For the past several years, Norwegian historian of religion Maria Kvilhaug has operated under the name The Lady of the Labyrinth, a name which derives from a Mycenaean Greek Linear B tablet found in Knossos (Gg 702). Knossos is a remarkable Bronze Age site on the island of Crete, a location famous today for its representation in later ancient Greek folklore as the site of a labyrinth, an intricate maze, wherein awaits a fantastical, ferocious beast, the ‘Bull of Minos’, the Minotaur (ancient Greek Μινώταυρος). What the concept of the labyrinth meant to the region’s Bronze Age inhabitants remains a mystery, although some aspects seem more or less certain—for example, there are strong indications the symbol and concept were associated with dance. Whatever the case, the labyrinth appears to have been of both great age and importance to the people of Crete, and labyrinth motifs appear on coins unearthed in Knossos dating from 350 to 200 BCE, long after Linear B fell out of use.

The Knossos site is also notable for its Linear B inscriptions, a (relatively) recently deciphered script with great implications for Classical studies and Bronze Age studies more broadly: In use by the Mycenaean Greeks around 1450 BCE, Linear B was finally cracked in 1952 by English self-taught classical philologist Michael Ventris and English classical philologist John Chadwick. The deciphered Linear B subsequently toppled many theories about the development and prehistory of Ancient Greece and what would become the Classical world, and greatly altered subsequent understanding of the development of ancient Greek culture—and the Bronze Age more broadly. Tantalizingly, Linear A and other scripts in the region remain undeciphered.

Knossos isn’t the only place where one may find labyrinths. The symbol and concept subsequently appear throughout Europe, in Asia, and even in the Americas. In Northern Europe, stone representations of labyrinth symbols are known from what is now Norway, Finland, Estonia, and possibly Denmark, but in Sweden they are most numerous. Much like other ancient Germanic monuments, such as stone ships, the labyrinths receive no evident mention in the ancient Germanic textual record, another example of the limitations of the ancient Germanic written record.

Kvilhaug publishes both fiction and nonfiction, drawing inspiration from the ancient Germanic corpus, and places a special focus on Germanic goddesses in a comparative perspective. Readers can find more information about Kvilhaug’s research and writing at her website here, including new upcoming publicaitions.

For a brief (and all too rare) English language overview of the labyrinth in a North Germanic context, see the following source:
* Myerberg, Nanouschka. 2006. “The Imperative Way” in Andrén, Anders. Jennbert, Kristina. Raudvere, Catharina (eds.). Old Norse Religion in Long-Term Perspectives, pp. 45-49. Nordic Academic Press.

1. Where did you grow up?

I was born and grew up in Oslo, Norway. My parents were, respectively, from Østfold and Vestfold, counties south of Oslo, lying to the east and the west of the Oslo fjord, and since we were a very close-knit extended family, I also spent a lot of my childhood there, and in the Hallingdal mountains, where my grandparents built a cottage that we used for some time every season of every year. I feel bonded to all these places.

2. Can you remember when you first encountered Norse mythology or, more generally, Germanic mythology? And what was the context?

That is a long story in many parts! Growing up in Norway and in a family that was both very literate and very history-interested, I would say I grew up with it, hearing and reading the stories even from an early age. My paternal grandfather, Einar Kvilhaug from Vestfold, was also extremely into local history, which led him to become quite the expert on the contents of the Ynglinga saga (Heimskringla), which tells the legendary histories of Vestfold kings. He also read a lot of other sagas as well as the myths of the Prose Edda. Einar was a great storyteller, and I was a child who loved nothing better than to listen to his stories of “the old days”, whether they were his own personal stories of growing up, the stories of his parents and grandparents, of his life as a sea-man, of his life during World War II when he was active in the resistance against the German Nazi occupation, or whether they were his retellings of the distant, Viking Age past, an interest he inherited from his own father and grandfather, who were both present when the Oseberg burial in Vestfold was excavated. I spent quite a lot of time listening to his accounts while we went for hikes in a Vestfold landscape dotted with ancient burial mounds.

I also remember my parents humorously pointing out the pagan aspects of the songs and dance traditions that my maternal grandmother had inherited from growing up on a farm. Despite being a devout Christian housewife, she led the entire extended family into near-ecstatic, stomping and chanting to the point of collective trance-dance every Yule, and this experience had some impact on my interest for older, pre-Christian traditions too.

