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Recovering the "Snorra Edda": On Playing Gods, Loki, and the Importance of History

Author(s): Mathias Moosbrugger


Source: Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 17 (2010), pp. 105-120
Published by: Michigan State University Press
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Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture

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Recovering the Snorra Edda
On Playing Gods, Loki, and tke Importance of History

Mathias Moosbrugger

University of Innsbruck, Austria

Distinguamus ergo quam fidem debeamus historiae ,


quam fidem debeamus intellegentiae.
-Augustinus, De vera velinone

I.

It might seem rather uncreative to those familiar with René Girarďs thinking
to deal with the story of the murder of Baldr as told in the Edda by Snorri
Sturluson, one of the foremost representatives of the extraordinary poetic
culture of medieval Iceland, from a Girardian point of view. This is obviously
because Girard himself has analyzed this story in detail in a chapter of his
book The Scapegoat.1 Everything else could either be seen as an unnecessary
addition to what has already been said- at most a contribution of interesting
but in the end not substantial details- or a (perhaps hypercritical) objection
to the mimetic theory as a whole from the viewpoint of another theoretical
approach, in order to detect the heuristic or hermeneutical weaknesses of the
mimetic theory. I do not intend to do either. Nevertheless, I will try to outline

Contaron: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Vol. 17, 2010, pp. 105-120. issn 1075-7201.
© Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.

105

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io6 Mathias Moosbrugger

a rereading of the Baldr-story that is quite different from and in some respects
contrary to the interpretation suggested by Girard. I am, in fact, suggesting
that, in order to understand the proper narrative structure and the inner her-
meneutical dynamic of the story, it is fundamentally important to read it not
solely paying attention to the phenomenological structure of the text, but in
the first place attending to the historical context of its genesis. Luckily, this has
been the object of historical research for many decades, and we are therefore
provided with a solid fundament for the following considerations. I hope to
show convincingly that only the application of historical research can enable
us to reconstruct the actual essence of this story- something, by the way, that
historical research itself has not yet been able to accomplish. Certainly, all this
does not mean that we have to historicize the story itself, as, for example, Saxo
Grammaticus did in his Gesta Danorum , but merely that we need to situate it- or
rather, its author- in the proper historical context.2 And as the mimetic theory
is not, as critics constantly claim, a quasi-totalitarian and mono-dimensional
system that allows only one "dogmatic" interpretation of a story, it is possible to
reinterpret texts already analyzed "formally correctly" by means of the mimetic
theory without- I hope- becoming unfaithful to its main theoretical insights.
By connecting a historical approach with the insights provided by mimetic
theory, I intend to defend an author, Snorri Sturluson, who, I think, is greatly
underestimated in Girarďs interpretation of the Baldr-story (Girard does not
even mention the author's name) and to recover the most profound hermeneu-
tical value of his Edda , which has not yet been detected by historians. Snorri
was a poetic genius, but it is not he who needs this defense; it is we who need it,
because he is, as I want to show, an author with an incredible understanding of
the socioanthropological powers that govern human society.

II.

It is useful to recapitulate Girard's interpretation in The Scapegoat ; this requires


in the first place a general overview of Snorri's Baldr-story itself.3 We all know
the main elements of this story: Baldr, the best and most loved of all the gods,
is, as dreams tell him, in danger of being killed. Odin, Baldťs father and the
highest of all the gods, knows this and is also aware that this would be the
beginning of the end of the world. So the Aesir prepare a strategy in order to
prevent any such thing from happening: the goddess Frigg has all creatures
take an oath that they will not do Baldr any harm- be it by fire, water, iron,
metal, stones, earth, trees, diseases, animals, birds, poisons, or snakes. This

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Recovering the Snorra Edda 107

"all-in insurance" makes Baldr and his fellow gods slaphappy- in the truest
sense of the word: assuming that nothing can ever hurt Baldr now, they stand
around him and throw at him whatever comes to their minds or respectively
their hands- and everything seems to go just fine. But there is a problem- and
this problem has a name: Loki. This very ambivalent god is jealous of Baldr and
therefore tries, disguised as an old woman, to find out if there is really nothing
in the world that can harm Baldr. Frigg unfortunately gives away the fact that
the mistletoe did not swear not to harm Baldr, because he was too young. Loki
takes the mistletoe and gives the little twig to Hödr, the brother of Baldr, who
has not yet joined the gods in their game, as he is blind and consequently does
not know how to take aim. Loki induces him to shoot at Baldr, telling him:
"You should be behaving like the others, honouring Baldr as they do. I will
direct you to where he is standing. Shoot this twig at him."« Baldr falls, hit by
this little twig, dies, and leaves the gods devastated. The god Hermod is sent to
Hel, the goddess of the underworld, to persuade her to release Baldr. She agrees
to do so, but only on condition that it can be proved that Baldr really was loved
as much as he was said to be. To prove this, everything and everyone there is
has to shed tears over Baldr's death. Unfortunately one creature- the giantess
Thökk, who in fact is Loki- refuses to do this, and so Baldr has to stay in the
underworld and the end of the world is about to begin.
Girard interprets this story from a strictly structural point of view. The
interpretation of the murder as given in the story itself does not convince him
at all- the rationally reasoned innocence of the group of gods who throw things
at Baldr simply for fun, thinking it will not harm him, as well as the claimed
blindness of the actual murderer, Hödr, are in Girardi eyes only signs of a
morally advanced mythological society trying to cope with the fact that their
fundamental myths are stories of vicious gods killing an innocent victim.5 So,
in a way, the society tries to purify its gods by making all possible and impos-
sible interpretations, to understand why a terrible act like the killing of Baldr
at the hands of the other gods could have happened. And as the guilt involved
in this act cannot simply be denied, they blame Loki; he becomes (to speak in
Girardian terms) the scapegoat of an interpretative purification of the gods. We
see quite clearly that Girard follows structuralist and phenomenological paths
when he uses the scenic "structure" of the story- the killing gods surrounding
the victim- to reconstruct the Baldr-myth as it was, presumably, before "moral"
interpretation rendered it the way it is told in the Snorra Edda. For Girard,
the interpretation given in the Snorra Edda is an interpretation of a morally
advanced society that produced a typical scapegoat, Loki, even though this time
it might only have been a literary scapegoat. In Girard's eyes, it is scenically

