Article serie overview

This article serie discusses the scientific relevance of ancient Nordic (un)historical sources. Topics found interesting are discussed from a geographical and logically mathematical point of view, when reviewing these sources.

One major hypothesis under investigation has been to consider the origin of Asa mythology to be, in fact, founded upon a genuine human tribe immigrating in Northern Europe. Another that the often mentioned ancient Swedish tribe Sueones or Svìar have not been solely nor primarily located around the lake Mälaren and the province of Uppland, but rather inhabiting a large area of the middle parts of the modern day state Sweden.

Feel free to email me at: mailto:wilmer.t@comhem.se to supply initiated comments, escpecially when or if erroneous facts are found, and not least with suggested reading references for the discussions held.

Content

Article serie overview

Introduction

This article serie will elaborate on the findings of ancient Nordic (old Norse) archelogical, linguistical and historical sources, from a geographical and logically mathematical point of view.

A number of hypothesis¹ will be examined, and some conclusions will be drawn as to whether these hypothesis bear any scientific value in the respects that are examined according to given, individual article purposes.

Following this and the same definitions, the term theory² is used for a collected set of hypothesis, viewed and discussed individually and / or put togehter as awhole.

Purpose

An objective view will be held in that (un)historical tales, sagas and other sources will be regarded as valid for making calculations of time, distances and geographical references. The same will be discussed in terms of logic, to find out whether there might be validity to the claim that the history of ancient North is not yet fully disclosed.

Hence, the paradigm³ of Ancient Sweden being founded solely or primarily around the northern shores of lake Mälaren, Uppland, will be questioned. Not to deduct that this belief must be wrong in every way, but to investigate whether other opposing beliefs may bear any real matter to a scientifically valid explanation of the history of ancient Sweden. Also, the paradigm of an immigrating Asa tribe being late constructions for mythological and ancestral purposes of the ruling classes will be questioned, for the same purposes.

The method will thus be inductive before deductive⁴, and at that holding rather a scientific than humanistic view towards the used sources. The articles will, consequently, not solely rely on "approved" diacritics of sources, but strive to present a probable synthesis for explaining the evolvement of ancient Nordic, and specially Swedish, turns of history.

Question

Hypothesis

The information value of our old sources

Naturally, to hold any view at all regarding the existence, first, and the location, second, of these ancient places of cult and religion, one have to be very well read of the actual historical sources, and of the findings in archelogical and linguistical science being conducted over the years.

From a scientific viewpoint, the content of old myths and sagas cannot be held as historically valid sources. For one thing, they are written down centuries after they are supposed to have happened, following oral traditions that at best have added some flavour to the original tales - if there are any real matter to them at all. More often, the tales have lend from one another and the final versions are likely to contain additions that can only render them untrustworthy as historical sources.

They can, however, disclose elements that have bearing and references in known and alleged sources from other parts of Europe, and hence some traces of the original (again, if ever existed) deeds and people may be identified from them. Furthermore, when several different sources relate the same topic, personas, actions or locations, it can be used as an indication of a real substance underlying the myths and legends - with the reservation of collaboration and dependencies between the sources, which must be thoroughly investigated.

Especially, the story of Odin and the Asas emigration according to Ynglinga saga is generally considered non valid by the offical views and scholars. Other parts of the extensive work of Snorri Sturluson (and other saga writers) may however be considered valid references for finding elements of the ancient history of Scandinavian people and their religious customs and beliefs.

The importance of keeping an objective view

To find any 'real' truth in historical myths and sagas, you are bound to have to take into account all possible aspects of science, not just the religious, historical, archeological and linguistic scholar domains. It have to be put together, and viewed objectively. Otherwise, the prevailing paradigm is bound to limit the perspective and interpretations possible from any given set of facts.

Therefore, in this ambition of objectivity towards ancient Nordic sources, also geographical and natural sciences will be taken into account. The inclination of this, of course, is that the myths and sagas and historical sources must be considered to have actual geographical bearing also for studying our ancient history.

The heritage of Thor Heyerdahl

An example of the importance to keep an objective view in order to get a new perspective on an old paradigm, is the admirable, now late, Thor Heyerdahl. Being non-historian, but a biologist, he has driven hypothesis to the limit in a vast number of areas, where the scholars of those affected disciplines have consequently ignored, and ridiculed, his hypothesis.

Where different discipline scholars have been mostly concerned by their own field of expertise, Heyerdahl has found new approaches to solutions from simply combining knowledge from different scientific disciplines, and put them together as a whole. Whether his findings in different areas have been shown to hold up for a scrutinized examination or not, he has undoubtly raised the interest in these topics and pointed out the importance of an objective approach, without the restraints by a certain paradigm.

