Thomas D. Hill
RígsÞula does not occur in the Codex Regius of the Poetic Edda; it is found instead in the Codex Wormianus, a principal manuscript of Snorri’s Edda. Based on its style and subject matter, however, it is usually allowed into the canon of Eddic mythological poems (the same is true of Baldrs draumar and Hyndluljóð, treated together with Vǫluspá in the next essay). A prose introduction clarifies that Rígr was an alias of Heimdallr, one of the Æsir. He comes to the house of Ái and Edda (Great-grandfather and Great-grandmother). They feed him; he advises them and sleeps between them for three nights. Nine months later Edda bears a child they call ÞrÆll (thrall, slave or serf). His appearance and duties and those of his eventual mate and children are described. (The catalogue of their many names, and those of Karl’s and Jarl’s families, is probably reflected in the poem’s title; a Þula is a list.) Next Rígr stays at the house of Afi and Amma (Grandfather and Grandmother), where he engenders Karl (freeman or peasant farmer); then at the house of Faðir and Móðir (Father and Mother), where he engenders Jarl (nobleman). Rígr instructs him in runes and aristocratic accomplishments. Jarl marries; his youngest son is called Konr ungr (young nobleman). He knows runes and, like the young legendary hero Sigurðr, he can understand the language of birds. Doubtless he will grow up to become a konun-gr (king), but the poem breaks off fragmentarily, after a crow exhorts Konr ungr to pursue the martial career of his father.
In 1981 Dronke argued that verses in two Icelandic sagas allude to RígsÞula (see Harris, 94–7 for earlier articles on the poem). In her edition, translation and commentary (1997), Dronke adds a third saga passage and suggests that the poem preserves archaic Norse-Celtic material but is less a myth than a learned fiction, composed perhaps ca. 1020. Karras thinks the poem’s view of society fits in better with the thirteenth century (60–63 and notes, 208–10). Fleck discusses knowledge of runes as a criterion for (sacral) kingship.
RígsÞula is apparently one of the more cosmopolitan of the Eddic poems; most scholars agree it shows signs of Celtic influence (the name Rígr is most likely a borrowing of the Irish word for king) as well as contact with some form of Christianity, perhaps from England. In his essay reprinted below, Thomas Hill explores analogues, chiefly from the British Isles, for the tripartite social division of mankind, as found in extra-Biblical material relating to the three sons of Noah.
Paul Acker
Dronke, Ursula. “Sem jarlar forðum: The Influence of RígsÞula on Two Saga-Episodes. ”Speculum norroenum: Norse Studies in Memory of Gabriel Turville-Petre. Ed. Ursula Dronke, et al. Odense: Odense University Press, 1981. 56–72. Rpt. Myth and Fiction in Early Norse Lands. Variorum Collected Studies Series. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1996. Item X (separate pagination).
——, ed. and tr. The Poetic Edda. II: Mythological Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.
Fleck, Jere. “Konr—Óttar—Geirroðr: A Knowledge Criterion for Succession to the Germanic Sacred Kingship. ”Scandinavian Studies 42 (1970): 39–49.
Harris, Joseph. “Eddic Poetry. ”Old Norse-Icelandic Literature: A Critical Guide. Ed. Carol J. Clover and John Lindow. Islandica, 45. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. 68–156.
Karras, Ruth Mazo. Slavery and Society in Medieval Scandinavia. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988.
In the context of Eddie mythological poetry, RígsÞula is strikingly anomalous.2 The poem speaks of an otherwise unknown god, Rígr, whom the prose preface identifies with the Norse god Heimdallr. He visits in sequence three households. The first is that of Ái and Edda, whose names mean ‘great-grandfather’ and ‘great-grandmother’; the second that of Afi and Amma, ‘grandfather’ and ‘grandmother’; the third that of Faðir and Móðir, ‘father’ and ‘mother’. Rígr spends three nights in bed with each couple, and from these unions spring Þræll, Karl, and Jarl, forebears of the races of slaves, freemen, and nobles. The poem concludes with an account of Konr, the youngest son of Jarl, who is apparently about to establish himself as a king when the poem breaks off.
