scandanavia and blacks

Supernatural Others and Ethnic Others: A Millenium of World ViewAuthor(s): John LindowSource: Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Winter 1995), pp. 8-31Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the Society for the Advancement of ScandinavianStudyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40919728 .

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Supernatural Others and Ethnic Others:

A Millenium of World View

John Lindow University of California, at Berkeley

poem Ynglingatal, attributed to the probably Norwegian ninth-century skald Êjóõólfr af Hvín, catalogues the deaths of the line of kings known as the Ynglingar, who ruled in Uppsala

during prehistory but may with some assurance be linked to archaeo- logical and other historical evidence. The poem promises thirty generations but delivers only twenty-seven; however, other sources are able to provide three monarchs preceding those found in Ynglingatal.

The earliest kings in ITnglingatal die in unusual ways, sometimes involving the supernatural. The first of these kings, Fjçlnir, enjoyed (if that is the word) a death without influence from supernatural or "other" beings; according to Snorri Sturluson's accompanying prose in Ynglinga saga, Fjçlnir was unable to find his way back to his quarters after relieving himself of the physical remainder of a night of drinking and fell into in a vat of beer and drowned. His immediate successors, on the other hand, were victims of the supernatural. Fjçlnir's son, Sveigõir, was apparently the first recorded victim of bcrgtagning, being taken into the mountain by supernatural beings, tjóòólfr's stanza is as follows.1

1 For this and the following stanza from Ynglingataly I cite from the edition of skaldic poetry by Finnur Jónsson (1912-15). Readers may also wish to consult the remarks in Akerlund (1939: 80-3), where a different but no less valid numbering system is used, and where each stanza (Âkerlund's are shorter) receives a pithy and sometimes unwittingly humorous summary; the stanzas I discuss here and below are summarized thus: 1 : "Fjolnir omkom hos Fro{>e" (Fjolner died visiting Fróôi); "han drunknade nämligen i mjödkaret" (in fact, he died in the barrel of mead); 2: "dvärgarnas salväktare narrade Sveig^er" (the hall-guardian of the dwarfs tricked Sveigõir) "dâ denne lopp efter dvärgen in i stenen" (when the aforesaid rushed after the dwarf into the rock); "och berget (eller stenen) slukade honom" (and the mountain [or rock] swallowed him up); 3: "Men en häxa âstadkom Vanlandes död" (but a witch arranged Vanlandi's death) "och hon plâgade honom" (and she tormented him), "och han brann vid Skuta" (and he burned near Skuta). Also important are the readings in Bjarni Aoalbjarnarson's edition oiYnglinga, saga ( 1941 : 26-30).



Supernatural Others 9

En dagskjarr Dúrnis niÔja salvgrÔuÔr SvcÍ£fÒi vélti, pás í stein enn stórgeÒi Dusla konr ept dvergi hljóp, ok sair bjartr peim Sçkmímis JQtunbyggÒr viÒ JQ fri ¿fein. (Finnur Jónsson 1912-15, vol. 1: 7)

(And the day-shy hall-guardian of the kinsmen of Durnir tricked Sveigòir, when the great-minded kinsman of Dusli leapt into the rock after the dwarf, and the bright hall, giant-built, of Sokmimir's brood [the rock], gaped open for the prince.2)

This is a nice verse. It juxtaposes light and dark, dwarf and giant, and it anthropomorphizes the hard rock which apparently swallowed up Sveigõir. According to Snorri, Sveigõir had gone to search out Goõheimr, the ancient seat of his divine forbears, to see whether he could find Odin. Somewhere in eastern Sweden he has stopped at a farm called at Steinig so named because of a huge rock located there. Sveigõir and his men, not having learned anything from the beery death of Fjglnir, are themselves intoxicated, and when they see a dwarf sitting at the foot of the rock, they rush closer. The dwarf calls on Sveigõir to enter the rock and, if he wishes, to meet with Odin. Sveigõir leaps into the rock, which immediately closes up after him, and he never emerges.

Sometimes Snorri seems to be guessing about what fjóoólfr's verses mean, but here he must be pretty close to the mark. In any case, the verse alone offers, if one accepts the traditional dating of the poem to the middle of the Viking Age, perhaps as early as the late ninth century,3

2 My translation, as throughout unless otherwise indicated. • ns wicn most oiaer rsiorse poetry, dating is a tierce proDiem, ana tnere nave been tnose who argue for a later date. Klaus von See, for example, thinks Ynglingatal may imitate Háley¿fjatal(not vice versa, as the usual view has it) and therefore must be from after 980 (von See 1988: 77-78). More radical is the attempt of Claus Krag to set the poem in a high medieval context (Krag 1991), an attempt which is, however, open to criticism (e.g., Andersson 1992). About all that can be said is that there is no absolutely compelling argument to strip the poem of its traditional date.



10 Scandinavian Studies

the oldest dateable attestations of the word for "dwarf' (in any Ger- manic language) and of Old Norse-Icelandic/ptaTmfgiant] . The dwarfs' fear of daylight is already present, as is the giants' prowess as the builders of large structures; in other words, the picture of these beings is consistent with much later traditions and with cognate traditions. As the first more or less dateable presentation of dwarfs, giants, and their hostility to humans, this verse deserves some importance in the history of Scandinavian folk belief.

The next stanza of Ynglingatalis equally important. It tells about Sveigoir's son Vanlandi, whose mother was Vana from Vanaheimr (here we seem to have an alternative version of the role of the Vanir in the learned prehistory and/or the mythology). This unfortunate mon- arch met his end at the hands - or more literally under the feet - of a nightmare, the first attested in Scandinavian texts.