His last project, Jakten på Odin (the search for Odin) was aiming at finding out whether Snorri Sturluson actually could be trusted when he states in Ynglingasaga that Odin and the Asas actually had emigrated from the Black Sea around 60 BC, a topic which will be elaborated on in the article [Ref. 4], Was Odin a genuine human being?.

An invitation to the reader

This article serie is written in English⁵, in order to be readable to a greater audience than if written in my native Swedish language. However, some parts of the articles (still) are provided in Swedish, mainly when the referenced sources are given in Swedish. In accordance to this, also other languages are quoted, such as Danish, Latin and old Norse or Icelandic.

Whoever reads these articles are more than welcome to supply initiated comments, especially when, or if, erroneous facts are found, and not least with suggested reading references for the discussions held in the articles.

Ancient sources and their interpretations

Several sources are available for founding an interpretation upon ancient Nordic history. However, mostly these sources are not contemporary, i.e. they are not written in the time they are relating. For the period up until say the mid 13th century, the sources are unfortunately scarce, and seldom contemporary.

As an example, the extensive Icelandic saga material was mostly written around 1200 AD, give or take some hundred years, and a lot of the related stories took place one, two, or even several hundred years before they were written. This, in turn, was done in a Christian society of people who found the ancient oral traditions of tales and poems so interesting that they decided to place these legends in writing. With this follows a degree of uncertainty as to whether the (lately) written sources can be deemed valid for historical references. Later treatments of ancient sources - which in itself, from our perspective may be deemed ancient sources - up into and beyond our own time therefore alwyas comprise, to some extension, an interpretation made on fewer or more, better or worse, assumptions regarding how this interpretation should be made. Hence, some important questions must always be raised before relating the content of our ancient sources:

Recollection of ancient sources

Of course, overviewing the complete set of available ancient sources is no light task. In his dissertation 1988, Sveariket i källor och historieskrivning, Lars Gahrn makes a thorough examination of available sources regarding our ancient history and their interpretations as made over the centuries, from, say, the 16th century and onwards⁷. It is interesting for the purposes of this article serie to quote a few passages from his work, to put a perspective to the analysis performed by the author of these articles.

He states the purpose of his dissertation to be a recollection of known facts regarding the history of ancient Sweden. In a later passage Gahrn declares the purpose of science to be `to define what is knowable and not to make assumptions'⁹.

As stated below, see [Note 1], this author disagrees on his definition, and would rather say that the defined knowledge base is essential as a foundation for further investigations, so that it can later be defined new, previously undefined facts of knowledge upon historical events. But this must inevitably comprise assumptions to some extent!

For our purposes, we will shortly mention the set of sources that may be used for examining the probable historical evolvement of ancient Sweden, here referred to as ancient sources.

List of ancient sources

The following table lists a selected set of ancient sources related to Scandinavia.

Table 2: Reference list of ancient sources¹
Author	Work	Time²	Reference
Ptolemaios	Almagest	~200 BC
Tacitus	Germania	98	[Ref. 52]
Prokopius		~350	[Ref. 47], [Ref. 61]
Jordanes	Getica	550	[Ref. 60]
(Anonymous)	Beowulf poem	700 - 750
Gregory of Tours	History of the Franks	720	[Ref. 95]
Beda	Ecclesiastical History of the English Nation	8th century
Einhard		> 814
Rimbert	Vita Anskarii	~880	[Ref. 68]
(Anonymous)	Scaldic poems
-	Rune stones, brakteater etc.	200 - 1100
Adam of Bremen	Gesta Hammaburgensis...	~1075	[Ref. 11], [Ref. 12], [Ref. 57]
	The Florens document
Gregorius VII (and others)	Letters of the Pope
Saxo Grammaticus	Gesta Danorum	~1200 - 1220	[Ref. 62]
	Gesta Norwegiae
Snorri Sturluson	Edda	~1220 - 1250	[Ref. 51]
Snorri Sturluson	Heimskringla	~1220 - 1250	[Ref. 50]
	Flatø-boken
	Landnamabok
	Diverse Icelandic Sagas
	Sverres saga
	Håkon Håkonssons saga
Lagman Eskil	Äldre Västgötalagen	< 1250
	Other provincial laws	1250 - 1350
	Notes about the history of Uppsala archbishopery	1270 Printed 1678
	Erikskrönikan	1320

¹Note: This list does not (yet) give itself out to be the complete list of ancient sources.

²The years are given Anno Domino, AD, if not otherwise stated.

