Gro Steinsland


Gro Steinsland is a Norwegian scholar of medieval studies and history of religion and since August 2009 has been the Scientific Director of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.
Steinsland has most recently been a professor in the Institute for Linguistic and Nordic Studies at the University of Oslo, where she was also a member of the international interdepartmental Centre for Studies in the Viking Age and Nordic Middle Ages from its founding in 1993 until its dissolution. She has also taught in the Institute for Religious Studies at the University of Tromsø and has held guest faculty positions at Linacre College, Oxford University and at the University of Bonn. In 2007/08 she led the international interdisciplinary research group in "The Power of the Ruler and the Ideology of Rulership in Nordic Culture 800-1200" at the Centre for Advanced Study of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and since 1 August 2009 has been its Scientific Director.
Steinsland specialises in pre-Christian religion, the associated Old Norse texts and mythology and the conversion of Scandinavia. At both Oslo and Tromsø, she made Norse religion a main subject within the history of religion programme. She is a member of the group for theology and religious studies in the Academy of Science and Letters. As a historian of religion, her publications take Norse paganism seriously and present it in a non-traditional light as having been still strong and vital when it encountered Christianity. In 2005 she published a wideranging introductory book, Norrøn religion, which presents the subject from the perspective of myth and praxis. In her influential 1989 PhD dissertation, Det hellige bryllup og norrøn kongeideologi: en analyse av hierogami-myten i Skírnismál, Ynglingatal, Háleygjatal og Hyndluljód, she reinterpreted the sacred marriage between a god and a giantess as a power myth legitimising rulership rather than a fertility myth; she specialises in the interpretation of written sources but has also made extensive use of archaeology and frequently takes an interdisciplinary approach. She has also emphasised the female aspect of pre-Christian religion, particularly in her 1997 book Eros og død i norrøne myter, in which she contrasts the sexualisation of death in, for example, references to drowning as being embraced by the sea goddess Rán with the post-conversion view of female sexuality as shameful.
Steinsland has also readily written newspaper opinion articles, for example in 2000 taking the position that Thor Heyerdahl's Odin expedition to Azerbaijan was inspired by a conjectural "charade" orchestrated by Snorri Sturluson.

Selected publications