No version of this etiological myth other than RígsÞula is extant in Old Icelandic or the other early Germanic literatures, and the social structure which the myth presumes is, in fact, profoundly different from the actual social structure of early medieval Iceland. Slavery was eliminated early in the history of the commonwealth; early Icelandic law does not distinguish between noble and commoner; and the Icelanders had no king until they submitted to the Norwegian throne in 1262.3 According to RígsÞula, however, the distinction between slave, freeman, and noble is not an arbitrary social convention; it is quite literally inbred. The poem is extremely, one might even say brutally, aristocratic in its ideology. Although the poem is concerned with the origins of kingship, it seems to reflect a specifically aristocratic rather than royalist view, in that the king who begins to emerge in the final stanzas of the poem is not set apart by birth from the other sons of Jarl, and is in fact the youngest son. It is Konr the young (Konr ungr) who becomes a king (that is, a konungr), and the poem seems to imply that he will become king simply by right of conquest.
But while the poem denies the common humanity of the three classes of mankind, the names of the three couples (great-grandfather and great-grandmother, grandfather and grandmother, father and mother) might seem to imply that the various classes of mankind share a common heritage. Indeed one commentator has suggested that the poet believed in social progress over time—that the descendants of a given class might aspire to a higher condition of life (Sveinsson, 291–2). But this reading of the poem seems too benevolent. What is at issue is who should do the servile work, and the answer which the poem unequivocally offers is that the thralls, that ugly race born to serve, should work for the benefit of their masters. The notion of social progress, of ascent from one class to another, was alien (and indeed probably repugnant) to the poet. The meaning of these names nevertheless still requires explanation. I would submit that while the poet was an explicit and unabashed apologist for social differentiation, he was intelligent enough to be aware that social differences do not have a physical basis. Despite the explicit statement of the RígsÞula poet, slaves, freemen, and aristocrats do not necessarily look different, and a young aristocrat might find slaves—in certain contexts—to be good companions. On a hunt, for example, a slave might be skillful and brave, or back at the manor a slave girl might be sexually attractive. If Þrælar and jarlar really were different races, sprung from the beginning from different stock, such moments of community, of shared human feeling, would presumably not happen. But of course they do, and the RígsÞula poet offers an implicit answer. The different orders of mankind are indeed fixed and unchangeable, but in the very beginning there was a certain kinship between the different orders of mankind, a kinship suggested by the fixed and yet linked sequence of the genealogical chain.
In terms of its contents RígsÞula is a repellent poem, particularly so because of the clear intimations of a kind of racism implicit in the description of the various social classes. Þræll has dark hair and is ugly and twisted; Karl is ruddy, “rauðan ok rioðan”; Jarl is blond. But the very fact that RígsÞula is so blatant in its insistence upon a specifically aristocratic ideology is revealing, in that it illustrates with great clarity certain crucial features of this ideology. The most important point about the myth is that it denies explicitly the conception of common humanity. If a jarl and a Þrcell are both fully and to the same degree human, then the fact that the jarl lives in relative luxury while the Þrcell lives in want is morally problematical. But if they are in some fundamental way different from each other, then their difference in status is natural, like the difference between various species in the natural world. And this is the clear implication of the etiological myth of RígsÞula. ÞrÆlar, karlar, and jarlar are different species, born in the beginning from different stock and different not merely in status and wealth, but in physical appearance. It is no wonder that this myth was not widely popular among Icelanders, who had no native aristocratic class and who believed that their native land had been settled by free men and women who fled Norway because they refused to submit to the political authority of Haraldr bÁrfagr, the first Norwegian king.
Although there are no parallels or analogues to this myth in other Old Norse-Icelandic mythological texts, some medieval Christian analogues have been mentioned, but not seriously discussed, in connection with the poem (Heusler, 96; Meissner, 115).4 These analogues are interesting in themselves and may help provide insight into the difficult problem of the original context of RígsÞula. Judeo-Christian thought is fundamentally egalitarian; it presumes one common ancestor for all men and an essential equality among all believers within the community of faith. For this reason the institution of the monarchy was alien to ancient Israel, and one of the important themes of the narratives concerning David in 1 and 2 Samuel is that Jahweh chose the youngest son of a man of no great social prestige to rule over Israel so that Israel might know that both king and kinship were utterly dependent upon him. Even so, a significant minority in Israel were never reconciled to the monarchy, a minority whose views are expressed in such texts as I Samuel 8.10–18, and in the context of specifically Jewish Christianity in Stephen’s speech in Acts 7.44–50. As far as the Christianity taught to the Gentile world is concerned, there could hardly be a more radical or thoroughgoing statement of the equality of all believers before God than Paul’s claim in Galatians 3.20 ff. that Jew and Gentile, man and woman, free and slave are all one in Christ.