En á vit Vilja broÖur vitta vêttr Vantando, kom, pás trollkund oftroÕa sky Idi HÕs ¿frimhildr Ijóna baga, ok sá brann á beòi Skútu menglçtuÒr, es mara kvalÒi. (Finnur Jónsson 1912-15, vol. 1: 7)

(But to visit the brother of Vili [Odin], the creature of magic arranged for Vanlandi, when the troll-related night-Hildr [witch] was to tread underfoot the enemy of the band of men; and that necklace-destroyer [king], whom the nightmare strangled, burned on the bank of Skúta.)

In Ynglinga saga,, Snorri Sturluson quotes the verse as evidence for the following story. Vanlandi visited "Finland" - the name is geographical although probably used mythically here (Sorensen 1977: 159-65) - and stayed there with Snxr the Old, who as a resident of "Finland" is presumably a Finn or Saami. There Vanlandi married Snaer's daughter, Drifa. The following spring he returned to Uppsala and failed to keep a promise to come back to Drifa within three years. After ten years, she arranged for a woman with shamanic powers (Old Norse-Icelandic seidkona) to charm Vanlandi back to Finland or kill him. When shortly




thereafter Vanlandi found himself eager to return to Finland, his re- tainers dissuaded him from the trip, but he was ridden by a nightmare; when the men protected his head, she attacked his legs, and when they then protected his legs, she attacked his head and killed him. He was cremated by the banks of the river Skúta.

Like its predecessor, this verse appears to offer first attestations, in this case of the words troll/ troll znà marti [nightmare], as well as the first description of a nightmare's riding of the victim, for which the verbs troÕa [tread] and kvelja [strangle] are used. Here again, the traditions represented in the verse have shown amazing longevity (Raudvere 1993: esp. 89-91, 297-8).

I cite these verses not only because of their chronological primacy and in support of my conviction of the continuity of Scandinavian folk belief, but also to demonstrate that from the very first, notions of ethnicity and social boundaries have been associated with the supernatural. Both Sveigõir and Vanlandi got into trouble away from home, where, as we might suspect, the "other" forces were at large. Sveigõir had been to Turkey and Scythia before encountering the dwarf in the uncharted tracks of eastern Sweden, and Vanlandi fell fatally in love in "Finland," which in its strict geographical sense here presumably means the land of the Saamis and is in any case located conceptually north of Uppsala. The farm at Steint presumably had human inhabitants, but being far from Uppsala, it also had supernatural ones, and they con- trolled the feature of the landscape - itself obviously with a strong supernatural component - for which the farm was known.4 The "Fin- land" of this early narrative goes a step further, for there the beings themselves are endowed with dangerous supernatural powers of magic. The nightmare who attacked Vanlandi may have been the sorceress employed by the "Finns," or it may have been called up by the sorceress, but in either case the "Finns" are the outsiders and the dangerous ones. In fact, the "Finns," imbued with magical powers, are stock figures of Old Norse-Icelandic literature. Perhaps the best known are the ones dispatched magically from Norway to Iceland by Ingimundr Êorsteinsson the Old, to look for his Freyr idol and in general check the lay of the land; the tale is known in kings' saga, family saga, and LandnAmabók. The legal oath known as the TryggÒamâl consigns one

4 Although dwarfs apparently left folk belief at a very early period, a few place names indicate clearly their presence in the preliterary period (de Boor 1924: 544, 552; Halvorsen 1958: 378).




who breaks a settlement to the life of an exile wherever: Christians visit churches and pagans hold sacrifices, beyond pine and fir tree - and beyond where the "Finn" stands on ski.5 The older Borgarthing law implies that trips to the "Finns" or to Finnmark are undertaken for the purpose of prophecy or even necromancy ("iEldre Borgarthings- christenret,"inKeyseretal. 1846-95, vol. 1: 350-1) and flatly prohibits belief in "Finns" ("¿Eldrc Eidsivathings-christenret," in Keyser et al. 1846-95, vol. 1: 389-90,403).

The two stanzas we have discussed send their victims on routes of travel well-known during the Viking Age : to Asia Minor and back to some remote part of eastern Sweden in the case of Sveigõir; and to the north to Finnmark in Vanlandi's case. Both routes were exploited for trade and perhaps also for plunder, and on each of them the traders met and interacted with people of very different race, ethnicity, and cultural identity. We may surmise that the two early Yngling kings who perished in the supernatural ways just described might have met different fates, with less overt supernatural intervention, had they traveled south (as did FJQlnir the tipsy non-swimmer) or west, where they would have met persons speaking Germanic languages like their own and following customs far more like theirs. Be that as it may, the fact of interaction is well established for the Viking Age, and people tended to ascribe supernatural abilities to those who were different. To complete the compass rose (on which see further Lindow 1994), let me mention western and southern examples.

When the Greenlandic explorations of North America took place toward the end of the tenth century, the Greenlanders encountered the indigenous population, who bear the name skrdingar in medieval Scandinavian texts. Whether these particular skrdingar were North American Indians or Inuit peoples has been debated, but the point is that to the Greenland Norsemen, as refracted through later Icelandic writings, they were very foreign. Eirikssaga rauda describes them as follows:

Peir váru svanir mcnn ok illiligir ok hoflu Hit há,r á hgßi; peir váru mjgk eygÒir ok breiÔir í kinnum. (eds. Einar Ól. Sveinsson and Matthias Póròarson 1935: 227)

5 The formula occurs in nearly all the variants, most of which, however, contain a great many other expressions of the distance to which the outcast shall be driven. For an English translation of one of the more complete, see Dennis et al. (1980: 184-5). The problem of variant versions in the sagas is taken up by Vogt (1938).




(They were dark- complected and ugly and had little hair on their heads; they had large eyes and broad faces.)

