Naturally I went to my books to see what those who study Norse myth for a living thought. There wasn't really a consensus: Else Mundal, Jenny Jochens, and Judith Jesch took a positive view, while John Lindow, Margaret Clunies-Ross, and Lotte Motz voted no. John McKinnell thought both parties were mauled by the process, and Carolyne Larrington had no opinion. Of three others I found online, Ross Enochs of the Marist College and Sarah Welschbach in her master's thesis voted no, while Lyn Skadidottir (in Jötunbok) voted yes.
Else Mundal makes a good point when she says that the gods were shamed. After all, bare feet were the mark of a penitent, and the covered faces equally convey mourning or shame. Then Loki's play with the goat is hardly the Aesir at their most virile, seeing as how he nearly castrated himself to appease her (which is probably why Loki was detailed for this job).[336] Mundal thinks that Skadi has put them in the same position as Thor in Hyrmskvida, and she thinks, too, that Loki was chosen to fool with the nanny goat as a symbol of the gods' "wounded masculinity".[337] (Lindow and McKinnell pick up on this as well, while not necessarily agreeing with the conclusion Mundal draws from it.)
Jenny Jochens points out that Skadi did, after all, become a goddess, a fate not shared by most giantesses who engaged in sex with the gods. In fact, there are two main patterns for god - giantess encounters: the Thor pattern where you kill them before they kill you, and the Odin pattern of seducing them and making off with their goods (Gunnlod) or otherwise using them (Rind). So you argue that Skadi, who was neither robbed nor killed, got off relatively lightly.
Judith Jesch sees Skadi as an in-between figure, who stands between those giantesses who are victimized by the gods, and goddesses like Gerdr, who seem to have been completely assimilated into the Aesir's world. Skadi's behaviour during her marriage to Njord seems to bear that out - they go to her place first, and when they go to his she does not scruple to complain of it.[338] We know that Skadi, despite her divorce, is invited to the gods' feasts, since she is present in Aegir's hall in Lks, and Snorri counts her as one of the goddesses, along with Gerdr and Jord.
Lyn Skadidottir points out that Skadi did succeed where all the other giants' bride-quests failed - she married one of the gods.[339] Thrym, Hrungnir and the Masterbuilder all failed to get Freyja, but Skadi married Freyja's father, and Thor had to stand by and watch. In the same book, Raven Kaldera says that Skadi got a seat at the gods' councils which she kept even after her divorce[340], which I presume refers once again to Lks, which is sometimes interpreted as the gods sitting in judgement over Loki.[341]
In the neutral zone we have Larrington and McKinnell. I put Larrington here because in her article on Scandinavia in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, in which she quotes Judith Jesch on Skadi as the one that got away, so to speak, but doesn't really express an opinion of her own. McKinnell does not see either party coming out of it well:
Similarly, Snorri’s story of Njõrðr and Skaði is an absurd burlesque, a: reversal of ‘normal’ wooing patterns in which a grotesque bride secures a husband by force and chooses him blindly, and neither husband nor wife can bear to live in the home of the other.[342]
Both Njord, by allowing himself to be chosen like a woman, and Skadi, who allows herself to be diverted from revenge, come off badly in McKinnell's reading. He views the myth as a burlesque of the bride-quest story anyhow, so we shouldn't expect the main characters to keep their dignity, although he suggests that the judgemental aspects could be later inclusions, much as Snorri moralizes over Frey's infatuation with Gerdr.[343]
Clunies-Ross and Lindow agree that Skadi's compensation wasn't worth much, and a contemporary audience would have felt it wasn't. Clunies-Ross clearly agrees with Jakobsson's Rule: the gods always cheat[344]. In Prolonged Echoes she implies that Odin somehow rigged the contest so that Skadi would not get Baldr. Enochs agrees with her, saying that while various outsiders tried to bargain with the gods, the gods always got the best of the deal. As he says: "The gods took advantage of the desires of others and entrapped them."[345] (This is as true of Thiazi as of Skadi.)
Lindow feels that a marriage based on choice of legs/feet rather than worked out amongst the two families would not have been worth much to a medieval audience, and in his second paper on the subject, he goes further and says that both Skadi and Freyr were in the power position and lost it through infatuation. (Skadi fell for beautiful feet, Freyr for Gerdr's arms.)
