are plainly cognate languages, there are good reasons for believing that
the mythological beliefs of the two communities might have been cog-
nate too. Secondly, it may, additionally or alternatively, be the case that
the Scandinavian settlement in Anglo-Saxon England during the ninth
century, or perhaps more fleeting cultural contacts between the Norse
and the Anglo-Saxons in earlier centuries, led to Norse myth becoming
known in some form to the Anglo-Saxons, and thus finding its way into
literary texts. It has long been argued that hostile relations and linguis-
tic differences between the two communities are likely to have limited
cultural interaction, but scenes from Old Norse myth—often alongside
Christian iconography—carved on traditionally English stone crosses in
 Introduction 11

parts of Anglo-Scandinavian England provide strong counter-evidence.

But whether we tend towards the shared cultural inheritance model, or
the theory of fresh Viking age contacts—and they are not mutually exclu-
sive—we cannot expect to see Old Norse mythic elements in precisely the
form they take in the later written sources, and dealing with the oral trans-
mission of material of course involves many variations and uncertainties.
Added to all this, there is one even stronger reason why any allusions
to pre-Christian traditions in Anglo-Saxon literature may be difficult
to discern and interpret. The conversion of Anglo-Saxon England to
Christianity, though a piecemeal affair, protracted and regionally uneven,
was more or less complete by the time of the Scandinavian settlements,
and by the time of the conversion of Iceland, around 1000 AD, almost
all of Anglo-Saxon England had been Christian for several centuries.
Anglo-Saxon authors were Christians, perhaps mostly clerics, and clerical
culture dominated literary production. There is nothing in Old English
literature even approaching the apparently free-reined transmission of
pagan traditions in Old Norse, but only the terse dismissals or shadowy
allusions one might expect from a literary culture largely controlled by a
clergy naturally hostile to paganism, and possibly responding to the threat
of recidivism in the early period, and then to the influx and influence of
large numbers of Scandinavian settlers in later times.
Nevertheless, the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf, which is set in a
semi-historical Scandinavian pagan past, shows many traces of what look
like versions of Old Norse myth. Identifying possible Norse influence in
the poem is a delicate matter, precisely because the poem’s Christian, and
probably clerical, author would surely have had to temper any mythic
material in an attempt to balance his own, or perhaps his patron’s, ideo-
logical and religious convictions against an artistic engagement with his
pre-Christian subject matter. Claims about veiled references to Old Norse
myth or pagan beliefs in Beowulf—and more widely in Anglo-Saxon
poetry—are still justifiably contested by sceptical scholars. Whether
Anglo-Saxon poetry—like Beowulf, or Widsith, or Deor—takes the char-
acters of the Germanic heroic age as its subject matter, or whether, as in
the reflective poems in the Old English elegiac tradition, poets concerned
themselves with the resigned but wistful recreation of a distant and faded
past, and meditations on ends and beginnings, we might look to find
Norse-related material, but can only expect carefully mediated allusions
at best. And in the post-Conquest period, while it is possible to argue for
instances of Old Norse material still leaving traces in literary texts, such
material has by this time become part of the collective body of English
story matter, and there is rarely any sense that poets are working with
non-native traditions.
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