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Gro Steinsland

The late Iron Age Worldview and

the Concept of ‘Utmark’

Our concern here is the ‘utmark’ or outfield, the outer areas of the farmstead,
cultivated and explored by men. It is not the empirically experienced outfield that
will be in focus, but rather the ideas and symbolism created around it. There are no
obvious sources that give us immediate access to the ideology of the outfield as such.
The question is whether it will be acceptable to consider the cosmological worldview
of the Viking period as a doorway to the ideas of the outfield.
The cosmology of the Viking period contains a mythological domain that may
be characterised as a sort of ‘outfield’. Within the mythological texts, the outer sphere
of cosmos is called Utgard, ‘the home/farm outside’, the areas outside the fence.
The question is whether the ideas connected to that cosmological domain may be
transferred to the concepts of outfield or ‘utmark’ surrounding the farmstead.
In the study of the history of religion, it is commonly assumed that there are
parallels between the cultural classifications on the cosmological and the empirical
level. This presupposition is, however, a hypothesis that has to be further investigated.
This broader task is not going to occupy us as such; it is a rather huge challenge that
has to be handled in an interdisciplinary way. I will concentrate on the narrower
question, whether it is possible to argue that there were some sort of parallels between
the ideas of the outfield on the microcosmic level and Utgard on the macrocosmic
level. The question presupposes that there is a sort of discernible worldview of the
Viking period. As we will see, it is not easy to present a comprehensive and universally
acceptable picture of the pre-Christian cosmology.

The pre-Christian worldview

Sources for the Norse pre-Christian cosmology are mainly the mythological texts,
the Eddaic poems, the scaldic poetry and the learned Edda by Snorri Sturluson of
the thirteenth century. It has been taken for granted that these sources mould the
contours of a pre-Christian cosmology, and are reliable representations of the Viking
period mentality.

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Gro Steinsland

Scholars working within the field of the history of religion usually refer to a
basic, fairly well-accepted model of Viking period cosmology. From a multitude of
source information, a circular model where one domain encloses the other in three
concentric circles seems to be discernible. In other fields, however, the interpretation
of the worldview of the Viking period points in other directions. It is my impression
that the structuralistic way of interpretation has dominated the interdisciplinary field
for some decades now, and that the hegemony of this school is still existent. But let
us first of all take a look at a model of cosmology currently accepted in the field of
history of religion.
The cosmos, created by the gods in primeval time, has a marked centre called
Asgard, ‘the home/farm of the gods’. This is the holy centre of the cosmos, from where
energies, order and will are constantly radiating towards its peripheries. Around the
holy abode in the centre, the territory of man stretches out, it is called Midgard, ‘the
home/farm in the Middle’. The name of this domain points to important conditions
of human beings. The outermost circle is Utgard, ‘the home/farm outside’. This is
where the giants and other chaotic beings live, forming a counter-culture to the gods
and their world.

Figure 1. Drawing made by the Danish professor Finn Magnussen, transferred by the French author Paul
Gaimard in 1840. It corresponds fairly well to the modern interpretation of the pre-Christian worldview. Hastrup
1990:27.

Cosmology is a kind of mental map of the world. The three encircled cosmological
domains form a huge, horizontal, flat plane. On this plane, the gods are constantly
travelling, and any intervention into Utgard is always filled with great dangers, the
gods have, from time to time, to cross the borders of Asgard.

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Surely, the Viking period man also experienced cosmos as a vertical plane, as up
and down, as height and depth. The mythological vertical axis of cosmos is primarily
expressed in the symbol of the world tree, Yggdrasil, which grows in the middle of
the world. The roots of the world tree stretch down into the underworld, where the
powers of destiny, the norns, live. The trunk of the tree rises through the domain
of human beings; its branches reach high up into the sky. Yggdrasil is constantly
nourished by water from the well of the norns. The world tree may be seen as an
ecological symbol of unity, the tree in the middle of the world bringing nourishment
to the whole cosmos. Along the two cosmological axes, the horizontal one and the
vertical one, the complex history of cosmos is unfolding, of which several stories are
reflected in mythological sources.

