1 - Magic, Miracles, and Rituals to Fight Famine in Old Norse Literature

Summary

Abstract

This chapter critically analyses a selection of Old Norse literary sources of different genres, and is aimed at studying people's need to resort to the ‘supernatural’ in order to fight famine and overcome the anxiety of hunger in medieval Scandinavia. Three main ‘supernatural’ anti-famine strategies are addressed: 1) ‘magic’; 2) miracles; and 3) sacrifices to the pagan gods. The intention is to emphasize the endurance of needs in the minds and in the literary worlds of saga authors and, presumably, in the real world in which they were attempting to flourish. The chapter emphasizes the continuities between non-Christian and Christian survival strategies that were based on the ‘supernatural’, and it shows that the texts shared a common view of the world and of its threats to food supply.

Keywords: Famine, Christianization of Medieval Scandinavia, Medieval Icelandic sagas, magic, miracles, pagan sacrifices

The fear (or, more plausibly, the anxiety) of hunger can be considered a general characteristic of our past. Life used to be much harder, much more challenging than it eventually became after the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, until the 1800s, the vast majority of the world's population lived on the equivalent of less than US$ 1 a day: more or less like a Roman slave, or a medieval peasant. By today's standards, that pretty much corresponds to the poverty line according to the World Bank as it was set in 2008 (US$ 1.25; in 2015 it was updated to US$ 1.90). The Middle Ages, much like most of the past, were a truly hard period to live through: a time when life expectancy was only 35 years – a level that had been stable since the time of the hunter-gatherer societies. In such a threatening world, food represented a concern: maybe not always a major one, but most definitely a constant one: this was true for the whole of Europe, and even more so for marginal areas such as Scandinavia.

Among the several typologies of sources that scholars can study to examine the anxiety of hunger in the medieval North, the Icelandic sagas represent a key opportunity, for they unveil details of cultural and social reactions to situations of emergency.