Living Words, Dead Religions

Question: I have heard that pre-Snorri oral tradition said that it was Utgard-Loki bound to the rock with venom dripping on him, and that Hod killed Baldur out of jealousy, and Loki was not even involved. Any thoughts on this?

Well, not really. The problem with pre-Snorri oral tradition is that it was oral, meaning it was never written down, which in turn means we have almost no idea what it could possibly have been about. We have literally no way of knowing what oral tradition was like in, say, first-century Iceland; we weren't there, and nobody wrote it down for us to learn about later, so it is an utter and total blank. They could have passed around oral tales of how Loki turned into an elephant and sucked the entire ocean into his trunk and then blew it back out in a shower of glittering rainbow sneezes and that's where the stars come from, for all we know.

Snorri's preservations of Icelandic mythology are from the thirteenth century and the Icelandic sagas are from the tenth, and along with the twelfth-century historical records of Saxo Grammaticus these are the earliest and most complete sources we still have. There are a few fragmentary poems from mainland German sources that are a little earlier (ninth or tenth century at best), but they're highly piecemeal and usually only mention mythological figures rather than recording any stories about them. But that's pretty much the entire extent of our sources for Norse mythology, which means that we know precious little about what happened before Christianity started coloring Norse religious ideas, and almost nothing about what oral stories might have been told in the many centuries before people started writing them down.

Like Greek mythology, the Norse legends of their gods and heroes enjoyed a sudden resurgence in popularity and study during teh nineteenth century, when mythology as a study discipline was firmly in vogue and the idea of the ancient yet noble religions and ideas of the ancestors of Europeans became a subject of much popular interest (and later, the Nazi party in twentieth-century Germany embraced some parts of Norse mythology as the indigenous religion of their "perfect race" and rewrote much of it in order to support their own agendas, which also helped keep the pantheon in the public eye). Unlike Greek mythology, however, Norse mythology didn't have a wealth of well-preserved epics and myths, just the few Icelandic and Danish sources that we already noted, and so scholars, as scholars always do, started making things up and trying to guess whether or not they were right.

Scholars love to theorize about Norse mythology and have been doing it for centuries, so I'm not surprised you've heard some theories about what pre-Snorri myths might have been like. Questions of whether or not some myths might be referencing Utgard-Loki instead of Loki are frequently popular, as well as the theory that the two figures are actually one and the same and their separation an accident of translation or the result of stories being confused over time. The idea of Hod killing Baldur out of jealousy actually probably comes from the Danish stories of Saxo Grammaticus, which we wrote about recently, in which Hod and Baldur are in direct conflict over Nanna and fight many battles for her love; because Hod wins Nanna in that story but she is married to Baldur in the Edda, scholars frequently theorize over what might have happened that changed that relationship and whether or not Hod might have "lost" her to him, resulting in a jealous motive for killing Baldur. Other theories of what pre-literate Norse myth might have been include the idea of Loki as a fire god (mostly based on extremely tenuous linguistic evidence, and a little bit of archaeology), the idea that Tyr was originally the All-Father and later superceded in importance by Odin's cult, the idea that Frigg and Freyja (as well as several other etymologically-similarly-named goddesses) were originally the same figure but were only separated in later myth, and a giant bucketful more on top of that.

So really, while Norse mythology certainly existed before Snorri, we can't know what it looked like. Early oral tradition hasn't been preserved, so all we know about it are guesses - very scholarly, very educated guesses, and that's definitely worth something, but guesses nonetheless! - and we therefore don't really know one way or the other whether either of the theories you mention are true. Unless new evidence about ancient Norse myths comes to light, we won't ever know one way or the other, which is one of those sad truths about mythology: we've probably forgotten at least as much as we remember, so learning about those old, old religions is a journey without an end. When it comes to Scion, each Storyteller has to basically choose which, if any, of the scholarly theories about Norse mythology they want to run with, because everyone's guess is pretty much as good as the next one's.

(It is important to note that orally-preserved mythology is no less real and importan, and that stories that have never been written down are not any less legitimate sources for studying a religion, but the different ways that oral mythologies have to be approached and the problems that academia has with accepting them in spite of their lack of citation are continuing issues in mythological studies, but that's a whole giant post on its own and I need to go to bed!)