If Judaism and Christianity are egalitarian religions, however, the world in which Christianity disseminated itself was rigidly hierarchical. The later Roman empire was a strictly ordered and structured social world, and if the barbarian tribes who destroyed that world were less disciplined in some ways than their Roman predecessors, they were just as preoccupied with class and inherited status as the Romans. In the early medieval world, class and rank were very immediate realities. Men naturally wondered about the origin of these institutions and turned to the Bible as the authoritative source concerning the early history of mankind. The Bible does not specifically speak to these concerns, but there is one verse which, taken out of context, has provided support for the conception that certain groups of people are inherently of less worth than others. One of the more obscure episodes in Genesis concerns Ham’s disrespectful behavior towards his father Noe5 when the latter falls asleep after drinking too much wine. When Noe awakens and learns what has happened, he curses—oddly enough—not Ham but Ham’s son Chanaan: “Maledictus Chanaan, servus servorum erit fratribus suis. Dixitque: Benedictus Dominus Deus Sem, sit Chanaan servus eius. Dilatet Deus Iafeth, et habitet in tabernaculis Sem, sitque Chanaan servus eius ”[Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren. And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant. God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.] (Genesis 9.25–27). To enumerate the difficulties which this episode raises would require an extended digression, but given the fact that the various nations of the world are descended from Noe’s sons, it is possible to read it as an etiological narrative concerning the existence of a race of slaves descended from Ham’s son Chanaan. Given the widespread and understandable misconception that it was Ham whom Noe cursed, the notion that slaves are descended from Ham is a widespread bit of what one might call extra-biblical Christian folklore. A medieval Latin riddling dialogue asks; “Quo ordine vel pro qua re servi facti sunt? ”[By what arrangement or for what reason did slaves come about?] And the answer is “De Cham, qui de verecundia patris sui risit.”6 [From Cham who laughed at his father’s shame.] There exists a “Christian ”etiological myth concerning the origin of slaves; it is a myth that had a sad history during the era of black slavery in America and even beyond it.7 Though this gloss on Genesis is still quite remote from the myth of RígsÞula, it was the basis, I believe, for an even cruder misreading of the biblical narratives concerning Noe and his sons.
I have found four instances of the motif with which I am concerned. The first is a brief Anglo-Saxon prose text consisting of various bits of canonical and apocryphal information mixed randomly together. The compiler discusses the sons of Noe as follows:
Nôe se heah fæder hæfde Þrysunu Þa wÆron Þus hâtene. sêm. châm. iaphêt. 7 of Þam Þrim sunum wearð onwÆcnad. 7 awrîdad eall manna cynn wearð onbe senced 7 ÞÆr næfre tolâfe newearð ma Þonne him eahtum. ac hit eall segifra flod for swealh. 7 for grind. 7 he eac Þagyt nolde urne drihten for his myldheort nesse Þæte ðes middan geard nære ortydre manna cynnes. ac ascyrede to lafe Þæt Þæt we eft of awocon Þurh Þæs halgan heah fæderes ge earnunga nôes 7 his goddra dæda mycelnesse. 7 of him Þrim eft wearð awridad twa 7 hund seofontig Þeoda ealdorlicra mægða. 7 swa fela is eac manna gereorða 7 heora gespræc todæled. Þonne awoc ærest of iafede noes suna .xv. mægða ealdorlicere 7 micele. Þonne on wocon. of chame .xxx. theoda mycelra 7 eac Þæt cynn wæs ge seald fram urum drihtne Þam oðrum cynnum twam on heaft nêad. 7 on Þeow dom. 7 Þæt wæs for Þon swa ge dôn Þæt hege tÆlde his fæder nôe Þær he on his sceape lôcode 7 his tobismere hloh. Donne on wôc fram Þam ðriddan suna sême 7 sê wes heora geongost wæs Þeh hwæðere onwisdome yldost seofon 7 twentig Þeoda 7 Þanon wæs awæcnod Þæt æÞeluste cynn 7 Þæt betste. Þæt wÆs for Þon Þe he his fæder noe nage tælde 7 untwe(o)gendlice of Þysum Þrim mannum noes sunum Þæt eall Þes middan geard wearð eft onwæcnod Þeh hye drihten on Þreo streonde 7 swa sibbe cneordnesse to dælde. 7 Þæt he to dælde for Þære tælnysse Þe hy heora fæder tældon nôe Þæt he on ðreo to wearp Þa cneordnysse. Þæt wæs wælisc. 7 oncyrlisc cynn. onge syðcund cynd. for Þyssum gyltengum Þe we nuge hyrdon wæron Þagesyblingas Þus to dælde.
