Bestiaries: Memory, the Carnal, and the Divine
One could herald the medieval bestiaries as the first legitimate attempt at a zoological catalogue, but upon close inspection it is clear that zoology is a minor concern for the bestiaries. It is indeed a catalogue, but it serves another purpose beyond merely recording. It serves the purpose of remembering in the sense that only a medieval thinker would fully understand. The art of memory is largely extinct today but in the world that bread the bestiaries it would have been well known among philosophers and men of religion.
One man, Giordano Bruno, believed that remembering was the path to the divine. He believed that the act of learning was in actuality the act of remembering things that humans inherently already knew.( Yates, 202) Through remembering we could achieve knowledge of the divine, and become God-like ourselves. (224) I don’t think I need mention that a man like Bruno was quickly labeled a heretic in Catholic Europe, and was promptly burned at the stake in Venice.(201)
I bring up Bruno simply to demonstrate the divine stigma that memory held in medieval world even if he was much more a renaissance thinker than a medieval philosopher, and he postdates the bestiary by nearly 700 years. Still, he is a perfect example of a time when memory contained divine attributes, and Bruno viewed himself as a continuation of the medieval memory treasies of the past.(Yates, 230) He then is still relevant to a medieval world where writing had come into common existence but was widely inaccessible to the average person, and in a world where the memory truly is the only way for one to remember (no flash drives or electronic planners) it is easy to understand the divine stigma of the memory.
How does this banter on memory apply to the medieval bestiary? It’s very clear that the bestiary was functional as a sort of catalogue of information, and catalogues or lists of information were very popular to medieval thinkers who categorized nearly everything and sorted it out into what is referred to as a memory palace or a memory theater. For an example of such a theater refer to figure one toward the back of the book. This theater is the creation of Giulio Camillo and is properly referred to as the seven pillars of Solomon. (Yates, 144) However, this is not necessarily the form a memory theater might take. I have built a memory theater out of downtown Bozeman, and even out of the classroom where our Nature and Culture class is held, and I would not be surprised if our Bestiary was created just as much as a memory theater as it was created to be a zoological catalogue or divine commentary.
Mind you, in the middle ages and medieval Europe memory theaters, predating Bruno, were not necessarily a path to the divine, but rather a reminder of the divine. Like Dante’s layers of Hell, and later the layers of Paradise, the medieval memory system was a reminder of the divine, a system for cataloguing the good and the evil. (Yates, 122) Similarly the Bestiary catalogues not what the layers of hell can teach us about the human relationship to the divine, but instead what we can learn about our place in the world, and about divine nature, through the observation of the animals.
Take for consideration this passage from our bestiary referring to the bear: “The bear signifies the Devil, ravager of the flocks of our Lord…” (60) or the pelican who tears open her breast and spills her blood to feed the children whom she loves. (146) Clearly, the pelican’s sacrifice is allegorical, but nearly all the animals of the bestiary are, and as such they are reminders not of the types of animals that exist, but of the human relation to the divine. Even the Phoenix is included in the bestiary, and while it is possible that the authors of the bestiary truly did believe in such an animal, it would not be farfetched to assume that they were more concerned with the allegorical qualities of the animal (i.e. it’s cycle of death and rebirth).
Why is there this deep seeded connection between nature and the divine? Pagan religions, by and large, did not bother to separate the natural from the divine, but that view ended with the introduction of western religions. Nature became wild and carnal and fearful and so far removed from the order and civility of organized religion. Of course it can be argued that religion in medieval time breed nothing like order or civility between humans, but whether or not we are willing to recognize that now has little to do with whether or not they believed it in the past.
Today we continue to draw a line not only between the divine and natural, but also between the human and the natural and the human and the divine. We believe that there is this separation, that there is anything which can be unnatural. I would like to argue that these distinctions do not exist. I would argue that there is nothing unnatural about the divine under the simple premise that everything is part of the nature of the universe. This of course means that the human aspect of our world is also part of the nature of the universe, but we cannot make this connection. It is alien to us.
