ANDERS KALIFF. Fire, Water, Heaven and Earth. Ritual practice and cosmology in ancient Scandinavia: an Indo-European perspective. 216 pages, 15 b&w & colour illustrations. 2007. Lund: Riksantikvarieämbetet; 978-91-7209-450-5 paperback £18.
ANDERS KALIFF. Fire, Water, Heaven and Earth. Ritual practice and cosmology in ancient Scandinavia: an Indo-European perspective. 216 pages, 15 b&w & colour illustrations. 2007. Lund: Riksantikvarieämbetet; 978-91-7209-450-5 paperback £18.
Review by Neil Price
Department of Archaeology, University of Aberdeen, Scotland, UK
(Email: neil.price@abdn.ac.uk)
Stone settings, without bodies or cremated bone; alignments of rock constructed with clear deliberation but free from any recognisable rules of symmetry or pattern; burials of human ashes, but representing only partial corpses; interments of animals without people; evidence of fires and other activities within and around these complexes, without obvious function; elaborate buildings with no evidence of occupation. In northern European digging circles all these precise, familiar but baffling phenomena are covered by a colloquial expression usually abbreviated to BAW, frequently employed in the informal interpretation of excavations. Bronze Age Weirdness lies at the heart of Anders Kaliff's fascinating new book, which follows a slightly broader chronological frame to explore the fundamentals of spirituality and ritual practice across much of Scandinavian prehistory.
Central to all these enigmatic archaeological traces is a single contradiction: for decades these and similar remains have been interpreted through the concept of the grave. Thus a pile of rocks without a body becomes a 'cenotaph', and collections of these features are described as 'cemeteries'. The inconsistency of this approach is obvious but had raised surprisingly few formal objections until the early 1990s when Kaliff began to publish his studies of prehistoric society based on the fresh data continually emerging from Sweden's vigorous investments in infrastructure, and consequently rescue archaeology. Focusing especially on the ethno-archaeology of cremation - in passing helping to revive the archaeological study of ritual and religion in Scandinavia - his early work shone a new spotlight on the spiritual world of later prehistory. The present volume is in many ways what he has been working towards for many years: not only a synthesis of his earlier positions but also a full-blown engagement with the comparative study of religion across the vast canvas of Indo-European culture that has previously hovered in the background of his research.
The volume is structured in sixteen unnumbered sections bracketed by an introduction and conclusion. The first few sections introduce the author's theoretical framework including terminology and an overview of his proposed Indo-European context. The Scandinavian material is then reviewed in detail, focusing on graves, 'altars' and evidence of fire rituals. The latter form a constant theme on a Vedic model, along with the 'annihilation of the body' through dismemberment and processes such as the grinding of the bones. Textual evidence for prehistoric cosmologies are then explored, culminating in an analysis of rock and stone as active materials in the mediation of these beliefs.
To somewhat simplify its arguments, the book revolves around three key themes: the problematics of cremation, burial and the rituals of the dead in later Scandinavian prehistory; the possible continuities between the documented glimpses of Viking Age mythology and the unwritten beliefs of the Bronze Age; and the interpretation of these phenomena against the suggested background of Indo-European religious culture.
The first of these is by far the most successful. Kaliff is especially interesting on the crucial intersection between concept, emotion and perspective in the complex package of preconceptions that underpins the notion of the grave within archaeological discourse. What are the distinctions between 'grave-goods' and 'offerings' in funerary contexts? How do we seek a prehistoric cosmology that is not hopelessly compromised by the afterimage of our own religious inheritances, regardless of whether we still believe in them? His discussion of funerary archaeology and ritual is superb - free from dogma, timely, original, carefully argued and rich in detail. The ideas and asides presented here will form the platform for any number of exciting new research projects.
Less convincing are the uses made of the Old Norse texts that purport to reflect the thought-world of pre-Christian Scandinavia in the Viking Age. Kaliff is very good on the folklore of Northern mythical beings and their wonderful interactions with humanity, and his knowledge of the sources is impressive. However, one of his primary tenets is that these texts contain relevant insights into Bronze Age spiritual beliefs and concepts of supernatural powers, preserved in some form of shadowy continuity, albeit dynamic, over the two thousand years that separate them from the composition of the poems and sagas. This position is problematic, to say the least, particularly since many scholars regard these texts as unreliable sources even for the Viking Age that they claim to describe, at a temporal remove of a 'mere' two or three centuries. The difficulties with this view emerge more clearly when one considers the third strand of Kaliff's argument, his putative Indo-European context.
Far-flung traditions of ritual that are relatively well understood, named and explained can be tempting anchors in the stormy seas of Scandinavian prehistory. Kaliff follows the architects of Indo-European religious argument, above all Dumézil, integrating the tripartite pattern of deities, twinned rulers and Indo-Iranian rituals that are its foundations into an over-arching explanatory model that places the Scandinavian treatment of the dead, and its underpinning cosmology, firmly within this arena. This is a far from straightforward claim.
The problem lies not with the notion of large-scale, long-term cultural continuities, but with the specifics of the example and the limits of analogy in the archaeology of religion. There are clearly suggestive similarities in many of the monuments that Kaliff traces in such eloquent detail - the prominence of stone, the importance of fire and proximity to water - but also a crucial lack of the broader cultural links that would give these features deeper meaning. To take an alternative, the circumpolar North, we find within this region, over millennia, clear and exact correlations of material culture, social structure, settlement pattern, world-view, even dress and the minutiae of custom and behaviour. These are demonstrably absent from the suggested parallels between the Indo-Iranian cultures and prehistoric Scandinavia: Vedic India is not Bronze Age Sweden, and in fact shares very little of its attributes when viewed across the whole social spectrum.
To go further, the fundamental notion of an Indo-European culture and heritage has been called into question so many times that its very validity is seriously in doubt. Kaliff is clearly aware of this debate, but appears curiously unconcerned. He argues instead that a rejection of the Indo-Europeans is merely politically-correct wishful thinking, because we find the idea ideologically inconvenient. He seems not to appreciate the possible corollary, which is that he chooses to believe in them because he finds them appropriate and useful. It is also curious that by proposing what is in principle such a monolithic interpretation, he thereby subscribes to the notion that there actually was a 'religion' in prehistoric Scandinavia at all. This goes against the current general consensus that, in its final manifestations at least, Scandinavian pre-Christian spirituality was instead an infinitely varied spectrum of local customs, beliefs and practices unfolding within broadly consistent frameworks. Even leaving aside questions as to the validity of its basic premise, the supposed Indo-European model thus appears as an unfortunately rigid - and equally illusory - alternative orthodoxy of prehistoric religion to that presented through the Christian filter of the medieval saga writers.
Anders Kaliff has written a thought-provoking, intriguing and passionately argued reconstruction of later prehistoric cosmologies in Scandinavia. Many aspects of the book will prove invaluable to archaeologists working in this region, and it deserves to be read by all students of Nordic religion. However, its superstructure rests on highly controversial foundations in the supposed Indo-European cultural and religious package. In the end, the strength of the case against the underpinning model for his entire book should surely concern any author more than is evident here.