Discussion about ancient sources

It is the belief of this author that science can never rely merely upon what is truly known and proven - thus opposing the statement of Gahrn. It is indeed an important task for science to define what is known, but this can never be the complete definition of knowledge - if so, nothing new would ever be known.

Quite the contrary, it is the most important feature of science to stipulate hypothesis and objectives on which a new perspective upon known facts may be founded. This new perspective, in turn, based upon known and proven facts, can then be used to explore new, previously unproven, facts of science.

Furthermore, it seems to this author that the science discipline of history not always have lived up to the dogm formulated by Gahrn - which by all means is the driving force behind his statement; historians over the centuries have had a great tendency to base their conclusions of ancient history upon exactly those kind of assumptions that Gahrn wants to avoid.

However, in the opinion of this author, Gahrn himself draws some of the conclusions in his dissertation upon such assumptions, and then onwards treats this as a solid foundation of fact. In a later article I intend to return with a more specific critisism on this topic.

TBD

Recollection of source interpretations

A lot of different views have been held over the years, regarding the privilege to define the cause of events in ancient Nordic history.

A discussion on a modern day conflict is given in the article Where lies Ubsola - ancient Uppsala?, concerning the paradigms of localizing the ancient tribe (or group of tribes) Sueones, or svíar. These two views are referred to by this author as the Svealand and the Götaland theories.

How to interpret ancient sources

It is evident that different scientists, working from a different perspective, have come to different conclusions even when based upon the same set of ancient sources. Each scientist makes her or his own interpretation, although hopefully basing this interpretation upon proven or known facts, but unavoidably also upon conclusions drawn by others, though these conclusions in turn should not be solely based upon assumptions.

Gahrn discusses the evolvement over time of elderly beliefs, which becomes outdated due to new findings that complement or replaces the former knowledge base. He explains the different views held, between contemporary scientists as well as over time, to be caused by the scarceness of sources, their shorthand formats, and most important their unreliability as valid historical sources¹⁰.

Several other authors have written commentary essays about the history and sources of ancient Sweden, e.g Curt Weibull 1962¹¹. A frontier of diacritics in Swedish research was Lauritz Weibull, who already in 1911 as his dissertation wrote Kritiska undersökningar i Nordens historia omkring år 1000; [Ref. 55], critical research in ancient Nordic history around 1000 AD. This to some extent can be said to have begun the era of diacritic-guided research and interpretations of ancient Nordic sources, remains and other findings.

In a later reflection of this, Henrik Janson 1998, [Ref. 32], comments that some of the major reasons that 20th century research still have not managed to completly dissolve the problems of ancient sources into a comprehensional and "proved" historical description, is that the usage of diacritics have been rather too vague than too stringent¹². The resaons for this, he finds to be that the questions asked when examining the ancient sources have been startlingly scarce on the question of why ancient sources were written, i.e. what their underlying purposes have been¹³.

Another important aspects, he finds to be a certain lack of importance drawn onto the science of religion, overlooking pre-christian but even more evident post-pagan religious cults in ancient Scandinavia.

Authors view

In the opinion of this author, any interpretation made from ancient Nordic sources, hence, must be made from the perspective of investigating what is already known, to search for probable hypothesis that might explain what is not already known.

Then, if those hypothesis are found probable, one may conclude upon a new view, proven or deemed probable enough, that brings our interpretation of history one step further on, setting the goal at the utopic complete and undisputable revelation of the causes and events of ancient history.

List of history works

It can be held, that the first attempt to write a history of ancient Sweden based upon some, and later perhaps all, the above listed sources¹⁵, was made around 1450 - 1457, with the so called prosaic chronicle¹⁶, for which work the author is unknown. Following this turnpoint, we will list attempts up until the 20th century here, with some treatments of the former part of this century, and discuss some later attempts separately.

Table 3: Reference list of ancient sources¹
Author	Work	Time²
	Prosaic chronicle
Ericus Olai	Chronica regni Gothorum	~1470
Olaus Petri	Svenska krönikan	~1540
Johannes Magnus	Gothorum Sueonumque historia	1526 - 1554
Olof Rudbeck	Atlantica	1677
Jacob Wilde	³	1731
Olof von Dalin	Svea rikes historia, del I och II	1747
Sven Lagerbring	Svea rikes historia	1769
Friedrich Rühs⁴	Geschichte Schwedens	1803
Erik Gustaf Geijer	Svea rikes hävder	1825
Erik Gustaf Geijer	Svenska folkets historia I	1832
C. J. Thomsen	"Det arkeologiska treperiodsystemet"⁵
Sven Nilsson	Skandinaviens Ur-innevånare	1838 - 1843

¹Note: This list does not (yet) give itself out to be the complete list of ancient sources.