Within a few months, according to Eiriks saga rauda, the Greenlanders have traded with, cheated, and frightened the skr&lingar, who later attack them. In the attack, the skrdingar launch a blue bag over the Norsemen, and it somehow frightens them into believing xhztskrœlinjjar are attacking from all sides. This was more than a mere subterfuge; Karlsefni and his men conclude after the battle that the attackers from all but the original direction were sjónhverfìngar [visions, delusions]. I would agree and would add that the magic bag of the skrdingar is a supernatural artifice rather like Odin's spear, which paralyzes an oppos- ing army with fear when thrown over them. Once again, then, different ethnicity is endowed with the supernatural.

The same occurred later with the Ethiopians, Moors, and other foreign races Europeans, Scandinavians among them, encountered to the south beyond the Mediterranean Sea. As in the continental literature, they were called simply "black men," but the color semantics make us think of "blue men" : Icelandic blamabr, Old Swedish blamap&r. Use of blar rather than svartr is almost certainly intended to mark an ethnic difference, for svartr was used of Nordic people with swarthy complexions, such as, to cite perhaps the most famous example, Harald Fairhair's son Hálfdan, nicknamed "the Black" to distinguish him from his historically undistinguished twin brother, Hálfdan the White. Nu- merous persons bore this nickname, inn sparti, just as others bore the nickname "the Red" as a result of ruddy complexions. It is certainly worth noting that the skrdingar, according to the passage cited above, were spartir menn [men of dark complexion]; by world standards, these northern peoples, whether Indian or Eskimo, must be reckoned relatively pale.

The blámenn, in any case, lived in one or more of the Blalönd[ Black Lands] that were part of the ordinary geographical knowledge of learned medieval Scandinavians; here again, the focus is ethnic, for the Black Sea is called Svartahaf, not Blatthaf or something similar. As characters in saints' lives and other European literature, blámennwcrc mentioned in the appropriate translations, and if they were described, what mattered was their black skin. Karlamagnus saga, for example, refers at one point to a bláfnaÒr" som er kolblár á sinn líkama ... er engi hlutr var hvítr á utan tenn ok augu" [who is black as coal on his body




. . . of whom no part of the body was white but the teeth and eyes]; (ed. Unger 1860: 54).6 One of the versions of Bartholomew saga postola mentions a blámaÕr "blacker than pitch" which (I believe this is the correct pronoun in this case) has been driven out from a pagan idol. The description goes on.

Eptir pat ¿feck ut or scurpßopinu ogorlegr blamaj>r biki svartari, harÒlundlegr oc hvassnefiaÔr, siÒsceggiaÒr oc svart skeßßit oc illilicty haritsvart oc sitty sva at toc a ter honum, augun sem elldr vari i at sia, ocflu£fu¿fneistar or sem afvellanda iarni. Or munninum oc nausunum for utsva sem brennusteins logi, oc honum varo venßir ocfìaÒrarsva sem clungr ocpyrnar. . . . {Postola sqgur^ ed. Unger 1874: 763 )7

(Thereafter a terrible blamaÒr went out from the idol, blacker than pitch, hard tempered and beaked, long-bearded and the beard black and hideous, the hair black and so long that it reached his toes, the eyes as if fire were to be seen in them, and there flew sparks out of them like bubbling iron. From his mouth and nostrils flames came like sulphur, and he had wings and feathers like bramble and thorns. . . .)

Here a connection is clearly being made with demons of hell. In the Icelandic fornaldarso¿jury however, blámenn are generally linked with secular creatures of evil, often in the alliterative pair blámenn ok berserkir [black men and berserks], once also in the alliterative pair blámenn ok bannsettar hetjur [black men and banished heroes] {Sorla saga sterka, in Fornaldarsö£fury ed. Guõni Jónsson 1959, vol. 3: 381). Whcnblamenn are described, their blackness is only one of their important characteristics, and those that have been added point in the direction of the fantastic and, like the demon expelled from the idol, the supernatural.

6 Cf. "Ki plus sunt neirs que nen est arrement / Ne n'unt de blanc ne mais que sul les denz" [who are more black than ink and who are white only on the teeth]; Chanson de Roland^ 11. 1934-5; these passages are cited in Fritzner 1973, vol. 2: 149-50. This entry offers an essay on the semantics and possible development of the word blámaòron which I build here. 7 The comparable text in Acta Sanctorum, which makes the demon an Egyptian, is close enough to the Icelandic to represent the source or something very like it: "Tune ostendit eis ingentem ^Egyptium, nigriorem ruligine, facie acuto cum barba prolixa; crines usque ad pedes, óculos Ígneos sicut ferrum ignitum, scintillas emittens; ex ore ejus, et naribus egrediebatur fiamma sulphurea: habens alas spineas, sicut strix, erat vinctus a tergo manus, ignitis catenis strictus" {Acta Sanctorum: Augusti 5: 37). [Then (the angel) revealed to them an enormous Egyptian, blacker than soot, with a pointed face with a luxuriant beard; his hair all the way to his feet, fiery eyes like molten iron, giving off

sparks; out of his mouth and nostrils came a sulpherous flame. Having thorny wings, like an owl, his hand was bound by his back, drawn tight in fiery shackles.]




One wrestling bldmabr is described as "furõuliga stórr, svartr ok digr sem naut; at öllu var hann ámátligr" [Frightfully big, black and stout as a bull; he was powerful in everything]; (Hjalmpés saga ok Ölvis, in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Guõni Jónsson 1959, vol. 4: 227). In Sörla saget sterka, a prince and his men catch sight of a whole band of blámenn.

I pessu bili sjá peir tólf rnenn stefna á mòti sèr, forkunnar storii ok ólíka oÒrum mennskum mönnum. Svartir váru par ok illiligir ásyndum, ekkert har á h'ófìi, brynnar hengu allt á nef niÖr, augun ¿ful sem í ketti, en tennrnar sem kaltjárn. (Fornaldarsögury ed. Guõni Jónsson 1959, vol. 3:371) (At that moment they see twelve men turning toward them, extremely large and unlike other human beings. They were black and ugly in appearance, had no hair on their heads, their brows hung down to their noses, their eyes were yellow as in a cat, and their teeth were like cold iron.)