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io8 Mathias Moosbrugger

obvious that a collective killing has taken place; interpretatively, a scapegoat is


made responsible for the act- for Girard, these two elements are the essential
points of his analysis.
In order to understand Girarďs interpretation, it is important to remem-
ber that not only- in his very specific way- does he faithfully use structuralist
convictions, but he also understands the Edda as generations of scholars have
done before him. They took the Snorra Edda as a direct source of the mythol-
ogy of pagan Scandinavia (and Germany). Jacob Grimm6 belongs to this long
tradition as well as James George Frazer, who regards the Baldr-myth as a "dra-
matized" rite of Germanic culture.7 The famous historian of religion Jan de
Vries similarly claims that the Baldr-story is an old myth whose essential parts
are originally Germanic,8 and Aaron J. Gurjewitsch states that the Scandinavian
culture of the high Middle Ages with the Edda as one of its most important
products still sufficiently reflects the world of barbaric Europe.9 Finally, Johan
Huizinga writes in his Homo ludens not only that the Snorra Edda presents origi-
nal Germanic mythology but also that the perspective of the Icelanders of the
thirteenth century on this mythology is the same as the perspective of their
pagan ancestors.10 All the scholars I have quoted- and many more- have tried
to find a way to look into the dark ages of Germanic and Nordic belief and
religious Weltbild before Christianization- for which, unfortunately, hardly any
reliable written sources are available. So they have tried to "promote" a late
medieval source to being a source of information on the old pagan society, even
though it was written when the pagan society had already vanished.11
However, the most recent decades of historical research have stressed that
the actual situation is far more complex. The Snorra Edda , written around the
year 1220, is, as numerous studies have now demonstrated,12 in fact not a com-
pendium of pagan religion or mythology.13 We have to consider the specific cul-
tural situation of medieval Iceland. Icelandic society- not least its intellectual
and social elites- was not only integrated into a complex ecclesial infrastructure
(quite different from that of continental Europe) and Christian convictions but
also at the same time tried to keep alive its extraordinary poetic heritage, the
skaldic tradition, which was- as far as technique was concerned- deeply rooted
in pagan convictions.14 The kennings , the specific metaphorical elements of the
skaldic technique (comparable to our figures of speech),15 referred in almost
every instance to mythological knowledge. But there was a problem: how could
this poetry ever survive, if the religious convictions it was based upon faded?
How could a Christian understand what, for example, the kenning "Sif s hair"
meant, if he was not raised in a society in which the religious background of this
phrase was clear to everyone? This was the issue that made Snorri Sturluson, a

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Recovering the Snorra Edda 109

Christian and part of the cultural and political elite of Iceland, write his Edda.
His aim was not to keep the pagan past of his people alive but to create a "poet-
ological" companion for the skalds with the "material" information to keep the
skaldic tradition alive.16 The old songs should be comprehensible for the com-
ing generations, and future songs should be based upon the same technique;
that is why Sturluson also developed kennings for Christ. It is important to
know all this when it comes to reconstructing the specific differences between
the version presented in Snorri's Edda and other eddic respectively skaldic rendi-
tions of the killing of Baldr. Luckily there are some other versions apart from
the Snorra Edda. Of course, it is very helpful that there are older versions that
are quite obviously situated within pre-Christian Scandinavia, so that we can
at least partly follow Snorri's reception of the old mythological material. But
even if this were not the case (as we do not seek primarily to reconstruct an
old pagan myth), a comparison of the Snorra Edda with all the other available
versions (be they historically pagan or not) will enable us to recover the proper
hermeneutical dynamics of Snorri's Baldr-story.
The most important and most complete version apart from Snorri's is the
one told in the Völuspd (The Seeress's Prophecy), which is included in the com-
pilation called The Poetic Edda. That is why we will use it as the central text for
comparison with the Snorra Edda. Not only is this song much older- scholars
tell us that it was written around the year 1000- but it also tells the story of
Baldr's death completely differently, not only in terms of poetic style but espe-
cially in terms of content:

I saw Baldr ' for the bloody god,


Odin's child , his fate concealed;
there stood grown- higher than the plain ,
slender and very fair- the mistletoe.

