The Temporality Research Cluster, ECA, presents this special public lecture by Terry Gunnell, University of Iceland, with the support of Northern Scholars, Dept. of Scandinavian Studies.
Through the Eyes of the Mask: The Man-God in the Hall
“As above, so below” refers directly to a key feature of many religious rituals in which performative power is gained from the invocation of what Mircea Eliade referred to as “sacred time”, in which two worlds (those of the mythical world and the present) temporarily blend into one, something that has the potential of simultaneously creating a “sacred space” in which both words and actions gain greater meaning (cf. recent work by Neil Price, Emily Lyle and Simon Nygaard). This lecture will build on a number of earlier lectures and papers in which I have considered various aspects of the rituals that may have taken place in the halls and cult houses of the Nordic rulers in the pre-Christian world. Focus will be placed on the role of the mask-helmet, such as that found in Sutton Hoo, and the potential that it would have had to transform the wearer into a hybrid man-god, simultaneously temporarily transforming the nature of the immediate surroundings and the audience situated within them.
This aspect of multiple hybridity will be placed initially in the context of not only other local traditions involving features of hybridity such as those relating to the animal fylgja, hamskipti, the berserkir and the ulfheðnir. However, it will go on to consider the ways in which the new Nordic national rulers had learnt from how both the Roman emperors and new Christian rulers of the Frankish empire had effectively extended their power by personally adopting semi-godlike hybridity, something that naturally continues amongst many rulers up to this day. Examples will be also given of the ways in which extant Old Nordic poetic works such as Grímnismál, Vafþrúðnismál, Eiríksmál, Hákonarmál, and even Vǫluspá seem to preserve memories of such temporary transformations of the hall into a mythic space as part of rituals relating to rites of passage of one kind or another.
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