From Thor’s hammer and Freyja’s feathered cloak to Sigyn’s bowl and Ran’s net, such materials and the stories they colour are informed by everyday objects of Iron Age life – spun with the magic, belief, and narrative traditions that made them icons. The Norse myths retain records of material objects that reinforced Scandinavian oral traditions and gave their stories power, memory, and influence. This paper proposes an archaeological reading of Norse mythology to help explain how ancient Scandinavians understood the presence and role of deities, magic, and the supernatural in everyday life. The vivid presence of material objects in Scandinavian cosmology, as preserved in the Old Norse myths, carries underexplored traces of belief systems and the material experience of Iron Age Scandinavia (400–1000 CE). But the Norwegian Erik seized one of his men with one hand, 1 er heiðnir menn kalla Ódáinsakr, en kristnir menn jörð lifandi manna eða Paradísum, "that the heathen people call Odainsakur, but Christian people the land of living men or Paradise" Eireks saga víðförla. The Danish prince advised that they return, for he considered it impossible to conquer the dragon or to pass it. On the stone bridge lay a dragon with his mouth agape. Erik conjectured that the river was the one called Pison by the king in Mikligard, and which has its source in Paradise. On the other side of the river, there was a plain from which came sweet fragrance. After having traversed its deep forests, they saw a river when it began to grow light, over which there was a vaulted stone bridge. They travelled through Syria and the immense and wonderful India, and came to a dark country where the stars are seen all day long. Still Erik was bound by his vow, and with his Danish namesake he set out on his journey, after the king had instructed them as well as he was able in regard to the way, and had given them a letter of recommendation to the authorities and princes through whose territories they had to pass. The king believed that Odainsakur was identical with Paradise, and said it lies in the East beyond the farthest boundaries of India, but that no one was able to get there because it was enclosed by a wall of fire, which reaches up to heaven itself. He told his royal teacher of the vow he had taken to find Odinsakur,-"frá honum heyrði vér sagt á voru landi,"-and asked him if he knew where it was situated. One day, the king talked with the Norwegian Erik about religion, and the result was that the latter surrendered the faith of his ancestors and accepted baptism. In company with a Danish prince, who also was named Erik, he proceeded first to Mikligard (Constantinople), where the king engaged the young men in his service, and was greatly benefited by their warlike skill. A saga from the fourteenth century 2 incorporated in Flateyjarbók, and with a few textual modifications in Fornaldarsögur Norðurlanda, tells the following: Erik, the son of a petty Norse king, one Christmas Eve, made the vow to seek out Odainsakur, and the fame of it spread over all Norway. 1 It was not situated in heaven but below, either on the surface of the earth or in the lower world, but it was separated from the lands inhabited by men in such a way that it was exceeding perilous, although not impossible, to come there. This place of joy was called Ódáinsakur, the-acre-of-the-not-dead, Jörð lifandi manna, the earth of living men. Among the Scandinavians far down in Christian times, the idea prevailed that their heathen ancestors had believed in the existence of a place of joy, from which sorrow, pain, blemishes, age, sickness, and death were excluded.
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