From that plant which seemed so lovely


came dangerous , harmful dart , Hod began to shoot;
Baldr' s brother was born very quickly;
Odin's son began fighting at one night old.

Nor did he ever wash his hands nor comb his hair ,

until he brought Baldr's adversary to the funeral pyre;


and in Fen-halls Frigg wept
for the woe ofValhall-doyou understand yet, or what
more?17

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no Mathias Moosbrugger

It is obvious that this song does not present a narration quite like Snorri's. In
fact, it is nothing but a poetic compilation of objective information, stating
only that Baldr, the bloody god, is doomed to die by a mistletoe plant at the
hands of his brother; to avenge this, a newborn brother will kill Hödr. But not
only is there no typical narrative perspective at all; the essential parts of Snorri's
version, on which general knowledge about this story is based, are also miss-
ing here: there is nothing whatsoever about the miraculous invulnerability of
Baldr, there is no godly game or collective involvement of any kind in Baldťs
killing, and there is no attempt at all to excuse his actual murderer- that is
to say, there is no scapegoat. In Snorri's version Loki is made responsible for
everything bad that happens. The fact that Loki does not play any role in this
rendition from The Poetic Edda is surprising; and he is not only missing from
this oldest version, which is without doubt very close to the old pagan myth,
but also from all the other skaldic respectively eddic versions: Baldrs draumar '
Lay ofHyndla , and Lokasenna do not give any hint in this direction, and even the
Gesta Danorum by Saxo Grammaticus (which was written only a few years before
the Snorra Edda and is, in almost every respect, very different from all the other
versions) remains silent as far as any involvement of Loki in the killing of Baldr
is concerned. So we see that Snorri is the first and basically the only source of
this story that develops a narrative structure in which Loki is blamed for every-
thing.18 Girard knew this (although he thought the changes from the old myth
were "agreed" on at a collective level for moral reasons), but he could not see
that Snorri is also the only one who mentions the element of the (eventually)
lethal collective game that the gods play.

III.

If we do not want to disallow the importance of all the other historical and
literary evidence relating to this mythological story, we have to conclude that
Girard's interpretation of the version in the Snorra Edda , that it is the version
created by a "morally advanced" society still thinking in terms of a sacrificial
logic, is at the very least unlikely. There is no proof- and no probability- at
all that Snorri told the story of Baldťs death faithfully as far as the structural
scenery is concerned but turned the narrative explanation upside down by mak-
ing Loki the scapegoat and denying the guilt of the collective group of gods and
especially of Hödr. In fact, both the narrative material- the structural scenery
of the godly game itself- and the narrative hermeneutical position- the complex
explanation of how this game became une fête qui se tourne mal- are the creations

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Recovering the Snorra Edda hi

of Snorri himself. Knowing this is crucial, but not only in order to understand
the Snorra Edda appropriately as far as historical facts are concerned. It also
gives us the opportunity to reread the story in a very different light. We know
now that this story cannot be- as Girard supposed- the result of a moral trans-
formation of a still sacrificial society but that it depends in its essential parts
upon the creativity of one author, Snorri Sturluson, who tried to collect old
mythological information so that the skaldic tradition of his culture would
not get lost. But in doing so, he evidently did not hesitate to rearrange this
information fundamentally. As a matter of fact, he was not only a collector
of mythological material, as Grimm, Frazer, Gurjewitsch, and others thought,
but- and this is in my eyes far more important- a storyteller. He took motifs
from the legends and myths of his cultural heritage and tried to turn them
into a story. This formal decision "forced" Snorri to give the old mythological
material a specific narrative structure comprehensible to his cultural environ-
ment. And I think it was a pragmatic decision as well: a simple collection of
old mythological information would have been just too boring for a society
that was no longer convinced that such information had any relevance for the
sustaining of the world order, as it presumably had in pagan times. If Snorri
wanted to succeed in preserving the old skaldic technique of the kennings, in
reference to mythological knowledge, in such a fundamentally changed society,
he had to make this knowledge more "exciting." This is to say, he had to make
a story out of it that could be understood and appreciated in a mentally and
religiously changed society, where the old mythological knowledge per se was
not credited with the same value as it had been in a pre-Christian era.
Now that we have arrived at a profounder level of understanding of the
historical context of the genesis of the Snorra Edda (and thus of its specific fea-
tures), the question we have to deal with is whether Snorri's skill as a storyteller
enabled him to create "only" one of the most impressive literary monuments of
the Middle Ages (which can hardly be denied), or whether his creation was more
than just Vart pour Vart.

IV.

