Guiding Ideas, Part III: A Case Study

The selection of Norse Paganism as a means to explore The Numinous is both of personal connection, but also of historical significance. As already stated, the author connects with the allegorical view of the world that Norse Paganism presents better than any other encountered system of belief. To further cement this branch of paganism as the vessel to dissect The Numinous is the curious historical uniqueness that the Norse culture developed over the course of their existence. In Scandinavia, the people we now call the Sami, resided through the duration of the last ice age, which ended around 9,700 BCE, coinciding closely with the end of the Paleolithic era. The continental Europeans began migrating north throughout the Neolithic period, an age of warming and glacial retreat, keeping mostly to the Scandinavian coastlines and river deltas. This happened at the dawn of the first millennium, focusing mostly on western Scandinavia, modern-day Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Eastern Scandinavia, what we know as the Baltic countries, would see a delayed land migration starting three hundred years later, only to be furthered by Viking incursions in the later half of the millennium.

These Neolithic hunter-gatherers carved out a very tough way of life, subsiding on every ounce of sustenance that their environment would provide. The mountainous terrain and harsh climate limited farming abilities, slowing cultural advancement through what is largely considered a springboard period in human history. There were no plains in Scandinavia like there were in central Europe at the time, which both provided farming as well as flocks of game for easy hunting. The Proto-Norse had only the sea to turn to for a steady supply of food, supplementing it from the land when they could. This, and the inability to traverse great mountain ranges, drove boat-building techniques to improve rapidly. Not only did this help provide better fishing opportunities in deeper, more distant waters, but it also opened up each settlement’s range of travel. A broader range meant greater trade opportunities, as well as raiding targets. These targets mostly kept to West Scandinavia until 750 CE, when raiding other Norse settlements started waging war on each other. There are many debated reasons for this era coming to an end and the Viking Age beginning, but it was at this time that the Norse started looking abroad.

First, they took to the Baltic coasts and created the people called the Rus. Much like later endeavors, these began as raiding parties that would take wares, currency, and slaves, and then return home. They gradually started turning into occupations and conquests as Vikings simply began settling the land that they traveled to. There, in the land of Rus, they began integrating culture and language until they completely diverged from Norse culture with a hybrid culture that would become Balto-Russian.

Up until this point, the Norse had traded locally within the Scandinavian, Baltic, and Frisian regions. Their geographic location had kept their culture relatively isolated from that of continental Europe. While they had developed a degree of literacy, they were still largely a culture of oral tradition, limiting their ability to develop and grow from generation to generation. This, of course, and a lack of abundant resources. The Norse were very much limited by their geographic conditions as it affected their exchange of ideas with other societies, as well as their ability to obtain resources to improve their own.

With the Dawn of the Viking Age, all of this would change. Their rapid expansion into new territories, for both trade and conquest, would expose them to cultures more advanced than they, and lead to cultural integration in almost every part of Europe, the likes of which are arguably the most influential in recorded history with regards to its impact on our modern history. This exodus of Norse culture unto the world, while extremely influential, would actually lead to its demise. Christianity had already swept through most of Europe and was reaching the last of its extremities. Through natural conversion, persecution, and political means, Scandinavia converted extremely quickly following the start of the second millennium.

The uniqueness of this case study is their very recent isolation. While most of Europe had entered the Medieval Era in terms of their technology, societal innovations, and more, the Norse were still very much stuck in the Iron Age, which is why they appeared and are attested to as being barbaric by the civilizations they interacted with. This principle makes them the desired case study for connection to The Numinous. A direct descendant of Proto-Indo-European Paganism, Norse Paganism was essentially preserved as a practice much later than what can be found virtually anywhere else in Europe. It is a recent secondary source to analyze, a snapshot of the revisioned original faith.

This original faith, also called “The Religion With No Name”, was the root faith from which almost all European paganisms sprung. As Neolithic tribes departed the Caspian Steppe, their faith mixed with the Paleolithic tribes already inhabiting Europe. Within a few generations, the whole continent was practicing this nameless religion. As these societies migrated, were displaced, and evolved, they gathered their own names and specificities. These would become the Duridic, Theodic, and Celtic paganisms, to name a few. Out of these larger four, Norse paganism is the most recently practiced in its original form for reasons previously mentioned, making it the most recent connection to its ancestral religion with no name and furthermore The Numinous.

This point of proximity is furthered by the history of Iceland. Like Norse society was isolated and preserved from mainland Europe, Iceland was a branch and replication of this phenomenon. Settled in the heart of the Viking Age, Iceland was the last of Norse cultural settlements to convert, making it the final practitioner of “the old ways” before Christianization. It is here where the old pagan culture was documented by the infamous Snorri Sturluson, a Christian poet, historian, and politician. Now, it should be noted that Iceland’s isolation is a double-edged sword. While it did preserve the absolute last of the original practitioners, their ways had been derived from the core of Scandinavia for a few hundred years. This leads to distinct differences and a unique Icelandic flavor of Norse Paganism which is noted in many instances.

So, Iceland being the preservation of Norse Pagan society, which in turn was the longest preserved Western Pagan culture, is the closest and most direct root back to the original religion, the closest one can get to the original interpretation of The Numinous. My own personal beliefs feel more like a pleasant coincidence in comparison to the historical significance that the study of Norse Paganism can bring into perspective with regard to Western civilization’s development of culture and religion.