In Avec César en Gaule (éd. d’Artrey, 1970),169 Raymond Schmittlein attempted to rehabilitate the proconsul of Rome, and attacked the virtually classic thesis according to which Caesar would have invaded Gaul by pure ambition and reignited the war each time that it was extinguished in a basic spirit of pillage and profit. (The book is prefaced by Alain Peyrefitte).
Outside of specialised journals, L’Anitquité gauloise (B. P. 119–05, 75224 Paris Cedex 05),170 a quarterly publication founded by Christian Pacaud, has striven to make the national past better known with a view to broad popularisation. Guy Rachet occasionally participates.
The society of friends of the museum of the château of Saint-Germain, presided over by Jean-Paul Palewski, has published the bulletin Antiquités nationales since 1969.171
Structures of Nordic Mythology
‘It is regrettable that a people in whose veins Frankish blood flows, upon the territory in which the Germanic dialects are today still spoken (notably in Flanders and Alsace), and who possess a province called Normandy, have forgotten their Nordic heritage and do not know to place the Edda and the Icelandic Saga next to Virgil and Tacitus’.
Renauld-Kranz includes these lines at the beginning of his Anthologie de la poésie nordique ancienne, published by Gallimard in 1964.172 It is a labour in which he intends to make one of the richest poetic traditions of all time available to the French public by restoring for the first time the great Eddic and skaldic texts (drawn from the Edda of Snorri Sturluson and the works of the ‘skalds’ or Scandinavian bards) in a rhythmic system similar to the original.
On the basis of ancient Nordic literature, Renauld-Kranz is currently attempting to deepen the character of the principal Germanic gods, and to establish the structures of Germanic religion, that is to say, the organising, constitutive forms that cannot be reduced to simple historic processes.
Nordic mythology perpetuates in its broad lines a common Germanic mythology which the authors of antiquity (Tacitus) and the Middle Ages (Adam of Bremen, Saxo Grammaticus) relied upon, and which modern authors (Jakob Grimm, Jan de Vries, Georges Dumézil, Otto Höfler) have afforded improved knowledge.
‘Scandinavia’, writes Renauld-Kranz, ‘is effectively the only Germanic country (and one of the few countries in Europe) whose literature still bathes in paganism. If we exclude the runic inscriptions, the first monuments of this literature date from the ninth century and the last documents of religious significance from the thirteenth. At this time, Scandinavia had been Christian for around two hundred years (in Iceland, the official conversion to Christianity was only proclaimed in the year 1,000). But it is very probable that the pagan tradition was still alive then’.
It survives even today in the local cults, pagan family traditions, and popular costumes.
The Three Functions
The dominant figures of Scandinavian mythology are as follows: on one hand the gods Tyr and Odhinn (Wotan in southern Germany), then the god Thorr, all three of the Æsir; on the other hand, a collection of divinities (notably Njordhr, Freyr, Freyja), the Vanir, with less distinct features, who patronise the same field of activity.173
This pantheon articulates itself around three functions, which are the basis of the Indo-European ideological structure as established by Georges Dumézil: sacredness and sovereignty (cosmic plane, first function, with Tyr and Odhinn), the warrior power (human plane, second function, with Thorr), fecundity and productivity (social plane, third function, with Njordhr, Freyr, and Freyja).
At the origin of the harmonious society of the gods, Germanic myth places a ‘war of foundation’ which opposes the Æsir and Vanir. (The same theme is found among the Romans, in a historicised form, with the Etruscan wars; and among the Indians, in the Mahābhārata epic). The cause is a Vanic goddess, Gullveig (that is to say, ‘gold-drunk’). Divided, the Æsir are first defeated and the Vanir invade their territory, Asgard (‘the enclosure of the Æsir’, cf. German Garten, French jardin, ‘garden’). But the Æsir prevail in the end, for their chief Odhinn, who knows the secret of the runes and watches over the order of the world, manages to ‘domesticate’ the assailants thanks to the binding power of his magic.
In the unified society that follows this period of discord, the Æsir acquire the functions of sovereignty (Odhinn) and of combat (Thorr), whereas the Vanir take on the economic function: they are charged to produce wealth. Such is the nature of the ‘social contract’ among the Indo-Europeans.