The key phrase in this passage is that the blámennwcrc not like other human beings. The term used here for human beings, mennskir menn, is regularly and logically juxtaposed against mmn [people] who are not mennskir[humzn] (see Haugen 1967 for some implications of this and similar distinctions); in other words against those who have human form but are not human, namely supernatural beings. The following passage makes it clear that bldmcnnm the fornaldarsögur were indeed berserks and closer to supernatural beings than to humans.

Hrólfr nef ja stóÔ upp ok malti: aEk skal pér í mót, blámaôr." Hrólfr bjó sik til ¿fltmu alllettilißd. SíÒan ráÔast peir á ok takast fangbrögÖum aUsterkliga, ok var peira atganga b&Òi b'òrÒ ok long. Mikill var aflsmunr meo peim, pvi at bldmaÖrinn matti bera Hrólfí fangi sir, hvert er hann vildi. Berserkrinn vildi farà Hrólfpd niÖr. Hann kom pó jafnan fótum undir sik. Pessi blámaÕr var mikill sem risi, en digr sem naut, blâr sem hei. KUr hafìi hann svd miklar, at par vdru líkari gammsklóm en mannanöglum. (Sturlaugs saga starfsamma, in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Guòni Jónsson 1959, vol. 3: 126-7)

(Hrólfr nefja stood up and said: "I will fight with you, black man" [blámaÕr]. Hrólfr prepared himself quickly for a wrestling match. Then they came to grips and started wrestling fiercely, and their struggle was both hard and long. Great was the difference in strength between them, for the black man could carry Hrólfr in his grasp wherever he wished. The berserk wanted to throw Hrólfr down then, but he always got his feet under himself. This black man was as big as




a giant, as stout as a bull, and black as Hel. He had claws so large, that they were more like the claws of a griffin than a man's nails.)

Hrólfr has only one opponent, a berserk blamadr, or perhaps we should say a black berserk. In any case, note particularly the similies used to describe this mighty wrestling blámaÒr. he has characteristics of a supernatural nature being and of an animal, and his blackness is presented in terms of a mythological being associated with death. Even the choice of an animal points toward a mixture of black men with the supernatural, since bulls frequently have supernatural affinities in Old Icelandic tradition. One example is Glaesir in Eyrbyggja saga, ch. 63; descended from a cow that licked the ashes of a revenant who was burned to stop his haunting and from some mysterious dapple-grey bull, this creature is identified as a troll by a blind woman with second sight and ultimately gores and kills his master Êóroddr.

Now, some of this transference of the supernatural to blacks had already occurred in the European medieval literature on which Old Norse-Icelandic drew. The passage from the Chanson de Roland I mentioned above begins by referring to the blacks as a contredite gent [cursed race] and implies that they are devils in the service of the Saracen army. We are all familiar with the assignment of the color black to Satan and his minions in later popular theology and folk belief - one thinks equally of religious iconography and of such motifs in legend as Satan in the form of a black dog - and this assignment obviously had occurred by the Middle Ages. African blacks, Moors, and Saracens were the enemies of the crusaders and were later accordingly cata- logued in medieval Scandinavia as enemies of Christianity; and demons, too, were enemies of Christianity. The line between the supernatural and merely ethnically different enemies must have been difficult to draw and difficult to keep.

In this light, it is worth considering one more linguistic detail. Al- though I am convinced that African blacks were called blamenn and not spartir menn because of notions of ethnicity, specifically a need for ethnic definition, the Old Norse-Icelandic prefix bla- also functioned simply as an intensifier in such words as bláfastr[vcry strong], bládjúp [bottomless depth in the sea], and blaskqgar [thick, deep forests]. The lexicographer Johan Fritzner (and others? ) imagined that the latter two words show the link with the color and invited us to think of the murky expanses of the Schwarzwald (Fritzner 1973, vol. 1: 151-2) - we of course will also think of the deep blue sea - but Jan de Vries regarded the prefix in bláfastr, at




least, as a homonym for "blue" of questionable etymology, perhaps related to English "blow" (de Vries 1962: 41, 46). Perhaps this particular term helped the blamaörm Icelandic move from ethnic "other" to berserk. Alternatively, perhaps the prefix really is just "blue," and it acquired its intensifying sense from the berserk blámenn.

Two of the blámennwc met above had such animal characteristics as eyes like those of a cat, the stout frame of a bull, and claws like a griffin; in short, there was a mixture of animal with the usual human features. Similarly, a different prefix joins with this concept another ethnic group we have already considered: zfinngdlkn was a man- beast mixture. Whztjjfálkn meant is anybody's guess, for it is found only in this term and in the poetic hapax legomenon hreingálkn, of uncertain meaning, perhaps "troll" (Bugge 1895, Halvorsen 1959). Finngalkn was used in the Icelandic Physiolojjus to translate "centaur" and therefore also for the constellation and astrological sign Sagittarius, which was said to have incorporated the mythical centaur. The salient point seems to be simply the mixing of forms, for the fornaldarsöjjur present various bizarre mixtures, such as Vargeisa, a being with the rump, hoofs, and mane of a horse, and the white eyes, large mouth, and powerful hands of a threatening anthropomorphic creature, with whom Hjálmjrér exchanged verses (Hjálmpéssaga ok Ölvis^ inFornaldarsößur^ ed. Guõni Jónsson 1959, vol. 4: 198-202, here 198), or the ogress called Grimhildr "when she was among humans," the mother of Ögmundr Ey]?jófsbani, one of Örvar-Oddr's many enemies; when she became a finngalkn, she acquired animal form below the head, with terrifyingly large claws and an enormous tail ( Örvar-Odds saga, in Fornaldarsögur, ed. Guõni Jónsson 1959, vol. 2: 282-3). The notion of mixture appears to have been sufficiently widespread for Óláfr Pórõarson hvítaskáld, author of the Third Grammatical Treatise^ to employ the term finny alknat along with nykrat (from nykr [nixie]) as a native category of cacemphaton^ metaphorical incongruence (ed. Björn M. Olsen 1884: 80).8In compounds like finngàlkn, the first component can only be the ethnic name of Saamis and Finns, here with reference to magic and shape -changing. The connection with the "other" is perhaps further strengthened by the location ofthefinngálkn

