Continuity and Change: Forms of Liminality in the Sacred Social Spaces of the Pre-Christian Nordic World

Murphy, Luke John

doi:10.1484/j.vms.5.112421

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 44 publications

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“…56 (154-57) relates how Egill Skalla-Grímsson visits the Gulaþing in Western Norway and sees the presumed tenth-century practice of erecting vébǫnd (vé-ropes)-a practice also described in the twelfth-century Frostuþingslǫg for Trøndelagen (127; see also . The concept vé, as noted above, is an Old Norse term for a sacral place (see Murphy 2016Murphy , 2018a; also attested in eddic poems like Grímnismál st. 13 and Lokasenna st. 51). In Egils saga, the judges are described as seated inside the vébǫnd and, furthermore, a prohibition of carrying weapons inside the vébǫnd was in place, presumably to prevent the breaking of the sacrality.…”

Section: Spatial Sacralization In Legal Contextsmentioning

confidence: 94%

ein lǫg ok einn siðr: Law, Religion, and their Role in the Cultivation of Cultural Memory in Pre-Christian Icelandic Society

Nygaard¹

2021

scancan

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The transmission of law in pre-Christian Iceland was an oral process in an oral society. In oral societies, such transmission processes may be characterized as a cultivation of cultural memory, which suggests that it was transmitted through a ritualized performance by a memory specialist. In the Icelandic context, this specialist was in all likelihood the lǫgsǫgumaðr. However, the connection between the transmission of law by the lǫgsǫgumaðr and ritual and religion has not yet been established explicitly. This is the subject of the present article, which first views the intricate relationship between law and religion in pre-Christian Iceland through the lens of Max Weber’s theory of value spheres and subsequently treats the transmission of early Icelandic law as a cultivation of cultural memory.

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Section: Spatial Sacralization In Legal Contextsmentioning

confidence: 94%

ein lǫg ok einn siðr: Law, Religion, and their Role in the Cultivation of Cultural Memory in Pre-Christian Icelandic Society

Nygaard¹

2021

scancan

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“…This is a body of scholarship seeking to demonstrate the intense variation within pre-Christian religion, arguing that different reflexes of this "same" religion may have shared certain common precepts and structures, but could differ from one another as much as any dialects of a language group (Nordberg 2012;cf. Ljungberg 1938;McKinnell 1994;Svanberg 2003;Bertell 2006;Brink 2007;Schjødt 2009;Gunnell 2015;Murphy 2016;2018a;2018b).…”

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confidence: 99%

Distinguishing Discourses of the Dísir

Murphy¹

2022

RvT

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Previous studies of the dísir have tended to focus on either their links with fertility or use of the term to designate a wide range of supranatural female figures. This study reassesses the textual evidence for the nature of these beings, applying Jens Peter Schjødt’s notion of “discourse” to argue that we should not be searching for a single coherent category of beings. Rather, it argues, our sources depict three semidistinct “dísir” discourses: a group of prosperity-focused female figures with strong links to local landscapes worshipped during the late pagan Iron Age; the use of the signifier “dís” as a poetic synonym for a range of female figures in verse; and a medieval textual discourse of “martial dísir” construed on the basis of poetic texts, but which has no basis in pre-Christian religion. RESUME: Tidligere studier af diserne har haft en tendens til at fokusere enten på deres forbindelse til frugtbarhed eller på brugen af termen til at beskrive en bred vifte af overnaturlige kvindeskikkelser. Dette studier revurderer tekstgrundlaget for disse væseners natur og benytter Jens Peter Schjødts begreb ”diskurs” til at argumentere for, at der ikke er tale om én standardiseret kategori af væsener. I stedet argumenteres der for, at kilderne afslører tre mere eller mindre særskilte diskurser om ”dísir”: En gruppe kvindefigurer med fokus på velstand med stærke bånd til lokale landskaber, som blev dyrket i den sene jernalder; brugen af termen ”dís” som et poetisk synonym for diverse kvindeskikkelser i digte; og en middelalderlig tekstdiskurs omkring ”krigeriske dísir” konstrueret ud fra poetiske tekster, men uden understøttelse in førkristen religion.

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“…employed by tightly-regulated soteriological traditions like Christianity -so-called 'world' or 'universal' religions -even important beings like deities can mean different things to different members of the same congregation. Recent studies of variation within Iron-Age European religious systems have shown that this problem is further exacerbated in henotheistic and polytheistic traditions (Murphy, 2016(Murphy, , 2017(Murphy, , 2018Nordberg, 2012;Svanberg, 2003). As such, we employ the concept of a 'semantic centre', which proposes that most supranatural beings can be argued to exhibit a single core characteristic, attribute, or association from which their other features may be derived (Schjødt, 2009).…”

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confidence: 99%

The Shifting Baselines of the British Hare Goddess

Murphy

Ameen

2020

Open Archaeology

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The rise of social zooarchaeology and the so-called ‘animal turn’ in the humanities both reflect a growing interest in the interactions of humans and non-human animals. This comparative archaeological study contributes to this interdisciplinary field by investigating the ways in which successive human cultures employed religion to conceptualise and interact with their ecological context across the longue durée. Specifically, we investigate how the Iron Age, Romano-British, early medieval English, medieval Welsh, and Information Age populations of Great Britain constructed and employed supranatural female figures – Andraste, Diana, Ēostre, St. Melangell, and the modern construct ‘Easter’ – with a common zoomorphic link: the hare. Applying theoretical concepts drawn from conservation ecology (‘shifting baselines’) and the study of religion (‘semantic centres’) to a combination of (zoo)archaeological and textual evidence, we argue that four distinct ‘hare goddesses’ were used to express their congregations’ concerns regarding the mediation of violence between the human in-group and other parties (human or animal) across two millennia.

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Continuity and Change: Forms of Liminality in the Sacred Social Spaces of the Pre-Christian Nordic World

Cited by 4 publications

References 44 publications

ein lǫg ok einn siðr: Law, Religion, and their Role in the Cultivation of Cultural Memory in Pre-Christian Icelandic Society

ein lǫg ok einn siðr: Law, Religion, and their Role in the Cultivation of Cultural Memory in Pre-Christian Icelandic Society

Distinguishing Discourses of the Dísir

The Shifting Baselines of the British Hare Goddess

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