Hello all, its my first post on this subreddit and It is actually in relation to another post on here, there was some speculation by u/Grimjestor some 6 years ago about the alleged relationship that christianity had with norse mythology. Specifically the discussion was centred around wether the Eddas were written by christians and wether as a result their was some bias and Christianisation of taking place (according to the thread the answer is yes-ish) I was just wondering if anyone had any reliable sources to back that information up as I want to use it in an essay but pesky high schools haunt adopted reddit as a reliable source of info yet...
Any help is super appreciated thank you in advance.
most of the answer holds up fairly well, but could use some clarifications and more specificity by today's standards. I'm gonna focus on the Eddas, rather than going on a tangent about Saxo Grammaticus and Adam of Bremen, though they are fascinating and often paint a wildly divergent image of Norse mythologies from the Eddic material.
By the "Eddas" we're primarily referring to two texts: the Prose Edda, written by Snorri Sturluson c. 1220, and the Poetic Edda, which is a compilation of older poems that is preserved in a single manuscript from the 1270s. These two texts make up a majority of what we know about the mythology - while the Prose Edda cites many poems in the Poetic Edda and elsewhere, it also has some stories that are not attested anywhere else. So yay.
The Prose Edda is a deeply fascinating thing - Snorri is writing a treatise on how to make good poetry when he writes it, and explicitly says "Christian people should not believe any version of these stories other than the version told here" - he's making a Definitive Edition of oral traditions his father really liked, basically! And he has to do some wrangling - did you know that Odin's son Vidarr is, according to the Prose Edda, also known as Aeneas? So, obviously there are some Decisions being made that alter it in substantial ways from what Viking-Age beliefs would have looked like. Margaret Clunies Ross, "Snorri Sturluson and the Construction of Norse Mythography" is a really solid introduction for Snorri's account specifically, and why he's writing it down in this form (Snorri also wrote Ynglinga saga, which touches on some of the same mythological moments but does so totally differently, and contradicts the Prose Edda sometimes)
As to the issue of how "Christian" it is... well, the more you look at it, the less clear it becomes. Richard Cole has a great article titled "Snorri and the Jews" that looks at anti-Jewish sentiment in the portrayal of Loki and his allies, which would undoubtedly be a borrowing from the broader European Christian milieu. But, it rapidly gets tricky.
A core part of that trickiness is that Snorri cites a lot of the poems in the Poetic Edda! Linguistic evidence within those poems suggests that they mostly date to the 900s, before the largest phase of Christianization in Scandinavia! Mikael Males has argued that Völuspá, for instance, dates to somewhere around 975, after the first Christian king of Norway died but before widespread conversion in the elite population. Now, as u/Platypuskeeper and u/Steelcan909 have both argued on this sub, there may be an intentional codification of Norse religious practices as a backlash to Christianity, so this doesn't mean that we can discount that a being like Baldr is influenced by Christian imagery, but it does complicate things greatly.
Another good example of this is the poem Hymiskviða. The poem itself seems to date from the early 1100s in the Orkney Islands, so solidly post-Christianization. That's all well and good, but Þór fishing up the Miðgarð Serpent seems to be one of the most popular stories in the Viking Age, with the Altuna runestone (1000s, Sweden), the Gosforth Cross (10th century, Northumbria), the Ardre VIII runestone (800s, Gotland), and the Hørdum stone (uncertain date, Denmark). As a bonus, in the 1200s, Niðrtigningar saga, a translation of the Gospel of Nicodemus, compares the Crucifixion of Christ explicitly to this tale - God is Þór, Satan is the Miðgarð Serpent, and Christ is the ox head that Thor used as bait. That's about as Christian of an attestation as you can get!
So we have to get into the question of "how well do the recorded poems record genuinely old oral traditions." That's kind of a foundational argument in the field, and one with no pretty answer. Naturally, the answer to some extent varies by text - the Hjaðningavig as recorded in Ragnarsdrápa (9th century) is probably more reliable than that recorded in Sörla Þáttr (12th-14th century). The current trend is to sort of doubt the extent to which we can actually access that oral tradition from the extant texts (though Carolyne Larrington in the introduction to her 2014 translation of the Poetic Edda accepts the mythological poems as almost entirely predating the widespread Christianization of Scandinavia), and so we're taking increasingly interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to attempt to answer that question. Pernille Hermann has an article summarizing the orality/literacy debate fairly well in Old Norse Mythology - Comparative Perspectives, which is also where Richard Cole's article mentioned above is found.
The topic is super complicated and doesn't have a lot of easy answers, but I hope those few articles mentioned throughout help you!
OK, you're interested in the Christian influence on the extant textual evidence of Old North Mythology, and looking for some reliable sources on the topic for the school's essay?
In this subreddit, the following FAQ concerns that you asked in OP, and answered more recently:
You and your school have a good guidance to pay enough attention to the source. All of the FAQs I linked above has a mention of the references in the end of the answer. Those who answered these question did not consider and write the post from a scratch, but based on some academic literature (books and papers) on Old Norse mythological study. If any reader is more interested in the topic, they are expected to check these references in person somewhere. This is how reference works.
The academic standard of their answers has been, however, unfortunately, not widely shared among recent popular history books of the Vikings and Old Norse mythology as well as some classic overview books published in more than 30 or 40 years ago. Unless you are prepared for reading some academic-nature books and essays written by scholars, this will really be a bit tough topic for high school student. Both internet articles and paper books are certainly a jumble of good and bad, but it is at least easier to distinguish the seemingly trustworthy from other pop history book in paper books, to give an example, by checking the publishers (university publishing can generally be more trusted).
The following are my personal recommendations:
Stefan Brink (ed.), Viking World (2008) certainly include a series of good articles on Old Norse religion and mythology, but it might be a bit difficult.
If you prefer other European languages to English, I'd at least try to find some trustworthy (to some extent) introductory books on the topic in German, French and Scandinavian languages.
Alternatively, I can also mention a site page on Viking Age Religion of National Museum of Denmark as a relatively up-to-date introduction to the topic, though I can't guarantee that all of their description there is based on the latest academic understanding.
References:
Here is the thread to which i'm referring as I realise even the greatest historians may not remember a random thread about norse and christian theology from 6 years ago :)