The Pagan Earl

In The Pagan Earl, Nicolas Meylan contextualizes and interprets representations of Hákon Sigurðarson (ca. 937–995) and his religious practices within the sociopolitical milieux in which his major prose representations were produced: Theodoricus Monk's Historia de antiquitate regum Norwagiensium, Historia Norwegie, and Ágrip af Nóregs konunga sögum (all produced in Norway and presumed to date to the 1180s-90s); the Icelander Odd Snorrason's Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar (dated to about the same period); the later compendia Fagrskinna and Heimskringla (dated to the 1220s-30s); and the late and more expansive version of Ólafs saga Tryggvasonar as it appears in Flateyjarbók (1387–94). Meylan's aim is to uncover the medieval Christian textual agendas behind narratives of Hákon and his tenth-century actions in defense of Norse religious traditions and in defiance of coerced Christianization. He writes: “The central hypothesis of the present study is that ‘paganism’ was, in medieval Scandinavia, a profoundly instrumental and context-bound category” (p. 19), or, as he later puts it: “We must ask what Earl Hákon represents in these texts” (p. 80).Descriptions of Hákon and his defense of pagan ways become revealed as tools for medieval writers seeking to comment on the consolidating, centralizing, and eventually also Christianizing politics of the dynasty founded by King Harald Fairhair and continued by his descendants, including Hákon the Good, Harald Greycloak, and Ólaf Tryggvason. Hákon's spirited return to a pagan Norway, Meylan argues, serves as a trope of resistance against processes of monarchical consolidation and a defense of the more decentralized governance of farmers, chieftains, aristocrats, and assemblies that had held sway in times past, both in Norway and in Iceland, “a system that . . . foregrounded decentralization, the law, popular assemblies, and local chieftains, as well as the personal rights of free farmers” (p. 91). This system did not exist in the absence of a king (except in Iceland) but in the presence of a ruler who recognized and embraced a more limited role, a “traditional, i.e., ‘pagan’, kingship” (p. 200). In tracing the rise and fall of Hákon Sigurðarson, Meylan seeks to underscore the “socio-political, rather than cultic” (p. 71) aspects of the texts’ representations of his reign, as well as its relation to sacrifice, temples, deities, conversion, myth, human sacrifice, fate, and religious institutions.Meylan presents skaldic poetry—the chief evidence cited in these medieval histories and sagas for the events they recount—including Eyvind Finnsson's genealogical Háleygjatal, Einar Skálaglamm's panegyric Vellekla, Glúm Geirason's elegaic Gráfeldardrápa, and stanzas by Hallfreð Óttarsson, Kormak Ögmundarson, Þórð Kolbeinsson, and Þorleif Rauðfeldarson. But he does so not so much as evidence of tenth-century events, but as works that twelfth- and thirteenth-century writers use and interpret strategically in constructing their narratives of the past. Some chapters do include detailed discussions of skaldic poets and their poems, including chapter 1, “Divine Kinship,” chapter 3, “Sacred Kingship,” and chapter 5, “Gods and Goddesses,” but these presentations are for the most part precursors in Meylan's argument to examine the ways the poems become interpreted, selectively quoted, or apparently suppressed in the histories and sagas under examination in the study.Alongside comparing textual accounts with the skaldic poems they cite as sources, Meylan compares the medieval histories and sagas to each other, analyzing with care and precision how the accounts differ from each other at each turn of Hákon's storied life. By comparing portrayals of Hákon and his religious practices from one text to the next, Meylan suggests contrasts in attitude toward a consolidated monarchy, with Heimskringla evincing the greatest sympathy for Hákon and thereby the greatest skepticism toward a system of centralized monarchical control. To varying degrees, Meylan finds this agenda mirrored or countered in the other texts he examines.Although Meylan notes that Heimskringla is Icelandic (p. 24), and although he at times links it with texts associated with Snorri Sturluson (including Egils saga, p. 93, and both Egils saga and Prose Edda, pp. 116, 149), he resists bringing the figure of Snorri into his argument, writing: “Snorri is paradoxically too well known; it would prove easy to read too much of his biography into the text [i.e, Heimskringla],” (pp. 24–25). In Snorri's absence, Heimskringla nonetheless evinces the characteristic Icelandic dislike of centralization and the nostalgia toward old systems of local control that scholars of the Icelandic sagas have long noted as a sort of Icelandic requiem to the fallen Commonwealth. Even the famous accounts of the conversion of Iceland under pressure from King Ólaf Tryggvason are shown to support this Icelandic tendency, relying not on royal force or coercion, but on the cooperation of “the three fundamental institutions of the ‘old’ dispensation: the law, the assembly, and the chieftaincy” (p. 140). Meylan's points about Heimskringla in particular are not unprecedented in scholarship: he draws upon and cites key prior scholars like Birgit Sawyer, Magnús Fjalldal, and Bruce Lincoln, upon whose work he bases his argument. But Meylan goes farther in detail than prior scholars, particularly in his comparison of different versions of the Hákon narrative and the possible agendas behind the texts’ contents and interpretations.The period under examination in this textual comparison is a long one, ranging from early Norwegian accounts like the late twelfth-century Theodorus to the late fourteenth-century Icelandic Flateyjarbók, and Meylan notes decided changes in attitude over this long period. For example, where newly converted skaldic poets could find new careers praising Christ, and thirteenth-century writers could evince an embracing antiquarian interest in the pagan past, the clerical compilers of Flateyjarbók depict old religious practices as inexcusable devilry and delusion (pp. 115–21).While Meylan argues convincingly for contrasting (anti)monarchical agendas in the texts he analyzes, his study at times seems to dismiss the validity or even the existence of the pieces of evidence, however fragmentary, that scholars of religion have used to try to reconstruct the religious beliefs of Norway and Iceland before the arrival of Christianity. Citing such scholarship in detail throughout the study, and praising reconstructionists’ “synthetic, at times extraordinarily erudite accounts of the history and morphology of the old religion” (p. 17), Meylan's study nonetheless at times seems to dismiss such evidence as the whole-cloth fabrications of medieval Christian writers. Of course, that need not be the case: positing a medieval agenda to texts like Heimskringla does not preclude its harboring shreds of evidence of past beliefs, be they drawn from writers’ knowledge of longstanding local customs and beliefs, seasonal practices and festivities, surviving placenames and monuments from the pagan past, extant skaldic and eddic poetry, and other items of what medievalists of the eighteenth century would eventually describe as “popular antiquities” and that scholars today describe as “folklore.” The past is always constructed in the present, and writers and historians, as well as other storytellers, always make choices about the things they include in their works and the meanings they ascribe to them. That scholars of Old Norse have been more interested in the religious context of the tenth century than the equally fascinating religious contexts of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is a tendency and a failing that Meylan's excellent reading of narratives of Hákon seeks to counter: there is much of great value to be said about the ways the writers of Historia Norwegie or Fagrskinna or Heimskringla constructed their narratives, and there are many ways in which their choices probably reflect concerns or understandings of their day, particularly in the realm of the operation of church and state in a far-flung North Atlantic Norway, increasingly drawn into forms of consolidation with the kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden. With Meylan's study, Hákon's significance as a trope or symbol in textual accounts of the Norwegian past receives the critical attention it is due

Ancient history · Archaeology · Arson · Art · Old Norse · Parchment · Ancient and Medieval Archaeology Studies · Classics · Historical and Archaeological Studies · History · Linguistics and language evolution