The function of sovereignty contains two aspects: one ‘judicial’ and religious, and the other ‘political’ and administrative. The fact that they are closely associated shows that, in the society of the gods (and by extension, that of men), they must necessarily go together. The political aspect establishes the relationship of authority, indeed of constraint; the judicial aspect furnishes, with the notion of law, the justification for this authority, and at the same time assures social cohesion and the smooth functioning of the world. Among the ancient Norse, leadership entails support and protection in return: a fundamental relationship, pivoting on ‘fidelity’ (Treue), of which we could cite many examples, from the Pax Romana (subdued and protected cities) to the feudal system (relationship of vassal to suzerain).
The Union of Reason, Passion, and Work
An entire historicist tradition has wanted to see in the myth of the Æsir and Vanir the more or less deformed memory of two different peoples, one living by hunting and gathering, the other by agriculture; they would have fought, and after, overlapped with each other. Archaeologists have put forward the names of the Megalithenvölker (people of the megaliths) and the Streitaxvölker (people of the battle axe). But Dumézil, in Les dieux des Germains (PUF, 1959),174 writes: ‘we do not think that the duality of the Æsir and Vanir is a reflection of these events; it is a matter here of two complementary terms of a unitary religious and ideological structure, two terms which imply each other, and which have been brought together, already articulated, by those Indo-Europeans that became the Germans’.
In a study entitled Histoire et société, published in Nouvelle école,175 Giorgio Locchi adds: ‘In essence, the Æsir and the Vanir effectively represent two different modes of life: on one hand an ancient tradition of great hunters, and on the other hand a new one: the producers or growers who could have infiltrated the midst of Indo-European societies by acculturation’.
The ideal society therefore recognised the union of intelligence (reason), force (passion), and the virtues of appetite (work). The Æsir occupied a dominant position; the Vanir a subordinate position. But this hierarchy forms a harmonious whole. And all the gods unite to combat Utgard, the ensemble of monsters and giants. ‘The gods are opposed to the giants’, notes Renauld-Kranz, ‘like the civilised to the wild, but also like the parent to the child!’
The principal gods are Thorr and Odhinn. The first is associated with air and wind, the second with fire and thunderbolts (the Vanir being earth and water).
Odhinn is the creator or at least the shaper of the world. It is he who ensures (with Tyr) the proper order of the cosmos. God of kings, he is also the king of gods. Like his Indo-European homologues (Zeus-Pater, Juppiter, Varuna), his power rests upon knowledge and magic. And his ecstasies themselves are of a spiritual order.
Thorr, god of war and storm, is the son of Odhinn, just as the lightning flash is the son of the sky. But just as the thunderbolt falls to earth, so too is it on the human plane that his activity unfolds. His power comes to him not from wisdom but from physical force, symbolised by his hammer. He incarnates the virtues of the heart and action: courage, generosity, loyalty.
‘Between “Red-beard” and “Grey-beard”, that is to say, between Thorr and Odhinn’, Renauld-Kranz states, ‘there exists a binary structural relationship demonstrated by several documents’.
‘This’, he writes, ‘is why Odhinn is the god of intellectual functions, which have their seat and their symbol in the head, while Thorr is the god of active functions, which have their s
eat and their symbol in the heart and at the same time their means of expression and application in the body. Odhinn thus represents the power of the spirit and Thorr the force of the body, and so the pair Odhinn-Thorr expresses the same polarity as the pair spirit-body’.
In the Vedic religion of the Indo-Aryans, we find an analogous relationship between Varuna and Indra. Hinduism preserves a very distorted echo in the opposition between Shiva and Vishnu.
At the same time, the relationship between Thorr and Odhinn translates an original relationship between the two age classes. Father and son. By contrast, the third function, which deals with (human) fecundity and (economic) productivity, is on one hand related to the feminine element, without distinction for age, and on the other to the greater multitude: the plebeians, the masses, the Third-Estate.
The Guardian of the Sanctuary
From the High Middle Ages, the cult of Thorr seems to overtake that of Odhinn. His patronyms are more frequently encountered in the names of people and places. And in the great pagan temple at Uppsala, according to Adam of Bremen, it is the god of the hammer who had primacy of place. The time was indeed one of conquests. And of retaliation.
