Neopaganism, folkism, heathenry—whatever you may call it—is in one sense a relatively recent “project” of sorts, an effort of contemporary people to return to the pre-Christian religious practices of our distant ancestors, celebrated for thousands of years before the turn into the Annis Domini of our time. In this regard, it is additionally a vast effort of reconstruction—employing a huge interdisciplinary array of academic fields: philosophy, history, philology, anthropology, archaeology, comparative mythology, and psychology to name a short few—to discover what the particulars of that pre-Christian worldview actually were.

One finding of this effort is that in contrast to the “revelatory” religions of Abraham, historical paganism has no such specific moment of unveiling, but is rather “experiential”, a religious system experienced and observed by man in his immediate surroundings, an understanding of the world that stretches back to the days when anything approaching “religion” could be comprehended. As such, paganism has no Bible, no guidebook, nor holy prophets. Considering that for Christians these things are ultimately the final say (or for some denominations, the “Sole” say) in any religious matters, how then do pagans know what is authoritative, what is “gospel”? Further, given the nature of reconstruction, how can someone tell if something observed is a genuine display of pre-Christian religiosity? More simply, what exactly did the Norse believe, and how do we know that this is what they believed?

This argument comes to a head with the Edda, a collection of sagas and poetry from medieval Iceland which purports to detail the myths, beliefs, and customs of historical Norse paganism. However erroneously, the Edda presents an image of such a “Heathen Bible”, a structured compilation of individual books that presents a narrative revealing a religious worldview, and from which a more or less complete sense of Norse religion can be derived. Further, a cursory investigation into the Edda will show you that these were written by Christian men in a Christian country. For these reasons and others, a frequently encountered critique against the “project” of reconstructing historical paganism (be it for modern worship or simple academic interests) is that we cannot possibly know if the Edda are genuine tellings of the beliefs of Norse paganism. For all we know, these are just vaguely-remembered folk tales, or even worse Christian inventions designed to manipulate more genuine expressions of paganism into something easier to convert. Don’t you know that everything you believe is thanks to the God-fearing filter of pious Christians?

For a number of reasons, this couldn’t be further from the truth. The extent to which the Edda accurately, genuinely, represents the pre-Christian religion of the Scandinavians is greatly undersold in favor of a lazy hand-waving gesture. The Edda have in fact enjoyed a long history of scholarship, including many of the earlier mentioned academic fields, particularly comparative literature and linguistics. While certainly obscure compared to the more well-known specializations and works of Dumézil or Frazer, academics have been meticulously analyzing every breath of every manuscript of the Edda for centuries now, ever since the Codex Regius had been rediscovered in 1643. Larger academic efforts in the 19th and 20th century brought the same relentless textual criticism to the Eddas that it was bringing to the Bible at the time, and those efforts have put us on a firm conclusion: the Edda are not Christian inventions or inversions, and are indeed reliably pagan: in content, and in origin.

A Brief Refresher on the Edda

Before diving into the technical arguments regarding potential influences or lack thereof, it is important to take a step back and reminds ourselves what the Edda actually are. They are actually two distinct compilations of Old Norse poetry: the Prose Edda, and the Poetic Edda.

Many habitually associate the Edda generally with their “author” Snorri Sturluson (b. 1179, d. 1241), a Christian Icelandic aristocrat (not a monk!), however only the Prose Edda can be attributed to him. This would include: his Prologue, where a euhemerized account of the gods is given, the Gylfaginning, which provides a large and rapid-fire style presentation of Norse myth, the Skáldskaparmál, a sort of quasi-mythological treatise on reading and writing poetry, and finally the Háttatal, which is essentially a free-form expression of Snorri's to create a new style of poetry. For most of Iceland's history, the Prose Edda was all that was available as far as written accounts of Norse religion went. Surely, there were still folk beliefs that Christianity had yet (and in many cases, still yet) to extinguish circulating in the villages of Iceland, and Snorri himself had mentioned other poems that no one had copies of. But as far as the written record went, Snorri was gospel.

That was the case until 1643, when the Codex Regius (or Konungsbók) was discovered, containing an additional 29 poems. This manuscript comprises the entirety of the Poetic Edda, or Elder Edda. Some of the poems include the Völuspá, our source for ragnarok, the Hávamál, our source for Odin's sayings and acquiring of the runes, and various heroic sagas, such as the Lays of Helgi. Though there are a number of hypotheses regarding authorship, it is not known with any real certainty who wrote the Codex.1 Compared to the Prose Edda, the Poetic Edda is not only much more substantial in “original” content, but also evidently older. More on this later.

As for Iceland itself, she was one of the last Western nations to convert to Christianity—nominally occurring in 1000AD upon the Althing's vote in favor of Iceland's kristnitaka, the taking of Christ. The process of conversion preceding this event was unusually rapid. Missions had been sent to Iceland in the 980s, but were reported as failures. In 998, the converted King Olaf Tryggvason was coronated in Norway, and due to the Germanic cultural belief in sacral kingship (which states that the people's religion is that of their ruler) necessitated a large wave of conversion to Christianity in Iceland.2

These facts inform us of two things: 1.) Christianity was not culturally relevant in Iceland before the 980s—it had not even begun to be the target of missions, and 2.) Christianization and adoption of Christian values of the island took centuries further still; indeed, the Althing converted upon the condition Icelanders could still practice private pagan worship, abortion by infant exposure, and the consumption of horsemeat, all banned by Rome centuries prior.3 Evidence suggests that outright worship of the old gods persisted in Iceland well into the 1300s. Even today, belief in elves and spirits is the majority opinion among modern Icelanders.4 When we take stock of what “Christian influences” were available at the time, these facts will be important to consider.

I will present 4 areas of research that provide strong evidence that the idea of the Edda cannot be used as a reliable window into pre-Christian religiosity in Scandinavia.

Evidence 1: Dating & Authorship

As far as the parchment itself goes, dating the Edda is relatively simple: the Codex Regius was written sometime around the 1270's (based on the calligraphy, wear, style, etc…), and Snorri's Prose Edda was written just prior sometime around the 1220s. This puts the pen-to-paper date of these myths at least two centuries after the kristnitaka. If only it were that simple. It must be remembered that Eddic poetry, like Viking-age skalds and Homeric poetry, are recordings of far-older oral traditions. Four hundred years had passed between Agamemnon and Homer, yet the information contained within it had allowed Schliemann to pinpoint and excavate the Walls of Troy itself some 3,000 years after its sacking at the hands of the Achaeans.5

Given this, and the fact that we are dealing with 2 individual collections of poems (each themselves with a wide ranging array of content and authorship), dating can be quite difficult. Doing so would be akin to answering when the Bible was written, albeit within a tighter time-frame. Though multiple attempts have been made to generate a scholarly consensus, as recently as 2004 the state of the field on this topic has been described as an “agnostic resignation”6. Previous attempts do, however generally agree on one thing: the content of the Poetic Edda is pre-Christian, with some sections originating as old as the 9th Century, placing it firmly within the Viking Age.

There a number of helpful tricks in generating a date range. Some of these involve deduction from historical context clues, such as the catastrophic 939 eruption of Eldgjá and its similarity to content in Völuspá. Others are far more technical, looking closely at the presence of lack of specific words or grammatical structure. For example, scholars have noticed the words reka (avenge) and reiðr (angry) in alliterating sentences containing all words starting with the letter v in the Edda. This indicates that upon the initial composition of the poetry, these words were the older form of vreka and vreiðr. When we look for this v versus r dialect in poetry with known dates, there is conclusive evidence that the v variant had gone extinct in Iceland well before the 11th Century. Therefore, any poetry containing this anomalous usage of r in alliterative v sentences can be reliably dated to before the kristnitaka. This list includes Atlakviða, Fáfnismál, Hávamál, Lokasenna, Sigrdrífumál and Vafþrúðnismál.7

Christopher Sapp of Indiana University provides a mathematical model which cross-references the grammatical structure of skaldic poetry with known dates to the poems of the Poetic Edda. His results put the majority of the Edda, including the essential poems of Hávamál and Völuspá, prior to Christianization.8 Though there is a fairly wide range in regards to these estimates, we do see something approaching an agreement that many of these poems predate the kristnitaka, and in many cases, the first Icelandic mission in 980. This modern analysis corroborates (or even bests) the age estimates of earlier scholars, such as Finnur Jónsson.

As for authorship, the dating leaves essentially no possibility for the Poetic Edda to have been composed by a Christian, and, likely one that had little to no contact with Christianity (and certainly no robust understanding of it). For this reason, I take issue with the “centrist” approach of scholars such as Henry Adams Bellows, who argued that a pagan author had some vague, unqualifiable, imaginative influence from the Gaels. A dating as early as the 10th Century seems to prohibit any cultural exchange to such a significant degree. Nevertheless, he does concur that the author was a practicing heathen:

That the poet was heathen and not Christian seems almost beyond dispute; there is an intensity and vividness in almost every stanza which no archaizing Christian could possibly have achieved. On the other hand, the evidences of Christian influence are sufficiently striking to outweigh the arguments of Finnur Jonsson, Müllenhoff and others who maintain that the Voluspo is purely a product of heathendom. The roving Norsemen of the tenth century, very few of whom had as yet accepted Christianity, were nevertheless in close contact with Celtic races which had already been converted, and in many ways the Celtic influence was strongly felt. It seems likely, then, that the Voluspo was the work of a poet living chiefly in Iceland, though possibly in the "Western Isles," in the middle of the tenth century, a vigorous believer in the old gods, and yet with an imagination active enough to be touched by the vague tales of a different religion emanating from his neighbor Celts.9

In short, all available knowledge on the issue of dating points to the fact that the written Eddic poetry of the 13th and 14th Centuries originate in oral traditions from at least 3 to 4 centuries prior (for Snorri as well, as he depended on these poems for his mythological knowledge), and are undoubtedly pre-Christian and written by then-practicing pagans. The prospect of Christian influences is therefore substantially less likely, and the prospect of total Christian revision even further unlikely.

Evidence 2: Literary Content

The second line of evidence deals with something a little more qualitative: it just sounds pagan. Given the disparity between the worldviews and metaphysical structure of Norse paganism and Christianity, one would expect to be able to have a sense of when a bit of myth is one or the other in veracity and content. Indeed, we reliably do. This is referred to by Bellows in the preceding quote: “there is an intensity and vividness in almost every stanza which no archaizing Christian could possibly have achieved.”

Plenty of research focuses on attempting to uncover which elements of Norse poetry have Christian influences, but there are problems regarding this approach. Dr. Jackson Crawford of University Colorado Boulder makes a succinct point10 regarding the assertion that Norse myths are too influenced by Christianity to be reliable: well, what of your influences? What makes you, us, capable of a more true-to-heart interpretation of Norse myth than accounts that are actually from pre-Christian society? Why is it that Norse myth has been influenced by Christianity, and not that Christianity has already been influenced by perennial or Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Germanic myth? Surely our Christian influences are incomparably vast, and it is our interpretation that would have problems, not that of the Edda. Conversely, what would be more fruitful is assessing which portions of poetry are very clearly not of Christian origin, first.

Given its preeminence in our understanding of Norse myth, let us stick with Völuspá for simplicity’s sake. John McKinnell provides such an assessment of what is clearly non-Christian in origin in this poem, in his article Heathenism in Völuspá: A Preliminary Survey11. He gives four different categories of pre-Christian myth: historia, things that were believed by the scribes as real historical events; fabula, miraculous or supernatural events that are contrary to the normal operation of the world; contradictions of Christian teaching; and distortions of potentially Christian teachings. In any of these cases, their presence is strong evidence of a pre-Christian oral composition. McKinnell explains:

Christian poets and other writers often consider it a laudable and profitable activity to recover the legendary history of the pre-Christian ancestors of their rulers, as is done, for example, in the Gesta Danorum of Saxo Grammaticus and in the late twelfth-century Noregs konungatal. 12 It is also clear that many poets who must have been Christians enjoyed retelling ‘ridiculous fables’ about the supposed gods, as is done, for example, in the light-hearted strophes about Óðinn’s sexual exploits in Hávamál, strophe 84 and strophes 91–110. However, stories that contradicted Christian doctrine would be regarded as perniciously false, while those that misunderstood or distorted Christian beliefs were heretical. Christian poets would be much less likely to compose poetry that included these kinds of material, and editors would be less likely to transmit it. For example, Snorri clearly knew the myth of Óðinn’s sacrifice of himself to himself on Yggdrasill, but it is never mentioned in Snorra Edda, probably because its obvious resemblance to the Crucifixion story would be likely to make it seem blasphemous. In cases where such material does survive, it seems unlikely to have been invented by Christians[.]12

Historia and fabula describe a category of myth that, in the eyes of Christians, posed no real threat of blasphemy and were therefore willingly retained. Contradictions and distortions reflect the idea that the author was not enough of an educated Christian to understand his error in understanding Christian teaching, that the similarities must be purely perennial, or that the details were too important to the intelligibility of the myth to be removed. Any are good evidence of pre-Christian continuity. Below are a few short examples of McKinnell’s exhaustive list, mixed in with my own commentary and findings.