8 Óláfr's remark should be compared with that of his uncle Snorri Sturluson, who in the commentary to "Háttatal" in his Edda discussed the nykrat style in a slightly different way and did not use the tcrmfinnjjálknat (ed. Finnur Jónsson 1931 : 217-8; cf. Clunies Ross 1987: 76-7).




slain by torkell hákr Porgeirsson in chapter 119 of Njáls saga, somewhere on the mysterious Viking trails east of Sweden.

This discussion of prefixes, suffixes, and unusual mixes would be incomplete without mention of the Old Norwegian name Bláfinnr, found in a document setting forth the boundary between Norway and Sweden during the later thirteenth century ("Grsenkseskjel mellem NorgeogSverige,"inKeyseretal. 1846-95, vol. 3: 487-91, esp. 491). The passage in question is set in ilio tempore, when Christianity was just arriving, and it relates the establishment of a remote parish and provin- cial boundary. Although it seems probable that an origin legend lies behind it, Bláfinnr in the text is no more than a peripheral Saami after whom a certain pond was named. It is, however, probably significant that he is associated with the opponent of the first Christian in the area, and his connection with the lake suggests that he and his race were primeval. Be that as it may, the name is redolent of possibilities, most of them involving magic, the supernatural, and boundaries not between districts but between races.

When medieval Scandinavians peopled distant lands with wondrous beings and strange beasts, they were following not only the lead of learned writers everywhere in Europe but also their own world view, which knew that "other" beings lurked in the woods and streams beyond the boundaries of the farm. Similarly, when medieval Scandi- navians assigned supernatural powers to other races and imagined some of them to be of mixed animal and human form, they were following - and simultaneously (re- )creating - their world view, in this case with respect to ethnicity. The last decades have seen a new realiza- tion of the way in which social groups create definitions of social boundaries by assigning various "emblems of contrast" to those outside their own group; here I think of the work of such scholars as Fredrik Barth (1969) and George de Vos (1982). The point is not the veracity of these emblems of contrast but rather the need to construct them and thereby to mark a contrast between inside and outside, us and them. The existence of any group automatically implies - perhaps requires - the existence of one or more others, for such definition is a matter of contrast, of marking boundaries (Schwartz 1982). Whether such marking occurs in individual psychology or in more collective cultural expression, it can be expected to appear in folklore.

Besides marking groups, such attitudes can and do also mark off individuals as deviants. The emblems themselves change: the mainstream




of yesterday's campus, for the most part, disdained cultural forms from outside the European canon; to do so today invites a charge of racism; and in university circles today it is certainly more ostracizing to be homophobic than homosexual. In Scandinavia, however, to generalize broadly, the emblems remained more or less the same from the Middle Ages down into fairly recent times. The directly ethnic attributions are seen most clearly in the Scandinavian peoples' conceptions of Saamis and Finns, who retained unbroken their power over magic (Tillhagen 1969). They carried out witchcraft of various typical kinds. They could still travel magically, like the nightmare who trod Vanlandi - a trait they share in legend tradition particularly with giants. They could change themselves into animals and functioned frequently as those classic man-animal mixtures, werwolves and man-bears. Their connection with animals is perhaps further shown in the legends in which Saamis and Finns rid the countryside of such pests as rats and snakes. Although portions of this "emblem" doubtless were empirical, with shamanism at their core, and although there were surely changes over time, the stability is apparent.

The more recent rural traditional legendry no longer had much to say about Inuit and black Africans, but it still assigned supernatural powers to the emblems of such social groups as were at hand, and not just Saamis and Finns: Gypsies and tinkers turn up occasionally with magic powers as well. And note further that personifications of the plague - those who brought the plague, according to legend - were a woman or a boy and girl from some unspecified place outside the district - "Finns," too, occasionally. When he was not disguised as a black dog, Satan often took the form of a strange gentleman, and other strangers served Satan and more generally evil by fiddling at endless dances, and so forth. Attribution of supernatural powers to strangers is so obvious and so well known within the older world view that it hardly needs detailing here.9

What is striking about these emblems of contrast assigned to other groups and to strangers in Nordic tradition is how closely they re- semble attributes of supernatural beings. It will be recalled that the very first ostensibly dateable instances of supernatural beings in Scandina- via, the dwarf and nightmare of Pjóòólfr's Ynglingcttal, were located on the one hand within the unsettled eastern part of Sweden and on the

9 See further the small anthropological literature on the figure of the stranger, particularly in Africa (e.g., Simmel 1908, Schulz 1966, Fortes 1975, Shack and Skinner 1979).




other specifically with Finns or Saamis. More generally, supernatural beings, whether in medieval or more recent recordings, control magic, can change their shape, mix animal and human form, and are dangerous if encountered in uncontrolled situations or outside the rules. Is Vanlandi any different from a man in a later rural tradition who becomes involved with an "other" girl and pays for this transgression? The following two legends, juxtaposed for other reasons in Gunnar Granberg's study of the sko£fsrây the central Scandinavian forest nymph, will serve to exemplify the matter.