In a way, it was this question that made Georges Dumézil write his book Loki ,
which is wholly dedicated to the story of Baldťs death.19 In this study, Dumézil
attempted to prove that the appearance of Loki in the story was not something
newly invented by Snorri. In doing this, he wanted to protect Snorri from the
criticism of modern philology and thus preserve his status as a central source of

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in Mathias Moosbrugger

Nordic mythology. Everything Snorri tells us (especially the important appear-


ance of Loki) is in DuméziPs eyes very archaic20 and is based upon traditions
that can be found only in the work of Snorri, who was a more faithful collec-
tor of pagan mythology than all the other sources- there is no development
involved and there must not be.21 As we have seen, this is wrong. But does the
fact that Snorri did not produce a reliable archive of pagan mythology render
his Edda an immense work but one that is of no use at all,22 as Dumézil sup-
posed, just as did the skeptical modern philologists from whom Dumézil was
trying to protect Snorri? I believe it is quite the contrary. As I stressed, historical
accuracy is methodically necessary for a deeper understanding of the actual
value of sources like the Snorra Edda- but (and here is where I fundamentally
disagree with Dumézil) obviously historical accuracy cannot be this value in
itself, at least not in this case.23 This is precisely the proper use of the mimetic
theory: to detect whether there is more to the Snorra Edda than its diminished
quality as a historical source of Germanic-Nordic mythology.
We must keep in mind that Snorri's version is the only source in which
the central narrative elements of the Baldr-story as we know it can be found.
As the version in the Völuspd showed us, for example, the older renditions that
are closer to pagan-mythological thinking give us only rather abstract infor-
mation about Baldr's death. Baldr was killed by his brother and was avenged
by a newborn brother- nothing more. No talk of collectively played games, no
explanation of the murderous incident by the accusation that a wicked Loki
was the reason for it all. Of course, you have already realized where all this is
going: contrary to Girarďs arguments, I want to argue that it is not possible
to detect a hermeneutical hiatus between the scenic structure of the story (the
gods' collective throwing of things at Baldr) and the narrative interpretation
given by Snorri (the genius malignus Loki as the reason for the tragic outcome),
on which Girard based his analysis. I think it has become quite apparent by now
that the real hiatus is between Snorri's story as a whole and the other versions,
the Völuspd being the most important of these. Knowing this enables us to see
Snorri's version in a completely different light and to recover Snorri's genius
by using central insights of mimetic theory. Now, in fact, we do not even need
to employ any intellectual creativity to detect the deeper socioanthropological
insights of the Snorra Edda version. The simple recognition of the historical
context in which the Snorra Edda was situated, together with what we know
from mimetic theory, makes everything entirely plain. Snorri gathered material
from the cultural and literary heritage of his people, which he regarded as nec-
essary to keep the specific Icelandic skaldic technique alive. He then rearranged
the material fundamentally, creating a wholly new story out of old information

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Recovering the Snorra Edda 113

and thus obviously developing an interpretation of the quite banal "mytho-


logical" knowledge of his forefathers that Baldr was killed by Hödr. This proves
Snorri to be an author of extraordinary insight into the essence of the struc-
turing powers of social groups that are explicitly described by mimetic theory.
While the old myth spoke only of a binary conflict between two gods, Snorri
presented the same incident structurally as the collective murder of an innocent
victim. This clearly is no residuum of an older myth, as Girard thought, but an
explanatory element newly introduced by Snorri himself. He could see beyond
the surface of this binary conflict and detect its roots in collective violence- one
could almost say he was more Girard than Lévi-Strauss in his way of thinking.
But there is more to his version. Snorrťs rather strange ways of excusing those
structurally responsible for the death of Baldr are not only dramatic and excit-
ing in terms of storytelling. Bringing the new character of Loki into the story is
an important second step: while the narrative element of the game is structur-
ally revealing the collective roots of murder and violence, Loki's involvement
in the killing provides a further and deeper interpretation of this incident. To
understand this properly, it is necessary to see that Snorri did not add Loki as
just another character in this drama but as the personification of a socioanthro-
pological principle already at work among the gods24- as an analytical symbol ,
so to speak, very similar to Satan as described by Girard in I See Satan Fall like
Lightning.25 In this manner, Snorri explained almost everything.26 Both in the
Völuspd and in the Snorra Edda , the story of Baldr's death is situated directly
before Ragnarökr , the end of the world. But while the Völuspd does not tell us
why this is, Snorri does: the satanic character Loki, who plays a major role in
Ragnarökr , is introduced as the ultimate reason for the beginning of the end of
the world. Girard came to the same conclusion (which he derived from other
premises), but he thought he himself had detected a subconscious mechanism,
perfectly hidden under a mythological veil, that made Loki, a divine outsider, a
scapegoat. But in fact, it was Snorri27 who introduced Loki in order to show just
what causes the end of the world,28 namely, the breakdown of consensus among
those responsible for maintaining the order of their world, the gods (although
their divinity is not the point here!), who seek to reestablish the order by exclu-
sion-/^ route antique des hommes pervers. In this context, whoever was responsible
for the actual strike that killed Baldr is of very little importance- this is why
Hödr is excused by such a strange explanation. Not only is he blind,29 but his
arm is led by the same destructive power that has already taken over the col-
lective. This destructive power is nothing but mimesis gone violent and, as we
have seen, Snorri's Loki says this explicitly when he induces Hödr to shoot at
Baldr with the words "You should be behaving like the others, honouring Baldr

