Solstices in Norse myth

[00:00:03]I am Old Norse specialist Dr. Jackson Crawford and I just wanted to say a few words with the summer solstice upcoming about the summer solstice in the Old Norse language and in pre-Christian Norse mythology.

[00:00:17]So, one of the things that uh as I've pointed out many a time we are least well informed about is the practice of pre-Christian religion as opposed to the stories of the pre-Christian gods.

[00:00:33]Stories are not necessarily threatening to the Christian missionaries who come in later. If people want to entertain themselves with stories about Thor as long as they don't think of Thor as somebody to worship that can be sort of provisionally tolerated especially in a small community like Iceland and indeed there was a lot of toleration of these stories for many centuries following.

[00:00:57]What is threatening to the practice of Christianity is the practice of the previous religion.

[00:01:04]So, we have extremely little about prayers, extremely little about rituals, extremely little about holidays because we don't want people celebrating those pre-Christian holidays, right?

[00:01:17]So, uh we just have to piece together little bits of hints about how one might celebrate a holiday like Yule in the pre-Christian Norse world and Yule is the holiday that we know best.

[00:01:34]Now, it's often assumed in modern times that Yule corresponds with the winter solstice, but that's not a given. Uh I've talked about in a couple videos how it seems that Yule may actually be later than the winter solstice.

[00:01:46]And likewise there is no indication from any Old Norse source that the summer solstice was significant to the Norse.

[00:01:55]Now, that is not to say that it couldn't have been. It might have been.

[00:02:01]Certainly, I think that they noticed it.

[00:02:03]There is a word for it, right? So, sometimes I point out, you know, well, there's not even a word in Old Norse for this thing, like with tattoos, and I think it's a pretty good indication that tattooing either isn't practiced or is very, very rare.

[00:02:15]Uh but, we do know what they call the the solar the summer solstice. It's um So, the solstice itself is a sól stada. It's actually usually said in the plural, sól stoda. Literally, like a sól the sól sun stopping or placement.

[00:02:36]So, you know, you can talk about the summer one or the winter one.

[00:02:39]This never comes up in a sacral context, right? It only comes up in our Old Norse sources in kind of pedestrian context.

[00:02:44]This was around the summer solstice or in something like Rímbegla, an Old Norse text that reflects a lot of uh foreign classical learning about the sky.

[00:02:56]We don't see it in terms of there being any sort of holiday, any sort of celebration, any sort of association with a god.

[00:03:03]So, it looks like something that people notice on their calendars. Surely, this has a lot to do with the planning of uh the sequence of agriculture or perhaps in a martial context when you might raid uh here there or yonder, but doesn't seem to have any sort of holiday associated with it. Um you know, this might be a little bit like how uh you're probably aware every year when uh Valentine's Day comes around just because there's you know, various things to to mark mark it, right? There's there's hearts and such on things.

[00:03:39]But, if one were to read a story by you about what happened during your February, we might not see very much about Valentine's Day because maybe you know, nothing significant happened uh for you. Maybe it doesn't matter that much for you.

[00:03:52]Uh I think that to a certain extent our expectation that there should be something significant about the summer solstice for the Norse is conditioned by two things. One is that of course in present-day Sweden, Midsommar is a really big holiday. It's bigger than Christmas for a lot of people.

[00:04:10]Um we were very privileged to spend last Midsommar in Sweden with uh Grimfrost.

[00:04:18]We did the whole, you know, putting up the pole and dancing around and everything. It was a lot of fun.

[00:04:23]Um but there's no indication that these traditions go back to the Old Norse period. That is not to say those traditions are old.

[00:04:30]But remember there are a lot of different layers of the past, right?

[00:04:33]There's many different generations back there and something can be pretty old by now that doesn't go back to Viking times, right? We see nothing in Viking times about uh significant holiday close to the middle of summer uh or the raising of these poles as a celebration.

[00:04:50]Before you say that Egil Skallagrimsson raised a pole, remember that it was for a very different purpose. It was to curse someone not as a part of a celebration.

[00:04:58]I think another thing that conditions us to expect a big significance to the summer solstice and and winter solstices probably um this way that you know, not only do we conflate many different layers of the past together but we conflate uh lots of different uh past cultures uh basically just for not being Christian. We tend to conflate them so all of the pagan cultures of uh medieval Europe which we are pretty under informed about, we tend to associate factoids about one with factoids about the other.

[00:05:31]So since Stonehenge looms so large in people's imagination of what pre-Christian religion might be like and of course it makes sense.

[00:05:40]It's in an accessible place. Uh it's hugely imposing. It's super impressive.

[00:05:44]My word, how did people make this, right? It's like it was it was designed to impress and it's still impressing thousands of years later.

[00:05:51]I think it's given us to expect that pre-Christian religions in Europe must have been really, really tuned into particular astronomical events like the summer solstice, winter solstice. And I think that's also a little bit conditioned by modern notions of magic and lay lines and things like this that might be, you know, energized by particular astronomical events, right? The planetary alignments and solstices and and and such and such.

[00:06:18]But Old Norse writers really just don't talk about this. So, while there might have been some significance to the summer solstice for the pre-Christian Norse, we don't know what that might have been and we don't know how it might have been celebrated.

[00:06:34]Any attempts to create a uh Norse solstice ceremony, holiday, etc. are then going to be the result of modern reconstruction, modern imagination.

[00:06:48]I hope that's a reasonably interesting take on this uh question that I get often around this time of year.

[00:06:55]And uh if you like these free videos about Old Norse language and myth, you should check out the Patreon where you can also get access to live interviews with great experts. And uh you should check out my translations of Old Norse mythological stories such as the Poetic Edda, now available in a second edition that I also finished last year in Sweden at about this time of year.

[00:07:17]Well, for now, from indoors in beautiful windy Colorado, I am wishing you all the best.