|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
LR/RL Copyright © by the International Comparative Literature Association. All rights reserved.
Literary Research/Recherche littéraire 21.41-42 (2004): 357-359 Katja Schulz, Riesen. Von Wissenshütern und Wildnisbewohnern in Edda und Saga. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004; ISBN: 3825315703 (pbk.) Giants don’t have to be tall. Even if this is just an illustrative detail of the results of Katja Schulz’s investigation of the giants in the Edda and the sagas, it hints at both the diversity of giants in ancient texts and the oversimplifications common to inherited knowledge. In later texts nearly all giants are tall and stupid, wherefrom the imbalance of their physical and mental powers that found their source in the “fantasies of proportion” (Sydow), which open the sly hero’s ways to glorious victories and the [end page 357] narrator’s to funny episodes. According to Northern myths, giants are the most ancient living beings, older even than the earth, which is made of the body of the giant Ymir. Because of their age they own the knowledge of the past, and sometimes of the future. This is why humans and gods alike go to consult them. So knowledgeable are the Norse giants that a few of them are able of fool even the gods, as it happens in the so called “glove-episode“ of Snorri’s saga, where Thor and his companions find themselves in a sportive competition with the giant Utgardaloki and his friends. The disciplines are: emptying a drinking vessel, eating as much and as fast as one is able to, race, lifting a cat, and catching up with Utgardaloki’s old nurse. In all disciplines Thor and his companions fail miserably. Only at the end of the episode, as they are leaving, Thor is informed of what happened: the drinking vessel was the sea, the cat was the Midgard-Snake, which that resides the circle around the inhabited world, the nurse was time itself. Loki lost the eating competition to a brush fire, and Pialfi lost the running race against thought itself. The study is well structured. At first the enormous variety of terms that name giants in the Edda and the sagas is examined: risis, trolls, jotunns, and purs, hrimpurs, flagds, gygrs, myrkridas and kveldridas are wandering through the ancient forests of north and east Scandinavia. They all are giants, but why do they enjoy so many names? Do these names distinguish among different sorts of giants? Schulz examines precisely this question but, instead of presenting a list of terminology and characteristics (as other researchers have done before), she finds out that the various names have no distinctive function that could be generalized. The result may be surprising, but, as Schulz’s approach is compelling, her conclusion is well-founded. Schulz’s study zeroes in the literal denotations of giants in the Edda and the sagas, and the part giants have to play in the plots. It must be emphasized that it is the structural and political interpretations offered by Schulz which make her examination of narrative strategies so interesting. For example, in the Edda giants are shown but not denoted as rich, because this would characterize them a) as successful, b) their treasures as legal and therefore c) the gods who attempt to get these treasures would appear as robbers. Or, to take an example from the non-fictitious world, while since the 7th century in Norway like in many European countries royal families tried to find their mythical legitimacy by claiming to descend from the Trojans, some northern dynasties had their pedigree originate with a giant. At first it seems to be strange to proclaim these mostly ugly, uncivilized, hulking beings as venerable ancestors. But let us not forget that giants are so old that they have been in Scandinavia from the very beginning. So the reign with a giant-genealogy appears more [end page 358] legal because those who root their genealogy in Troy are “immigrants“. Consequently, Schulz notes that “the Fornjotr-genealogy of the Jarls turns out to be an anti-royal propaganda against the reign of the Norwegian kings” (267f). While most male giants are monstrously ugly and spread fear, female giants are often very beautiful, so even the gods – despite the fatal rivalry of gods and giants – are not disinclined to having sex with them or, well, to marry them. But gods usually have affairs with she-giants as a means of getting from the giants something they need. The locus classicus is the myth of Odin, the giantess Gunnlod, and the stolen scalden-met, which makes a famous poet out of everyone who drinks it. To get it back, Odin spends three nights with Gunnlod, until the opportunity comes to steal the scalden-met back from her father. The marriage between a giantess and a god seems to be a hyper-gamy, while the affair or marriage between a male giant and a goddess is utterly forbidden. But the giants have a great urge for such a liaison, and so their efforts to manage it and the efforts of the gods to avoid such a hypo-gamy are contrary but in a way proportional. Schulz compares the roles of giantesses and goddesses and points out that the former, which are more vividly depicted, are much more active than the latter. From this result she infers that they have a stronger position in their social group than the goddesses, and that the social structures of the giants’ world are less patriarchal than is the case in the gods’ world. Schulz also deals with the giants as embodiment of the other, the changes Christianity brings into the representations of giants in the sagas – the giants viewed as aboriginal inhabitants –, the geography of the giants, to name only some of the issues that the author concerns herself with. She also provides the reader with comparative information, which increases the suggestive power of a koïné of giants; for instance, the titans at the Pergamon-altar have Celtic hairstyle, which characterizes them as representatives of a foreign, barbaric power. Schulz’s study abounds in anecdotes and useful references, but is also clearly structured: a happy mixture from which the reader benefits thoroughly.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||