Motz sees Skadi's position as akin to Brynhildr's. Both were tricked out of their choice of man, and she contrasts Brynhildr's refusal to have anything further to do with Gunnar against Skadi's more pragmatic approach.[346] As far as Motz is concerned, Skadi has been deflected from her purpose: revenge. By accepting a husband instead, she has betrayed herself. (Although according to Snorri it was Skadi herself who demanded a husband from amongst the gods, and Clunies-Ross sees her action as subversive, potentially threatening the Aesir if she did get the god she wanted.) Motz does have a point when she compares Brynhildr's laughter when she achieves her vengeance with Skadi's laughter at Loki's humiliation. She thinks that heroic female characters get treated better than Eddic ones, as comparing Brynhildr/Skadi and Sigdrifa/Gunnlod shows.
Welschbach thinks that Skadi only partially succeeded, and in a very compromised manner. She doesn't see the demand for a husband in the critical light that some writers do; as she puts it:
Matrimony was an integral part of the ongoing power-struggle and the binding via marriage could enlarge a party’s predominance or better its position of power (Andersson and Miller 1989, p. 24). In hindsight to this the act of choosing a husband has to be understood as an option for Skaði to strengthen her rule and upgrade her reputation.[347]
Since Skadi is the only one of the jotunns who succeeds in getting a spouse from amongst the Aesir, to that extent she has won. (The Master-Builder, Thrym, and Hrungnir all get hammered by Thor for their ambitions, while Thiazi gets burned.) But instead of getting Odin's legitimate heir and the god who would rule after Ragnarok, she ends up with the hierarchically lower (and older) Njord.
Further, since the gods did make Skadi laugh, they could be said to have "won" that round. Welschbach discusses the parallel case of Bolli and Kjartan in Laxdæla saga. Bolli marries the woman intended for his foster-brother Kjartan, and then offers him a young stallion by way of compensation. Kjartan refuses, and the feud escalates until Kjartan's death. Welslchbach points out that as long as the relationship was unbalanced by the failure to redress Bolli's unjust act, violence is not far off.[348] After the gods have given her a husband, and made her laugh, presumably they are quits. As a further, gratuitous act of compensation, either Odin or Thor threw Thiazi's eyes up in the sky as stars, which confirms that he was no ordinary opponent.
Chapter 15
Sami Parallels
It is tempting to view the unhappy marriage between Saamis and Nordic people in the literary motifs as a symbol of the relationship between the two peoples, an inescapable life together, attraction and drifting apart at the same time. And perhaps there is a mythological superstructure for this relationship in the Old Norse myths, in the unhappy marriage between Njordr and Skadi, the giantess who went skiing and hunting like a Sami woman; she longed to return to the mountains, and left her husband.[349]
The "Other" is a very hot topic right now. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's book on monsters came along just as scholars were beginning to re-evaluate the role that giants played in Norse myth. Clearly there was something in the air. For your average medieval Scandinavian, giants might very well be "Other" but they were a remote other, whom they were unlikely to encounter. But there was another "other", with whom they might very well trade or otherwise interact, and these were the Sami, who are usually called Finnar in the Old Norse texts.
Today, the Icelandic word Finni means an inhabitant of Finland. However, in medieval times it seems that it usually meant the people who lived in Finnmork, which would be today's Finnmark, in northern Norway. Those Finnar would have been
the Sami people (once called Lapps or Laplanders).
The Finns of Finland can also be called Finnar (their name in Swedish) and may be that there were two kinds of Finnar: Finns themselves and the Sami people.[350] The two peoples speak Finno-Ugrian languages, but are very different, the Finns having long abandoned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, while the Sami were famous for living off the land, fishing, hunting and trading.
The Sami live in northern Europe, in the region they called Sapmi, which includes some of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and the Kola Peninsula in Russia.[351] The genetic origin of the Sami is unknown, but some claim that they are aboriginal Northern Europeans, who repopulated the Sapmi region after the last ice age. Archaeologists have placed people in the region from before 8100 BCE, although the Sami languages are dated from about 2000 - 2500 years ago.
