This throws much of the mythological poetry concerning the deity into a new light, and, in this article, I focus on the consequences for the interpretation of images of shaking and fire in two poems, Lokasenna and Þrymskviða. Recent scholarship has indicated that the conception of the Old Norse god Þórr as a thunder god may have been unfamiliar to Viking Age and medieval Icelanders and even to some Scandinavians. Coalitions of strongly associated concepts act as narrative vessels for the deity’s survival, preserving conceptualizations about the god over successive authors’ iterations on a narrative and perhaps assisting in the stability of traditional poetry in oral transmission. The pivotal quality of strength facilitates the formation of new associations with culturally salient concepts like volcanic eruptions and earthquakes, whilst irrelevant associations are shed.

Þórr is demonstrated to be a very flexible supernatural concept. However, a dichotomy between Icelandic and Scandinavian material is observed regarding the importance of thunder and lightning to Þórr’s characterization. According to the factors previously identified, therefore, thunder and lightning cannot offer a transmission advantage. Strength is shown to be integral to the deity’s mythological representation, but thunder and lightning, despite the breadth of sources considered, is not. In the following chapters, two major concepts now associated with Þórr are examined. Certain factors are distinguished as key to stability in oral transmission: culturally inculcated expectations regarding a concept, counterintuitive breaches of these expectations and the capacity of a concept to adapt to novel textual and extra-textual contexts. After discussing the problems this creates for modern commentators examining diversity, I analyse two competing schools of thought in CSR, a context-focused model of transmission and a concept-focused model.

Many of the major sources of Old Norse religion are Christian documents, negotiating with a pagan heritage through the prisms of Biblical and classical religious traditions. I hope to contribute to the ongoing debate over the socio-cultural and cognitive roots of religion. To do so, I adopt, develop and evaluate a methodology from the Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR), an amalgamation of disciplines including psychology, anthropology, neurobiology and zoology.

Taking literature about Þórr as a case study, this thesis aims to understand the operations underpinning both this change and stability in Old Norse mythological representations. As a result, the mythologies of oral cultures change over time. Ideas can become forgotten, be misattributed and mutate.

Edda by Unknown