As part of my own small contribution to fighting the advancing creep of AI in our lives, I’ve been sharing human-made art just about every day on The Norse Mythology Facebook Page, which I’ve run for over 15 years.
It hurts my soul a bit to have to even use the phrase human-made art, but our social media feeds and search engine results have become so absolutely full of crappy AI-generated imagery that we now have to add that hyphenated modifier to a noun that has never before needed such a clarification.
So, late at night, I search for illustrations of Norse mythology to post the next morning. Maybe an image of Tyr for Tuesday, Odin for Wednesday, or Thor for Thursday. Maybe just a beautiful image of Freyja or a glowing World Tree.
1700s Icelandic manuscript of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda [Public Domain]
I then track down the artist, so that I can credit their work in the post. Even before AI began stealing from artists, the internet has long divorced images from their creators via endless reposting and reusing, so this isn’t always so easy.
I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how many people get what I’m doing, how many thank me for promoting actual artists, especially in the Norse mythology space where so many social media pages now endlessly vomit out AI images with AI captions.
But (there’s always a but) then the Helmet Patrol shows up.
Yeah, dude. We all know that Viking helmets didn’t have horns. You’re really not the first person to discover this fascinating fact. I’m still going to share this great Arthur Rackham illustration from the 1910s.
Okay, buddy. Thanks for sharing your extensive knowledge of antique footwear and informing all of us that this painting of Thor shows him wearing a boot style from a century after the Battle of Stamford Bridge and so isn’t “authentically Viking,” but I really don’t care.
I seriously don’t care at all if the clothing, hairstyles, and/or weaponry in some painting of a Norse deity can’t be absolutely sourced to Scandinavian archaeological sources between the years 793 and 1066.
Maybe I should clarify.
Sure, if a modern artist is creating an image that purports to represent a religious ritual to Thor in Iceland in the year 902, then yes, I would appreciate it if they put some work in and strove to portray what things may have looked like in that specific place and time. That would be nice. Thank you. I appreciate the effort.
But if the artist is seeking to portray Thor himself, then I defer to the creativity and vision of the artist. The human artist. The one creating a work of art. The one whose artistic creation will eventually get ripped off by the AI monstrosities scraping the internet for fuel to poop out more abominations.
I’m being snarky, but there’s a theological background to what I’m saying.
Across time and space
I don’t believe that gods are bound by time and space. I definitely don’t believe that the Norse gods are stuck in Viking times.
Part of the basis for this belief is from the archaeo-artistic record.
There are rock carvings in Sweden from around 1800 BCE depicting what appear to be deities that are like reverse echoes of the gods we know from Icelandic sources of around 3,000 years later.
There is a small bronze sun chariot made in Denmark around 1400 BCE that likewise seems a prefiguration of the sky-riding sun goddess from the Eddas of the 1200s CE.
There are also hammer amulets from England originating around the year 500 CE that resemble the Thor’s hammer pendants popular centuries later in the Viking Age.
If depictions of religio-thematic subjects in what we could call Germanic pagan arts and crafts stretched out over a historical period spanning three millennia, why insist on boxing the gods into the relatively brief era of the Vikings?
The Icelanders themselves didn’t. Illustrations of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda made in the 1700s show the gods in decidedly post-Viking gear, my favorite being an image of Odin with his name spelled out in runes across his chest like a band logo on a t-shirt.
So why not depict the gods in a way that makes sense to us today, during the short time we’re alive on this planet?
If your conception of Odin has him wearing jeans and a hoodie, hanging out on bench and feeding the pigeons in Central Park, go for it. That’s not how I see him, necessarily, but I support your artistic honesty. To thine own self be true.
Sometimes, I myself think of the gods in non-anthropomorphic forms.
I tend to see Thor in the storm, with the trail of his burning hammer drawing giant runes in the black night. I see the earth goddess in the hills and fields of summer, the icy Skadi in the snow that covers Chicago in the winter.
As a musician and a writer, I suppose I see Odin with my third eye. I experience his presence as the whisperings of creativity, as the breath of inspiration. When I do visualize him, I see him as an old wanderer. Sometimes, I see him in the weathered face of an elderly person living on the streets, with grizzled beard and faraway eyes.
Walk among us
I’m not a cosplay Viking. I’m not interested in wearing recreated medieval Icelandic clothes while celebrating Midsummer or any other rite of the year. That sort of thing always strikes me as cultural appropriation, like blackface justified by pointing to the results of mail-away DNA tests. It also seems a bit too Renaissance Faire. It’s not for me.
Yes, I read and reread the Norse myths and poems, then I read them again. I write about them. I teach about them. I see the world through the lens of their imagery and act in the world through the guidance of their ethics. I experience the texts as a source of endless inspiration.
But I’m perfectly willing to say this bit here actually is bound by the times in which it was created. I have no problem saying this part is of primary importance, but this other part we can cast aside. I’m under no illusion that these texts written down by Christian Icelanders are somehow the inerrant words of the gods. Critical thinking isn’t just for when we read news reports.
Yes, I’m fascinated by the latest archeological finds from the long-ago time, and I’ve spent a lot of time reading classic and contemporary scholarship. I think it’s important to learn as much as we possibly can about the societies that lived these religions as living traditions into which they were born and buried (or burned).
But my own actual lived experience of religion, while impacted by archaeological finds and academic theories, is not determined by them. My conception of divinity as it moves in the 21st century United States is not bound either by what Vikings may have done or what professors now think they may have done, not least because the fixation on the Viking Age focuses on only eight hundred years of a three-thousand-year span while often brushing aside the rest – and I haven’t even brought up later folklore and folk practices, which add another millennium to the continuum.
Our experiences are our own.
I feel a responsibility to the issues and challenges of our own time and to the future far more than I do to the past. So much of religion in the broadest sense is about looking to the past, and that gaze can too easily distract us from what is right here in front of us and what is to come.
Having said that, how can I possibly side with the Helmet Patrol who hit their caps-lock keys and shout down modern artistic interpretations of the gods?
The gods walk among us. Right here, right now. We should open our eyes and see them, in whatever guise they appear.
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