Class 12: Old Norse Ecocriticism and “Culture”

The introduction to Christopher Abram’s Evergreen Ash: Ecology and Catastrophe in Old Norse Myth and Literature, “Ecocritism and Old Norse,” comprises two or even three parts: a survey of ecocriticism as a field; a memo on the specific advantages Old Norse literature, and especially Old Norse literary records of pre-Christian Northern religion, offers to ecocriticism; and some final cautions about the limitations of the supposed advantages of these pre-Christian materials: does an “animistic,” “green” “paganism,” if such a thing is recoverable through Old Norse, Christian-authored writing, and if such a thing ever existed, actually offer tools to hold back the ongoing ecological catastrophies of the present? Our answer surely depends on what we think the problem is, or who’s to blame.

Here’s a better summary of the chapter than mine from Adam Oberlin’s review for The Medieval Review, which I offer as a model of one way to write an academic book review:

Abram makes a more important observation: ecocriticism of premodern texts exhibits a duality, a desire to escape boundaries established by the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, but also for obtaining for the medievalist a relevance and immediacy otherwise lacking in scholarship less concerned with the present (22). Mythic commentary about ecology is described as an “ecopoetic project” and “literary world-making” (23), establishing opposition to a mythopoetic understanding of the project, perhaps one step closer to the ontological work involved–the creation of a new world, familiar and alien, both then and now. ON-I appears to offer a convenient window to ecocritical analysis vis-à-vis Christian epistemology and ontology: the myths and literature may reflect a pre-Christian, more ecological worldview; Norse pagan culture presents no ontological category of ‘nature’ which, according to certain perspectives in ecocritical discourse, perpetuates distancing the social from the natural; Scandinavian paganism has animistic elements, suggesting less anthropocentric relationships; texts exhibit a liminality conditioned by the supernatural (a burgeoning subfield of late); and ecological catastrophe is immanent in Icelandic literature and culture.

A model, then: the introduction, which often situates the work under review in relation to its field; the fair-minded chapter-by-chapter summary; and then a final paragraph that rounds things out with the Big Picture, sometimes preceded by what I once waggishly called “the asshole paragraph,” viz., the paragraph where you complain about the work’s limitations or conceptual errors. That paragraph, done right, typically isn’t about spelling errors nor about the book not having been written by you: it’s about errors that materially damage the book’s intended argument, or even more fundamental conceptual errors.^[1] Not all gaps are errors; some are. If you’re asked to do a book review for a journal – that is, not more bellelettristically for, say, the [City] Review of Books — this format will help you get it done, for the point of an academic book review in an academic journal is to be helpful for someone deciding whether to consult the book. Your goal, chiefly, is to provide a précis of the book under review, and only secondarily to evaluate it. If the errors are appalling, then by all means, let ‘er rip.^[2] But most academics books rest at the level of utility and should be evaluated as such.

In re: Abram, then. Once his introduction shifts towards Old Norse culture and literature, it does good work. Before that, we’re often mired in moves common to a lot of ecocriticism. My issues are not with Abrams, then, but with the field. Here’s one.

In re: Iceland:

Nowhere else in the Old World was such a new world to be found. Iceland, itself a remarkably young landmass in geological terms, was an effectively pristine ecosystem, untouched by human hand, when it was discovered and settled, allegedly by a few Irish monks and then by droves of Norwegian colonists in the ninth and tenth centuries.

The phrase “effectively pristine ecosystem” offers Iceland as, effectively, prelapsarian. Human activity is presented as uniquely intrusive; until we arrive, things are pristine. My argument is not of course that “nature is red in tooth and claw” – that’s too simplistically “grimdark,” as if the “truth” of things is always in the cruelest manifestation — but rather that if we reëvaluate the distinction between “nature” and “culture,” we must recognize that nonhuman activity is up to things as well. We can all agree, I trust, that culture is irreducibly poorly fitting: a field of misrecognition, misdirected drives, sublimation, and error – all the wobbly furniture of the psyche as arranged in psychoanalysis — and therefore as prone to getting things wrong as it is to setting us up as social beings. But why should we assume that “nature” is outside that, pristinely? Why should we assume that nonhuman worlds are nonsocial? What forms of interaction are social and which not? I’m not sure I could draw the line convincingly. I don’t think Abram would want me too try, in fact, given the thrust of his introduction elsewhere.

I am reminded of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s 2006 (!) blog post on Roger Caillois, whom he calls a “surrealist biologist,” in which Cohen offer this paraphrased tidbit from Caillois’ “Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia”^[3]:

Against those Darwinians who see in every attribute of an animal its evolutionary use value, Caillois develops an anti-utilitarian argument in which the spatial and the corporeal interpenetrate. Mimicry, the vertiginous displacement of environment onto body, is for Caillois not a survival strategy but an unnecessary surplus, a “dangerous luxury.” Predators are seldom deceived, he observes, when their prey adopt attributes of the space they inhabit, such as when a butterfly imitates a twig or a beetle disguises itself as a pebble. Most animals hunt by smell, not sight.

Our attack on the reduction to mere pristine utility should be directed as well to the so-called natural world. If we want to undo culture/nature dualism, we need to find error, excess, and failure – as well as temporarily stabilizations that offer temporary thrivings – universally. Abrams writes “everything is ecology.” Surely, uncertain as we are as to whether we’re driven by something more than ceaseless recursive chemical interchanges with everything else, we could also say: “everything is culture.”^[4] Or nothing is. Nothing is pristine! Nothing harmonious. Act accordingly.

A monumental (and to my mind admirable) example, one that’s nearly all this paragraph: S. J. Pearce, “The Inquisitor and the Moseret: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages and the New English Colonialism in Jewish Historiography.” Medieval Encounters : Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Culture in Confluence and Dialogue 26, no. 2 (2020): 145–90, on Geraldine Heng’s The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. ↑
A superb recentish example: George Zhijian Qiao’s review of Maura Dykstra’s book Uncertainty in the Empire of Routine. “Was There an Administrative Revolution?” Journal of Chinese History 8, no. 1 (2024): 147–66: from the first paragraph, “Failing to engage most of the relevant historiography and filled with misinformation, the book demonstrates a poor command of its subject matter. The author bases her arguments on questionably chosen primary sources without critiquing them or explaining her strategies in using them, and she exacerbates this problem with a citation method that makes tracking her sources unnecessarily difficult. There are at least a dozen places where the citations do not match the content of the book. As a result, the book is conceptually, methodologically, and factually unsound.” ↑
from Minotaure, 1935, “Mimétisme et psychasthénie légendaire” ↑
If I had more space, I would have something to say about Abram on “feudalism” (27) and about the repeated invocations of the “new” or “alternative” (eg 21), and what the medieval might offer to a world remade, at least for now, by burning petroleum. Literary criticism can do things; but there are things it can scarcely do. Contra Abram’s snide comment about “politicians” (20), the solutions require mass politics, which requires professional guidance to prevent mass politics from collapsing into mere demagogic popularism. See Vincent Bevins’ If We Burn. ↑