animals and humans
vägar till midgård 1. Myter om det nordiska. Mellan romantik och politik Catharina Raudvere, Anders Andrén & Kristina Jennbert (red.) 2. Plats och praxis. Studier av nordisk förkristen ritual Kristina Jennbert, Anders Andrén & Catharina Raudvere (red.) 3. Kunskap och insikt i norrön tradition. Mytologi, ritualer och trolldomsanklagelser Catharina Raudvere 4. Ordning mot kaos. Studier av nordisk förkristen kosmologi Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert & Catharina Raudvere (red.) 5. Minne och myt. Konsten att skapa det förflutna Åsa Berggren, Stefan Arvidsson & Ann-Mari Hållans (red.) 6. Hedendomen i historiens spegel. Bilder av det förkristna Norden Catharina Raudvere, Anders Andrén & Kristina Jennbert (red.) 7. Att se och tänka med ritual. Kontrakterande ritualer i de isländska släkt- sagorna Peter Habbe 8. Old Norse religion in long-term perspectives. Origins, changes and interactions Anders Andrén, Kristina Jennbert & Catharina Raudvere (eds) 9. Föreställd hedendom. Tidigmedeltida skandinaviska kyrkportar i forskning och historia Gunnar Nordanskog 10. De odödliga. Förhistoriska individer i vetenskap och media Nina Nordström 11. Draksjukan. Mytiska fantasier hos Tolkien, Wagner och de Vries Stefan Arvidsson 12. En grundläggande handling. Byggnadsoffer och dagligt liv i medeltid Ann-Britt Falk 13. Med kärret som källa. Om begreppen offer och ritual inom arkeologin Åsa Berggren 14. Animals and Humans. Recurrent symbiosis in archaeology and Old Norse religion Kristina Jennbert
v채gar till midg책rd 14
Animals and Humans Recurrent symbiosis in archaeology and Old Norse religion
Kristina Jennbert
nordic academic press
The project ‘Roads to Midgard – Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives’ was financed by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. Financial support has also been provided by Lund University, Malmö Heritage, and the Swedish Research Council. The publication of Animals and Humans: Recurrent symbiosis in archaeology and Old Norse religion has been financed with grants from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation. ISSN 1650-5905
Nordic Academic Press P.O. Box 1206 SEw-221 05 Lund, Sweden info@nordicacademicpress.com www.nordicacademicpress.com
© Nordic Academic Press and Kristina Jennbert 2011 Translation: Alan Crozier Typesetting: Frederic Täckström, www.sbmolle.com Cover: Jacob Wiberg Cover image: Sleipnir in close-up on a picture stone from Tjängvide 1, Alskog Parish, Gotland. The stone is now in the National Historical Museum, Stockholm. Print: ScandBook, Falun 2011 ISBN: 978-91-85509-37-9
Contents Preface
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1. Introduction
9 17 23 31 34 38
2. Animals in Norse mythology
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Archaeology and Old Norse religion The archaeology of religion Human–animal relations Old Norse religion versus Christianity Orality, materiality, visuality
3. Animals in Midgard
53 57 Cattle 61 Sheep/goat 63 Pig 64 Dog 64 Horse 65 Cat 67 Poultry 67 Pets 68 The farm perspective and animal husbandry 70 Game 78 Hunting 85 89 Animals in rituals Houses and farms 92 Cult houses 96 Graves 101 Animal graves 105 Outlands 112 Domesticated animals
4. Animals between context and text Bodily metaphors
Complete bodies Parts of bodies Special body parts
Animals and humans
5. A Midgard mentality – why animals?
The practical and functional purposes of animals Food
118 123 126 127 128 130 139 145 145
Raw material Animals assisting humans
Social identity and lifestyle
Forn siรฐr Networking A social game Norse animal ornamentation Falconry and visuality Gender and sexuality
Animal and human properties Personal names Animal fylgjur
Transformations between animal and human
6. Old Norse religion
Shamanistic features Pre-Christian versus Christian Sheep/goat Dog Horse Serpent Wolf or lion?
