The Exile's Bazaar
  • Home
  • About
  • Destinations
  • Book
  • Publications
  • Contact

Notes from a fascinating world.

The world is like a bazaar, full of interesting odds and ends, and I've been exiled into it. This is my all-over-the-map (literally and metaphorically) attempt at capturing some of the world's many wonders.

The Prose Edda and the Myths We Tell

9/9/2019

 
I should have read the Prose Edda before I went to Iceland, but I didn’t. Well, better late than never.

Despite its small size and population, Iceland has served as the keeper of memories of the Nordic/Germanic peoples. Around 1220, the Icelandic poet, lawyer, and politician Snorri Sturluson wrote the Prose Edda, which serves as a compilation of Norse mythology and culture that were threatened with being forgotten with the advent of Christianity. Indeed, one of Snorri’s motivations for writing was to explain a number of “kenningar” or periphrasis that appear in traditional poetry that drew on mythology, which future generations of Norsemen might no longer understand.

At one point, for example, Snorri writes:
How shall gold be named? It may be called Aegir’s fire; the needles of Glaser; Sif’s hair; Fulla’s head-gear; Freyja’s tears; the chatter, talk or word of the giants; Draupnir’s drop; Draupnir’s rain or shower; Freyja’s eyes; the otter-ransom, or the stroke-ransom, of the Aesir; the seed of Fyrisvold; Holgi’s how-roof; the fire of all waters and of the hands; or the stone, rock or gleam of the hand.
Then Snorri proceeds to tell the story behind each kenning.
Picture
Gullfoss, "Golden Falls," Iceland.
PictureLess than Christian decor on a church door, ca. 1200 A.D., Oslo, Norway. Perhaps depicting Odin's combat against the wolf Fenrir at Ragnarok.
Despite its purpose of memorializing the ancestral culture, Snorri’s Edda also adopts a Christian worldview and assumes that the Norse gods were all false. (If you read my post on Lāčplēsis, the Latvian national epic that makes Christians into villains, the contrast may strike you as much as it strikes me.)

The book opens with a euhemeristic or historical theory of mythology, i.e., the approach that takes divine figures to be based on real people who came to be mythologized. Specifically, Snorri claims that the Nordic gods or “Aesir” were based on the heroes of ancient Troy — Odin was Priam, the Trojan king, and Thor was Hector. Paralleling the Aeneid, the Aesir escaped Troy to sail to northern Europe. There they took advantage of the superior culture and technology that they brought with them from Asia, installing themselves as kings and convincing posterity that they were gods. The word “Aesir” Snorri supposes to have meant “Asia-men.”

If you recall another earlier post on the Norwegian adventurer and scholar Thor Heyerdahl, this account should be ringing some bells. Heyerdahl spent many of his later years trying to demonstrate a similar theory of the Aesir, arguing that they were warriors who came from present-day Azerbaijan. In his case, he thought “Aesir” derived from “Azov,” as in the Sea of Azov by Ukraine. Although the government of Azerbaijan is very fond of Heyerdahl for this reason, scholars have generally ripped his theory to shreds.

So similarly Snorri’s theory of Trojan origin cannot be credited. For one thing, Snorri contradicts himself. If Odin and Thor and the other Aesir escaped to Scandinavia to found new kingdoms, then how could they have also been Priam and Hector who died in Troy? According to Snorri, Troy was the real Asgard. Ragnarok, the prophesied fiery end of Asgard and the gods, was really the story of the fall of Troy. And Thor’s struggle with the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr at Ragnarok, which ends with their mutual destruction, was really his deadly duel with Achilles.

Other Norse writers give similar and even more outlandish accounts of the Aesir. Odin, according to tradition, had fought heroically at Troy before escaping alongside Aeneas. He then became an ally of Mithridates VI of Pontus, a formidable adversary of the Roman Republic. Rome finally defeated Mithridates after Pompey took command. After that, Odin escaped with his people to the north to found the Germanic nations that one day would take revenge upon Rome. The preposterous nature of this story should be obvious as soon as one reflects that Troy fell over a thousand years before Rome made war on Pontus. Odin would truly have to be a god to have lived long enough to fight both Agamemnon and Pompey. Not to mention the Romans’ own mythology that also traces their founding to Aeneas and Troy.

As some kind of Chinese, I am also struck by this tendency in European myth-making to trace one’s own origins to another people. And it’s usually to a people from the east, who are for that precise reason more sophisticated than Europeans. What an inferiority complex. How strange to think that these same Europeans would come to colonize much of the world and to travel around it proselytizing the opposite view, that the white man from Western Europe was for that reason superior to everyone else.

“We” Chinese prefer the opposite story, that everyone else came from us. I am reminded here of the (unsupported) proposition in Chinese historiography that Koreans are descended from refugees escaping a tyrannical king in China. A zany group of Chinese “scholars” recently announced in Beijing their “discovery” that all European languages are secretly derived from Chinese. So — though you might not have realized it — when you’re speaking English or French or Russian, you’re really speaking a Chinese dialect.

Nearly as head-scratching is the theory proposed by the French historian Joseph de Guignes that China was founded by colonists from ancient Egypt. But, unlike Snorri’s Edda, that is not a theory that is likely to find a place in the story that the Chinese tell about themselves any time soon.


Comments are closed.

    Author

    Writer, traveler, lawyer, dilettante. Failed student of physics. Not altogether distinguished graduate of two Ivy League institutions. Immigrant twice over. "The grand tour is just the inspired man's way of getting home."
    Follow me on Twitter (@W_T_Han) and Instagram (@wthtravel).
    ​https://www.scmp.com/author/william-han

    同是天涯淪落人,
    ​相逢何必曾相識?

    Updates Mondays.

     
    Want to be notified of new posts?
    Get newsletter
    Powered By Constant Contact
     

    Archives

    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016

    Categories

    All
    Afghanistan
    Africa
    Amazon
    America
    Antarctica
    Anthropology
    Archaeology
    Architecture
    Argentina
    Armenia
    Art
    Astronomy
    Books
    Brazil
    Buddhism
    Caribbean
    Caribbeans
    Caucasus
    Central America
    Central Asia
    Chile
    China
    Christianity
    Cinema
    Colombia
    Costa Rica
    Criticism
    Cuba
    Culture
    Easter Island
    Economics
    Ecuador
    England
    Essay
    Ethiopia
    Etymology
    Europe
    Family
    Film
    France
    Goths
    Halloween
    Hinduism
    History
    Huns
    Iceland
    Immigration
    Inca
    Indonesia
    Iran
    Iraq
    Islam
    Japan
    Kenya
    Korea
    Law
    Linguistics
    Literature
    Maldives
    Martial-arts
    Mathematics
    Medicine
    Mexico
    Middle East
    Mongolia
    Mythology
    Nepal
    New Zealand
    Pacific-islands
    Panama
    Persia
    Peru
    Philosophy
    Politics
    Portraits & Encounters
    Portugal
    Psychology
    Race
    Refugees
    Religion
    Rome
    Russia
    Science
    Sherlock Holmes
    Singapore
    South America
    Spain
    Sri Lanka
    Superman
    Syria
    Taiwan
    Television
    Travel
    Travel Advice
    Ukraine
    United States
    USA
    Uzbekistan
    Vaccination
    Voltaire
    Women
    Writing
    Zoroastrianism

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • About
  • Destinations
  • Book
  • Publications
  • Contact