Skogsrâa hade fâtt makt ma' en kar. Han geek at skogen kva'll after kväll. Han va finad à mager. Men sa en gang sa hade en hoper kar er sammangadda sej â skulle halla hönöm, nur den tia ble att han skulle iva'g. Skogsrâa ropa, men han kom inte. Dâ kom ho nâ'rmre. À han ble totalt vriden, sa att han bet ã änne tugga fragge. Da tog en âgeck ut a sköt à'tter henne. Men strax kom däflera skogsrir fram â tog henne à drog iväg te skogen. (Reported by Anders Petter Svensson, born 1855, from Eskilsäter, Värmland; printed in Granberg 1935: 245)

(The skogsrâ had gotten power over a man. He went to the forest night after night. He was tormented and had lost weight. But then one night a bunch of men had gathered to hold on to him when the time arrived that he should be off. The skogsrâ called out, but he did not come out. Then she approached more closely. And he went completely crazy, so that he was biting and foaming at the mouth. Someone went out and shot at her. But then immediately more skogsrân came out and dragged her back into the forest.) Det var en kopparslagare som bodde i Torna Hâ'llestad. À sa en dag hade hanngâttgenom Prästaskogen därnere, à dar hade han träffat eft fruntimmer â haft beröring med henne. Men nur di sen trà'ffte en, hade han blivit rent ursinnig âgalen, à han dog kort därefter. (Reported by Pal Persson, born in 1853, from Silvâkra, Skâne; printed in Granberg 1935: 245)

(There was a coppersmith who lived at Torna Hällestad. And one day he had gone through the forest Prästaskogen down there, and he had met a lady and had some contact with her. But when they met him later, he had gone quite out of his mind and crazy, and he died a short time thereafter.)

By populating the mountains and forests, the rivers and streams, even the land under their farms and the days long ago with supernatural beings and by assigning to them the same emblems of contrast they assigned to the human groups and individual strangers they encoun-




tered, I submit that people created other social groups and categories and thought about them in the same terms they used to think about the other outside groups we would term ethnic groups. Let us make no mistake about this point: supernatural beings enjoyed an empirical existence and were probably - we can only guess about this - more real to many people than, say, Hottentots or Bushmen or the King of England would have been. Similarly, the supernatural aspects of such ethnic groups as Saamis and Finns and of such disadvantaged individuals as those accused of witchcraft were also empirically demonstrated. In other words, the distinction on which we insist, between "natural" and "supernatural," or "human" and "supernatural," was not terribly important in the relatively fixed stable system of Scandinavian (here we could probably just as easily say "European") world view. What mattered, apparently, was the primary distinction between one's own group and everything outside ofthat group. Those on the outside, for whatever reason, were different, and that difference might be marked through application of any of the emblems of contrast, or so I would argue. Thus, to repeat one of the examples just cited above, the two children who carried the plague were strangers to the district - and they might also be shape changers and appear initially as, say, a coil of rope (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf 1988: 348).

The logical consequence of this line of thought is a breakdown of the distinction between ethnic and supernatural beings. Such a breakdown was in fact argued, perhaps half unwittingly, by Halvdan Koht ( 1923 ).10 Addressing himself to the question of the "Finn-problem" - the ethnicity of those denoted with the term Finn in older Norwegian materials - Koht argued that the referent of the term was neither "Saami," nor "Finn" of any variety, but rather "troll," in two senses: troll as master of magic, and troll as master builder. For the latter sense he relied, of course, on the southern Scandinavian masterbuilders of the sort classified by von Sydow as the Finn type (1907-8).

Whether we find ourselves persuaded by Koht's reasoning or scep- tical about it, we must recognize the need to exercise care in reading and understanding folk narratives, especially legends, in which ethnic terms occur. In a review of Kvideland and Sehmsdorf ( 1988 ), Bengt af Klintberg makes this point with respect to the gypsies: the apparently ethnic term tatre, he points out, citing Adam Heymowski (1969),

10 Anna Birgitta Rooth (1969) adduces materials that aim in this direction but never makes the point explicit.




"does not refer to the ethnic group of Gypsies (Rom), but to a category of stigmatized itinerants, comparable to the tinkers of the British Isles" (af Klintberg 1990: 233).

Let me summarize my argument up to this point. I have found a basic stability in Scandinavian world view, traceable to the earliest written texts and still present in the older traditional rural legendry, in which the supernatural is assigned to ethnic others. I have then argued that the supernatural beings of folk belief constitute social groups created by tradition participants and marked with the same emblems of contrast. A question immediately presents itself: why create such groups? This question goes to the heart of any consideration of identity, but it is so vast that I cannot take it up in any detail here. I find myself reasonably satisfied with the various functionalist explanations that have been put forth, as exemplified, for example, in Lauri Honko's oft- cited article on "Memorates and Folk Beliefs" ( 1964) and work ofthat nature. But I would of course recognize the historical factors attaching to such groups as demons and others involved directly with Christian doctrine, and I would insist on provision for change in any model. In line, however, with the theoretical structure in which I have embedded my argument up to now, I would like to suggest that wholesale cre- ation and maintenance of "other" groups, such as supernatural beings, offered a means for the "inside" social group, i.e., that group com- posed of the tradition participants, to define itself. In other words, I believe that the emblems assigned to outsiders can hardly have been arbitrary, given their persistence in time, and they can presumably be turned back on the tradition participants to tell us something of their own view of themselves; what is ascribed to the other may be the obverse of what one would ascribe to oneself. A brief review of the emblems, reversed, should provide a sense of the society's view of itself. In what follows, I will attempt a curtailed version of such a review, taking up only the broadest and most evident of the emblems. The review will therefore not escape the realm of generalization, but I believe that such a broad view is reasonable for a first pass through the material and justifiable on the grounds not only of the striking similari- ties from throughout Scandinavia geographically, but also chronologically.