Summing up
149 150 154 155 165 169 170 174 179 183 184 188 189 196 199 201 202 205 205 209 211 216
7. The archaeology of religion
217
8. To interpret interdependence over time
222
Notes
230
References
242
Index
270
Preface My study of animals, or rather my study of the relations between humans and animals, is a part of the larger project ‘Roads to Midgard: Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives’. This is a multidisciplinary project at Lund University, Sweden, involving archaeology, medieval archaeology, and history of religion. As one of the archaeologists in the project, I have carried out a long-term study of ritual practice in Old Norse religion, and how rituals can be related to Old Norse mythology. The interdisciplinary character of the Midgard Project (as it is called for short), and the contrast between archaeological material culture and written texts, has yielded far-reaching research findings. Words and concepts, outlooks and research perspectives from different disciplines came together during the project period, chiefly in the intensive years 1999–2004. One result of the interdisciplinary discussions within the project was that my own sense of belonging to the subject of archaeology was strengthened. The temporal depth of archaeology and the focus on oral cultures exerted an increasing fascination on me. The prehistoric periods in Scandinavia are a time with little or no textual sources. They were oral cultures where material culture was important for social identity, for communicating and remembering. It is the fragmentary material remnants that are in focus in this book, where the intention, besides studying animals, is to sum up the potential of archaeology to study religion. There are several interpretative barriers to researching attitudes to animals, not least because of anthropocentrism. Yet it is a challenge to study the Norse pre-Christian conceptual world and with it an extinct religion. This book chiefly concerns how a pre-Christian everyday mentality shaped the keeping of animals and the outlook on animals, and how the different animals seem to have had functional, symbolic, and connotative meanings. The source material of prehistoric archaeology is viewed in relation to the medieval texts that were written down long after the period they concern. The subtitle of the book stresses
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animals and humans the scientific study of mentality, ritual, power, and lifestyle based on archaeological material culture and textual evidence. Animals and Humans: Recurrent symbiosis in archaeology and Old Norse religion has grown over a long time. I have gradually changed the way I think archaeologically. Several passages and discussions from my earlier articles written in the course of the project have been incorporated, but they have also been reappraised during the work with this book (Jennbert 2000, 2002, 2003a, b, 2004a, b, 2005, 2006a, b). The research was mainly done in the years 1999–2005 as part of my research lectureship in the archaeology of religion at Lund University, and subsequently parallel to my work as head of the Department of Archaeology and Ancient History, Lund University. All the participants in the Midgard Project have been significant, so I would like to take the opportunity to thank them all for the wonderful years spent together on the project: Anders Andrén, Catharina Raudvere, Stefan Arvidsson, Åsa Berggren, Ann-Britt Falk, Peter Habbe, Ann-Mari Hållans, Maria Lundberg Domeij, Ann-Lili Nielsen, Gunnar Nordanskog, Erik Magntorn, Nina Nordström, Heike Peter, Gun-Britt Rudin, Jörn Staecker, and Louise Ströbeck. Thanks to Alan Crozier, who translated the text into English, and to Annika Olsson, editor at Nordic Academic Press, for fruitful collaboration. Thanks also to Gunnar Broberg and Inger Ahlstedt Yrlid, Deans of the Faculty of History and Philosophy at Lund University, who many years ago put their faith in my project about animals in the archaeology of religion. The book is dedicated to my family: Anders, Karin, and Maria. Lund 2011 Kristina Jennbert
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chapter 1
Introduction Animals are a fascinating object of study, whether you are standing in front of one of the famous Palaeolithic cave paintings of Lascaux in the Dordogne, or looking at Viking Age artefacts with pictures of animals and fantasy creatures. In the cave at Lascaux the animals step out of the rock; they are in the rock itself and the visitor almost becomes a part of the rock. On the Viking Age objects the real and imaginary animals mock the observer, grasping, intertwining, and grimacing. In Norse mythology, Odin’s eight-legged horse Sleipnir communicates speed and strength. He was conceived by Loki, who had turned himself into a mare to distract the stallion Svadilfari so that the giant who was supposed to build Asgard was delayed in his work. Sleipnir has the ability to move through the world of the gods (see the cover picture). Why is this? What does Sleipnir actually represent? Animals do not leave the observer unmoved; animals concern us. Animals play an important part for humans. We relate to animals in different ways and are somehow dependent on animals for their practical utility as a source of food, for transport, for medical research, and as company. Besides the functional aspects, animals and their properties hold symbolic values for humans. Through their mere existence, animals contribute to the way people regard themselves. Humans and animals have been close to each other for thousands of years, and the outlook on animals differs in different cultural worlds. Emotional and functional relations to animals go a long way back in time. It seems as if there has always been some ambiguity in the connections between animals and humans. The archaeological evidence of the way man has humanized animals and assumed animal forms goes back to the Palaeolithic. Symbiotic relations like these also seem to be cross-cultural. In Norse mythology, for example, animals have human and superhuman properties. In pre-Christian Scandinavia, as in other times and places, animals had tremendous powers, presumably