Noe the patriarch had three sons who were named thus—Sem, Cham, Iapheth. And of those three sons was sprung and increased all the race of man. [There] were drowned [all men] and there was not left a remnant more than those eight, but the greedy flood swallowed and destroyed everything. And he [God] even then did not wish, because of his pity, that this earth should be barren of the race of man, but he set [them] apart as a remnant from which we sprang in the course of time because of the merits and the greatness of the good deeds of the holy patriarch Noe. And from those three sprang seventy-two chief nations of peoples. And in so many ways are the voices of men and their speech divided. Thence there sprang first from Iapheth, Noe’s son, fifteen distinguished and great nations, from Cham thirty great peoples, and also that race was given by our Lord to the other two races in captivity and slavery. And this was done for this reason—that he [Cham] derided his father Noe when he [Cham] looked upon his [naked] body and laughed in scorn of him. Then there sprung from the third son Sem, and he was the youngest of them (he was, however, the oldest in wisdom), twenty-seven peoples, and thence there sprung the noblest and best race. That was because he did not mock his father Noe. And without doubt [it is] from these three men, Noe’s sons, that all this earth became populated again—though the Lord parted them into three and so parted three races of relationship because of the mockery with which they mocked their father Noe. And he [God] cast those races into three parts—one was servile, and [the other] the free race and [the third] the noble race. For these offenses which we have now heard were these kinsmen thus parted.
Another brief instance of this motif occurs in the early twelfth century in Honorius Augustodunensis’s geographical and historical work, the Imago mundi:
Secunda aetas
Sem filius Noe ipse est idem qui et Melchisedech vixit dc .ii. Huius tempore divisum est genus humanum in .iii. in liberos, in milites, in servos. Liberi de Sem, milites de Iapheth, servi de Cham.9
[Sem, son of the same Noe is the one who like Melchisedech lived 602 years. At this time humanity was divided into 3, into free men, soldiers and slaves. The free come from Sem, the soldiers from Iapheth, the slaves from Cham.]
The Imago mundi was an influential text and was disseminated relatively widely; in discussions of later medieval texts it is frequently cited as the source for the association of the sons of Noe with this tripartite division of mankind, but the most recent editor of the Imago mundi was not able to identify the source of this piece of extra-biblical lore (ed. Flint, 125).
While the association of Ham and the servile estate is relatively commonplace,10 I have been able to identify only two further instances of this tripartite division in later medieval literature. In the Cursor mundi, an early fourteenth-century biblical poem, the poet speaks of the sons of Noe and remarks:
O Þis thre [Noe’s sons] can Þe folk to brede And fild Þe werld o lenth and brede.
O Þaim it was sua mani men
O sere kind, sexsith tene.
Knyth, and thrall, and freman,
Oute of Þer thre breÞer bigan;
O sem freman, o Iaphet knytht,
thrall of cham Þe maledight.
O Þis thre com all, als Þou sais,
Has bene in werld and yeit beis. (1:130, 11. 2129–38).11
[From these three [Noe’s sons] people began to breed and filled the length and breadth of the world. From them many men came, of various kinds, six times ten (i.e. 60). Knight, and thrall, and free man, all descended from these three brothers; From Sem, the free man, from Iapheth, the knight, the thrall from Cham the accursed. From these three, as you may see, comes everyone who has ever been in the world and who exists now.]
Again in the late-thirteenth-century Weltchronik of Jansen Enikel, after Noe consigns Ham and his children to perpetual slavery, he turns to his other sons:
“Sem, lieber sun mîn,
dû solt hiut und immer sîn
gewaltic und immer frî.
all sæld won dir bî,
und swas künftic von dir sî,
daz müez immer wesen vrî …
wider den dritten sun er sprach,
dô er in vor im stên sach:
“Japhêt, liber sun mîn,
mit freuden müezt dû immer sîn—
daz hâst dû verdienet wol,
dîn lip ist ganzer triuwen vol—
von hinnen biz an den lesten tac.
mit êrn ich daz wol sprechen mac. ” er sprach: “dû solt mit êren leben,
wan ich wil êr vil an dich legen
und wil dir segen daz swert,
wan dü bist aller êren wert. ”
dô er den segen dô enpfie,
dem vater er vor mit êren gie.
er sprach zuo im vil schône:
“sun, sô dir got lône,
sit diu êr an dir lît,
sô solt dû dînes bruoder wîp,
dînes bruoder kleiniu kindelîn …
Japhêt was der êrst man,
der ritters namen ie gewan.
sîn vater segent im daz swert,
wan er was aller êren wert.