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114 Mathias Moosbrugger

as they do." But evidently this time, scapegoating (the scapegoat being Baldr,
not Loki!) does not work. The oath- one of the most important instruments
of social consensus in societies without central jurisdiction30- has already failed
before, as the narrative element of the excluded mistletoe shows; and no social
consensus can be reestablished afterwards by a collective sacrifice of tears to
bring Baldr back. And due to this dissolution of all social structures among the
gods that cannot be reestablished by scapegoating, Ragnarökr eventually arrives:
an eternal winter prevails, until finally monsters appear and in the last battle
between the gods and the powers of the underworld, everything, including the
gods, is destroyed. The story of Baldťs death as told by Snorri is, in the end, a
revealing story of mimesis, exclusion, and the apocalypse. Unfortunately, I can-
not go into the details of this wonderful story line; in particular, the interesting
question of how the resurrection of a radically transformed world after this
apocalyptic battle is to be understood has to be left out. Nevertheless, I think
my point has become clear: Snorrťs interpretation of the murderous conflict
between Hödr and Baldr as a collective incident and his introduction of the

satanic character of Loki as an analytic symbol of the incident as a whole (thus


narratively "excusing" the gods that he has just structurally "accused") clearly
show his immense insight into crucial socioanthropological dynamics.
In the end, everything I want to tell you in defense of Snorri Sturluson
is quite simple and nothing new at all. The bottom line is (and I might be a
bit too daring here) that I think Snorri's story of Baldr's murder is- from a
certain perspective- a brilliant adaptation of the scriptural interpretation of the
Passion of Christ, especially as given by the Gospel according to John; not con-
stantly on the same level, of course, but still similar enough. A sacrificial way
of thinking can even misunderstand the Passion as something that was caused
solely by one vicious traitor, namely, Judas.31 And ecclesiastical history shows
that this sacrificial thought has been present throughout the centuries: it was
Judas, it was the Jews who were responsible for the death of Christ (meaning,
not us, the faithful witnesses).32 However, the teaching of the Church has always
stated very clearly that in the end, it was a collective gathering, even a gathering
including the disciples, against Jesus that actually led to his Passion. The New
Testament is pervaded by this knowledge- and as I said, the Gospel of John,
especially chapter 13, hermeneutically prefigures almost everything that can be
found in Snorri's interpretation of Baldr's death: the group of apostles is gath-
ered with Jesus just before the Passion begins. Jesus is shaken by his knowledge
of what is going to happen (as is Snorri's Baldr, who has dreadful dreams of his
death). And just as Judas is about to deliver Jesus, John writes: "After he received
the piece of bread, Satan entered into him" (John 13:27). The Church has, as I

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Recovering the Snorra Edda 115

said, always regarded the death of Jesus as the result of a collective gathering
of all humankind against him. Nevertheless, John and the other evangelists
do not hesitate to say explicitly that there was a special traitor, Judas, who was
ruled by Satan. It is plain to see that Snorri adapted all these major insights
of the biblical revelation to interpret the death of Baldr.33 Loki- an obviously
satanic force34- leads Hödr's arm, so that within a collective gathering already
satanically poisoned against Baldr, his strike is the one that ultimately causes
Baldr's death. But this is no scapegoat mechanism to free the others involved
in the incident from their guilt- just as Judas35 and Satan36 in the Gospels are in
fact no scapegoats that could hide the deep involvement of the other apostles
or the rest of humankind in the collective gathering against Christ. It is crucial
to see that the narrative exculpation of the collective of the gods must not be
misunderstood as a moral exculpation: Snorri's combination of scenery and
narration as analyzed above cannot and must not be separated. I understand
to some extent the potential criticism that Snorri could have described the her-
meneutical essence of this element in a more obvious way, so that "sacrificial"
misinterpretations might have been prevented.37 I am convinced, though- as
even the Gospels can be fundamentally misinterpreted in a sacrificial way- that
Snorri's version is an astoundingly revelatory analysis of "things hidden since
the foundation of the world." In a time when sacrificial thinking was all too
present within Christendom, his version of an old pagan myth was closer to
the central insights revealed in the Bible and the essence of the teaching of
the Church than many explicitly Christian interpretations of revelation and
Christendom- structural or literary. And to reply to DuméziPs claim that the
proof that Snorri rearranged and changed old mythological knowledge makes
his work fundamentally "useless": it is exactly this creative rearrangement by
Snorri that makes the Snorra Edda far more useful and precious than it would
be if it were just a source of mythological material, compiled to attract the idle
curiosity of scholars of later generations.

NOTES

i. "Ases, Curetes, and Titans," chapter 6, René Girard, The Scapegoat , trans. Yvonne Frec-
cero (London: Athlone Press, 1986), 66-75.

2. See Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence : Paul's Hermeneutic of the Cross (Min-
neapolis: Fortress Press, 1992), 60, writing similarly about the Cross: "Its symbolic
significance must be elaborated on the basis of its historical content." See Cesáreo
Bandera, "My Encounter with René Girard," in For René Girard: Essays in Friendship and
in Truth , ed. Sandor Goodhart et al. (East Lansing: Michigan State University, 2009),

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ii6 Mathias Moosbrugger

40-41: "Reading Violence and the Sacred and Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World ,
it becomes clear that Christianity is not something to be understood in the abstract,
in some sort of atemporal or suprahistorical isolation, but in direct relation to, and
contrast with, the pre-Christian past."

3. See Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda , trans. Jesse L. Byock (London: Penguin Books,
2005), 65-69.

4. Sturluson, The Prose Edda , 66.

5. See Girard, The Scapegoat, 68. See also Girard's remark in the discussion of this theory
in Violent Origins: Walter Burkert, René Girard , and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and
Cultural Formation , ed. Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1987), 135.