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animals and humans reflecting the prevailing social structures. The transformation between human and animal that is found in the archaeological evidence, as in Norse mythology, suggests that hybridity between species is not merely biological but also expresses cultural relations. The historian of ideas Gunnar Broberg writes that people in early modern times ascribed human features to animals. It was the natural instincts of cruelty, greed, sexuality – the kind of properties that people feared most in themselves – that animals were allowed to symbolize. The concept of ‘animal’ arose as a comment on human behaviour. There are several descriptions of the human character and its animality. Aristotle called man the political animal, the medical scholar Thomas Willis coined the term the laughing animal, the inventor and politician Benjamin Franklin wrote about the tool-making animal, the philosopher Edmund Burke spoke of the religious animal, the lawyer and author James Boswell and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss used the term the cooking animal.1 In his book The Artificial Ape: How Technology Changed the Course of Human Evolution, the archaeologist Timothy Taylor draws attention to the complex relationship between animals and humans and his theory of the significance of technology for evolution and our contemporary drive for technical innovations. One example of innovative technology which touches on this research project is the technologizing of the word and the creation of written language. This revolutionary technology radically restructured human cognition and communication.2 Human features have probably been ascribed to animals in all cultures. The characteristics specific to various animals and to humans have developed and changed over the millennia. Selective breeding to achieve fine, aesthetically pleasing animals, with useful properties for man’s functional needs, has thus been combined with mankind’s own development, particularly with the aid of technological innovations which have also concerned animals, breeding, and the outlook on animals. Animals, their breeding and husbandry, may therefore also have affected human evolution. Generally speaking, animals serve as comments on human behaviour and abilities. In Swedish a person can be described with animal metaphors such as wise as a poodle, strong as a horse, stubborn as a donkey, and hungry as a wolf. Animals thus help us to understand people’s characteristics. Hypothetically, then, it may be assumed that pre-Christian
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introduction animal metaphors also shed light on the way in which people perceived themselves in relation to animals of different kinds. Do animal metaphors trigger a psychological drama? Is there a builtin ambiguity between species? To what extent are species dependent on each other? What are the practical and functional aspects of the relationship between humans and animals? What do different animal species represent in the human mind and in Old Norse religion? Can animals be an expression of social identity and lifestyle, of power and political alliances? Do animal metaphors help to define what is human? And how do people define animals in terms of their view of themselves? Is there a need today to justify hunting, animal husbandry, and meat eating? No matter what question of this kind we ask, animals prove to be a vital aspect of human life. Animals are good to think with, wrote the anthropologist Claude LÊvi-Strauss. Our perception of the animal kingdom is a cultural construction and is connected to social relations, kinship ties, ecological circumstances, and modes of linguistic expression.3 This classical statement puts into perspective the study of the different roles that animals may have played in a Norse pre-Christian conceptual world as well. There are several reasons to assume that perceptions of humans and animals were different in pre-Christian times from what they are today. The early Christian church historians in the fifth century and the medieval law texts show that perceptions differed from those in previous periods. In the fifth century Augustine wrote that there is a dividing line between human and animal. In the Middle Ages, on the other hand, there were numerous expressions of ambiguous dividing lines between humans and animals.4 From a Darwinist perspective man is a biological creature, one among many others in the animal world. Animals can therefore be defined in very broad and biological terms. Both a biological and a teleological outlook also seem to influence today’s perceptions of humans and animals, and the relationship between them. Human relations to animals are specific to each time and culture. Nevertheless, there seem to be general attitudes to animals that go back into prehistory. We may assume that attitudes to animals are related to their practical utility and have to do with how they are tended. Even stocks of game animals need to be looked after if hunting is to be sustainable in the long term. Animals have been treated according to human needs but also according to how people have related the animals
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animals and humans to themselves. The actual domestication of animals and the keeping of livestock requires knowledge and continuous work. One may wonder whether this time-consuming work actually means that humans have been domesticated by animals rather than the other way around. As early as the Stone Age, because of technological innovations, animal husbandry probably became so demanding that the production conditions provided a way to create identity and express status and power. Animals thereby became part of a power game, which can be studied archaeologically in any period through house design and landscape development, rituals in connection with death and burial, innovative technological processing, and images adorning artefacts, rocks and stones, textiles, wood, and antler/horn. People’s relations to animals depend on social and political circumstances. But there is also an undercurrent of a cosmological framework that links contemporary events with those in earlier times. Animals were involved in communicative strategies in their own time and in the conceptual world. They were used metaphorically to describe the creation, the structure, and order of the world. It is possible that they were also used to manipulate, change, and exert influence? The Norse myths describe animals with their powerful properties: they could make the world quake, or they could save it from destruction, like Thor’s goats and the Midgard Serpent. The aim of this research project has been to study the different functions and meanings of animals in pre-Christian times and to ascertain the various ways in which animals were incorporated in Norse cosmology, mythology, and rituals. Another intention is to study the role of animals in the process of Christianization and what this was like in relation to paganism. The main aim, however, is to assess how this research project about relations between humans and animals helps us to understand the character and structure of Old Norse religion. The project started with questions concerning the stock of animals, how they were managed and bred, fundamentally examining how animals were a part of everyday life and what might be called a Midgard mentality in pre-Christian times. Domesticated animals, wild animals, exotic animals, and fantasy creatures are a part of this Midgard sphere. The project builds on analyses of archaeological find contexts, animal bones, artefacts, and iconography, specific places such as settlement sites, farms, graves, and wetland finds, above all in southern and central Scandinavia during the first millennium ad.
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introduction
Iceland
Västerbotten
Ångermanland
Jämtland
Finland
Dalarna
Norway
Sweden Uppland Södermanland
Bohuslän
Östergötland
Västergötland Småland
Denmark
Öland
Blekinge
Jutland
Skåne Sjælland
Fyn
Gotland
Bornholm
200 km
Figure 1. Map of the Nordic countries showing principal areas mentioned in the text. (Henrik Pihl, Riksantikvarieämbetet.)
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