Introduction

This book is about the relationship between myth and materiality in the Nordic Iron Age. It presents an interdisciplinary interpretation of text and material culture, two modes of expression that belongs together yet represent two different temporalities: the written historical documentation of an oral past long gone versus the contemporary material representation of those very same cosmological structures in action. They made their sudden appearance in the early fifth century and lived on for another half millennium or more before they were finally written down as a corpus of historical heritage. Therefore, to understand the relationship between myth and materiality it is necessary first to discuss their different historical temporalities.