(p. 58, 11. 2995 3000; 3006–25; 3032–6).
[‘Sem, my dear son, you shall today and always be mighty and always free. All happiness shall dwell with you, and those who in future are descended from you, they will always be free.’ … To the third son he said, whom he saw standing before him: ‘Japhet, my dear son, you will always have joy—for you have earned it well, your body is completely full of trustworthiness—from now until the Day of Judgment, I wish to say honorably,’ he said, ‘that with honor you will always live. I intend to do you much honor, and will bless this sword for you, for only you are worthy of all honor.’ When he had received the blessing, he went before his father respectfully. He spoke many fine words to him: ‘Son, may God reward you since such honor exists in you, you must guard over your brother’s wife and your brother’s little children, with faithful protection.’ … Japhet was the first man who ever won the name of knight, his father blessing the sword for him; only he was worthy of all honor.]
These are relatively few instances scattered both geographically and temporally, but they show that a Christian etiological myth associating the sons of Noe with the three classes of society had some currency and continuity. There are three points I wish to make about his myth. The first is that it is a radical and radically clumsy misreading of the biblical text.12 In these texts the author or redactor is attempting to derive a tripartite structure from a text which is essentially bipartite. The story of Ham can be taken to imply that Ham is set apart from his brothers, but both Iafeth and Sem are admirable figures in the biblical narrative. Second, another problem with the myth in relation to its biblical prototype is that in the Old English the nobles are descended from Sem, whereas in the other texts Iafeth is defined as the father of nobility. The problem is not simply one of inconsistency. In its original context the roll call of the sons of Noe had real geographic significance, and this fact was widely known throughout the Middle Ages. Thus to define either Sem or Iafeth as the father of “true ” nobility implies that the nobles of either Europe or Asia are imposters. The difficulty, of course, is that it is impossible to reconcile an etiological myth of this sort with real biblical history.
The third point is that if this myth is a clumsy gloss on the relevant biblical texts, it does correspond closely to the myth of RígsÞula. To begin with, the ideological content is identical. The three classes have been fixed from the time the history of the nations began to unfold. If these classes did not emerge as part of God’s original plan of creation, the three orders were—according to the Old English text at least—originally and irrevocably separated by God’s judgment. Another correspondence between the Christian myth and RígsÞula is that mankind is divided into precisely the same three classes. This correspondence is particularly striking in that medieval Europe evolved another pattern of social tripartition, the famous orator es, bellatores, laborantes formula,13 which was widely current, and which reflects quite a different view of social function than the myth with which we are concerned. In this formulation the crucial division is between the honorable estates, the oratores and the bellatores [those who pray and those who fight], and those who work. The distinction between free and slave workers is immaterial. Work, the production of goods and services, is itself degrading.
Are the pagan myth of RígsÞula and the analogous Christian myth related, and if so, how? In discussing these questions, caution is necessary since the evidence concerning both the currency of the Christian myth and the sources and transmission of RígsÞula is extremely fragmentary. The correspondence between these myths, however, seems sufficiently close that some kind of relationship is very probable. The simplest explanation would be to suggest that RígsÞula and the Christian myth originated in a similar social and ideological matrix. The originator of the Christian myth may or may not have known of the pagan myth embodied in RígsÞula; the author of RígsÞula, wherever and whenever he wrote, seems not to have been influenced by Christian thought. But they both assumed that certain features of the social world as they knew it reflected the way God or the gods had ordered this world, and the myths they constructed embodied this conviction. While the Christian myth (or at least the Old English version of it) is older than the manuscript in which RígsÞula is preserved, and perhaps even antedates the composition of the poem, the myth itself accords much better with what we know of Germanic and Celtic pagan thought than with Christianity. Given a choice between the possibility that RígsÞula is derived from or modeled after some version of this Christian myth and the alternative possibility that the Christian myth is a “pagan ”misreading of the biblical text, I find the latter much more likely. I do not mean by this that some reluctant convert deliberately sought to invest the biblical text with covert pagan meaning; I am concerned rather with the continuity of deeply rooted habits of thought. Some early medieval Christian may have believed in social tripartition of this type as an immediate fact of social life and sought to provide an appropriate biblical etiological myth, perhaps in response to pagan myth or perhaps simply to account for the “fact ”of such social tripartition. If so, his gloss may seem clumsy to us, but reflects a serious effort to explain the social order in which he found himself.