As the Nordic peoples moved further north and the Sami south, they came into contact, although they had very different lifestyles and cultures. The Nordic people were mainly farmers, while the Sami were mainly hunters and trappers up until about 1500 CE, when a crash in reindeer population led to many of them settling down. Their shamanistic religion was very different from the pre-Christian beliefs of the Norse.
There is a theory that they were driven north by incursions of Viking settlers, although there is no historical record of actual battles between them. The nature of the relations between the Norse and Sami are still being debated, but there were political alliances, although the actual people seem have had little contact apart from trading.
Lately, though, with the new interest in circumpolar religions and cultures, as well as the willingness to assume that cultural exchange between the two groups was a two-way street, the Sami have been coming to the forefront again. With this shift, we have seen a renewed interest in the idea of the giants as honorary Finns, and the Finns as honorary giants. Skadi in particular, with her skis and bow, has looked like the Finn-women who marry the Yngling kings, marriages that often go wrong. The idea that there is some Sami - Scandinavian content to the Thiazi - Skadi myth is not news. Folke Strom was theorizing along those lines before the Second World War.
As Kusemenko puts it:
Nobody denies the fact of great Scandinavian influence on the Sami in the Viking Age. But if we ask whether this Sami-Scandinavian contact is reflected in Scandinavian culture, we get as a rule a negative answer....The Scandinavian influence on the Sami languages and on the Sami culture on the one hand stigmatization of the Sami in the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, which has been extrapolated to the whole period of the Sami-Scandinavian contacts on the other, has made an assumption about Sami influence on the Scandinavians impossible.[352]
There is, however, good reason to assume that contact was a two-way street, and that while the Sami were seen as "other", these were others the Scandinavians could borrow from.
Sami - Norse Relations
The usual description of the Sami in Old Norse literature is that they were good hunters, archers, skiers, fishers, sorcerers, magicians, and healers.[353] Even the rather mundane ability to ski was given a magical spin in Saxo's account, in which at first he marvels at how fast the Sami are on skis, but later becomes more fantastical in his account of them:
When they [the Sami] scattered in flight... they cast three pebbles behind them, which to the enemy they made look the size of three mountains. Stunned by this cheating vision, Arngrim recalled his men from pursuit, believing himself blocked by a wall of towering cliffs. The next day they met again and were defeated, whereupon they flung down snow and gave it the appearance of a mighty river.
(Gesta Danorum V, Hollander's trans.)
The third time, however, the Finns had run out of magic, and Arngrim's troops carried the day.
The Sami were associated with prophecy, too. According to Saxo, when Othinus (Odin) wanted advice on how to avenge the death of his son, the Finn Rostiophus is able to tell him.
They appear in historical accounts, too, notably in the life of Harald Fairhair, who fled from his father with a Sami adviser from Hadaland. (It wasn't just pagans, either, Olaf Tryggvason visited a Sami for her prophecies when he went to Norway, although later church laws forbade others from taking advantage of this sort of advice.[354])
We have to assume that Odin, with his interest in prophecy and wisdom, learned more on Samsey than how to beat a drum (Lks 24). Magic in ON literature is associated with gender or ethnicity, so that people who practice it are usually either women or non-Norse, like the Sami. (This is the point of Loki's taunt to Odin about Samsey - not only doing a womanish thing, but a strange, foreign one into the bargain, as practiced by foreigners that most Norse people were wary of.)
It was not just prophecy that the Sami were credited with. They were supposed to be able to change themselves into animals, often whales or walruses. (In Sturlaugs saga starfiama a Finn turned himself into a dog and an eagle during a battle with a Norse magician.[355]) They could also transform into trolls. The Sami were also supposed to be able to control the weather, just as the giants could.
The Sami were well-known for these qualities, so much so that others could be described as Finns or Finnish if they also could use magic or wisdom. The prose introduction to Volundarkvida tells that Volund's father was a "Finnish king" and one of his brothers was named Slagfinnr. All the brothers "skied and hunted for animals"; very Sami behaviour. Another group who often came in for that comparison were the giants, who were also supposed to be wise, magical, and to live in inhospitable areas. The Sapmi lands could easily stand in for Utgard, and like the giants, they were strange, other, but at the same time had goods, magic and wisdom that the Norse wanted.