I would like to digress for a short while. Don’t worry; this will be relevant again shortly. I want to mention a friend. Her name is Misty and she is a dog. In a previous paper is asked why it was so wrong to refer to Misty as a person, but now I would like to go the opposite direction, because Misty is also natural in a way we do not consider people natural any more. Even though she is domesticated we know that misty is not human, and is therefore closer to the natural, or carnal world that we believe we as humans are separate from. We believe her to be wild, or last that a part of her is wild or natural and yet we keep Misty and her kind close to us as a companion species, and we lose ourselves in their silent friendship. Perhaps Misty is a conduit. Perhaps we people love dogs and cats and hamsters and parrots and iguanas because they are still connected to that natural world and we believe that we are not. Perhaps we still find something in nature that is divine. Perhaps we think that what is natural simply is divine like the pagans did. Perhaps our memories theaters and bestiaries and pets are our connections to the natural and to the divine.
Orality and Norse Mythology: The Past and the Preserved
The Song the Earth Sings
Sean Kane, a professor of cultural studies at Trent University says that “Myth… seems to be the song of a place to itself, which humans overhear.” (51) This may seem a bit mystical for a twenty first century audience, but the truth is that a culture’s mythology speaks multitudes of how that culture views human relationship both to the Earth and to the divine.
Myths serve a practical purpose in addition to religious purposes in that while they taught people their places in the world they conveyed practical information about what humans can and cannot do. An example would be from the Algonkian tribe native to what is now southern Quebec. They have a story about a trickster god by the name of Nanabozo who ate white berries and was forced to climb a tree in order to escape from his mounting diarrhea. (Kane, 39) Perhaps this isn’t a pleasant tale, but Algonkian children know what berries not to eat. Another story is more somber. It is from the Haida culture on the west coast of North America. It tells of a group of boys being slaughtered by Qaasghajiina, a creek goddess, for their disrespect of the land. Besides being a sad tragedy, this story is a lesson to the Haida people to remember their place in the unforgiving powers of nature. (47)
The above examples, however, come from hunter-gatherer societies, and translate poorly to the mythic cultures of Europe, which for ages have been agricultural. We cannot expect myth’s to take the same form in these two opposite societies. For instance, you are not likely to find a god connected to agriculture in a hunter gather society, nor would you consider water or a rock to have a spirit in most agricultural societies. In fact Kane uses the Norse tradition as an example of how a mythical tradition forms in an agricultural society. If a society plants grain or raises cattle, they need land. If societies must compete for land, there will be wars. At this point a polytheistic religion would surely have a god of agriculture and a god of war, and if there are going to be gods there are going to be priests. Now there is a godhead specific to the priesthood. True to this theory, Norse mythology has a god for each war, agriculture, and the priesthood, which are Thor, Frey, and Odin respectively. (Kane, 22)
In a modern society we don’t approach traditional European mythology (i.e. Greco-Roman myth or Norse myth) as a legitimate religion, and we would be hard pressed to find any modern followers of these belief systems. We view the stories as parables and a source of moral teaching, but we tend to forget that for the peoples in these places and times it was very much an acting and functioning religion. This is especially true for the Norse religion. As the Greco-Roman religion began to die out with the philosophers, and when Caesars were feeding Christians to the lions, Norse priests were still sacrificing to Odin, and Kings (who in early times may have been more like chieftains) were building mead halls in honor of Thor.
The fact that the Norse religion survived so much longer than any of the other pagan religions in Europe is exactly why it is so enticing. The fact that it was a primarily oral society (primarily oral because there was a runic alphabet, though it was not accessible to the public) also makes it interesting. The society, an agricultural warrior culture, took form around these concepts. Religion shaped the culture the way any anthropologist would expect it to, but we cannot underestimate the affect that oral traditions would have on a pre literate society and religion.
Orality: How the thoughts of a pre-literate society take form.
The English language has a record high of over 1.5 million words. Many of these words have multiple meanings, and most have meanings that have changed over time. (Ong, 8) I think that when we view the course of our normal dialect, our day to day conversation, we will be able to think of only a couple thousand words that we actually use. The rest are for literary flair and pedantic discourse. This over abundance of vocabulary is a flaw, or be it an obstacle, that is not dealt with by pre-literate societies. The most abundant of primarily oral languages have only a few thousand words to deal with (8) which, in the light of an oral culture’s inability to record hundreds of thousands of discrete items, makes perfect sense. There are no dictionaries, there are no thesauruses, and an oral society is not going to concern itself with the adoption of Latin and French into its vocabulary. It is a tradition that is going to value function over form, where the word “forest” is perfectly functional and there is no need to refer to it as an “arboreal landscape.”