6. See Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie. Vollständige Ausgabe (Neu gesetzte, korrigierte und
überarbeitete Ausgabe für marixverlag) (Wiesbaden: Marix Verlag, 2007), 47.

7. See James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion , 3rd ed., part 7/
vol. i, Balder the Beautiful: The Fire-Festivals of Europe and the Doctrine of the External Soul
(London: Macmillan Press, 1976), 101-5.

8. See Jan de Vries, Altgermanische Religionsgeschichte II: Die Götter- Vorstellungen über den
Kosmos. Der Untergang des Heidentums , 3rd ed. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter and Co, 1970),
348-49.

9. See Aaron J. Gurjewitsch, Das Weltbild des mittelalterlichen Menschen , 5th ed. (Munich:
Beck, 1997), 23; see also 39.

10. See Johan Huizinga, Homo ludens. Versuch einer Bestimmung des Spielelementes der Kultur ,
3rd ed. (Basel.: Akademische Verlagsanstalt Pantheon, 1949), 210-11.

Ii. On methodological problems, see Jacques Le Goff, La naissance du purgatoire (Paris:


Gallimard, 1981), 150: "Les œuvres écrites à partir du Xlle siècle sont des élaborations
d'artistes oraux savants. À l'époque où se récitent, se chantent, puis s'écrivent ces
œuvres 'vulgaires,' ces cultures 'barbares' sont déjà depuis plus ou moins longtemps
en contact avec la culture ecclésiastique, savante, chrétienne, d'expression latine. La
contamination vient ajouter à la difficulté de discerner le vrai héritage 'barbare.' Loin
de moi de rejeter cet héritage: je crois au contraire qu'il a beaucoup pesé sur la culture
médiévale mais il ne me semble pas que nous soyons encore suffisamment armés pour
l'isoler, le caractériser, le peser."

12. For the following, see Rudolf Simek, Die Germanen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), 200;
Simek, Religion und Mythologie der Germanen (Darmstadt: Theiss, 2003); Simek, Die Edda
(Munich: Beck, 2007); and Arnulf Krause, "Nachwort," in Die Edda des Snorri Sturluson,
trans. Arnulf Krause (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1997), 252-71.

13. This knowledge is not new, though; see Eugen Mogk, Zur Bewertung der Snorra Edda
als religionsgeschichtliche und mythologische Quelle des nordgermanischen Heidentums (Leipzig:
Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1932).

14. The complex relationship between older social and political structures and new ecclesi-
astical structures is depicted in Jesse L. Byock, Medieval Iceland : Society, Sagas , and Power
(London: University of California Press, 1988), 137-64. See also Jesse L. Byock, "Intro-
duction," in Snorri Sturluson, The Prose Edda, trans. Jesse L. Byock (London: Penguin
Books, 2005), xi: "The Icelanders, rather than shedding blood among themselves as did

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Recovering the Snorra Edda 117

the Norwegians, peacefully accepted the new religion through a political compromise
in the year 1000 at their annual national assembly, the Althing. This collective decision
sanctioned a gradual transition to the new belief system. The old forms of worship
faded within a few decades of the conversion, but the Icelanders continued long after-
wards to value stories from the pagan times as a cultural heritage rather than a creed."

15. See Jesse L. Byock, "The Language of the Skalds: Kennings and Heiti," in Snorri Sturlu-
son, The Prose Edda, trans. Jesse L. Byock (London: Penguin Books, 2005), 123-26.

16. See Byock, Introduction, xi: The Edda was written as a handbook ror those aspiring
Icelandic skalds who wanted to master the traditional forms of verse and the older

stories essential to the imagery of Old Norse poetry. Rather than reconstructing cultic
practices of the old religion, which had ceased two centuries earlier, the Edda concen-
trates on what was still known at the time of its composition: myths, legends and the
use of traditional poetic diction."

17. The Poetic Edda, trans. Carolyne Larrington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008),
8.

18. See Eugen Mogk, Lokis Anteil an Baldrs Tode (Helsinki: Suomalainen tiedeakatemia,
1925); following E. Mogk's theory, Jan de Vries, in The Problem ofLoki (Helsinki: Suoma-
lainen tiedeakatemia, 1933), has emphatically stressed this point: see 167-79.

19. Georges Dumézil, Loki (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959).

20. Dumézil, Loki, 103.

21. Dumézil, Loki , 106.

22. Dumézil, Loki , 56.

23. Working from strictly historical premises, Eugen Mogk, who adequately interpreted the
historical character of the Snorra Edda , was apparently unable to see the deeper value of
the Snorra Edda after his deconstruction of its significance as a source of the Germanic-
Nordic Weltbild and religion. Having considered the proper skaldic and eddic poetry
only as a cultural phenomenon per se (hence seeing Snorri's creative arrangements
merely as misleading counterfeits), he writes: "Nur dadurch, dass man immer wieder
die alte Dichtung durch die Erzählungen der Snorra Edda zu deuten sucht, haben wir
uns das Verständnis so mancher Stelle der eddischen und skaldischen Dichtung ver-
baut. Reissen wir uns von ihr los, so wird auch die schwierigste Stelle . . . verständlich"
(Mogk, Lokis Anteil , 5). And in Zur Gigantomachie der Voluspd (Helsinki: Suomalainen
Tiedeakatemia, 1925), 1, Mogk emphatically devalues the Snorra Edda when he writes
about "Stellen, wo die Snorra-Edda der Forschung Scheuklappen angelegt hat."

