The Border of Heathendom. Poetics of Paganism at the Court of Hlaðir À la charnière des religions: la poétique du paganisme à la cour de Hlaðir

Skaldic panegyrics composed during the tenth century for the jarlar of Hlaðir confirm the traditional depictions of these rulers as unyielding pagans. These poems also reveal, however, traces of contact with Christian practices and notions, actively appropriated for the purpose of celebrating a markedly "pagan identity". This paper addresses passages in which poems for Hákon jarl Sigurðarson explicitly re-claim such an identity in juxtaposition to Christianity, advancing the hypothesis that several aspects of Hákon's proactive paganism were in fact influenced and informed by the opposing ideology of the Christianizers. In particular, the claim of the ruler's privileged bond with the divine, often interpreted as reflecting ancestral notions of "sacral kingship", finds parallels in the contemporary propaganda of the Anglo-Saxon and Ottonian kingdoms, the two political entities exerting most direct influence on the aspiring Norwegian royal houses.