Historia:

• The “golden age of the gods” as described in stanzas 7 & 8. Several other historical sources treat this as an event that really happened, albeit euhemerized: the “peace of Fróði” in the Ynglinga Saga, Saxo Grammaticus’ History of the Danes, and Boethius’s De Consolatio Philosophiae.

• Yggdrasil and the Urth’s Well in stanza 19, for which Bellows provides the following helpful note: “Urth (‘The Past’): one of the three great Norns. The world-ash is kept green by being sprinkled with the marvelous healing water from her well.” Adam of Bremen treats this as a contemporary fact in his Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, noting that the sacred tree at Uppsala is maintained by an adjacent sacred spring, in which sacrifices are performed.

• The magic practiced by the vǫlva, the poem’s namesake female seeress. The practice of seiðr (etymologically related to “string”, as in predicting one’s fate) by women is widely attested in other sources as a real occurrence. One such example is Tacitus, who credits the Bructeri seeress Weleda in predicting the events of the Batavian Revolt following Nero’s death.

Fabula:

• The burning of Gullveig and her repeated rebirth in stanza 21. Later Christian scribes treated this as an allegory for the refining of gold by fire, and saw no contradiction to Christian teaching.

• The pledges of Heimdal’s hearing and Odin’s eye. While realistically possible for anyone to lose an eye or an ear, Christians saw it as against nature for one to receive wisdom as a result, even though in the myth this was their entire motive for making this sacrifice.

Distortions:

• During ragnarok, dwarves leave their mountain castles and groan outside the walls. Though scholars have made comparisons between ragnarok and the apocalypse of Revelation, here is a dissimilarity: in Revelation, kings and powerful men beg for rocks to fall on them in order to avoid God (Revelation 6:15-17), while the dwarves of ragnarok come into the open in fear of the mountains crushing them (stz. 48).

• Biblical language is rife with the appearance of Satan as “the dragon”, particularly in the end times of Revelation (Rev. 12 1-9). Like Satan, Völuspá’s dragon Niðhǫggr appears from the depths to consume and punish man (sts. 39, 66). However, unlike in Revelation, Niðhǫggr appears after the end of the world and the death of the gods has already occurred, and a new world has already been born.

Contradictions:

• The gods create the material world (stz. 3 & 4), name night & day (stz. 6), and create the first man & woman (stz. 17 & 18)—directly contradicting the Genesis account which attributes these acts to God alone. Further, the first man and woman are created from trees, not clay, which places it firmly in the Indo-European family of myth, not the Near-Eastern family. More on this later.

• The statement that three norns ordained the lives of men and tied their fates (stz. 5–12) directly contradicts both the idea of God’s divine providence and the teaching that human souls possess free will. As a side note, many have hypothesized that the persistence of this contradictory belief in Germanic peoples had later profound implications for the Protestant Reformation.

As it is shown, a patient textual analysis of Norse poetry can reveal interesting things in regards to the question of Christian influence. It is not difficult to catch a Christian scribe red-handed when he attempts to either remove or alter mythic content, provided there is earlier material available (see Evidence 3 and 4). Here is one final interesting example in Helgakviða Hundingsbana II - The Second Lay of Helgi the Hunding-Slayer:

The Maiden said:

51. "Mad thou wouldst seem | alone to seek,
Daughter of heroes, | the house of the dead;
For mightier now | at night are all
The ghosts of the dead | than when day is bright."

Sigrun was early dead of sorrow and grief. It was believed in olden times that people were born again, but that is now called old wives' folly. Of Helgi and Sigrun it is said that they were born again; he became Helgi Haddingjaskati, and she Kara the daughter of Halfdan, as is told in the Lay of Kara, and she was a Valkyrie.

The passage comments on the clear telling of the reincarnation of the lovers Helgi and Kara, but adds in the little aside that “this is an old wives’ tale”. While the author may have been attempting to defend his people against a stereotype of superstitious nature, he does reveal that the idea of reincarnation has an ancient and firm existence in pre-Christian Scandinavia, and indeed, it does.