The first part of this paper was a relatively straightforward attempt to cite a series of medieval Christian analogues to the myth of RígsÞula. The second part, concerning the possible relationship between these myths, was more speculative, though I hope only moderately so. In the final part of the paper I propose to discuss whether these new analogues have any bearing on the extremely difficult problem of the original date and location of RígsÞula, and this aspect of my argument will necessarily be speculative indeed. The great problem of RígsÞula scholarship is that while the poem is potentially an extremely important source of social history, this importance is largely vitiated by the absence of any reasonably informed consen sus as to its date and provenance.14 Suggestions as to date and provenance range from the tenth to the thirteenth century and from the Old Norse-Icelandic-speaking areas of the British Isles to Norway. The analogues I have cited do not resolve the issue, but they must be considered along with various other pieces of evidence which have been cited with regard to the possibility of Celtic, specifically Irish, influence on RígsÞula (Young, 101– 7; Turville-Petre, 151). In response to the question of where the Christian myth originated, I would answer, admittedly on the basis of intuition, that it has the look of a specifically “insular ”gloss on the Bible. To begin with, the original author or authors, if the gloss originated in several places independently, believed in social tripartition as the “natural ”social condition of man. Secondly, the gloss presupposes an intense interest in origins and at the same time a kind of learned crudity which are very characteristic of a certain strand of the tradition of insular exegesis. The author must have read the Bible for this gloss to have occurred to him; if he had read it more carefully and with more sophistication, he would have seen the obvious difficulties which the gloss entails. All these features fit quite readily in an early medieval insular context. In both Ireland and Anglo-Saxon England, social tripartition of this sort was a prominent feature. Again, early Irish exegetical literature reflects an almost obsessive interest in origins and concern for tripartite patterns of the most diverse kind.15 In the context of later medieval thought, one would expect a somewhat more sophisticated reading of the Bible, and not this particular form of social tripartition. The fact that the earliest example, the Anglo-Saxon text, is an insular text supports this suggestion. That the other examples I have identified occur in Honorius Augustodunesis’s Imago mundi, the Cursor mundi, and Jansen Enikel’s Weltchronik accords with this suggestion, since it was quite common for some of the odder motifs of early medieval exegesis to have an extended afterlife in medieval popular religious texts, long after serious exegetes and theologians dismissed them as fanciful absurdities.16
The conclusions I have suggested, and in particular the suggestion that the gloss on the sons of Noe has an insular origin, are tentative and must be tested further. But for better or worse, an insular origin has already been proposed for RígsÞula on other grounds, and if my suggestions are confirmed they would support this hypothesis.
While I have been concerned with this problem for some years and have explored the usual resources, I have no doubt that further instances will turn up. The motif can be summarized succinctly and could occur in unexpected places. When we have a fuller inventory it will be possible to speculate about its sources and dissemination with more assurance. More significantly, perhaps, this paper might redirect attention to a problem which has not received much interest in recent years—the filiations between Germanic and Celtic myth and what one might call “popular Christian mythology.” Some nineteenth-century scholars, particularly some of the more extreme followers of the Grimm brothers, were so zealous to see pagan survivals everywhere that the whole topic has enjoyed a certain disrepute in Anglo-American scholarship in this field in the twentieth century (see Stanley). But these filiations exist, and the fact that it is necessary to be extremely cautious in exploring them does not mean the subject should be ignored. For if RígsÞula and the Christian texts which I have cited are not directly related, an indirect relationship is clear, and this relationship is important for our understanding of the development of the medieval image of the social world. Rígr and Noe are very different figures; the possibility that their children might seem alike could only be the result of historical and religious miscegenation.17
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1. In preparing this paper I have been helped materially by friends at Cornell and elsewhere. I would like to thank [the late] Professor R. E. Kaske of Cornell University, Professor George Tate of Brigham Young University, Professor Charles D. Wright of Texas Tech University [now at the University of Illinois], and particularly Professor Joseph Harris of Harvard University.