This is only one distinction of an oral culture; a distinction which holds true for Norse oral traditions as it would for any other. There are, however, nine distinctions or psychodynamics of oral tradition that are introduced by the Jesuit scholar Walter Ong, at least five of which can be applied quite nicely to the ballads of the Edda. (Exactly what the Edda is I will elaborate on in another section) Specifically, for the sake of my own familiarity, we will use the first ballad of Sigurd the Dragon-Slayer about Regin the smith. Though I use this example specifically, these rules can be applied widely.
The first psychodynamic that Ong introduces is that Oral traditions are additive rather than subordanative. (Ong, 37) This is to say that in a narrative, no action or occurrence is more significant than another. This can be seen in our example as the simple content of the ballad. It is no more important that King Sigmund was slain than it is that Sigurd slays the dragon Favnir. In fact we may think that the story is about the slaying of the dragon, but it is no more about that than it is about the treachery of Regin the smith. So it can be seen that the story is not about one simple plot, but it is about many, layered plots, none of which is subordanative to another.
The second feature of oral traditions is that it is aggregative.(Ong, 38) Oral “literature” (if we can call it literature) does not exist in single words as modern language does. We write our thoughts word by word, but in an oral culture this is not the case. They group together word clusters in the form of epithets and clichés. This is a pneumonic device for storytellers more than anything else. Take for consideration the cliché “it’s raining cats and dogs” which would be viewed as an incomplete thought if any of the words were missing. This is how the entirety of the storytelling exists in the Norse culture, references are repetitive and almost no nouns exist without adjectives. Specific examples from Siggurd would be the re-occurrence of references to Regin as a “clever smith” or that “his words cannot be trusted” and epithets for the “Brave King” or a “fair lady.” The ballad is chock full (another cliché) of these epithets and clichéd references, but to continue citing more examples would not further my point.
The story telling tradition is repetitive, which is Ong’s third psychodynamic. (39) This is a fact that has been recognized by many scholars, but what it means is basically that if something is said once, it will probably be said twice, if not three times or more. Consider these two consecutive verses from our example:
The brave men of the hall
Were forced to take a stand;
War soon stalked about,
In King Giur’s Land.
War soon stalked about
In King Giur’s Land;
All joined themselves in battle,
First on the south sea-strand.
Verbatim repetition exists here as a very concrete example of the repetition. Again, like so many of these features, it serves as a pneumonic device. It is closely linked to the previous psychodynamic in that it allows the story to continue driving without creating an over abundance of verse that needs to be memorized.
Fourth, Ong states that the form of the poetry is conservative or traditional.(41) In the case of Siggurd, this form exists as eddic verse, but Scandinavian ballads also exist in skaldic verse. I will elaborate on the eddic verse in the next section, but suffice it to say that to change the verse form of these ballads simply isn’t done. To break this traditional verse is to ruin a perfectly functional pneumonic system.
The final psychodynamic that Ong gives us is that oral traditions are participatory rather than distant.(45) This says as much of the literate culture as it does of an oral one. Something understood about the composition of a book, a novel, or an essay is that it is composed by a distant writer who records his or her thoughts in solitude, which in turn is read by an audience in solitude. Indeed even the word “audience” can be misleading when referring to the individual readers of a manuscript. This is not the case with an oral culture where both the composition and performance of these oral ballads is done in a social setting. For obvious reasons it is difficult to relay a direct example of how this is manifested in Siggurd the Dragon-Slayer by throwing text at you or alluding to the theme of the ballad, but there are still cultures alive today, like the Faroese, that chant these ballads in a ritualistic and social manner. It is as social and performance oriented as live music or a dance, in fact on the Faroe Islands both music and dance are incorporated into the singing of the ballads.
