[Bill Carpenter]

Thanks, friends. I'm afraid I flunk the Silmarillion quiz. But I have a nephew in law who has read it 20 times!

Happy trails, Janice. Birka shows up in histories as a great trading depot, including for the trade in captured Frankish and English people carried down the Volga and on to Baghdad.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Sadly that is true, though in the Swedish histories it is ignored and they are called tradesmen and merchants. People get very upset at the mention of slave trade and human sacrifice and deny it vehemently. All countries whitewash their histories and their religions.

In fact the word "slave" comes from "Slav" because so many Slavic people were enslaved by the Vikings and carried off to the Muslim countries where, (we shall suppose) their descendants are faithful practitioners of Islam today.

They should not be romanticized, the Vikings. Mr. Putin might well have some of their less desirable genes.

What's more, (as I'm, sure you also know, Bill) Russia was founded by the fierce Rus who were none other than another strain of Vikings. Via the Norman branch not only England was conquered but also Italy conquered and united. If the colony on Newfoundland had survived who knows what world politics would have looked like today. Maybe not much different. The human race isn't a very nice success story.

(Can someone please gag that woman who just goes on and on?)

[Bill Carpenter]

Thanks, Janice. (What lightweights, those guilty Swedes.)

[Angela France]

For the English readers still with us, I'll mention that this quote is from a small pamphlet "Lost Gods of England" and the author is Kathleen Herbert, about whom I know next to nothing at this point--only that she wrote a triology set in sixth century Britain, one of which won the Georgette Heyer prize for an outstanding historical novel, and that she read English at Oxford.

I had to come in on this, Janice, as the above title caught my eye. I have had, and enjoyed, for many years a book titled 'The Lost Gods of England' by Brian Branston, It is 200+ pages and was published in 1957. I can't help wondering if there is any connection between the two (I see Herbert's pamphlet was published in 2011).

[Janice D. Soderling]

Thank you, Angela, for commenting. I found a copy of this book close to home at a decent price and have ordered it. If you liked it, I'm sure I will too.

I don't know if there is a connection between the two books. The Herbert book is titled "Looking for the Lost Gods of England" and the Branston book is titled simply "The Lost Gods of England". I'll let you know how they compare when the Branston book arrives. Should be sometime this week.

[Angela France]

I will be interested to know how they compare. Branston is a scholar and there are academic papers of his that I've seen online but his writing style is easy to read. I found 'The Lost Gods of England' very interesting as he makes a case for a split between the norse and english gods, and their mythology going in different directions, informed by environment.

[Gail White]

I would be interested to know more about this too. Easter is famously named for a pagan goddess of whom we know practically nothing.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I have two items I'd like to document in this thread, items I stumbled over in the course of my haphazard reading.

The first is from a little dictionary I took with me on my recent Viking sighting expedition: "Vikingatidens ABC", which might be rendered in English to somthing like "ABC of the Viking Age". (The observant will note the "tidens" in the title which is (tid) the same root that appears in the -tide of Yuletide and Eastertide--I digress.)

With reference to my musings and Tim's (post 18)

I regard it as 8th C. and written in Scandinavia. It is monotheistic, no Christ, no conception of the trinity, no mention of the Germanic pantheon, only the All-father. So I date the poem by its theology. I believe the poet had some familiarity with the Old Testament, not the New. So it certainly couldn't have been written in England after St. Augustine converted the country.

this entry is interesting:

Allfader, ett av Odens epitet. Förekommer i isländsk skaldediktning och bl a i eddadikten "Grimnismål". I "Snorres Edda" är A. den främste och äldste av gudarna.

This entry is authored by CO Carin Orrling, antiquary at the Swedish History Museum.

Quick translation:

All-father, one of the epithets applied to Odin. It occurs in court poetry and (among other places) in the Eddaic poem "Grimnismål". In "Snorres Edda" Allfather is the foremost and eldest of the gods.

Note: The translation of "skadediktning" to "court poetry" follows "A Companion to Old Norse-Icelandic Literature and Culture", edited by Rory McTurk.

The second item I'd like to document is from "Women in Medieval English Society" by Mavis E. Mate.

Quote:

(...) During the second half of the twelfth century literate women turned from Latin to French and command of the Latin language and grammar disappeared, even from the nunneries (Orme, 1984: 158-60). The court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, as she moved from Poitiers to England and back, played a dominant role in the promotion and diffusion of the ideals of troubador lyric poetry and became the catalysing factor in the integration of Celtic myths into continental literature (Lazar 1976). By the end of the fourteenth century, however, French was ceasing to be the spoken and literary language of gentility and writers such as Chaucer and Langland had shown the power and flexibility of the native tongue. (...)

This seems pertinent because one can extrapolate that in a similar way, in an earlier age, the oral Beowulf was transported from court to court by entertaining bards and when it finally came to be written down the religion of the original stories had been changed--in keeping with the times.