I also remember my father, while hiking in the Hallingdal mountains, telling me about the most important pagan gods of the past so vividly that I believed in them, and asked where they were now, when people no longer believed in them. I was about nine years old, and my dad told me that he thought that they only lived for real in people’s minds and memories, and that their power died when nobody believed in them. That made me feel very compassionate about them and I remember directing myself towards the great mountains making a promise; that I would do my best to keep their memories alive. As I grew up and had finished reading all the books of the main library’s children and youth section, I went upstairs to the grown-up floor, but being only 12 years old, grown-up novels were too difficult for me. Then I discovered the non-fiction section crammed with books about other cultures, histories, and mythologies filled with color pictures. For years, I immersed myself in all sorts of ancient history books about every exotic part of the world, and soon developed a love for mythology in particular, whether it was Indian, Egyptian, Greek, Sumerian, Celtic, Native American, Chinese—well, any part of the world fascinated me with their wealth of mythical imagery. With puberty came an interest in womanhood, especially since I reacted very strongly to how my female peers only found faults with themselves and with their bodies while obsessing about looks and boys—those did not interest me at all, as I was still more into books than boys, and while looking for other paths for me as a woman, I discovered women’s history and goddess mythology, which led me down the road to the works of Marija Gimbutas and other fantastic researchers, which helped me connect with a time and age when becoming a woman could be a spiritual and empowering experience.

It was only when I left Norway and moved to England for a while, living with people from many different parts of the world, that I actually took a renewed interest in the history and mythology of my own roots. I had a very particular experience when I went into a bookstore and saw a copy of the Poetic Edda in English translation by Carolyne Larrington. I remember stopping there and feeling that if I picked up that book, things would change for me, my whole life path would transform, and I remembered my childhood promise to the old gods, that I would dedicate myself to keeping their memories alive. Spooked by that feeling, I left the store without buying the book, only to spend the whole night dreaming about norns spinning webs around me, and a goddess with the head of a mare-skull leading me down dark rivers in the underworld, where I could detect remnants of an ancient culture that would have to be discovered anew. I took the hint and went back to that bookstore to buy the copy. I read it over and over, making notes, thinking about it, dreaming about it, seeing the characters in all sorts of natural features and even in the features of people I met and knew—all the time feeling a strong pull towards having to decipher this poetry because I felt so strongly that they were trying to convey something that was lost in translation into our own time and into our modern languages and mindsets.

Back in Norway for a summer break, I bought the Poetic Edda in two different Norwegian translations, reading those too, discovering yet new things in both of these. In the end, I tried to remember what little Old Norse I had actually learned in school (we had some Old Norse in high school) and spent weeks in the National Library painstakingly going through the original Old Norse texts of the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda, comparing them with the translations I had and looking up Old Norse words in the dictionaries. I was particularly interested in deciphering the meanings of names and place names, being convinced that these also held meaning. I started drawing cartoons about the myths, an artistic approach I kept up for years, and which further enhanced and deepened my understanding of this poetry as a spiritual and metaphysical philosophy conveyed through the language of metaphorical and allegorical poetry.

In the end, I enrolled back into the University of Oslo and took History of Religion studies as well as Old Norse philology classes, which was very helpful in terms of learning how to research this poetry and the culture in which it emerged, with more scientific methods.

3. How would you describe your religious beliefs (or lack thereof)?

I would not say I am religious, spiritual is a better word. In Norwegian, we say that someone may ‘fall between two chairs’—which is sort of the story of my life. I grew up in a very academic, non-religious, science-oriented family that was extremely skeptical toward both the oppressiveness of religion and the folly of New Age spirituality. I carried that perspective with me even when I delved into the myths and philosophies of various religious and spiritual paths of varying age and culture. And yet, my personal experience with strong dreams, lucid dreams, and other incidents that felt otherworldly, or which made animate what most people regard as inanimate, made me convinced that all the mythologies out there were in fact describing, in human language, something real yet beyond the physical, or rather, perhaps better, within the physical. I spoke to trees and rocks and beasts and stars and the Earth herself, and felt that my attention was answered, that they spoke back. I was thoroughly convinced, based on my experience and feelings, that this world is crammed with sentient beings and that nature itself is sentient and may be communicated with. I never felt that this was in any way contradictory to science or evolution. I seriously had a deep spiritual visionary experience while reading Stephen Hawking’s astrophysical book on Dark Matter, even if I am certain this was not his intention [ed.: A Brief History of Time, 1988, Bantam Dell Publishing Group].