These five psychodynamics, a healthy chunk of the nine presented by Ong, apply very readily to the Norse storytelling or mythological tradition. The remaining four apply, but are simply too abstract to apply directly to a single text. They say that the story telling tradition is close to the human life world, agonistically toned, homeostatic, and situational rather than abstract. (42, 42, 46, 48) I don’t want to go into too much detail on these four psychodynamics for the sake of risking clarity, but in a roundabout way they all point to the idea that the myths are morally and practically relevant to the society they belong to.
Were forced to take a stand;
War soon stalked about,
In King Giur’s Land.
War soon stalked about
In King Giur’s Land;
All joined themselves in battle,
First on the south sea-strand.
Verbatim repetition exists here as a very concrete example of the repetition. Again, like so many of these features, it serves as a pneumonic device. It is closely linked to the previous psychodynamic in that it allows the story to continue driving without creating an over abundance of verse that needs to be memorized.
Fourth, Ong states that the form of the poetry is conservative or traditional.(41) In the case of Siggurd, this form exists as eddic verse, but Scandinavian ballads also exist in skaldic verse. I will elaborate on the eddic verse in the next section, but suffice it to say that to change the verse form of these ballads simply isn’t done. To break this traditional verse is to ruin a perfectly functional pneumonic system.
The final psychodynamic that Ong gives us is that oral traditions are participatory rather than distant.(45) This says as much of the literate culture as it does of an oral one. Something understood about the composition of a book, a novel, or an essay is that it is composed by a distant writer who records his or her thoughts in solitude, which in turn is read by an audience in solitude. Indeed even the word “audience” can be misleading when referring to the individual readers of a manuscript. This is not the case with an oral culture where both the composition and performance of these oral ballads is done in a social setting. For obvious reasons it is difficult to relay a direct example of how this is manifested in Siggurd the Dragon-Slayer by throwing text at you or alluding to the theme of the ballad, but there are still cultures alive today, like the Faroese, that chant these ballads in a ritualistic and social manner. It is as social and performance oriented as live music or a dance, in fact on the Faroe Islands both music and dance are incorporated into the singing of the ballads.
These five psychodynamics, a healthy chunk of the nine presented by Ong, apply very readily to the Norse storytelling or mythological tradition. The remaining four apply, but are simply too abstract to apply directly to a single text. They say that the story telling tradition is close to the human life world, agonistically toned, homeostatic, and situational rather than abstract. (42, 42, 46, 48) I don’t want to go into too much detail on these four psychodynamics for the sake of risking clarity, but in a roundabout way they all point to the idea that the myths are morally and practically relevant to the society they belong to.
Form: The Eddic verse
In the previous section I mentioned that the ballads all have a set form that simply was not tampered with. This is true for the ballads, but not all stories in the Norse tradition. There are sets of stories known as the Sagas that are mostly related to Icelandic and Norwegian tradition that are written in prose, but while they are spackled with bits of mythology, they are primarily historical accounts rather than religious poems. Probably the most famous examples are the Vinland Sagas about the discovery of North America (although I don’t think I need to point out that the Vikings did not call it “America”). However, I hope that I don’t have to explain the form of prose, because it doesn’t have one, so I will not delve into the form of the Sagas.
What I do want to discuss is the form of eddic lay. This form is originally Germanic, and traditionally dealt with Germanic hero legends (Hallberg, 11) but was adopted by the Norse poets (who were also of Germanic descent) almost exclusively to convey mythology. In the next section I will discuss the Edda (an actual compilation of eddic poetry) but for now I would like to focus on the meter of the poems. There are two types of eddic meter, but I will focus on what is believed to be the older form known as fornyrðislag or “epic meter.”(12). It consists of stanzas of eight line, each with two stressed syllables and a varying but comparable number of unstressed syllables. The line are joined together in couplet form using alliteration in the form that fallows:
Ár var alda
Þats ekki var,
vara sandr né sær
né svalar unnir;
iörð fannsk æva
né upphiminn,
gap var Ginnunga
en gras hvergi.
Of old was the age
Ere anything was,
Sea nor cool waves
Nor sand there were,
Earth had not been
Nor heaven above,
But a yawning gap,
And grass nowhere.