Structuralistic models and some critical views upon them

In recent decades, analyses of Old Norse mythology have attracted attention especially
from the field of social anthropology or ethnology. For the most part, it has been
structuralistically inspired scholars who have worked on this topic. One can draw a
common thread of thought from the Russian scholar Aron Gurevich’s works in the
late 1960s, through Eleazar Meletinskij in the 1970s to the Danish anthropologist
Kirsten Hastrup and her elaboration of a structuralistic analysis of Norse cosmology
in the early 1980s. My impression is that the work of Kirsten Hastrup has had a lasting
impact on the scholarly literature, perhaps particularly in the field of archaeology.
The structuralistic analysis of Norse cosmology was criticised by the Danish
historian of religion Jens Peter Schjødt in 1990. To some extent, the Australian
philologist Margaret Clunies Ross followed up this criticism in 1994. Still, it seems
that these objections have not been noted, and have not led to any further debate
worth mentioning.
Aron Gurevich (1969) took for granted that there is a correspondence between
the cosmological conceptions of the Norse culture and the empirical, human world.
In his article, he sees the farmstead as a prototypical model of the universe. The
mythological contrast between Midgard and Utgard is paralleled by the concepts
innangards and utangards, ‘inside the fence’ and ‘outside the fence’, concepts which
contain both a territorial and a legal meaning. The single farmstead with its infields
and outfields was comprehended as a limited, localised ‘universe’. Topographical space
was at the same time religious and mythological space. Though Gurevich is looking
for a system, he is mindful of the problem of source criticism. For instance, he points
out some of Snorri Sturluson’s obviously erroneous assumptions.
The ideas of Aron Gurevich were elaborated upon by Eleazar Meletinskij (1973).
The title of his two-part essay in Journal of symbolic anthropology is characteristic:
‘Scandinavian mythology as a system.’ Meletinskij argues that the structuralistic method
of Claude Lévi-Strauss may be applied to Norse mythology. The semantic oppositions
life-death, north-south, nature-culture, chaos-cosmos, familiar-foreign, land-water,
male-female and so on, are in his opinion very well suited for the Norse material.

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Meletinskij’s viewpoints and conclusions were accepted by Kirsten Hastrup and

used in her own research in several articles from the 1980s and onward. But strangely,
a number of the reservations Gurevich made as early as the 1960s concerning source
criticism have disappeared along the way. Here, I will refer to Kirsten Hastrup’s article
‘Cosmology and society in medieval Iceland’, first published in 1981, later in the book
Island of anthropology (1990). In the common structuralistic way, Hastrup assumes a
basic division of cosmos into two parts.

Figure 2. The cosmological model of Kirsten Hastrup. Hastrup 1990:29.

To be able to work with two poles in the cosmology, Hastrup has to unite the
abodes of gods and human beings into one: Midgard. This domain is seen as opposed
to Utgard, where giants and forces of chaos dwell. This basic division of the world
into an opposition between cosmos and chaos, order and disorder, is paralleled in the
microcosms of the farmstead, where innangards, the inside, is seen as the opposite of
utangards, the outside. Topographically, the contrast can be seen in the opposition
between land and water. Hastrup even argues for the same twofold basic opposition
in the social sphere, in the ideas about us and the others.
Coexisting with this horizontal model, Hastrup also notes a vertical model,
symbolised by the world-tree, Yggdrasil. Along the vertical line between ‘up’ and
‘down’ she places the gods and the powers. The gods’ domain is in the top of the tree,
in heaven, Odin’s place, for example, is in the top of the world tree, together with
the eagle residing there. Humans have their place in the middle of Yggdrasil’s trunk;
while the norns, the snake and the abode of Hel with the dead are placed at the roots
of the tree.
In this way, the distinction between ‘up’ and ‘down’ is laden with value, while it
simultaneously contains a gender opposition: male gods have their place ‘up there’, in
heaven, while female powers of death have their place ‘down there’, in the underworld.

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Figure 3. Kirsten Hastrup’s model for related oppositions. Hastrup 1990:31.

