Lyfing
08-22-2009, 01:36 AM
Berserkir: A Double Legend, by Anatoly Liberman..
It sometimes happens that modern scholars know something about antiquity and the Middle Ages hidden from those who lived at that time. For example, unlike Plato, we can etymologize many Ancient Greek words. Perhaps we even understand a few lines of skaldic poetry better than did Snorri. But berserkir (whom, to simplify matters, I will call berserkers, as is done in English dictionaries) fared badly. The Vikings’ contemporaries had lost all memory of berserkers’ identity. In the 13th century, berserkers reemerged in the sagas as society’s dangerous outcasts and soon disappeared without a trace until medievalists revived them in their works. The berserker-related boom is now behind us, but an impressive bibliography of the subject testifies to scholarship devoid of a factual base and feeding mainly on itself. The central theses of this paper will be offered dogmatically, though each of them can be supported by multiple references. It should also be understood that I am by far not the first to draw negative conclusions from this scholarship.
Later,
-Lyfing
It sometimes happens that modern scholars know something about antiquity and the Middle Ages hidden from those who lived at that time. For example, unlike Plato, we can etymologize many Ancient Greek words. Perhaps we even understand a few lines of skaldic poetry better than did Snorri. But berserkir (whom, to simplify matters, I will call berserkers, as is done in English dictionaries) fared badly. The Vikings’ contemporaries had lost all memory of berserkers’ identity. In the 13th century, berserkers reemerged in the sagas as society’s dangerous outcasts and soon disappeared without a trace until medievalists revived them in their works. The berserker-related boom is now behind us, but an impressive bibliography of the subject testifies to scholarship devoid of a factual base and feeding mainly on itself. The central theses of this paper will be offered dogmatically, though each of them can be supported by multiple references. It should also be understood that I am by far not the first to draw negative conclusions from this scholarship.
Later,
-Lyfing