24. See Wolfgang Palaver, René Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und
gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen , 3rd. rev. ed. (Münster: LIT Verlag, 2008), 328: "Letztlich
ist der Teufel aber nichts anderes, als jene Mimetik, die als eigentliches Subjekt des
mimetischen Zyklus angesehen werden kann. Seine Personalität weist auf jene realen
Personen hin, deren mimetisches Zusammenspiel er verkörpert." See also Raymund
Schwager, "Der Sieg Christi über den Teufel. Zur Geschichte der Erlösungslehre," in
Raymund Schwager, Der wunderbare Tausch. Zur Geschichte und Deutung der Erlösungslehre
(Munich: Kösel, 1986), 50: "Kann dieses untergründige, kollektive Wollen der Menschen
voll mit dem Satan identifiziert werden? Von einem anderen Satan wird im Zusammen-
hang mit der Verwerfung und Kreuzigung nirgends gesprochen. Der Teufel erscheint
nur so lange als eine eigenständige Gestalt, wie er als Versucher wirken kann, d. h.

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ii8 Mathias Moosbrugger

solange seine Macht noch nicht gebrochen und sein lügnerisches Wesen noch nicht
voll durchschaut ist. In den Passionsberichten hingegen ist nur noch vom untergrün-
digen satanischen Wollen der Menschen die Rede."

25. See the description of Satan in René Girard, I See Satan Fall like Lightning, trans. James
G. Williams (New York: Orbis Books, 2001), 32-46. Girard's "structural" interpretation
of Satan is quite contrary to the theological conception interpreting Satan as a per-
sonal entity. For a helpful analysis of the (at first quite disturbing) use of the word
"person" in the Catechism of the Catholic Church of 1992/1997 to describe Satan, see Bernd
J. Claret, Geheimnis des Bösen. Zur Diskussion um den Teufel , 2nd ed. (Innsbruck: Tyrolia-
Verlag, 2000), 337-57. See also René Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World:
Research Undertaken in Collaboration with Jean-Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefbrt trs. Stepehn
Bann and Michael Meteer (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 162: "Even with John's text, the
danger of a mythical reading is still present, clearly so, if we do not see that Satan
denotes the founding mechanism itself- the principle of all human community. All of
the texts in the New Testament confirm this reading, in particular the Temptations'
made by Satan the Prince and principle of this world"; see also 419).

26. Chris Fleming, René Girard: Violence and Mimesis (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004), 140,
describes the "Girardian" Satan as the "divinity of choice"- a notion that is also very
suitable for the role of Loki in the context of the murder of Baldr.

27. Therefore, in the case of the Snorra Edda we have to use a more complex hermeneutical
approach than the approach to myths described by Girard in Violent Origins, 131: "We
must realize . . . that whatever scapegoat we find is not provided directly by the myth,
but by our own insight, by our own decoding of the myth

we are doing it ourselves and that the myth is not doing it for us."

28. With regard to the relation between mimetic theory and the texts that Girard deemed
as forceful revealers of this theory explicitly at work (certain literary works and
especially the Bible), I tend to question what Hamerton-Kelly, in Sacred Violence , 197,
implies when he writes that "it does not seem important to settle the question whether
Girard discovered the sacrificial mechanism in the Bible or whether he merely found
it disclosed there with exceptional clarity." Almost every theory can be "discovered"
in whatever text it is looked for. If such a theoretical "discovery" was not triggered
by certain texts themselves , every anthropological theory would be lost in never-ending
discourse without ever hoping to arrive at reality itself. That is why, in my eyes, the
question of whether Snorri himself, writing his Edda, introduced important elements
of the insights described by mimetic theory or whether it was only Girard who, reading
Snorri's stories, could see beyond the ability of the blind archiver of Icelandic mythol-
ogy is of fundamental interest.

29. This disability of Hödr is also something that is to be found only in the Snorra Edda.

30. See Paolo Prodi, Das Sakrament der Herrschaft. Der politische Eid in der Verfassungsgeschichte
des Okzidents (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1997); André Holenstein, Die Huldigung der
Untertanen. Rechtskultur und Herrschaftsordnung (800-1800) (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1991),
esp. 4-59.

31. I agree with Wolfgang Palaver, René Girards mimetische Theorie, 271, when he writes:
"Oberflächlich gesehen könnte man die Passionsgeschichte beinahe wie einen Mythos
lesen"; but this is, in my eyes, not only due to the fact that "auch hier von der kollektiven
Tötung eines Opfers gesprochen wird" but also because of a possible misinterpretation
of the role of Judas in the course of the Passion.