The feminine as such becomes linked to the underworld, to death and darkness.
Testing analytical models is interesting, but we ought to remember that a
model may become a sort of straitjacket. For a historian of religion, Hastrup’s binary
analytical scheme turns out to be very problematic. Some of our objections concern
source criticism, others concern the interpretation of central mythological themes.
As a structuralist, Hastrup sticks to a binary division of the world, she places
gods and humans into one compartment. This does not, however, agree with the
textual sources that all express a basic difference between gods and human beings.
As a result of the mixture of gods and human beings in Hastrup’s interpretation, the
gods lose their position as the very centre of the world. The necessary communication
between human beings and gods is eliminated. Thus, the importance of the sacred
places in the empirical landscape, somewhere delimited as a holy sphere, is lost as
well. The very name Midgard, as a domain ‘between’ the holy centre of the world and
the opposite forces in the outerworld, becomes meaningless when the primary abode,
Asgard, is diminished.
The vertical axis along Yggdrasil is not satisfactorily interpreted either. Placing
Asgard and the gods in heaven simply does not fit. The ethnologist builds this model,
without looking to any source criticism, on Snorri’s late information about the
pre-Christian worldview. No scaldic or Eddaic poem places the world of the gods
in heaven. Only Snorri does so, in his thirteenth-century Edda. We then have to
ask whether the holiness of Heaven was something that arrived in the North with
Christianity.
Neither the polarity between male and female, placed ‘up’ and ‘down’ respectively,
seems to agree with what the sources tell us about male and female powers. I myself
cannot see why the female powers should be confined to the underworld. When
mythology places the norns beneath the roots of the world tree, it does not mean that
the powers of fate belong to the sphere of death.

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Indeed, it seems rather problematic to read a deeper code of meaning into the
vertical axis. Of course, humans experienced the cosmic space both as a flat plane
and as a vertical space, but according to the sources that reflect the Viking period
mentality, the vertical axis does not seem to contain any deeper, hierarchic meaning.
Heaven was empty, for the Viking period the sky was just a territory of transport, for
gods as well as for other beings. We may conclude that the horizontal, circular cosmic
plane is the primary in the Norse worldview of the late Iron Age.
One conclusion is that the synchronic, structuralistic analysis does not fit the
sources. A source critical, historical and hermeneutic perspective on the textual
sources is necessary.
The structuralistically inspired model of Norse cosmology which was presented
by, among others, Kirsten Hastrup, has been criticised by Jens Peter Schjødt and
to a certain degree by Margaret Clunies Ross. Schjødt (1990) maintains that the
vertical axis of Norse mythology was not imbued with meaning and symbolism
until Christianity brought a new cosmology to the North. It is in the Christian
framework that ‘up’ and ‘down’ become terms laden with value. Therefore it is not
reasonable to place the pagan gods in heaven, as Hastrup does. Though his research
is structuralistically inspired, Schjødt warns us that the structuralistic model may
become a compulsory system because it so easily ignores historical developments.
Source criticism is a very necessary element.
Margaret Clunies Ross (1994) maintains that Hastrup’s mainly structuralistic
analytic model is so simple that it blurs the variety of Norse cosmology rather than
clarifies it. Ross regards the sources as historical entities when she argues that the
horizontal, circular cosmic plane is primary in the Norse worldview. She thinks that
Norse cosmology is more appropriately analysed in connection with social hierarchies
in the worlds of gods and humans. Clunies Ross agrees with Hastrup in viewing
the opposition between male and female as a basic cosmological opposition between
superior male creative power and the female connection to chthonic forces and death.
In my view, this too, is an oversimplification of what the sources tell us about the
spheres of influence of male and female powers.
The limits of this paper do not permit any discussion of the basic assumptions of
structuralism itself, namely that human beings will, independent of time and space,
always think in binary oppositions, and that the same basic oppositions may be found
underlying every mythology, every social system, no matter how different they may
seem. Here, I will only briefly call attention to the fact that some researchers in the
field of society and culture are not convinced by the basic theories of Claude Lévi-
Strauss, for instance the social anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1973).
Thus far, we must conclude that Norse cosmology and its world of forces are
so diverse that no one has yet succeeded in developing a fully satisfactory, simple
model of the pre-Christian worldview. So far, the circular, horizontal model where
one ‘home’ encloses the other in concentric circles, with energies radiating outwards
from the cosmic centres from where the gods are situated and to the outmost spheres,
seems to me to be the best illustration of the complex Norse worldview.

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What can we say about the mental experience of the outfield?