Evidence 3: Comparative Myth & Philology

A third set of evidence can be found in comparative myth and philology. The theory underlying the use of either dataset is the same, hinged upon the movements of the Indo-European migrations. We can deduce that the content of a myth is genuine if it reflects the natural passage of the content within a people over time. We can use one very simple, but valid, example. Norse myth tells us of a god named “Tyr”, who is associated with order. Across Eurasia we find curiously similarly-named gods such as Jupiter, Zeus Pater, or even Tian and Tengri. These associations are not accidental, as all of these gods descend from a single origin in the Dyḗus ph₂tḗr of the Proto-Indo-Europeans. When Norse poetry gives us mythological content and language that aligns with this general phenomenon of descent from PIE peoples, we can be sure it is genuine.

I assume the reader is generally familiar with the comparative mythology of Dumezil and others, or at least the general sense of a commonality between European pre-Christian religions. That they share similar gods, who partake in similar myths, and possess similar qualities and names. Here is one example that is far more granular and goes to show the extent of the preservation of Indo-European religion in Norse myth: In Gylfaginning, Snorri accounts that the primordial giant Ymir is slain by Odin, Vili, and Vé, and his body is used to create the world: his flesh becomes earth, blood the seas, bones the mountains, and skull the sky. Scholars D.Q. Adams and J.P. Mallory comment that:

"The [PIE] cosmogonic myth is centered on the dismemberment of a divine being—either anthropomorphic or bovine—and the creation of the universe out of its various elements. The most frequent correlations, or better, derivations, are the following: Flesh = Earth, Bone = Stone, Blood = Water (the sea, etc.), Eyes = Sun, Mind = Moon, Brain = Cloud, Head = Heaven, Breath = Wind".

In both cosmogonic myth and the foundation element of it, one of the central aspects is the notion of sacrifice (of a brother, giant, bovine, etc.). The relationship between sacrifice and cosmogony was not solely that of a primordial event but the entire act of sacrifice among the Indo-Europeans might be seen as a re-creation of the universe where elements were being continuously recycled. Sacrifice thus represents a creative re-enactment of the initial cosmic dismemberment of a victim and it helps return the material stuff to the world."13

There are countless examples of this motif in Indo-European myth. In the Old Irish Táin Bó Cúailnge, also derived from 12th Century manuscripts, the geography of Ireland is created by a dissected bull. In the Purusha Sukta, the cosmic being Purusha is sacrificed by the gods, creating all life and the castes. Vedic and Iranic texts describe a “Yema” and “Yama”, both deriving from the same root as Ymir, “yemh-”, meaning “twin”. Ovid’s Metamorphoses describe the titan Atlas as such:

Atlas became a mountain, as huge as he himself had been. Now his hair and beard were changed into trees, his shoulders and hands into ridges. What had been his head before was the crest on the mountain summit. His bones became stones. Then he grew to an immense height in every part (so you gods determined) and the whole sky, with its many stars, rested on him.14

In the case of the Gylfaginning, we have a Christian writer, writing in a fully Christian Iceland, tasked with writing an account of the creation of his own people. How does he perform? According to comparative mythology and philology, with flying colors. In the text, Snorri passes this off cleverly as a dialogue between Christians and Heathens in what could be a form of medieval “CYA”. Regardless, the end result is the same: we have a reliable account of Norse myth, even under such Christian circumstances.

Another example is Yggdrasill, the world-tree attested in Völuspá, Hávamál, and Grímnismál. Cases of a world-tree that connects the ground to the sky in some divine sense are so widespread and ancient that it is impossible to point to any specific origin. The conception of a tree rising through a number of worlds is found across Eurasia, specifically within the ancient shamanic traditions of Siberia. Shamanistic beliefs often describe the use of a large, central tree used as a ladder to climb to the heavens. The conception of an eagle at the top of the tree and a serpent curled round its roots echoes various cosmologies. One hypothesis for this widespread prevalence in myth is that the Germanic and other European peoples worshipped the gods in the open clearings of dense sacred groves, where a tall-standing oak (surely nourished by the ecologically uncompetitive clearing) associated with a sky god towers above the practitioners. In this instance, not only do we have clear comparative evidence across Eurasia (going back tens of thousands of years!), we also have a solid hypothesis on anthropological & psychological grounds as to why this myth permeates across cultures.15

There are too many individual myths and poems to perform this type of analysis for all of them within one article: fates & norns, divine twins, wars in heaven which decide the outcome of creation, chaoskampf, cattle raids, divine alcohol, and so on. However, I hope that this category of evidence shows that not only is such a thing possible to do in any instance with some work, but that those who exclaim Norse poetry as being too Christian to exemplify genuine pre-Christian myth are already typically familiar with a large sum of evidence within comparative mythology. That we can talk about a Thor at all, without question, is rudimentary evidence of that.

