In Pursuit of an Æsirist Ideology

The most elementary definition of ideology is probably the well-known phrase from Marx’s Capital : ‘ Sie wissen das nicht, aber sie tun es’ — ‘they do not know it, but they are doing it ’. The very concept of ideology implies a kind of basic naiveté : the misrecognition of its own presuppositions. Abstract: Is it possible for characters in fiction to be motivated by unique ideologies in the way that political movements are in real life? This essay considers the example of the Æsir (the dominant tribe of gods) in Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda . Analogies with later ideologies are offered as a way to highlight the idiosyncratic ideological brew which seems to govern the Æsir’s actions. The Æsir have the acquisitiveness, violence, and sexual neurosis of a colonial regime. They have the reactionary’s aptitude for cynical manipulation of history. They have the frailties of the modern capitalist. These comparisons are used to sketch out an ideology which is more than the sum of its comparanda: Æsirism. (Finnmark is very wide. The sea runs from the west and adjoining it there are large fjords. It is the same way to the north and all the way to the east. And Norway is to the south, and the borderlands encompass nearly all the south, just like outer Hålogaland. And east from Numedal comes Jämtland, and then Hälsingland and then Kvenland, then Finland, then Karelia. And Finnmark sits atop all these countries and there are huge mountainous counties up in the marches, some [counties] in the valleys, and some alongside the lakes. In Finnmark there are very large lakes and next to the lakes large borderlands, and tall mountains run from one end of the marches to the other, which are called Kjølen.) Snorri seems to combine aspects of both the Norwegian legal concept of the griðastaðr , as an occasion of heightened sensitivity to misdeeds, and the Church concept of asylum, where none may be punished. Both of these influences would situate the sanctuary he imagines in the Middle Ages rather than in mythic prehistory. Indeed, his use of griðastaðr looks like a rather feeble attempt to explain the lack of immediate vengeance when Baldr is struck down.