2. All citations of RígsÞula are from Neckel and Kuhn, 1:280–87. RígsÞula is not an Eddie poem in the strict sense, since the only text is appended to a fourteenth-century text of the Prose Edda of Snorri Sturlason (Codex Wormianus). For a recent discussion of possible allusions to the myth of RígsÞula in the Íslendinga sögur, see Dronke.
3. See Jóhannesson, 344–45 et passim. On the problem of slavery in medieval Iceland, see Foote [and Mazo Karras].
4. Of the four analogues to the myth of RígsÞula noted below, only the one from De imagine mundi has been cited as an analogue of RígsÞula. The others, as far as I am aware, have not—at least in the context of Eddie scholarship.
5. Since the crucial form of the story for the purposes of this paper is that of the Latin vulgate, I cite the names in their Latin rather than their more familiar English form.
6. Wilmanns, 169, riddle no. 37. For a later example see Suchier, 267. The riddle in question in no. 30 is the “Gespräch zwischen Adrian und Epictitus,” which Suchier edited from a fifteenth-century manuscript.
7. For a good discussion of the influence of this misreading of the Bible on American Southern ideology in the early nineteenth century, see Peterson.
8. Napier, 2–5. The original text of these notes occurs in British Library, Cotton Tiberius A.iii, fols. 43–44. N. R. Ker dates the manuscripts as mid-eleventh century; for a description and discussion of the manuscript as a whole see Ker, 240– 48. For the convenience of the reader I have provided a literal and in places rather tentative translation. Napier’s text is a diplomatic one and the text as we have it seems confused in places.
9. Honorius Augustodunensis, Imago mundi, 3.1, p. 125; PL 172, col. 166. On the career and identity of Honorius Augustodunensis, see Flint, 1977 and 1982. If Flint is correct in arguing that Honorius Augustodunensis spent time in England in the earlier part of his career and that the Imago mundi is an early work, then the brief passage I have cited from the Imago mundi and the text on Noe and his children from Cotton Tiberius A.iii are closely associated both temporally and geographically.
10. A full gathering of instances of this gloss on the curse of Chanaan would be quite extensive. For some instances gathered virtually at random see Die altdeutsche Genesis, ed. Dollmayr, p. 44, 11. 1530–1 et passim; Hugo von Trimberg. Der Kenner, 1:56–7, 11. 1360 ff.; Le mistère du viel Testament, ed. de Rothschild, 1:252–3, 11. 6472 ff.; Ginzberg, 1:169, 5:192.
11. I quote from the version of the poem preserved in B.L. Cotton Vesp. A. iii; the variants in the other manuscripts are not significant.
12. For a cogent medieval analysis of the absurdity of attempting to ground slavery on this or any other biblical passage, see the Sachsenspiegel: Landrecht 3.42, f 1–6 (149), pp. 223–28.
13. There has been a great deal of discussion of this formula recently. See for example, Duby; Dane; Dutton; Le Goff.
14. See Young, and von See, who argues for a later date and a Scandinavian context.
15. For discussion of the characteristic features of Irish exegesis in the early Middle Ages, see Bischoff and McNally. For a study which focuses on triads in early Irish and Irish-Latin literature, see Sims-Williams.
16. For a single but striking example of such a motif, see The Prose Solomon and Saturn and Adrian and Ritheus, ed. Cross and Hill, 67–70, where the dissemination of the apocryphal account of the eight parts of Adam is discussed.
17. It has been suggested that I relate my discussion of RígsÞula to the comments of Dumézil. Detailed discussion of Georges Dumézil’s attempt to relate the tripartite structure of RígsÞula with his postulated Indo-European tripartite structure would be out of place here, but two points deserve mention. In the first place, Dumézil’s whole argument is concerned with the fact that the tripartite structure defined in the poem is quite different from the Indo-European tripartition he postulates. One can imagine how Dumézil’s tripartition might have evolved into the one defined in RígsÞula, but the differences are striking. Secondly, Dumézil’s suggestion that konr ungr is a magician and priest rather than a warrior is not supported by the text of the poem as we have it, and kings in the ancient Scandinavian world and Germania generally were preeminently leaders in war. [See further the article by Frakes in this volume. Eds.]