Ragna Hrafnamaður
Ragna Hrafnamaður (Րագնա Հրաֆնամաձւր) was a scholar, savant and philosopher of the seventh century CE, born in what is now Siurskeyti. She is the acknowledged founder of the philosophical tradition now known as Arlatur, and is more commonly referred to within that tradition as the Summoner (Կվեձյարինն Kveðjarinn).
Early life
Hrafnamaður was born in the late sixth or early seventh century CE in the village of Hélla, in what was then the commonhold of Álsklett. The region was in this period broken into a varying number of intermittently feuding statelets, although Hélla’s position on the far north coast of the Siur lands kept it isolated to some degree from political turmoil. She was the third child and eldest daughter of Jarl Hrafnamaður, a well-to-do merchant, and Hjördís Birgissor, who was at the time of the birth a reikómari or itinerant judge within the Siur legal tradition.
Hrafnamaður was regarded from a very early age as a highly intelligent and perceptive child, and it was far from unexpected that she expressed a desire to follow her mother into the law. Later biographies have held that the key incident which pushed her in that direction was proceedings taken against her paternal aunt, Goðvild, who was tried on charges of “abstraction of property” laid by her husband. At the time, this was a term quite distinct from “theft”, and was used mainly to describe adultery, given the technical status of women as “possessions” of their husbands at the time. The charges – wholly spurious and brought by a husband known to be subject to fits of jealousy – were nonetheless upheld, despite strenuous intervention by Birgissor, and Goðvild received the brand or skömmerki (literally “shame-mark”) customary in such cases. The sense of injustice that surrounded the case is held to have fuelled some of Hrafnamaður’s later thoughts on the equality of the individual and the flaws within the law as it stood.
After completing her education – somewhat more advanced than the norm in the area, as befitting her parents’ status in the community – she began her legal apprenticeship in 622, accompanying her mother on circuit duties, mainly serving as a messenger and occasionally as a court bailiff.
The philosopher
With ample time to discuss with her mother the principles and nuances of Siur law while on circuit, Hrafnamaður began to explore what she saw as the inequities of the system she was training to serve, informed as it was by the long-standing customs of Thúrun, the traditional religion of the Siur. This enquiry led her into a much more far-reaching examination of contemporary Siur society, extending over both religious and secular aspects. This was a lengthy process, interspersed as it was by her court work, but was committed to writing in stages over the period to 630, in a period referred to in later Arlatur writings as the Sálleit or “soul search”. The result was a series of philosophical treatises, generally in the question-and-discursive-answer format common in such works in this period; these treatises – the preferred term in modern Arlatur is “Disputations” – form the heart of her work, Principles of a Spiritual Life, the central core of modern Arlaturi philosophy.
For the next ten years, Hrafnamaður wandered the Siur lands, expounding this newly-synthesised philosophy; much of this was done in the style of market-place declamation usual at this time, although she is known to have been involved on occasion in lengthy arguments with Thúrun scholars. (However, the celebrated 1653 painting by Þol Dalsbýlis, Ragna Before the Túli, is almost certainly based on a fictional incident, as well as depicting Hrafnamaður as being in her teens. A common belief that she was of teenaged years when she first developed Arlatur has only recently begun to fall from public perception.)
Her earliest known activity in this period can be fairly reliably dated to 631, when her name appears, described as farandi og kennari (“itinerant and teacher”), in surviving legal records from the commonhold of Rauðurbrú. This may mark the effective beginning of her work in spreading the philosophy of Arlatur across the Siur lands; reference to her as “the Summoner” – kveðjari being a long-established juristic title in the region – appears to date from at least 635.
The growth of this strongly egalitarian philosophy began to be seen as a threat by religious and secular authorities alike. The powers ruling over the land were angered by Arlatur’s refusal to acknowledge the basis of their superior status, which Arlaturi perceived as (usually) unearned and unmerited. The senior figures of Thúrun were angered by the Arlaturi position that Thúrun adherents could not claim to be among the “elect”, and thus destined for salvation in the next world; no individual could be so favoured on the path to einingu, the state of oneness held as the ultimate goal of all Arlaturi, as there was no outside entity from whom to seek such favour.