The review might start anywhere, but given the examples already mentioned, we might begin with shape-changing. "Others" can change their shape; "we" cannot. Altered shape, or the corollary, human




bodies where they should not be, always indicate trouble, such as haunting, illicit interaction with the supernatural, or an impending death. If we change shape or cause someone else to do so, perhaps by moving his fetch, we forfeit our human rights and become "other." That, I believe, is the explanation for the following legend from Österbotten, translated by Kvideland and Sehmsdorf. A girl is on her way to a dance.

When she got close to where the dance was being held, she came to a creek. While the girl stared down into the water, a man rose to the surface and handed her a big knife. She took the knife and the man vanished. She knew him at once; it was a man who was away at sea at the time.

A few years later, the man returned and married the girl. One day he saw the knife, recognized it, and asked his wife whether she had tormented him that night long ago. When she admitted how she had gotten the knife that evening, he stabbed her to death. (Kvideland and Sehmsdorf 1988: 45)

By moving his fetch, the girl took on an emblem of contrast, which removed her from the in-group and stripped her of her in-group and human rights.

Supernatural beings may be able to change their shapes, but they often retain some fundamental aspect of their otherness. This can take many forms, but a very typical one is some animal characteristic, such as a cow's tail on a skogsrci or other nature being. Perhaps, I have thought, this marks the marginal status of some farm animals. They are somehow part of the household; they live about the farm, some of them in structures like houses; they are important factors in the liveli- hood of the farm and share in the good and bad times; and some even bear names. And still they are property to be exploited and in some cases slaughtered for food. It should be noted that the animal features of supernatural beings in the rural legendry tend to be those of household animals, not wild animals. This may support a surmise that people ascribed animal features to supernatural beings as part of an unconscious attempt to distance the household animals from themselves; if supernatural beings have features of such animals, and are by definition not part of the group, neither are the animals.

Interestingly, the other major characteristic of the skojjsrâ, her hol- low back, suggests in its totality another kind of liminality. The more southerly conception assigns her a back like a kneading trough, the




more northerly a back like a rotten or hollowed out tree trunk, in eastern Nyland like that of the simple wood scoop used to muck out stables. All are processed forms of the trees that constitute the major staple of her environment, two processed by human culture for domes- tic use, the other by nature. The trees have become difficult to classify and therefore constitute matter wrongly placed, to use the formulation of Mary Douglas ( 1984); the kneading trough and muckrake, by virtue of the minimal preparation needed to fashion these tools, still look like trees, but they function within the household; and the second is neither living nor dead. In short, the dassificatory system suggested here involves assigning the liminal with the "other" and is consistent with the world view I sketched briefly above.

Human life was linear and divided into ritually marked and set off stages: childhood (entered by baptism, departed at confirmation), young adulthood, married status, finally death and funeral. The supernatural beings can subvert these stages, by living to untold ages, and they can even invert linearity. A typical changeling would manage both if he was an old man playing the role of a human baby. If there is anything to the line of reasoning I am following, these aspects of the supernatural beings indicate an awareness and perhaps acceptance of the irreversibility of time and the human life cycle. In effect, they advocate the usual path and exert pressure on persons who might not wish to act their age.

More generally, we might express this as a willingness of humans to be ruled by nature, a willingness they expressed by creating a group of beings, inimical to themselves in most ways, who rule over nature. However, the ritual markers of the linear life cycle have all for centuries been the property of the Christian Church, and the Church has not surprisingly become a focal point for group definition. Before the conversion to Christianity, Saami shamanism may have contrasted with the religious forms of the Nordic peoples; afterwards it certainly did, but there cannot have been a great deal of opportunity for rural peoples anywhere in northern Europe to encounter non- Christians.

Nevertheless, Nordic folk belief and legend tradition make it abun- dantly clear that religion was a fundamental part of self-definition, since the one thing shared by all the supernatural beings is that they are not quite right religiously. The näkk longs for salvation (ML 5050)11, and the changeling is so thrilled that he speaks and reveals his identity

11 The types numbers used here are from Christiansen 1958.




on the way to being baptized (ML 5085). The huldre people seem to have churches and ministers, but their creed is not standard; a few legends purport to present the theological details that cause variation from Lutheranism (ML 505 5 ).12 The dead hold a midnight service, but it is threatening and inimical to humans (ML 4015). Where this atti- tude was most visible, however, and this was so throughout Europe, was in the complex of witchcraft beliefs. According to these, one might obtain the kind of powers over natural laws and - more important - over one's neighbors' property, that were also from time to time ascribed to other ethnic groups, such as Saamis and Finns, by entering into a pact with Satan. The details of these pacts are well known (see, for example, Wikman 1960), and, despite variation, all rest on a repu- diation and reversal of Christianity.

Although it may be implicit in much of the medieval material, perhaps especially in the kings' sagas and attendant pœttir, Christianity, and especially the appropriateness of given sects, does not rank among the most embracing of the emblems of contrast in the oldest written records. By contrast, an argument could easily be made and defended to the effect that Christianity is the foremost of the emblems of contrast in the more recently collected materials of the rural peasantry. Why this difference? It implies that Christianity, and indeed one particular kind of Christianity, practiced at exactly the right time of day (not too early Christmas morning, for example), had come to play an increasing role in the tradition participants' definition of themselves. Although verifi- cation cannot be obtained, and it offers a simple answer to a complex question, I am tempted to wonder whether we should look to the wrenching effects of the Reformation as a clue to the primacy of religion in the supernatural other in the traditional legendry. Surely this major shift must have called into question all sorts of previously unassailable facets of the classification of persons and events. If bishops could be executed, who iwxreligiously correct and who was not? If the host was after all not transformed into the body of Christ, could any changes of substance or shape occur within Christianity? Kathleen Stokker demonstrated in a recent article (1989) the role of Reforma- tion theology in formulating the image of the minister in some legends, and an unsettling religious shift makes it generally easier to compre -