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Recovering the Snorra Edda 119

32. See Hamerton-Kelly, Sacred Violence , 137.

33. See Josef Fleckenstein, "Zum mittelalterlichen Geschichtsbewußtsein. Bemerkungen


zu seiner Einheit und Mehrschichtigkeit," in Josef Fleckenstein, Ordnungen und for-
mende Kräfte des Mittelalters. Ausgewählte Beiträge (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Rupre-
cht, 1989), 443: "Es ist jedenfalls wichtig zu sehen, daß in unseren schriftlichen Quellen
germanische Vorstellungen in der Regel mit christlichen verbunden sind- ja mehr
noch: daß sie zumeist so sehr in den christlichen Grundtenor einbezogen sind, daß sie
als solche kaum mehr in Erscheinung treten."

34. We do not have to enter into the question of whether the heathen Loki had originally
had the devilish features that are later attributed to him by Snorri. It seems quite safe,
though, to follow Jan de Vries, who is usually very sceptical when it comes to Christian
influences on the Nordic culture, when he writes "that the Christian devil has exerted
a great influence upon the later development of the Scandinavian Loki" (de Vries, The
Problem of Loki, 198), although he "could never have adopted the character of Satan, if
he had not been predisposed to it" (de Vries, 199-200).

35. See Hans Urs von Balthasar, Kleiner Diskurs über die Hölle , 2nd ed. (Ostfildern, Germany:
Schwabenverlag, 1987), 25 (my emphasis): "Gewißheit läßt sich nicht gewinnen, aber
Hoffnung läßt sich begründen. Das wird der Grund sein, weshalb die Kirche, die so
viele Menschen heiliggesprochen hat, sich nie über das Verlorensein eines einzigen
geäußert hat. Auch nicht über das des Judas, der irgendwie zum Exponenten dessen
wurde, woran alle Sünder mitschuldig sind. Wer kann wissen, welcher Art die Reue war,
von der Judas ergriffen wurde, als er sah, daß Jesus verurteilt worden war (Mt 27,3)?"
Dramatic theology as developed by Raymund Schwager- see his Jesus in the Drama of
Salvation : Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption, trans. James G. Williams and Paul
Haddon (New York: Crossroad Press, 1999)- provides hermeneutical tools to achieve a
deeper insight into this irgendwie ("somehow") of Judas's specifically being involved in
the course of the Passion by analyzing the complex (dis-)connection between the role
one plays in the drama of salvation and the possibility of one's eventual personal salva-
tion. See also Nikolaus Wandinger, Die Sündenlehre als Schlüssel zum Menschen. Impulse
K Rahners und R. Schwagers zu einer Heuristik theologischer Anthropologie (Münster: LIT
Verlag, 2003), 187-93.

36. Ciaret, Geheimnis des Bösen , 339, writes as follows, analyzing the Katholischer Erwachsenen-
Katechismus promulgated by the German Catholic bishops in 1985: "Für die Kirche
existiert zwar ein Teufel, und sie sagt auch, daß dieser den Menschen versucht, aber
die Frage: 'Woher kommt das Böse?' wird ohne Rückgriff auf den Teufel allein mit der
menschlichen Sünde beantwortet." Beyond this important diagnosis, the connection
between human sin and the devil has to be taken into account, if one does not want to
misunderstand the importance of the category of the devil as proposed by the Church.
See Raymund Schwager, Banished from Eden: Original Sin and Evolutionary Theory in the
Drama of Salvation , trans. James G. Williams (Leominster, Herefordshire, UK: Grace-
wing, 2005), 156: "However, does the collective projection arising out of a reciprocal
quest for honour expose the entire reality of Satan? This question is hard to answer,
because evil is a mystery for which we never quite find the clue, so we must finally speak
of it in images. . . . Therefore the New Testament writings, even after Easter, speak of
the devil as a distinct figure. This post-Easter language of Satan therefore presents no
objection to our interpretation."

37. Shakespeare's version of the killing of Hector in Troilus and Cressida has also changed
the commonly known story of Homer from a battle between two enemies, Achilles and

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I20 Mathias Moosbrugger

Hector, to a collective murder (see René Girard, "A Universal Wolf and a Universal Prey:
The Founding Murder in Troilus and Cressida" in René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William
Shakespeare (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 230)- this is astoundingly similar
to Snorri's adaptation of the mythological version of the killing of Baldr as analyzed
above. But Shakespeare- being the master of literary revelation- usually describes his
insights more obviously: he writes in a way that (usually) makes the point of his plays
understandable almost regardless of the historical context and knowledge of his read-
ers. In order to understand Snorri's revealing storytelling, an "intrinsic" analysis of his
Edda, an analysis such as is made of Shakespeare's plays, does not suffice: a historical
approach has to be introduced to enable us to understand the specific literary tech-
niques used by Snorri to reveal the reality of collective killing behind the mythological
version of the murder of Baldr. However, even Shakespeare's plays sometimes have to
be put in a certain order to be able to reconstruct the proper narrative structure of a
certain play as far as its revelation of the nature of mimetic desire and the scapegoat
mechanism is concerned: see René Girard, "Sweet Puck! Sacrificial Resolution in A
Midsummer Night's Dream" in René Girard, A Theater of Envy: William Shakespeare (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 241-42. And it is Girard himself who, comparing
Sophocles and Shakespeare, implies that a correct identification of the revealing power
of a text might depend upon the acknowledgment of the proper cultural (i.e., histori-
cal) context it is situated in: see "An Interview with René Girard," in René Girard, "To
Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature , Mimesis} and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), 223.

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