Stephen A. Mitchell

Heresy and Heterodoxy in Medieval Scandinavia

Although medieval Scandinavia was home to no large-scale heretical movements, it did experience heresies, heretics and stridently heterodox views. How many? The answer, as it turns out, is less certain, yet more interesting than the figure established in previous scholarship. Specifically, this essay challenges Jarl Gallen’s position (as articulated in his entry on ‘heresy’ in the authoritative Kultur-historisk lexikon for nordisk medeltid) that cases of heresy in medieval Scandinavia were (1) rare and (2) occurred exclusively in Sweden. The five cases Gallen cites are set against nearly a dozen other episodes, cases that often involved the same criteria (i.e., the language of the charges, the authorities disposing of the cases and/or the theological bases for the charges), which ought, I argue, to be part of any discussion of heresy and heterodoxy in the medieval North. The essay concludes that such instances were neither limited to Sweden nor rare, but rather appear fairly regularly as regards both the spatial and temporal frames reflected in the historical record.

The Battle on the Ice

focusing on the people involved and not mentioning the ice explicitly (see below), the Bjarkarímur poet presents it as a dramatic clash of arms. The second story, in two versions, tells what happens after Hamlet (Amlæd) avenges his father’s death. In no Scandinavian account does he die following that vengeance, as in Shakespeare’s final scene, and the two versions offered here of the events that follow, translated by Janice Hawes, put an entirely different spin on the drama that is so familiar to us in English. Amlæd’s wife Yngafred is especially a surprise.

Yuletide Beasts at Lejre

In the more or less realistic fiction of the fifteenth-century Bjarkarímur [Rhymes about Bjarki], the hero Bjarki trains the young and cowardly Hjalti to be manly by having him drink the blood of his first kill. These are animals (a wolf and a bear), not monsters, so the slaying of these “yuletide beasts” is nothing like Beowulf’s killing of the monster Grendel, or even like the killing of a makeshift dragon (called a troll, and winged) that substitutes for this episode in the closely related Hrolf Kraki’s Saga (chapter 23). Nevertheless, the very existence of this story suggests that a creature of some kind preying on the hall in midwinter—or perhaps two in succession—could well have been a tradition associated with Lejre, the legendary home of the Scylding kings. By following the original line by line (in Finnur Jónsson’s 1904 edition), Stephen A. Mitchell respects the form of these “Rhymes about Bjarki”1 in a way that previous translations do not. He partly imitates the alliteration2 and rhythm (but not the rhymes, as rhyming would have required excessive deviation from the meaning of the text), and he refrains from standardizing alternating tenses to one tense, as in modern English. The protagonist is sometimes named Bjarki, sometimes Böðvar; he is the Böðvar Bjarki of Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. As the passage begins, Bjarki has just saved young Hjalti from being bullied by King Hrolf Kraki’s men.