The Role Of Carvings In Norse Literature

In fact, many surviving rune carvings all over Viking areas in Europe are inscriptions written in the third person by persons wishing to commemorate the deceased. Creating epitaphs of this kind was the task of rune writers or carvers, usually retained by the wealthy. The carver often declares his own name or that of the person who wished to remember another, often a warrior who lived and died nobly or valiantly in battle. For some Vikings, the person who carved the rune performed a kind of divination or contribution to another’s divination, which became a common theme in Norse literature (Raudvere 2008: 238). Carvings of this kind appear in many locations that had Viking inhabitants over several centuries. Some are large markers erected …show more content…
Fylgjur or guardian spirits were attached to persons and families and appeared as animals, often in dreams, to warn or advise. Fortune was a settled fact of life: a person would now and again be warned of something to do or not do, or of a hard time to come, by a sorcerer. The possibility of bad luck was more important to Viking psychology than that of success, since they felt themselves in the presence of destructive spiritual forces that could reflect ill will, greed or other misfortune on a family (Raudvere 2008: 240). Disir were female spirits, and others could be animals, including horses. The outer world was not as it might appear taken at face value, of course, and human beings stood to be tricked by their own vices. This quite elaborate Viking world should help a reader to see the mistake of reducing a complex tradition to matters of myth or literature or runic divination, which many Vikings would have seen as mere details in the greater cosmology to which they were subject. The resurgence of runes and divination and the Viking (or just Norse) pagan revival of the last generation or so may not have seen so much public attention had it not been for the mainstream success of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and other entertainment …show more content…
Over time, they became important traders from Greenland to the Caspian Sea. Most who went to settle in the British Isles were from what are now Norway and Denmark. They and their descendants became a frequent presence in the north of England, coastal Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and had a long legacy on the Isle of Man. What these and other migrant Vikings on the continent probably saw as usual in fuþark messages, signage and memorials, now have a different importance to revivalists who stress divination involving runes, interest in spells, runes in connection to Wicca, and a host of other interests that might surprise many Vikings of old if they could see them today. Some contemporary semi-scholarly publications address rune magic, spells and divination directly (Thorsson 2012; Paxson 2005). The more one imagines from scholarly work the often rough lives of Vikings long separated from Scandinavia, the more one sees the open possibilities both of wishing to adhere to the old and of following what had changed over time, as second- or third-generation Viking migrants and colonists were not apt to recognize (Abrams 2012: 16-17). In light of the numerous Viking conquests,