The Concept of Religion in Current Studies of Scandinavian Pre-Christian Religion

Abstract

In recent Swedish studies of Scandinavian pre-Christian religion of the late Iron Age, various scholars have questioned the utility of the concept of religion in this field. According to these scholars, the concept of religion obscures the specific character of religions of the small-scale non-literate societies of the pre-Christian Age. In the article, I critically examine suggestions that we abandon the academic concept of religion and replace it with an emic concept, or a concept derived from an emic context. I further argue that this strategy implies an inappropriate dualistic opposition between Scandinavian pre-Christian religion and so-called world religions. I conclude with a critical evaluation of problematic formulations of religious change and variation, presented by the same scholars who criticize the use of the academic category of religion. I try to draw attention to certain problematic implications of these demands. I conclude that we should continue to employ the concept of religion in connection with the religious worlds of pre-Christian societies. The strategy proposed by these scholars may turn out to be merely one more way of imposing misconceptions on this period.

Siðr, Religion and Morality

“…Andrén 2005, 106, 125;Blomkvist 2016;Jennbert 2011, 23-24, 164;Raudvere 2005, 196). Annette Lindberg (2009) and Andreas Nordberg (2012Nordberg ( , 2018 have rejected this approach and make the following arguments:…”

“…White 2021), that cognition is expressed according to disparate cultural, physical, social, and technological environments. A nominally singular religion like Roman Catholicism might find its mythology and doctrines interpreted quite differently in, say, parts of twenty-first-century Spain and Ireland with practical consequences for everyday life; modern and medieval Catholicisms are at further removes from either of these modern counterparts (although, as Lindberg 2009 Nordberg 2018 remark, that rarely presents a problem for scholars' application of religion to early conceptions of Christianity), and Old Norse worshippers have values, abstractions and narratives that are even more dissimilar still. Using a common terminology potentially highlights contrasts between traditions as well as correspondences and can be used to better explicate the object of study, especially in tandem with an investigation of the signification of related emic terms like siðr.…”

Att hasla voll inför fältslag. En analys utifrån kategorin siðr

“…2. Denna diskussion inbegriper att jag förhåller mig till den kritik som har riktats mot användningen av inhemska kategorier på fornskandinaviska källor; jfr Blomkvist 2002;Lindberg 2009;och Nordberg 2012. 33.…”

Religion in the Viking Age Moral Economy

“…The term religion has been considered controversial in recent years but will be employed here in the sense of a grouping of customs, texts and principles that turn toward the supernatural or transcendental. For sensible discussions of the usefulness of these kinds of etic constructions to Old Norse studies, see Lindberg 2009 andNordberg 2012. social complexity, like that undergone by Scandinavia in the Iron Age and early medieval period. 3 Some of these theories have already been tested against Old Norse evidence by Ben Raffield, Neil Price and Mark Collard (2019;cf.…”