3. Central concepts and principles

There are some central concepts that we can use to link together the analysis of the religion to its sources. These will provide common reference points in order to link different sources together. The following is not an exhaustive list of the types of concepts that can usefully be linked to the source corpus, but represents some of the main phenomena that end-users are likely to find useful to explore through an interface to the resource.

3.1. Beings

The religions deal with a range of named beings, objects and places which share many similarities with things observed in the world of their practitioners, but which clearly do not belong to the human world. The most obvious are anthropomorphic figures (gods, giants and other beings), as well as mythic animals and objects. (This category may also include mythological places, but for various reasons I will not deal specifically with mythological places here.) In order to understand these beings, we have to have ways of linking them together when names and representations differ.

Many of the gods and other beings have multiple names, and in some cases the identification of a named figure with a particular god may be controversial. The category of beings must therefore be independent of the different names that individual beings are given, but connect to those names and the evidence for them.

Pictorial representations of these beings rarely have text which identifies them as a particular being. The identification of a mythological being in a picture must be done by different means. This can be encoded as a different set of links between the sources and this category.

3.2. Attributes

One of the main means of understanding the gods is by means of the various attributes assigned to them which distinguish them from each other and in some cases from the human world. These attributes can be visualisable, concrete phenomena such as an object (Thor, for example, carries a hammer) or physical attribute (Thor’s beard is often referred to, as are his piercing eyes). Thor’s name itself (< PGmc *thunraz) is the word for a physical phenomenon: ‘thunder’.

These attributes are often disparate but can be linked to the being in question by a range of usually written sources. The textual evidence for linking an attribute (such as a hammer) to a particular being (such as Thor) can then form the basis of identifying a visual representation of a male being with a hammer as Thor, or associating a hammer-shaped amulet with the god.

Attributes may include more abstract phenomena that are associated with particular beings, such as legal assemblies, virginity or immense strength. These can be linked to the other phenomena (beings, sources) by the same structures as the more concrete attributes.

3.3. Narratives

The religions involve stories about the various beings and their interactions with the world and each other. These form common narratives which help to build a picture of how the gods and other mythological beings interacted, and may form the basis of various pictorial representations from early Scandinavia.

Like the previous concept of attribute, narratives normally have as their evidence base textual phenomena that describe various identifiable beings and their actions and interactions. Also like attributes of gods, this evidence base can be used to identify narratives in non-textual phenomena, and can be linked to beings in a similar way to attributes.

3.4. Practices

A fourth concept that will be discussed here in a more limited way is the human element of worship and religious practice. This involves interactions between humans and their environment, including objects, the landscape and particular sites. This may involve such practices as naming a place after a god, performance, passing around a horse phallus, divination rituals, worshiping a Germanic god reinterpreted as a Roman one, or using a religious or magical word or image in particular contexts.

The issue of religious practice is difficult because this kind of information is likely to be lost in cases where the practice has been discontinued for some time before the source appears, but there are some sources that can provide this information. The following discussion will touch on some of the religious practices that can be incorporated into the proposed resource.

3.5. Principles

This paper defines a structure that encompasses a large proportion of these concepts and the way they can be linked to the evidence for them. The way in which it does this is according to certain principles of how the concepts, sources and links are treated, namely:

1. The above concepts should be an interpretative end point: beings, attributes, narratives and practices should be the result of the analytical process for the resource, rather than behaving as concepts that the analytical process depends upon. In terms of the electronic resource, these are the ‘subject’ of the RDF-like triple and other more concrete items and concepts in the resource should link to these as objects.
2. The concepts should be linked ultimately to the evidence base in the form of items localisable in time or space to a certain extent. These include manuscripts and objects, which in most cases can be dated and located geographically; known authors, for whom similar information is often also available; and anonymous texts to which often a putative date and/or location can be attached.
3. The interpretative and analytical steps in linking the interpretative concepts to the localisable items should be explicit and as detailed as practicable. This means the encoding of intermediate stages of analysis, some of which will be dependent on the source type and/or religious concept.
4. The implementation should use wherever possible existing authoritative public resources. Where possible Semantic Web services should be used; in other cases, semantic links should be made to conventional Web resources.

The following discussion will be structured largely around different types of sources and how these can be linked to the above concepts. I will start with textual sources and progress to a range of other source types.

References