My work with the Poetic Edda, even from the start, and all through the various stages of approaches, even—or especially—when I began using scientific methods, well, that work kept challenging my preconceptions all the time. I had to read the poems over and over and over for years on end, each time discovering something new, and often enough something that forced me to change my entire paradigm of understanding, so much so that in the end, I had to dismiss paradigms completely and do my best to let the poems speak for themselves. And yet, even from the start, I carried with me my personal vision of a very real Odin who kept appearing in my dreams, nudging me on, telling me that this, in fact, was the point; not to try to make the myths fit in to confirm my original views, but to keep questioning them, to keep transforming them, deepening them, letting the myths speak for themselves rather than to my wishes. This was, he kept “saying”, the path to real knowledge and real wisdom, the never ending expansion of knowledge, the need to leave pet ideas behind in the face of new knowledge. I became comfortable with that flexibility in the end, and, suddenly, after years of quite obsessive study, I suddenly had a more complete picture after all—not finished, it cannot ever be, but extensive and coherent enough to form a basis for something I could take pride in sharing with others.

When I began sharing my research results in a popular science approach on YouTube back in 2009, I had already spent more than a decade developing my theories, and had long since completed my formal university studies (2004). I was a bit overwhelmed by the response I got from Neopagans or “modern Heathens”—these in particular seemed to appreciate my approach. I had never been part of any religious group like that (hardly a part of any group at all), but it was a delight to get to know people who thought more like me, or who could appreciate my insights so fully. I still kept to myself as usual, struggling with the whole social thing. But I was invited to and partook in my first blót only a couple of years ago, and I found it very meaningful and beautiful, a way of coming together and connecting both with the people who lived before us, and with the powers that be, without enforcing dogmas on exactly who and what those powers are—that part appeared to be up to each one of us. I liked that, I felt there was power and meaning in that ritual, in that coming together in what became a sacred grove, and I wished that I had experienced this sort of communal connection before, even if I am probably not personally made up for being religious or a part of a religious or any other ideological community.

To sum up what I believe after all this time, and what I suspected even from the start: Eddic poetry represented a spiritual and philosophical tradition within the Norse culture, not necessarily representing the entire culture, but certainly a subculture of initiates, mystics and philosophers. While the mythical characters kept appearing in my dreams and artistic approaches (I kept drawing them), in a human-like form, I was utterly convinced that their human form was my own mind’s attempt to understand them on my own terms, and not representative of what they actually look like or what they really are. To me, the gods and other mythical beings are not ‘super-human’ figures who actually live like people in particular abodes, who marry and have children, the way they appear to in the myths, at least on a literal and more superficial level. Rather, they represent one particular culture’s poetic translation into human language of observable cosmic, physical/natural, metaphysical and psychological features that exist simultaneously on many levels, including within everything and everyone, different powers with particular purposes in a sentient universe, making their impact on the world and within each person.

This view (above) represents, ultimately, one of the most important results of my two decades of research on Norse mythology; it was not something I consciously believed when first starting out. I started out quite humbly trying to figure it all out, knowing that I did not know what the poets had intended in the first place, as well as not knowing what powers really rule this world and how to relate to them. At first, I became, through my studies, convinced that this view (above) was how the poets who composed the Eddic poems believed. 

I am not saying that this was how all Old Norse people believed, of course not. Most people are simpler than this. Most people have more practical and personal concerns, and embrace their respective religions either as a family and culture tradition to be taken for granted, or as a way of finding a moral, social, and religious tenet for ordering this all-too complex and diverse world into a simpler, dogmatic system that can be easily understood and adhered to. But I believe that my understanding of the poetical version of Norse myths represents the core of the insights developed by initiates and mystics of their time, resulting in a playful, poetic, allegorical approach to the gods and other powers known to their own culture, much the way that yogis and other mystics within the Hindu tradition perceive the mythology of their own culture, while most Hindu people are content with a more literal understanding, with upholding ritual traditions, and with approaching their gods with their personal and economical concerns.

I, for my part, feel that these ancient mystics and poets touched on something that resonates with me on a spiritual level, and I believe in this too, mainly as a result of considering what I discovered from my studies and trying it out on my ongoing sense of communication with what I have always perceived to be a living, sentient universe. To me, no matter how much Odin has appeared to me in my dreams and nudged me on, Odin is before anything else still but inspiration impersonated, the quest for knowledge and the expansion of understanding, existing like a force of nature both within the universe at large and within each person. That makes ‘him’ real, even if ‘he’ is really not a ‘he’, but rather an intangible, impersonal power, a drive towards expanding knowledge which I believe exists in the universe at large, in every life form, in the very power of evolution, and within each person, a real but intangible power, recognized and translated into the poetical and cultural language of mystics who lived more than a thousand years past.