‘That Thorr remains down to the end of paganism the warrior and the defender of the gods, the “guardian of the sanctuary”, has no better proof than the common invocation of which he is the object by pagans against invading Christians. It is around him that the holders of the ancient faith would rally; it is him, and not Odhinn, that they opposed to Christ, to Saint Olaf, and to the converters’.
Renauld-Kranz concludes: ‘Some idea of the personality of the ancient Scandinavians, their knowledge of man’s powers, of a specific image of man, is guaranteed; and it is this image which is reflected in their mythology. Man thus projects himself into the universe by the same movement by which he attempts to explain it. And so one could, in the final account, define this mythology as a cosmic anthropology’.
*
Structures de la mythologie nordique, a study by Renauld-Kranz.176 G. P. Maisonneuve et Larose (11 rue Victor-Cousin, 75005 Paris), 234 pages.
*
A new French translation of the Eddas has appeared in Les religions de l’Europe du Nord (Fayard-Denoël, 1974),177 an important collection of texts presented by Régis Boyer, Professor of Scandinavian Language and Literature at the University of Paris-IV (Sorbonne) and Eveline Lot-Falck. This translation differs from that of Renauld-Kranz to the extent that it does not seek to render the Nordic poems in a French poetic form, but selects the original texts, transcribed in a literal manner, according to religious criteria. The introduction by Boyer covers ‘the sacred among the ancient Scandinavians’ and emphasises the importance of Destiny and the heroic values among the Nordic people.
Régis Boyer has also translated several sagas into French. (La Saga de Snorri le Godi. Aubier-Montaigne, 1973; Le Saga de Njall le Brûlé. Aubier-Montaigne, 1976), as well as the text of the ‘Landnàmabok’ (Le livre de la colonisation de l’Island. Mouton, La Haye, 1974).178
The problem of Indo-European tripartition has been the object of a meticulous examination, as much on the religious and ‘cosmic’ plane as on the social and ‘human’ plane, in the edition of Nouvelle école (Nr. 21–22, winter, 1972–73) that was dedicated to Georges Dumézil.
On ancient Scandinavian cosmology and its kinship with the Indo-European account of the origins of the world, we find some concise but clear indications in the text by Magnus Magnusson, adapted by Marcel Bougaran: Les Vikings (Atlas, 1976).179
The journal Heimdal (B. P. 124, 14402 Bayeux Cedex), directed by Georges Bernage, takes as its subject the study and rediscovery of the ‘Norse heritage in Normandy’. It has published several articles (of popularisation) on Nordic mythology.
The Vikings in America
Every year, on the 9th of October, America commemorates Leif Erikson Day — three days before Columbus Day. This results from a debate which took place on the 4th of March 1964 at the United States Congress, in the course of which the senator Thor Tollefson launched to the podium and proclaimed:
‘I am Norwegian like Leif Erikson. My father has given to me the name of a brother of Leif, Thorwald Erikson, who was killed by the Indians in Massachusetts. And I am proud of him’.
At the end of the debate, at the suggestion of senator Hubert H. Humphrey, to whom the book by J. Kr. Tornöe, Norsemen Before Columbus (Allen & Unwin, London 1965) is dedicated, President Johnson decided to set the 9th of October as the date for the true discovery of America.
More than four centuries after Christopher Columbus, the Americans thus confirmed that the Genoese navigator had had illustrious predecessors: the Vikings.
It was a summer morning in the year 982. A robust ship sways on the waters of the Breidi Fjord on the northwest coast of Iceland. The vessel is loaded with materials and provisions. Forty men are on board, including fifteen rowers. The sharp-eyed captain stands at the prow.
This is duke Erik the Red.180 Born in Norway, outlawed in his country, he leaves for the unknown.
Rich in detail, highly colourful, the accounts of the Viking expeditions feature in the collections of Sagas bequeathed to us by the European North: the Landnàmabok or ‘Book of colonisations’, the Flateyarbok (cf. the English Annals), the Hauksbok, etc., all set down in the fourteenth century.
The Landnàmabok, the book containing the national Icelandic epic, relates how, towards the year 900, a Norwegian named Gunbiorn, sailing towards Iceland, was diverted far to the west where he glimpsed a large unknown island.