If there was prejudice or uneasiness around the Sami, it didn't stop Icelandic and Norwegian kings marrying them. Harald Fairhair, for example, was married to a Sami woman Snaefrid ("Snow-peace"), and they had four sons. Harald composed a verse about her after her death. The Danish king Gram declared war on the Finnish king Sumblus, but then fell for Sumblus' daughter and that put paid to the war. Helgi, king of Halogoland, sought to marry Thora, daughter of the king of the Finns. (His friend Hother helped him, a la Skirnir, because Helgi had a bad stammer.[356]) Some of these stories, especially the latter, many not be true, but they reflect what was seen to be possible. In light of these stories, it is interesting that there was a personal name Halffinnr, (Sami by half), and that it was usually understood to mean finnskr at móðurkyni (Sámi after mother).[357]
Skadi and the Sami: three generations?
Skadi has evident features which correspond to the cliché features of the Sámi in Old Icelandic literature. She goes skiing, hunts with a bow and shoots game. In skaldic poetry, she is called ondurdís, ondurgoð ‘ski goddess’ . She is a giantessbut she belongs to the gods. She was one of Njörd’s wives, but according to the Norwegian skald EyvindFinnson (!), she did not want to live with Njörd and did better by marrying Odin. She had many children with him. One of them, who was the ancestor of a very well-known person in Norwegian history, Hakon Jarl, was called Sæmingr.[358]
Not just Skadi, either. It has been argued that the name of her son Sæmingr also indicates Sami origin, although that doesn't seem provable one way or the other.
The etymology was put forward by the German scholar Karl Mullenhoff, who read Saemingr as "son of Sami". This etymology is pretty well discredited, but Saemingr would have been a powerful symbol of Sami-Scandinavian coexistence, just as Harald Fairhair's sons would have been.
Mundal thinks that it is a misunderstanding to see the relation between the two words Saemingr and Sami as depending on a phonetically correct derivation. She thinks that any relationship between the two would have rested on folk etymology; Saemingr could have functioned as a name derived from 'Sami' if that was what people believed.[359] Also, she says:
We can see from a story in Vatnsdœla saga, chapter 12, that a word for the Sami people phonetically equivalent to the first part of the compound name Sæmingr was k
nown among the Scandinavians. In this saga Sami men speak of themselves as semsveinar. The last part of the compound word, sveinar, is an Old Norse word for ‘young men,’ but the first part of the compound word must, however, be a Sami word that the Sami used about themselves.
Whether the name Sæmingr was made up to make associations to the Sami, whether the name existed first and the associations to the Sami were caused by the first part of the compound name, or whether the name Sæmingr in the Middle Ages was associated with the Sami at all, is impossible to say with certainty. We do not know whether the genealogy back to Ódinn’s and Skadi’s son Sæmingr was Eyvindr Finnsson’s invention, but it is worth noting that Eyvindr himself was from Northern Norway.[360]
Mundal goes on to say that the Hladir themselves, Saemingr's descendants, were supposed to have been from northern Norway, and so Eyvind may have wanted to emphasize the northern connections with a name that evoked the Sami, which Saemingr would. Of course, this implies that the ruling family of Norway had Sami ancestry.
Nor does the Sami connection stop with Saemingr. Thiazi may have a counterpart in the Sami fishing god. Southern Sami tjaehtsi, "water", has been suggested as the origin of his name, which de Vries and Simek consider etymologically difficult, and there is a Sami god Tjatsiolmai, which looks good, however specialists may feel about it. At sites where Tjatsiolmai is honoured, there are large stones in the form of a man or large bird. One site in Northern Finland has a seven-meter stone at the shore of the lake; the lake is called Taasti-jarvi in Finnish, which corresponds to the Sami word Tjaastijauri (Tjatsi lake or Water lake).[361] Others have similar names, such as Tjatsisoulo (‘Water island’).
Another connection between them is that both receive sacrifices. Tjaziolmai received sacrifices so that people would have luck fishing, and the story in Hst and Skld of Thiazi demanding food from the gods is often interpreted as the giant demanding tribute. According to Snorri Thiazi was out at sea, fishing, when Loki appeared to rescue Idunn. Tjatsiolmai often accepts sacrifices while in the shape of a bird, and was often represented as a bird or a man with bird feet.[362]
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