Again I want to stress that I am not declaring a scholarly breakthrough , but simply re-stating my suspicions that Beowulf, though transcribed in English, is an old oral poem that retains relicts of its Scandinavian and pagan origins: Allfather Odin morphed to the Christian Allfather, Loki morphed to Cain, and that damnably joyful raven is a typo.

I haven't yet delved "The Lost Gods" so I may be back.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I finally worked my way down the stack to "The Lost Gods of England" and it is exactly the reference I needed. I recommend it to anyone interested in the subject and send my eternal gratitude to Angela France.

Among other helpful items it mentions that the Allfather attribution is not to Odin but to the god Tiwaz who preceded him and usurped him (Tuesday and Wednesday, Tiwaz and Odinn/Odin/Woden but that's an off-track note).

Tiwaz (under his many Indo-European names) was the original Sky-God who fertilized the Earth Mother. Our Indo-European heritage is always with us.

On the original topic of this thread I can say I got grist for my mill re the theory that Beowulf (the version we know) was a Christianized poem that had its roots in the pagan Sweden--this was perhaps not done by monk scribes as I suspected, but by time and devout converts.

p. 36. We then begin to suspect that the Beowulf poet was Christianising pagan material--and so he was: such monsters as he names were part and parcel of the heathen mythology and had nothing to do with Cain until Old English converts tried to combine elements from their own pagan myth with the new Christian one.

It is a mesmerizing book; especially those who are familiar with the mythologies of religion in the various cultures will have many aha moments. The "Lost Gods" is making me spend time on a lot of other references and leads such as the legend of Wayland the Smith and this casket https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franks_Casket . (Some of my favorite books are museum catalogs.)

Anyway, I'm having a great time. Including being made more steadfast in my belief that religion fulfills a primitive need and it's all superstitious bunkum.

How sad for those lads who martyred themselves in Syria, how sad for the Christians et up by the lions, how sad for all the evangelists backing Israel because they hope for the Apocalypse, how sad for all of mankind who has endured death and destruction down the ages from altar sacrifices (there is a link between Iphigenia and the Aztec prisoners) to placate the gods and warred throughout the ages.

33 “The Lord our God delivered him 1over to us, and we defeated him with his sons and all his people. 34 “So we captured all his cities at that time and utterly destroyed the men, women and children of every city. We left no survivor.

If you consider the religious horrors served up in our lifetime--the exterminations of the Jews in WW II, the atrocities of the Bosnian war two decades ago, the Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland, etc. etc. so who is surprised that ISIS attracts young westerners to join the beheading of the infidels.

There are many translation of Cesar Vallejo's poem below, but the one I like best is (of course) the one I first read which was by Michael Hamburger.

Los dados eternos / The Eternal Dice

God of mine, I am weeping for the life that I live;
I am sorry to have stolen your bread;
but this wretched, thinking piece of clay
is not a crust formed in your side:
you have no Marys that abandon you!

My God, if you had been man,
today you would know how to be God,
but you always lived so well,
that now you feel nothing of your own creation.
And the man who suffers you: he is God!

Today, when there are candles in my witchlike eyes,
as in the eyes of a condemned man,
God of mine, you will light all your lamps,
and we will play with the old dice …
Gambler, when the whole universe, perhaps,
is thrown down,
the circled eyes of Death will turn up,
like two final aces of clay.

My God, in this muffled, dark night,
you can’t play anymore, because the Earth
is already a die nicked and rounded
from rolling by chance;
and it can stop only in a hollow place,
in the hollow of the enormous grave.

This was a long thread, but hopefully it is completed now. Even though I didn't find compelling proof that the "joyful raven" is a corruption. Thanks all who took part.

Adding in: the original magnificent poem.

Dios mío, estoy llorando el ser que vivo;
me pesa haber tomádote tu pan;
pero este pobre barro pensativo
no es costra fermentada en tu costado:
¡tú no tienes Marías que se van!

Dios mío, si tú hubieras sido hombre,
hoy supieras ser Dios;
pero tú, que estuviste siempre bien,
no sientes nada de tu creación.
¡Y el hombre sí te sufre: el Dios es él!

Hoy que en mis ojos brujos hay candelas,
como en un condenado,
Dios mío, prenderás todas tus velas,
y jugaremos con el viejo dado.
Tal vez ¡oh jugador! al dar la suerte
del universo todo,
surgirán las ojeras de la Muerte,
como dos ases fúnebres de lodo.

Dios míos, y esta noche sorda, obscura,
ya no podrás jugar, porque la Tierra
es un dado roído y ya redondo
a fuerza de rodar a la aventura,
que no puede parar sino en un hueco,
en el hueco de inmensa sepultura.
- Cesar Vallejo

[Bill Carpenter]

It's the Branston book you're recommending, I take it? Thanks for scouting this trail!