The Role Of Carvings In Norse Literature

In fact, many surviving rune carvings all over Viking areas in Europe are inscriptions written in the third person by persons wishing to commemorate the deceased. Creating epitaphs of this kind was the task of rune writers or carvers, usually retained by the wealthy. The carver often declares his own name or that of the person who wished to remember another, often a warrior who lived and died nobly or valiantly in battle. For some Vikings, the person who carved the rune performed a kind of divination or contribution to another’s divination, which became a common theme in Norse literature (Raudvere 2008: 238). Carvings of this kind appear in many locations that had Viking inhabitants over several centuries. Some are large markers erected
for the purpose of remembering deceased comrades or friends or those lost elsewhere. Whatever the case, they make it clear that in Viking culture the names and traits of exemplary people were to be remembered. Other important beliefs had to do with persons and families receiving a certain mix of good things that, if lost, went to someone else.
Fylgjur or guardian spirits were attached to persons and families and appeared as animals, often in dreams, to warn or advise. Fortune was a settled fact of life: a person would now and again be warned of something to do or not do, or of a hard time to come, by a sorcerer. The possibility of bad luck was more important to Viking psychology than that of success, since they felt themselves in the presence of destructive spiritual forces that could reflect ill will, greed or other misfortune on a family (Raudvere 2008: 240). Disir were female spirits, and others could be animals, including horses. The outer world was not as it might appear taken at face value, of course, and human beings stood to be tricked by their own vices. This quite elaborate Viking world should help a reader to see the mistake of reducing a complex tradition to matters of myth or literature or runic divination, which many Vikings would have seen as mere details in the greater cosmology to which they were subject. The resurgence of runes and divination and the Viking (or just Norse) pagan revival of the last generation or so may not have seen so much public attention had it not been for the mainstream success of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and other entertainment
materials! Vikings on the Move What is referred to as the Viking Age includes the 8th to 11th centuries with scholars of language tending to extend their scope to the late 15th century (Gardeta and Larrington 2014:3). The term of Viking derives from the Old Norse vikingr, meaning seaborne piracy or seaborne raiding, with the singular of viking referring to a seaborne raid (Somerville and McDonald 2014: xvi-xvii). Few early medieval Scandinavians would have understood themselves as Vikings, or known to what others referred if they were addressed in this way. Over several centuries, Vikings appeared in North America, followed Russia’s rivers to Istanbul and the Islamic world, and in the late 8th century were often present in Denmark, Norway and Sweden; they appeared in old Russia’s Novgorod and Kiev, and soon settled into York in England and Ireland’s Dublin coast.
Over time, they became important traders from Greenland to the Caspian Sea. Most who went to settle in the British Isles were from what are now Norway and Denmark. They and their descendants became a frequent presence in the north of England, coastal Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and had a long legacy on the Isle of Man. What these and other migrant Vikings on the continent probably saw as usual in fuþark messages, signage and memorials, now have a different importance to revivalists who stress divination involving runes, interest in spells, runes in connection to Wicca, and a host of other interests that might surprise many Vikings of old if they could see them today. Some contemporary semi-scholarly publications address rune magic, spells and divination directly (Thorsson 2012; Paxson 2005). The more one imagines from scholarly work the often rough lives of Vikings long separated from Scandinavia, the more one sees the open possibilities both of wishing to adhere to the old and of following what had changed over time, as second- or third-generation Viking migrants and colonists were not apt to recognize (Abrams 2012: 16-17). In light of the numerous Viking conquests,
migrations and settlements, there is reason to specify carefully the Vikings one means, their locations, the number of generations present, the language or languages they had come to speak, and their religious or other beliefs. A “Pure” Viking Heritage? Cultural revival has been a popular theme of the New Age movement and similar trends of the later 20th and early 21st centuries. An idea of returning to a “pure” or pre-industrialized utopia can be extremely appealing, though the specifics attributed to a vague time period may in fact span centuries or draw together bits and pieces from several locations and centuries. A romantic notion of Viking society or exploits can refer directly to mythology and also runic magic of different kinds. In fact, Viking settlements, as on the Isle of Man or near Dublin, adopted cultural features from those they lived among and frequently married. Vikings away from Scandinavia kept up their cultural habits even as they adopted the languages and religious influences to which they were exposed (Jesch 2015). Their value system seems to have had a strong sense of the heroic and a wish to preserve the memory of deceased comrades, friends or relatives known to have died elsewhere, as in the large stones mentioned earlier. A literate, well-raised son knew how to express himself or jot things down using runic script. Judith Jesch (2015) has concentrated her research on people that became both Viking and Celtic in culture, naming their children according to both, as exhibited in various runic inscriptions in Scotland (57). Scandinavian cultural features were kept up in one place or another and old stories were retained, but writers made more grammatical mistakes as time went on, or used Celtic and other non-Scandinavian terms more liberally. Such details of the Vikings as people prone to not just colonizing but “settling in” are often overlooked, what with impressions of long ships and horned helmets taken from 19th century popular art. Vikings who joined British and other non-Viking environments seem to have been often ordinary farming or small trader people absorbed over generations.