If we follow the structuralists, the outfield stands opposed to the infield as chaos
does to the cosmos. The symbolic values of the outfield then turn out to be darkness,
death, female powers, anti-life and destruction. If we, on the other hand, take a
hermeneutic approach to the mythology and the texts on a source-critical basis, this
conclusion turns out to be completely wrong.
If we assume possible parallels between macrocosm and microcosm, Utgard and
the outfield, the outfield is on the contrary filled with potential resources. We have
to take a look at the mythology presented in the texts, at the world of powers and the
activity within the domains of the gods and the giants as well.
The pre-Christian gods were neither almighty nor all-knowing. As creators in
primeval time they had created a world according to their own will and vision, but
as a matter of fact they struggled hard to maintain the cosmic balance necessary to
secure the future of the world. Experience showed that the cosmos was full of different
powers, not only gods. It was, in particular, the giants who were the opponents of the
gods. But – and that is an important lesson from Norse mythology – the antagonism
between gods and giants cannot be explained as a parallel to the Christian dichotomy
between God and the Devil, good and evil, light and darkness. In a way, life was much
more complicated. The gods needed the giants, their knowledge, their competence
and their powerful objects, just as the giants for their part desired objects belonging
to the gods. Gods and giants interacted constantly, they exchanged objects, they
celebrated great cultic feasts together, for instance an annual drinking party at the
abode of Ægir, the sea-giant. We may just remind ourselves that the huge cauldron
in which the gods used to brew the holy drink, the ale, was kept by the giant Hymir
during the rest of the year (Hymiskviða).
Though the interaction between gods and giants is partly peaceful, lives may be
at stake. Thor is constantly going east with his hammer, ready to keep giants at bay
so they will not become too many and thus disturb the balance of cosmos. He is also
a short-sighted spitfire who easily lets anger and macho-temper carry him away. Men
knew this, and were even able to laugh at Thor, the very guardian of the cosmos.
Odin is a more cunning figure; he gains the love of giantesses, steals the golden mead
from the mountain as well as the art of mastering runes from the giants.
It may be in this context of interaction between gods and giants that we should
interpret that which the literary sources tell us about cultic places related to female
giants. A parallel is the mythical story about Njorðr spending one half of the year
high up in the mountains, in the home of his wife, the giantess Skaði.
We could go on listing fragments of myths that show how essential the contact
with Utgard was for the gods. Interaction and exploration are keywords to understand
these stories. The mythologies of the ruling families of Norway contain the same
insights. Both the earls at Lade and the kings of the Ynglinga family descend from
a sacred couple where the husband and the wife are of very different origins. The
prototypic ruler is the offspring of a god and a giantess. The Ynglinga kings seem to
descend from Freyr and Gerðr, the earls of Lade from Odin and Skaði.

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It is the crossing of borders, the negotiations and agreements, the mixture, which
is the clue. The energy and the potential for life seem to lie at the crossing-points
between Asgard and Utgard.
The same wisdom is the basis for all human activity concerning the outfield.
The outfield had resources to exploit, although not easily uncovered. Great efforts
and skill would be required to bring them into the light of day and safely home.
Therefore, one had to consort with the powers of the outfield just as carefully as one
consorted with the gods of the infield, through rites and magical undertakings.
A number of more recent sources tell about rites and cults in the outfield: to
giants, land spirits, dwarfs, elves and so on. These customs and beliefs lived on for a
long time, almost into our own times (see for instance Bø 1987). How can we explain
this continuity, despite the change of religion in the late Viking period? An explanation
may be that the Church focused on the struggle against paganism as a struggle against
the pagan gods. The pagan pantheon, Odin, Thor, Freyr and Freyja and the rest of the
gods were first demonised and later on euhemerised by the Church. Both strategies
were used to deprive the pagan gods of their power. The more unspecified collectives
of powers dwelling in the outer domains of the old cosmos were mostly left alone, as
these minor powers did not threaten the God of the Christian Church. The Church
concentrated on eradicating the official pagan sacrifices and the public worship. Thus,
giants and land spirits, dwarfs and elves, which were gradually transformed into wood
nymphs, fairies and pixies, survived throughout the centuries.
Norwegian folklore reflects an extensive tradition of mountain dairy farming
(Solheim 1952). A huge corpus of folk traditions tells about the dangerous outfield
and the lure and seduction by the powers that dwell there, the hulder, the elven
people and so on. Rites and magical undertakings were enacted on the road to the
summer farm in the mountains, like pouring milk and butter on offering stones for
‘the other people’. ‘The other people’ had their own settlements, their own farms
with shining fat cattle. The hulder, or wood nymph, tried to seduce young men,
the elven king sought to marry a human girl. These are transformed versions of the
old mythological tales about the wealthy giants. ‘The other people’ were not totally
negative. Lots of gold waited in the mountains for those who were brave enough! Not
until Henrik Ibsen’s drama Peer Gynt, with The Woman in Green and ‘Dovregubben’,
this rich popular religious complex of folk tales becomes wholly negative. We can say
that with Peer Gynt the Christian dualistic view of the world and its powers triumphs.
But that is another story. To sum up, there seems to be a lasting continuity in ideas
and conceptions about the outfield in Nordic culture. Is this something peculiar to
the North, or is it a common European tradition?