²The years are given Anno Domino, AD, if not otherwise stated.

³The name of the source is missing; given by Garhn, [Ref. 24] p. 12.

⁴According to Weibull, [Ref. 53] p. 30, the German Rühs was relying on the critiscism raised by his fellow-countryman August Ludwig von Schlözer, 1771, who unbiased by the earlier Swedish historians stated that no written sources were reliable for depicting the history of Sweden.

⁵The name of the source is missing; given by Weibull, [Ref. 53] p. 34.

Discussion on history works

Discussion

The purpose of this article serie

The purpose in each included article is to investigate whether the prevailing paradigms such as those mentioned in section Purpose on page 4 can be adequately questioned, to, if so, serve as a basis for possible revelations of unknown archeological remains in those places that are indicated as interesting by the findings.

Article foundations

Time-line discussions

The main concern for challenging ruling paradigms of ancient Nordic sources will be that of a time line. That is, whenever deductive "facts" are established as based upon different, and most importantly in time differing, sources, the approach will be to investigate whether a new perspective and an unbiased assumption on time-line for the expected results can reveal an alternative interpretation to the history of ancient Sweden.

The Asas viewed as a tribe of genuine human beings

A major basis for the line of reasoning will be to consider the origin of Asa mythology to be, in fact, founded upon a real human tribe immigrating in Northern Europe, just as stated by Snorri Sturluson and Saxo Grammaticus. This is discussed in the article [Ref. 4] Was Odin a genuine human being? Both these contemporary but (according to this author) independent writers of the early middelages states that a human tribe of schamanistic wizards gained the reputation of being gods. See "Ancient sources referencing the Asa gods" on page 21. in that article.

From the science of religion, the paradigm of today clearly states that the genealogy lists of ancient sources that ties the kings and rulers to a herescent from the gods are later constructions. It is the opinion of this author, however, that the questioning of the ruling paradigm of Snorris Asas being an imaginative creation will lead to a profound new view of all ancient Nordic sources, and that the collaterals from applying this hypothesis in further discussions on ancient Nordic paradigms will, no doubt, revolutionize the way ancient Nordic sources and archeological findings are interpreted.

The Sueones were not solely living in the provinces of Svealand

A second important basis for this article serie is that the tribe, or perhaps collective reference of several tribes, denoted e.g. Sueones (by Adam of Bremen) or svìar (by e.g. Snorri Sturluson), were not solely based in the Northern lake Mälar regions of todays province of Uppland, but rather inhabited all land of middle and southern modern day state Sweden, apart from those areas former belonging to the Danish empire.

Hypothesis under investigation

Main articles

Each one of these articles discuss certain hypothesis pertaining to an important paradigm regarding ancient Nordic history.

Background articles

For background references and reading, also a set of complementary articles will be provided:

Conclusions

[This article serie is yet only at a preliminar status; therefore the complete conslusions cannot be entered at this time.]

References

Litterature and background articles

Background articles

Litterature

External links

Article revision history

Table 4: Revision history Ancient Nordic sources
Rev	Date	Change summary
0.1	2003-06-30	First issue
0.2	2003-07-19	Restructured template and added links to new articles.
0.3	2003-08-13	Again, restructured template and added links to new articles.
0.4	2003-09-01	Added Discussion with article series overview (and Conclusions, TBD).
0.5	2003-09-19	Added source overview chapter.

⁴By the definition made by Holmberg in [Ref. 83], p. 15, a deduction comprise conclusions made from generally acknowledged principles regarding a specific topic, whilst an induction builds upon a number of reflections or observations, thus making a general conclusion on the topic at hand based on these observations.

¹¹In [Ref. 53], Historiska problem och utvecklingslinjer, he briefly refelcts upon ancient Nordic sources and their interpretations made over the centuries.

¹³He references the definition on relative source values, as defined by Kristian Erslev , 1911 ([Ref. 101]) §6, as related above.

¹⁵Following the course of time, the reliability of these ancient sources has, step by step, decreased as assessment foundations has turned towards a much more strict and, might we state, scientifically demanding interpretation of events stated in these sources. Basically, the need for diacritics and collaboration in contemporary sources and / or other scientifc evidence therefore has been, and should be, the norm for evaluating the cause of events given in a certain source.

¹⁶Curt Weibull, [Ref. 53], p. 23, Sveriges forntid i äldre och nutida historieskrivning, and also Lars Garhn, [Ref. 24], p. 10.

Article serie overview

Summary

Content