Historical Atlas reading

It was a bit sad to get to the end of this book. I had a pretty hard time keeping track of which ruler was ruler of which place. The only real comment I had about this reading was of that picture of the door on page 114. It looks so much like the door Gandalf has to open to get into the mines of Moria. Tolkien must have really really liked Norse mythology and tradition and art, that's all I can say! :)

Ibn Fadlan

My goodness! The only thing I could think while I was reading this is "man, it would stink to be a slave girl in this culture!" I think that Ibn was just as horrified as I was, which is why he included a lot of gory details about trading slave girls, and many men taking the same slave girl to have their way with, and the burial rituals where the girls get their lungs cut out while they are still living and being strangled (I saw an explanation of this on History Channel once - it looked quite nasty!)!! Of course, the commentary on the bottom of the page (and really the entire article) discusses whether or not Ibn is actually talking about Vikings this whole time - that debate is noted, but...it makes sense that these would be things the Vikings would do. The idols and gods they worship in Ibn's description seem consistent with what we have read in the Atlas, especially about Frey and Freyja.

I also noted the relationship with these people (who I think we are to assume are the Vikings) and their gods when I was reading. It was interesting to me that the vikings assumed that they could bargain with their gods in order to make the most money in their trades - and then when they didn't make a whole bunch of money, they would pray and sacrifice to the lesser gods too! That was quite contradictory with my own personal belief - so different, at least, that I did make note of it.

Discovering America...

These sagas (Eirik's and Graenlendinga) were most interesting to me because I remembered that there were maps in the back of the book, so I followed the vikings along their journeys. I thought that the footnotes were insightful too, about how historians and scholars would argue that one thing or another couldn't have possibly been the way the saga describes and years later someone would dig up a ruin just where the saga said it ought to be. For example, Thjodhild's church, which was built "not too close to the farmstead" (p86). The church makes me think of something else I thought a lot about while reading. This saga contains much more...Christianity, if I can just call it that. Not only do the characters talk about being Christian more, but there are many more "Christian" characteristics they live out as well (at least in comparison to Njal's saga). Gudrid became a nun when she was an old woman, for example (p 71). Thorbjorn refuses to participate in the reception of the prophetess and has a messenger fetch him when she leaves his home (p 83). That scene and many others show the struggle between Christianity as it was preached to them, and the religious traditions they had known for centuries before. We see many times the ways of the old world - Thorstein Eiriksson comes back to life and tells Gudrid her future, Leif Eiriksson is considered lucky, which according to Magnusson in the footnote means much more than we mean by the word today. I found the change in the religious nature of viking life during these specific times much more interesting than the brief introduction to Christianity in ch 100-105 of Njal's saga. Much more interesting and much more...believable? Yes.

Comment for Historical Atlas

While I was reading in the Atlas this last week, I kept thinking about the conversion to Christianity part of Njal's saga. Were the Christianized vikings any more civil than the preconversion vikings? And does that necessarily mean that they were any less Christian than other men of the church who killed and plundered? It was interesting that the Atlas said the only difference between the Vikings and other Christianized cultures in Europe around the same time was that Vikings didn't keep from attacking the church as well. This raises a question: how can people of a certain organized religion attack their fellow followers and still be considered members of that religion? How can Christian men attack the church and NOT be condemned as barbarians? But then I think that there must be examples in history of the same thing done by other people groups...

The whole idea interested me quite a bit. Was the Viking conversion to Christianity a REAL conversion, or was is just done to get ministers to stop bothering them? Are there sagas in which some Christian Vikings refrain from killing ministers of the church? As you can see, I have more questions than answers this week...