12 Given the almost total paucity of legends on this topic, one may reasonably question Christiansen's postulation of a type.




hend the complexity and often contradictory nature of the minister in Nordic folk belief, even accepting that the pre-Reformation priest must also have been a liminal figure.13

No examination of the marking of social groups would be complete without consideration of the relationship of group to individual. This relationship is highlighted, it seems to me, by the existence of solitary supernatural beings, those who live outside of and perhaps without recognition of families. We may take the skqgsrân as an example of solitary beings; they do not apparently live in families, despite the willingness of some of them to come out and carry off their fellow being as in the text cited above. Granberg devotes a short chapter to the solitary nature of the skqgsrân in Swedish-language areas and cites many recordings to support it (1935: 74-6). Duty compels me to add that he also reminds us of the forest women in Denmark and Germany who tend to occur in groups, rather than individually. Such a conception, however, also tends toward the solitary, for there is no family life: no spouses, children, or grandparents. Indeed, the skcysrân are always female, except in the areas where they are always male, a situation which makes family life quite unthinkable. Solitariness is also evidently one of the roots of charges of witchcraft laid at the door of, for example, widows and widowers, the socially odd, and so forth. There we have a simple shift from solitary to "other" and, therefore, supernatural. This basic distinction expresses, then, the obvious value that family life is good and deviation from family life is bad, as well as the importance of a clear and unambiguous placement within kinship systems and other social structures.

And in fact the skqgsrän attack normal family life. They are would- be homewreckers who not only attempt to seduce married men into infidelity, but who even bring little cakes to them in the woods in the guise of their wives. They are wholly immodest, given to such lascivious displays as lifting their skirts and pulling men to their breasts. What is more, they are quite open about their sexual aggression. One legend

13 1 readily admit the level of generalization at which this kind of speculation operates, but I cannot forbear adding my impression that the role of Christianity seems greater, to my eye, or at least of a different order, in the legendry of the Reformation lands of Scandinavia and Germany than in Catholic Europe. Perhaps work undertaken by persons more familiar with other European traditions will be able to enlighten us on this point.




with a largely southern Swedish distribution turns on a post coitum exchange between a skogsm and a human:

She: That's the first time I've tasted Christian meat. He: That's the first time I've screwed the Devil. (Granberg 1935: 244-5; English translation of complete variant text and discussion in Lindow 1978: 113-4)

The man's quick retort, a kind of fighting of fire with fire, extricates him from the obviously bad situation in which he would otherwise find himself.

This particular complex suggests that control of sexual impulses was regarded as the "human" way of doing things, that is, as the form of behavior culturally sanctioned by the in-group. Animals and supernatural beings show no such restraint, and humans who failed to do so would be, like solitary witches, shifted toward the supernatural, as in the belief in the evil eye or other harmful characteristics of whores and others of loose morals (as set forth in Frykman's study of the whore in rural Scandinavia [1977: 25-54]).

Finally, music and virtuosity. People sang hymns in church and ballads and other folksongs at home, and instrumental music abounded. As is well known, however, incredible virtuosity on a musical instru- ment was the property of Satan and some water spirits. The most gifted humans obtained it, according to some beliefs, from these agents. Here again, cultural identity selects against the unusual and conflates it with the supernatural (cf. von Sydow 1973).

So much for the survey, which obviously could have gone on indefi- nitely. If it contains few surprises to those familiar with the tradition, it may surprise others in what it leaves out. If the emblems of contrast indeed fiinction as symbols of cultural identity, we must conclude that two of the major factors of intellectual discourse of the last century, class and gender, were apparently not much of an issue. I cannot see that the supernatural beings or ethnic others of Scandinavian rural legend tradition or folk belief highlighted their social class or a class system or showed any particular interest in gender roles. This is not to say that these matters were not at issue. As Bengt Holbek verified ( 1987), they were probably central to fairy tales. How then could they be so absent from the emblems of identity? The reasoning followed here would suggest that crofters and peasants, day laborers and house- wives, found in their situations more in common than in contrast. Only




in the psychologically more expressive form of the fairy tale could they ventilate their differences.

Given the evident prejudice against anything different, from prodigious sexual appetites to prodigious musical talent, and a disinterest in some of the matters that seem most pressing to our own postmodern eyes, it may appear surprising that brains appear to be rewarded. I am led to this statement by the almost total inability of supernatural beings of whatever sort to triumph over humans in narrative tradition. Satan is continuously being outwitted; if he had even a small percentage of the souls he nearly gets in legends, the road to Hell would be crowded indeed, and Satan is the cleverest of the bunch. Nature beings are, one must admit, downright stupid, and outwitting them is any legend hero's birthright. In fact, although luck sometimes enters into the plot, one outwits supernatural adversaries by knowing the rules', by knowing the power over "other" beings of such symbols as steel and the cross, by knowing that such beings cannot cross plowed furrows or other areas that erect symbolic barricades, by knowing - like the man who dabbled in supernatural sex in the legend mentioned above - how to get the last word. In other words, the standard pattern in legend of the resolution of conflict, the elimination of the threat and restoration of the status quo, is itself a celebration of a knowledge of the values of the culture and a further means of marking it off from the "other."

The view that has emerged of rural Scandinavia from this survey of some of the emblems of contrast attributed to other ethnic groups, disadvantaged or threatening members of the culture itself, or especially to the supernatural owners of nature, is hardly surprising and can be read out of any number of other sources. What has made the game worth the candle, or so I hope, is the possibility that in viewing the "other" and the supernatural of older rural Scandinavia in this perhaps flickering light we have had a chance to glimpse what the members of the culture themselves constructed to define themselves and found important enough to retain in tradition, in some cases, perhaps, for a thousand years.

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amall use subject

university of illinois

tjlfrs stanza