(Hallberg, 12)
I have highlighted the alliterative words by bolding them, and you can see that the alliteration occurs twice on the first line of each couplet, and only once on the second line. The stressed syllables are always the first syllables of the alliterative words in the first lines, but in the second lines of the couplets it is more subjective. (12) This is the oldest poetic form in the Norse tradition, and probably the best known form thanks to the Edda.
Christianity, the Death of Paganism, and Snorri
It’s no secret that the introduction of Christianity meant the death of pagan religions in Europe. In Iceland Christianity was introduce around 1000 C.E., and with it came the Roman alphabet that extended literacy beyond the priesthood.(Ross, 116) It was shortly after that Chritianity was made the official religion by the Althing, which was essentially the Icelandic parliament. (Ross, 116) This was at a fairly young age for the island, which had only been settled roughly 100 years before and was almost entirely pagan, though there were some hermits whose homeland of Ireland had already converted to Christianity. (116) However, even with the official decision to adopt Christianity, many Icelanders were slow to convert to this foreign religion and a full conversion of the populace wasn’t to occurred for nearly 300 years. This slow conversion, and the popular desire to stay connected with their pagan heritage, may be the only reason the Norse religion survived with any detailed record. (118)
Though the oral tradition had largely faded away with the introduction of a democratic writing system, it was precisely this writing system and the actions of one man that allowed the myths to survive. This man was Snorri Sturluson, who in the early 13th century took up the task of recording in eddic lay the myths and ballads of the pagan religion. His compilation is known as the Edda, which is broken into three main sections: the Codex Regius, which deals primarily with the world and actions of the gods; the Codex Wormianus, which is primarily concerned with the hero ballads such as Siggurd the Dragon-Slayer; and the Codex Upsaliensis, which is a montage of all kinds of fun stuff. (Ross, 128-129) The myths and songs of the Edda are believed to be archaic and the basis for the original Norse religion, but Snorri’s manuscripts are relatively new and are believed to be the first full written record of the Eddic myths, which of course speaks multitudes for the functionality of the earlier oral tradition as a means of preservation.
If there was a possible downside to Snorri’s contribution, however, it is that he was Christian. Because of this most scholars believe that the Edda cannot be viewed with an unwary eye. Snorri was most certainly concerned with preserving the myths, but to believe that an outsider to the religion could accurately portray the ideologies of a belief system he doesn’t belong to is a lack of healthy skepticism. However, all skepticism aside, most scholars will agree that they owe a great deal to Snorri because without his manuscripts studying a coherent record of the Norse Religion would be an impossible task.
Remnants of the Past
The Norse religion did not escape the fate that the introduction of Christianity had doomed it to. No European pagan beliefs did, however there are still shards of its mysticism buried in the day to day life of the Scandinavian culture. It’s important to recognize that compared to the rest of Europe, Christianity came very late to the Norsemen, and for a society that has so much history and folk tradition, it’s to be expected that any mysticism and superstition will be based out of their pagan roots.
One example is in the Vinland Sagas, which as I mentioned before were written to function as history books, however they are rampant with Viking superstition, attention to omens, and even conversations with the dead, which is interesting considering that they are not pre-Christian. In fact there are many Christian references in the sagas. Leif the Lucky himself was charge by the King of Norway to bring Christianity to Iceland. In addition it is likely that the authors of the original Vinland manuscripts were Christians rather than pagans, which means we must also have a healthy skepticism about the role of both the Christian and pagan religion in the tales.
Another example of mythical influence on Christian Scandinavia comes from the folklore of Norway. The stories are of simple, God-fearing people in a peasant culture, but they too cling to the superstitions of the pagan religion. The protagonists in these folk tales are always faced with obstacles in the form of magic and trolls, where trolls were originally the ugly, often stupid enemies of the Norse gods.
Whatever the case is, there are still tracks of the mythical Norse religion making their mark in the modern world of what once was home to a rich story telling culture. It could take its form in the folklore of Norway, or in the Faroe Islands where they still sing the ballads in traditional verse, but this oral, mythical religion played the key role in creating rich cultures that have not lost their roots in their pagan past.