Although the Arlaturi were initially seen as no more than a nuisance – partly due to the relaxed attitude to outside religions held by Thúrun, provided that they did not disturb general order – attitudes towards them began to harden by the middle 630s. Hrafnamaður was herself imprisoned for short periods, usually on public order or vagrancy charges, in the early part of her ministry, and with concerns over her safety increasing, she appears only with great reluctance to have tried to keep her movements a secret after about 635. Her own words make her stance clear; the 2nd Disputation states, “The truth does not hide from the light.” The hindrances placed on her and her increasing body of students foreshadowed in some respects the more overt persecutions that would follow after her death in the period now known as the Thjáning.
The death of the Summoner
Hrafnamaður is understood to have died late in 640. By long-standing tradition, the cause of death is taken to have been pleurisy developing from pneumonia, after she was caught in a thunderstorm in isolated country in the commonhold of Ærlasse; this is the explanation generally preferred within Arlatur today. However, there is a persistent counter-theory that she was killed by agency of the thein of Ærlasse; at this distance in time, evidence to prove or disprove the theory is very thin on the ground, but some credence is lent to it by the status of that commonhold as one of the last to accept Arlatur (as late as 885).
Birgissor, still in good health for her age although retired from the law, took up her daughter’s teachings in earnest and, with other early adherents, continued the work of disseminating Arlatur across the Siur country. Hrafnamaður, Birgissor and many of the earliest Arlaturi are regarded with especial respect within modern Arlatur, and are collectively known as the vonhöld, a term which loosely translates as “one who holds out hope”.
Legacy
With the philosophies of Arlatur today firmly entrenched as a day-to-day influence on the lives of millions of people across western Messenia, Hrafnamaður holds an assured place as one of the most pivotal philosophers and teachers in the continent’s history, and as one of the key figures in the creation of modern Siurskeyti, given the central place of Arlatur in the Siur cultural heritage. Her pivotal example has informed Siur public life to such an extent that even the traditional setting of the Siur age of majority at 16 years has been justified by the belief that Hrafnamaður was of this age when she developed the philosophies of Arlatur.
Given the paucity of information available about the life of Hrafnamaður, it has been very difficult for most historians and students of Arlatur to separate the fact from the fiction. (It should, however, be noted that only a small minority of studies of the period of Hrafnamaður’s life actually deny her very existence.) Parts of what is known about her life and work – as separate from the philosophy of Arlatur itself – have almost certainly been subject to alteration and embellishment over the centuries, going back even as far as the Lífsblöðin, written by the nemandi Helsson af Dári and the first biography of Hrafnamaður. Of the sizeable body of work on what might be termed “ragnology”, Minna Jarpur’s 1986 study The Summoner probably stands as the most objective.
A memorial to Hrafnamaður, raised in its current form in 1971, stands in her birthplace of Hélla. The town itself was retained as an exclave by Siurskeyti after the secession of Helminthasse in Petrial 1812; the attempt by the Helmin alliance to blockade Hélla into submission in the subsequent Summer War is seen as one of the major factors in turning public opinion in both countries against the war, which ended in Nollonger of the same year.
In popular culture
While co-option of Hrafnamaður’s image and person for literary or other similar purposes was rare before around 1850, the following century and a half saw a wide variety of “imaginings” of her personal history within popular media. Sometimes this has been done for deliberate shock value, as with the 2005 exhibition Kveðjarinn by the Siursk artists Afsakað og Ævagamall, which depicted the Summoner as a dominatrix figure carrying a lantern; however, by far the greater part of such adaptations has been done sympathetically, if at times irreverently. The recent television miniseries Ragna, a 2014-15 Siursk-Helmin co-production starring the Helmin actress Emília Tjörn as Hrafnamaður, is only the most recent in a long series of cinema and television depictions, including the 1968 Kveðjarinn, in which Lilja Aftan’s portrayal was long considered definitive, and the light comedy Ragna og Ég (“Ragna and Me”, 1978).
Literary renditions of Hrafnamaður have been similarly varied, although she has comparatively seldom been the lead character in such works. She has most recently appeared as a supporting character in the Birgissor series of historical galir by Bergmundur Stafli (from 2010), in which Hrafnamaður’s mother Hjördís Birgissor uses her legal training as a reikómari to act as a detective as she wanders the country, although the series began before Hrafnamaður began the synthesis which became Arlatur, and its development is a minor strand in the series as a whole.