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Author Topic: Lords of Ljodhus  (Read 951 times)

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Lords of Ljodhus
« on: April 22, 2015, 10:06:17 am »
I know some people have expressed an interest in Scandinavian Scotland, that brief moment when paganism returned to the country, and, well, I've come upon a little more information on the matter.

In 1983, Barbara Crawford wrote Scandinavian Scotland, considered to be the authority on the subject, but it's out of date. In 2007 a conference was held reanalyzing what was known about this period. The speeches were published in Scandinavian Scotland-Twenty Years After: The Proceedings of a Day Conference held on 19 February 2007, edited by Alex Woolf. Notre Dame University is the only library in the U.S. that has a copy, and if you want to read it, you'll probably have to buy a copy like I did, from the publisher, St. Andrew's University in Scotland.

The third chapter, "The Norse Gods in Scotland," by Judith Jesch, is a most critical examination of the sources. Only two pieces of evidence are unambiguous enough in the time and place they originated in to provide something bordering on conclusive:

1. Arnorr jarlaskald's poem Thorfinnsdrapa was written for Earl Thorfinn of Orkney. It mentions a kenning of Odinn. (p.54)
2.On the island of Broch of Gurness, Orkney, a thor hammer was found in a grave. (p.58)

And that's it.

But then it gets interesting.

The fourth chapter, "One Coast-Three Peoples: Names and Ethnicity in the Scottish West during the Viking Period," by Andrew Jennings and Arne Kruse, says on page 98 that the Hordar tribe, after whom Hordaland is named, settled in Dal Riata (western Scotland). From place-names in Norway it's known, with a fair degree of certainty, that Njordr and Tyr were worshipped in this county ("How Uniform was Old Norse Religion?" Stefan Brink, in Learning and Understanding in the Old Norse World: Essays in Honor of Margaret Clunies Ross, ed. J. Quinn, 2007, pp.119) so I think it's safe to assume that they continued to be worshipped in the Hebrides.

Now, historians all say Scotland was colonized by western Norwegians,  so I began to wonder why would Arnorr write a poem about Odinn, whose cult centers were in Trondelag, in northern Norway, and Ostfold, in the southeast. (Brink, p.113) I looked up the genealogy of the Orcadian earls, and it turns out the founder of the dynasty was an earl of More, now More og Romsdal county (perhaps named after the Raumar tribe), which borders the Trondelag region.  So Odinn was the god worshipped by this family.

This made me ponder the thor hammer. Thorr was worshipped in the area surrounding Oslo (Brink, p.115), so some southeastern tribal members (the Grenir? Hedir? Raumariki?) must have made it to Fortriu (eastern Scotland and the Northern Isles).

So we have Tyr and Njordr worshippers on the west coast, Thorr worshippers on the east, and Odinn-worshipping nobility in the middle. The scant evidence is not as dim as it first appears. Also, Jesch mentions (p.49) that the religion of these immigrants consisted of domestic rituals that would not have been unlike those recorded in modern times by folklorists.

Another thing I wanted to point out, is that these were tribal gods, not gods of specific things, who looked after all the needs of their people. Hopefully this gives Heathens interested in this culture something to work with.

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