4. How would you describe your political beliefs (or lack thereof)?

I often think about the countless people throughout history and in our own time, who are or have been talented and creative in some way or other, but who never had the opportunity to develop their talents due to oppressive social restrictions imposed on them by their class, by poverty, by gender, skin color, or whatnot. I think this is a great loss to the human race, so naturally inclined towards diverse creative outputs—everybody has some talent or other, yet most never get to practice it, spending their lives within repressive and limiting social and economic systems, the result of a row of systems which has only ever benefited the very few.

I wish our human society had developed along different lines, without all the psychopaths and narcissistic despots in power, creating one system after the other and bombarding us with silly delusions which constantly seek to keep people in line and at each other’s throats while working hard hours as serfs to create profit for the few. To think that a person like me, who embraces my personal freedom to just be myself, forever living in the pursuit of knowledge and hopefully wisdom, research, writing and other creative output, would be dismissed and barred from that true life and soul purpose, and told that my genitals and biological breeding functions define who I am supposed to be and what I am supposed to do, and to be told that I am supposed to feel that this is natural to me, is a disgusting, truly ridiculous, and very depressive thought. Yet this is reality—and has been the reality—of countless women whose talents and capacities are and have been constantly repressed. This is not true only for women, but for anyone who does not belong to the ruling economic elites of this world—and even the few who actually manage to make a living out of their talents are severely restricted by a system developed to serve only big-scale commercial interests. Even though I am not quite as restricted as most, I still feel this system in my bones. I could never be the happy housewife ideal that narcissistic abusers suffering from delusions of superiority (due to actual inferiority complexes) keep wanting to impose on us, but I am not particularly happy about working my arse off in a job where we create profit for somebody else at the cost of our skills, our talents and our soul’s purpose either. But that is the reality for most people, and partly even for me, since I cannot make a living from my books.

I truly believe in the personal freedom to stake out our own paths in life, and I wish our human society at large was way more supportive of the natural diversity, creativity and individual complexity that human beings are born with in some way or other. I also wish for a system where the commercial interests of very few people did not rule the entire world with their need for slave labor and loyal serfs, in a way that quenches our souls, our creativity, and our ability to engage in whatever makes our souls sing, instead forcing us into a rat race of exploitative work conditions and false hopes for the possibility of getting to the top end of society (without dying internally). 

Basically, I wish we could recreate a more natural state where social consciousness and solidarity prevailed, where our diverse individualities were generally respected and accepted, even appraised, and where the point of life was culturally considered to be about growth, learning, creativity, art, exchange of ideas and having enough time at hand to spend most of it with friends, family, enjoying festivals, and delving into our favorite interests, and where “work” only meant the social duty to partake in necessary activities that benefited the entire society. It could be that simple, but instead we keep slaving away most of our time, and mostly for somebody else’s profit, while we are constantly bombarded with distracting popular concerns that are really only about serving somebody’s commercial interests, giving false hopes for success in a system designed to keep the majority unsuccessful, keeping us in line or at each other’s throats. We are all, left and right, fooled by an age-old tactic of divide and conquer, where all sorts of completely shallow differences are exalted into something extremely important, causing us to point fingers at other groups rather than taking down a repressive system designed to create economic growth for a tiny group of selfish pricks while the rest of us must live our lives in some sort of serfdom.

As radical as this may seem to some, I would still not fit into any particular -ism, since they all, in some way or other, involve a degree of thought policing and severe persecution of anyone who in any way deviates from the dogmatic paradigms supposed to be the only truth. I admit that I have not mastered political discussion, so I keep away from it except when I really feel that I have a moral obligation to say something.

5. Do you have a formal academic background connected to Germanic studies? Where do you do your research on the topic?

I studied history, philosophy, the history of religions, and Old Norse philology at the University of Oslo. Nowadays, I do most of my research at home or in the University Library.

6. Does Norse mythology and/or general Germanic mythology influence your creative output?

Well, apart from my non-fiction books, which are about Norse mythology, the eddic poems in particular, and my occasional articles about cultural aspects of the Viking Age or earlier, I did write four novels set in the early Viking Age, where I had to be creative about some cultural and religious details that we cannot prove for certain. I also did all those cartoons many years ago, some of which I ended up using in some of my more creative videos. 

Joseph S. Hopkins thanks Maria Kvilhaug for her participation.