Evidence 4: Archaeology

The fourth and final category of evidence pertains to archaeological findings. Given that no manuscript of Eddic poetry before the Codex Regius exists, and given that its mythic content likely only existed in oral form prior, the only way we can look for “written” evidence is in more crude ways: runic inscriptions, rock carvings, toponyms, burial mounds, and the sort. The most useful aspect of archaeology is that it, unlike oral traditions, can give us a firm date of when something was made. If we read a motif or imagery in Norse myth and see that passage replicated in some way that isn’t paper, we can correctly assume that the myth is not only far older, but in congruence with those older dates. To use a simple example again, the reader is probably already familiar with Thor’s association with mjolnir. He is also probably aware of the widespread use of mjolnir pendants in pre-Christian Germany & Scandinavia. This shows that the poetry has preserved an essential quality of the god, as well as the way in which people remembered and worshipped him.

But we can prove far more than this. Huddled underneath a church in rural Gotland was a textbook example of such evidence, the Ardre Stones. Just one of these stones, Ardre VIII, shows us a number of Norse myths that were present in 8th Century Gotland—two hundred years prior to Harald Bluetooth, and 500 years before Snorri. On it is engraved a number of myths which are preserved in Eddic poetry:

• Vǫlundarkviða, or The Lay of Weyland the Smith. Under the longboat, Níðuðr's dead sons are hidden to the right of the smithy, and Vǫlundr can be seen flying away in bird form (stz. 30–39)

• Thor’s fishing trip in search for Jörmungandr, as depicted in Hymiskviða.

• The punishment of Loki for the death of Baldr, and

• A spear-wielding Odin riding to Valhalla on Sleipnir, shown with 8 legs.

A similar artifact can be found in the Tjängvide image stone, dated to 8th to 10th Century Gotland, containing likewise striking depictions of Siegfried and Brunhild, Odin carrying a dead man on his 8-legged Sleipnir, being welcomed by a female valkyrie into Valhalla—all occurring above a warband of men on a longboat.

Some motifs within a passage are so specific it is impossible to “accidentally” present the myth the same way twice in some convergent, accidental fashion. For example, in Snorri’s retelling of Völuspá in a segment of Gylfaginning, he gives a rather specific and graphic telling of how the great wolf Fenrir is killed by Vidar:

The wolf will swallow Odin. That will be the cause of his death. And immediately after Vidar will come forward and step with one foot on the lower jaw of the wolf. On this foot he will have a shoe for which the material has been being collected throughout all time: it is the waste pieces that people cut from their shoes at the toe and heel. Therefore anyone that is concerned to give assistance to the Æsir must throw these pieces away. With one hand he will grasp the wolf's upper jaw and tear apart its mouth and this will cause the wolf's death.

Enter the Gosforth Cross, a confusing thing, dated to about 925AD. It’s a massive pillar topped with a crucifix in Northumbria in a churchyard dedicated to Mary, yet, on it are engravings of several depictions from Norse myth: Loki bound with Sigyn protecting him, Heimdallr holding his horn, another depiction of Thor’s fishing trip, and of course: Vidar slaying Fenrir. Not just stabbing him as the Poetic Edda describes, but precisely how Snorri had described it. He steps his foot onto his lower jaw to hold it open, his off-hand holding open the upper jaw.