In 982, Erik the Red, searching for this mysterious land, discovered Greenland, which had not yet been covered by ice (hence ‘green land’). Returning to Iceland, Erik chartered a veritable fleet: twenty-five boats, six hundred men, a sufficient quantity of livestock. Only fourteen vessels will arrive in safe harbours. Thus begins, in 996, the colonisation of Greenland.
During the same period, the Icelander Bjarni Herjulfson gets lost in fog while making his way to Greenland and ends up travelling as far as Labrador. Following the coasts for nine days, he thinks he has found an island. Weary of struggling, he returns to the north where he rejoins the Greenlandic encampments. But he recounts his adventure. And imaginations are enkindled.
Leif Erikson, son of the outlaw, is a friend of Bjarni. Captivated by his accounts, he cannot resist the call of the sea. In 999, he too quits Norway for Greenland.
In 1003, he raises his first expedition. Forty men accompany him. Following the route indicated by Bjarni, Leif successively discovers Helluland (‘land of flat stones’), Markland (‘land of forests’), and Vinland (‘land of wine’, or ‘land of the vine’).
The first two of these lands correspond to Baffin Island and Labrador. The third is situated between Boston and New York, on the site of New England: the remains of an encampment (Leifbudir in the Sagas) have been discovered on the small island of Chappaquiddick, on lake Menemsha.
Having spent more than a year in Vinland, the Scandinavian explorers return to Greenland. Leif takes the place of his father, who had died in the interim. He will not leave again.
In 1006, one of Leif Erikson’s brothers, Thorwald, organises a second expedition. He is killed by Indians the following year. A third brother, Thorstein, consequently decides to search for his body. But he fails to reach Vinland and dies shortly after his return.
His widow, Gudrid, is remarried to an Icelander recently arrived in Greenland, Thorstein Karselfni. He also embarks in turn, in the spring of the year 1011.
The expedition includes 160 people, including two women: Gudrid, and a natural daughter of Erik, Freydis. Arriving in Vinland, the immigrants set up a permanent camp. This time, the colonisation of America genuinely begins. It spreads rapidly.
When Leif Erikson died in 1025 at the age of forty-six, colonies are already installed on a good part of the continent, from Labrador to Virginia. Some expeditions have been undertaken to the interior of the land, in the direction of the Great Lakes,
to current North Dakota and Minnesota. In total, more than four thousand people are scattered across Vinland, living primarily by trading.
The Grœnlendinga Saga even records the nomination of the first ‘bishop of Greenland and Vinland’, Eirik Gnupsson, who would have taken up his duties towards 1115.
From Cartography to Ethnography
C. W. Ceram writes in Le premier Américain (Fayard, 1972):181 ‘The fact that the Vikings have disembarked in North America before Columbus has been acknowledged as early as the last century’. This conviction is substantiated by numerous material proofs.
The first and foremost is cartographic. As early as the fourteenth century, the map by the Italian Pizzigano includes the outline of the east coast of North America. The one by Martin Waldseemüller, drawn at Saint-Dié in 1507, reveals a map traced with astonishing precision. We find the same richness of detail in the planisphere of Sebastian Cabot (1544), currently at the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in the map of the Danish geographer Sigurd Stephanson, which dates from 1570.
The map of Vincent de Beauvais and Jean de Plano Carpini, which would have been prepared around 1245, before being recopied around 1435–40, is even more remarkable. Indeed, it mentions the name Vinland (Vinlanda) and includes several annotations on the voyages of Leif and Bjarni.
Its discovery in 1957 in a manuscript on Mongolia (the Tartar Relation), and its publication in 1965 by Thomas E. Marston and R. A. Skelton (The Vinland and Tartar Relation. Yale University Press, New York), aroused vivid emotions and provoked a polemic. In 1966, forty experts gathered in Chicago to discuss it. This was the ‘The Vinland Map Conference’, whose proceedings were published in 1971 by the University of Chicago. But since then, the authenticity of the map has been cast into doubt: we are practically sure today that it is a forgery (cf. Eila Campbell, ‘Verdict on the Vinland Map’, in The Geographical Magazine, April 1974).
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