European cosmology in the Middle Ages

The Swedish archaeologist Anders Andrén published in 1999 an interesting article
where he outlines the cosmology of the Middle Ages and concludes that the Christian
worldview on the Continent must have differed from its counterpart in Scandinavia.

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Here, Andrén is not occupied with the ideological ideas that one uses to underline
the vertical and hierarchic worldview of the Christian church, in sharp contrast to the
horizontal pre-Christian one. In this article, Andrén instead focuses upon the popular
religion and the local society and the spatial, value-laden education that Christianity
brought into European culture.
Andrén argues that local landscape was moulded according to the Christian
cosmology. The church was situated in the middle of the new cosmology, symbolically
centred upon the altar and the Utopia, the heavenly Jerusalem. Around the church,
a new conception of space grew forth, graded from the centre to the periphery. The
landscape was divided into zones with higher or lower degrees of holiness, as can be
seen from the peace laws in the Scandinavian provincial codes. The laws acted as a
means by which to discipline people spatially. The place where a criminal act was
committed influenced heavily upon the punishing fine. The church with its choir and
altar was the most sacred place. The same perspective was applied to the farmstead:
infields and meadows were parts of the sacred landscape. The forests and the outfields,
further away, did not have the same degree of holiness.
Andrén assumes that the European picture of holiness and landscape cannot
correspond to conditions in Scandinavia, where economic gains from the outfield,
like fur, fish, iron, and timber, were essential to permanent settlement. There is rather
reason to believe that traces of pre-Christian cosmology, which was also value-laden,
but on different terms than the Christian cosmology, lived on in Scandinavia into the
Middle Ages. From my field of study, I agree with this assumption.
Utgard and the outfield were not emptied of holiness like the periphery in the
Christian cosmology. On the contrary, the outer sphere was loaded with power and
energy – but it was another power than that of the gods. Prosperity had to be taken
out of the hands of the giants, transformed and brought into the domains of gods
and humans.

The challenge
Consequently, the challenge we are facing is the question of whether there is any
correspondence between the imaginative cosmology and the lived, everyday life.
Does the cosmology really fit? And what about the problems of regional variations of
landscapes when it comes to the empirical exploitation and the shaping of imaginary
worlds?
It seems to me that the cosmological, mental conceptions of Utgard have parallels
in the conceptions about the outfield. Thus, the myths and the everyday practices
seem to have corresponded in some ways. However, as long as we have not undertaken
a cross-disciplinary research on the topic, this hypothesis can neither be verified nor
refuted. This conference makes it clear that we have some work to do together in the
field of mental cosmology and the empirical use of the landscape in the Iron Age.

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Summary
The article discusses whether it is possible to gain information about late Iron Age
ideas around the outfield or ‘utmark’ by exploring the cosmology of the Viking
period, as transferred in Norse literary sources. A primary task of the contribution is
a discussion against the commonly accepted view upon pre-Christian cosmology, as it
is interpreted by structuralistic scholars from Aron Gurevich to Kirsten Hastrup.

I want to thank M.Phil. Marit Myking, Middelaldersenteret, UiO, for assistance in

preparing this paper.

References
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