Evidently, the Scandinavians were absolutely thrilled with this whole “Thor goes on a casual fishing trip for the representation of primordial chaos” thing, because we have multiple carvings showing it. Not only that, but they pick up on a specific motif within the myth: that when Thor gets a bite, the pull from the serpent is so strong that his foot is ripped through the floor of the boat and leaves Thor’s leg sticking into the water. For this, we have the 700’s Danish Hørdum Stone (above) and the 1100’s Swedish Altuna Stone (below):

On a personal level, I would have been prepared to argue that we should not expect to see the congruence of myth beyond such distances and time. As people move and grow apart, their myths become slightly altered, and specific details are lost. As it turns out, my gut assumption has been shown out the door. Archaeological evidence shows two important things: one, the origin of the myths as described in Eddic poetry can be shown to be hundreds of years prior to Christianization, and secondly, oral traditions have a remarkable capability for preserving the content of myth over long distances and over many generations. Both facts indicate that we can put a substantial amount of trust in the medieval poetry which describes Norse myth.

Applying an Exegetic Model: Ask & Embla

We now have four different categories of evidence at hand showing that the content of Norse myth is reliably such, with little to no Christian influence. Additionally, we now have four different methods of determining if something has Christian influence, or if it can be trusted as a genuine expression of pre-Christian beliefs. With this, we can pick one example of a questionable myth and apply our previous methods to this end.

For this, I want to work with something that appears as obviously Christian: the first man and woman, Ask and Embla. One may be reading Völuspá and pause at this mention of the gods creating the first man, “ash”, and the first woman, “vine”, and have the predictable and reasonable reaction. Ask and Embla, yeah, sure, this is obviously Adam and Eve and the author didn’t even try to conceal it. Well, not so fast. Let’s see what previous methods can show.

1. Dating and Authorship: Given that the primary source for this myth is Völuspá, we can use earlier estimations of the early to mid 900’s for the poem at large for this specific myth. This puts it decades prior to the first Christian missions to Iceland and its conversion.

2. Literary Content: As Bellows had remarked, the striking imagery of the poem leaves little doubt to its pagan composition. Further, we have direct and obvious contradictions to Christian teachings, namely that Ymir first creates Ask and Embla as trees or wood, and are later then given life and intellect by the gods after the sacrifice of Ymir. Further, these individuals are created from wood, not clay, which leads into the next category.

3. Comparative Mythology and Philology: A striking creation myth where the first man and woman are created from matter and “breathed” into by a divine being is by no means exclusive to Genesis. Examples of Indo-European analogues are endless. Hesiod’s Works and Days tells us that Zeus creates the generation of the Bronze Age from the ash-tree Meliae, where the blood of Chronos drips onto the world. Both Plutarch and Lykophron tell us that the Arcadians considered themselves “offspring of the oak”. This motif stretches back to the Odyssey, where Penelope toys with the disguised Odysseus: “For surely you are not from the oak, as in the old stories.” Tree-cults are widespread in the Baltic and Finland, with songs recorded detailing the creation of man from tree stumps. Chapter 15 of the Zoroastrian Bundahisn describes the first man and woman Matro [Mashye] and Matroyao [Mashyane] being created from a tree after a war in heaven in which evil is defeated.16 The etymology of Ask and Embla are additionally useful—they, against our assumptions, possess to connection to Adam and Eve. The two have clear etymological origins in Ash and Elm or Vine, with a number of theories pointing as to the meaning of the origin.17 It is clear that Ask and Embla belongs to a long tradition of the first man and woman being created from wood, not clay. Whatever relation Genesis and Völuspá have in regards to this myth is excessively far more ancient than syncretism in 13th Century Iceland.

4. Archaeology: The Braak Bog Figures were discovered in 1947 in a peat bog in Schleswig-Holstein. Dating to the 2nd or 3rd Century BC, they are ~8 foot tall wooden figurines of a man and woman with emphasized sexual characteristics. Two theories exist as to their identity: they are either the “Lord and Lady” of the Vanir, or the then-contemporary form of Ask and Embla. Their construction of wood, emphasis on sexual characteristics, and religious significance make either plausible. Another site, the famous Kiviksgraven of Bronze Age Scania, contains depictions of the aforementioned motif of creation from fire. While these two sites are no doubt speculative in regards to Ask and Embla, they do show that the idea of a pair of man and woman pair as the ancient progenitors of their people had significance well before the arrival of Christianity.

As the evidence shows, even a myth which we would be so tempted to initially wave off as of clearly Christian origin has been revealed to be anything but. It has turned out that it is our assumptions and biases in a Christian world that has corrupted and contaminated our understanding of a genuinely pagan myth, not the other way around. Such a discovery is possible for all myth, and the notion that we must throw our hands in the air due to the historical context of a particular date of composition is completely absurd.

