The passage from the heathen to the Christian North did not happen overnight – and sometimes both worlds stand on one and the same stone. Two crosses show this masterfully.
The passage from the heathen to the Christian North did not happen overnight. It was no clean break but a long, often contradictory flowing-together of two worlds – and sometimes these two worlds stand literally on one and the same stone. Two famous stone crosses in the British Isles show this masterfully: they are Christian monuments and yet tell the old Norse myths.
That of all things Ragnarök, the doom of the old gods, should appear on a cross of Christ is no accident. For the newly converted Norse, the end of the old world and the beginning of a new one was a story they knew – and one that could be transferred effortlessly onto the new faith.
„The sun turns black, earth sinks in the sea; the bright stars fall from heaven." — Völuspá, after Bellows
In English Cumbria stands a slender high cross over four metres tall, from the 10th century – one of the most impressive surviving stone crosses at all. Its finely worked reliefs show scenes from Ragnarök: Heimdall with the horn, the gods’ fight against the wolf, the bound Loki with his faithful wife Sigyn catching the poison – and in the midst of it all a crucifixion.
Heathen doom and Christian salvation stand here side by side, as if the stone would proclaim one great message: the old world ends, a new one begins. The Christian sculptor did not attack the old myths but used them – he told the triumph of the new faith in the familiar imagery of the old time.
More drastic still is a cross-fragment from Kirk Andreas on the Isle of Man, named after its patron Thorwald. One side shows Odin, spear in hand and raven at his shoulder, at the very moment the wolf Fenrir devours him at Ragnarök – one even sees the god’s foot in the beast’s jaws. The other side bears Christian signs: a figure with cross and book treading down the evil dragon, and a fish, the old symbol of Christ.
The message is of great force: the old father of the gods, Odin, is devoured by the wolf – his time is over –, while on the opposite side Christ triumphs over evil. Hardly any monument captures the change of faith so directly and so powerfully in stone.
The reading of the individual scenes as Ragnarök is widely accepted, but in detail it is repeatedly a matter of debate – on the Gosforth Cross especially, not every figure can be identified beyond doubt. The core message is sure: Christian patrons deliberately used heathen imagery to make the triumph of the new faith intelligible. This is no relapse into heathendom but clever missionary art.
For us these stone crosses are fascinating witnesses of an in-between time, when people lived with two imageries at once. They show that culture rarely runs in clean cuts, but in transitions, mixtures and after-echoes. It is exactly these layers that make Norse history so rich – and a reason we so gladly bind its motifs into lasting material.
Ragnarök · The Fenris-wolf · Odin · Picture Stones.
Gosforth Cross; Thorwald’s Cross (Manx crosses). Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; Richard N. Bailey, Viking Age Sculpture. Image credit (title): Gosforth Cross (Cumbria), photo Dougsim, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons).