[Main Blog Post] The Seed of Yggdrasill 1 - Introduction and the Books of Old

[jprussell]

This week, I take my first step in tackling Maria Kvilhaug's massive tome The Seed of Yggdrasill. As with some of her other work, it is a frustrating blend of genuinely wonderful insights and sloppy organization, but hopefully sharing my thoughts on them will help both of us get more out of it!

Comments

[k_a_nitz]

Re: "The other thing she does is to point out how her understanding is that the myths can be understood, enjoyed, and found meaningful at multiple levels, whether as magical tales, clues to religious ritual, or representations of deeper spiritual realities."

There is a whole cottage industry in academia around this idea for literature in general - the keyword to look for is intertextuality (my MA thesis was around intertextuality in a German novel). You could say the equivalent of kennings for Anglo-Saxon Christians would be references to phrases from the King James Bible or the Book of Common Prayer - if you pay attention when reading English novels from about 100 years ago or older you will often catch these (intertexts) and if you know the original context you may grasp the deeper meaning buried in the text.

[jprussell]

Thank you, that's a term I had heard before, and I could infer the basics of its meaning, but having a more precise definition is useful. Absolutely that's a major part of what gives most myth its staying power (Jordan Peterson makes a point about how much intertextuality there is just within the Bible itself, for example). But I wasn't just stating that the references within a given myth give it more depth, but also something about what kind of depth those references might be trying to evoke. To go slightly farther afield for an example, I'm meditating my way through the Mabinogion for JMG's Dolmen Arch books. The book The Four Branches of the Mabinogi by Will Parker does an absolutely fantastic job of laying out how each story simultaneously has elements from 1) half-remembered ancient Celtic history, 2) myths and folktales, 3) references to recent history/dynastic politics, and 4) individual psychological processes. Many of these layers are accomplished simultaneously through things like intertextuality (like referencing the Welsh Triads), but from your description, it doesn't sound like the inclusion of those different takes is necessarily intertextuality itself - or have I misunderstood?

[k_a_nitz]

The thing with intertextuality is that it is connected up with Reader-Response Theory, which from memory is based on the idea that the meaning is constructed by the reader (so different readers will get different things from the same book) and so in a sense intertextuality encompasses not just the inclusion of texts from other works or the references to them, but also the connotations that those intertexts bring out in the reader's mind. So you get the ideas of shallow and deep reading - shallow reading takes the text as it is, deep reading goes down the rabbit hole of all the intertexts and their connotations/associations, as deep as you like. I hope that make sense.

[jprussell]

Ah, okay, so it does have a wider meaning than I was inferring from your description, thank you for the clarification!