Conclusion

With the above evidence, I have no doubt made simplifications and left much out. It is not possible to summarize the entire corpus of evidence in this interdisciplinary inquiry, and so I therefore make no claim that what has been presented is exhaustive. I do, however, argue that what has been presented makes a clear case that scholarship has long argued that the content of Norse myth cannot be disregarded upon a hand-waving assertion that the setting of its composition makes it unreliable and rife with Christian contamination. The above evidence makes a strong case against this.

The question that participants in a “reconstructionist project” of Indo-European religion should be concerned with, conversely, is what was left out by individuals like Snorri. While we can look at a bit of text and make a number of logical conclusions about its nature and content, that is not an option for something that simply does not exist. If a Christian decided to remove a bit of myth, or if its copies were destroyed later, we would be left in the cold in regards to what that may have been. Indeed, finding precise “handbooks” for how to perform rituals across all of Indo-European religion is difficult even at the scholarly level. Contemporary pagan communities have certainly suffered from this.

While we can certainly be happy with a defense of the sources of Norse mythology at this point, I would like for a moment to touch upon the underlying thought process of such a criticism, that influence and syncretism necessitates some form of corruption or even annihilation. As Bellows had remarked, it is possible that the pagan author of Völuspá had been touched or influenced by the nearby Gaelic Christians of Ireland and The Isles. But this phenomenon of cross-cultural, religious exchange was by no stretch of the imagination a problem for historical pagans themselves, nor was it for Christians!

I do not mean simply the incorporation of feasts and gods into liturgy, or more broad topics of “Germanization”18, but the central metaphysical rationalizations of what the witnesses of the Crucifixion saw that lie at the heart of Christianity. Before the Old Testament was even written, Greek religious influence had thoroughly seeped into the Levant. During the Exile, the Jews marinated in the religious and cultural stew of Axial Age Persia. As many scholars have pointed out, concepts such as the Trinity would not have been possible without this cultural exchange between Hellenes and Hebrews—further evident by its increased theorizing and promotion as Christianity spread in Greece, exemplified best by John of Patmos's Gospel19. Even for the Old Testament, does it matter that the Flood Narrative is so obviously not a myth of Hebrew origin, or is the myth held dearly for reasons other than its historical relationship to the Jews? Never has this been seriously considered “a problem” for Christianity. What matters is simply the truth, if it’s there in the content, of if it’s not.

Though establishing a defense of the methodology and material used to reconstruct historical paganism is evidently fruitful, the more general sense that a battle with Christian influences will be present is obvious: we ourselves are sufficient examples, and in the end the most problematic. Virtually all of us were raised Christian. We went to Church on Sundays, took grape-juice communion, and learned about Jonah. Our language, habits, and cultural expressions are utterly saturated with the Christian context we were raised in, and the 1500 years of generations prior. When some idiot in a shitbox Honda Civic cuts of me off on I-65, I’m probably going to exclaim “Jesus Christ” out of Southern habit. When Easter, Halloween, and Christmas come by, though we certainly seek to reestablish the pre-Christian practices and spirit involved, we generally keep the same formula as the rest of our family and look forward to doing so each year. Besides, given the continuity of pre-Christian folk beliefs within these holidays, this is seen as a trivially easy task.

However, this being presented as a criticism of paganism from Christians has something of a rich element. The history of Christianity is precisely this struggle: what do we do with Plato? Are we permitted to read and enjoy the Iliad? Were my ancestors demon-worshipping malcontents or were they touched by God in some primordial, pre-revelatory fashion? Contemporary pagans indeed find themselves in much of the same situation as the Early Christians: a “new” religion that skirmishes with the old guard, in a midst of more than a few apocalyptic sentiments, swimming with thousands of heresies all competing for the mantle of “objective truth”. Just as they had, each issue must be taken up upon its merits. Accounts of Norse myth deserve their own proper exegesis with all available tools—that one may improperly interpret Norse myth through these minimal influences is not an argument against the easily attainable, objective reality behind it that all seek. Hand-waving does no one any good.

With that in mind, I suggest to any interested in this “project” the words of Saint Basil the Great's in his Address to Young Men on the Right Use of Greek Literature:

So we, if wise, shall take from heathen books whatever befits us and is allied to the truth, and shall pass over the rest. And just as in culling roses we avoid the thorns, from such writings as these we will gather everything useful, and guard against the noxious.20

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