'Haliurunnae'
paper pulp, acrylic 65 x 47 x 31’’
‘Seiðr’ is an old Norse term for a type of sorcery which was practiced in Norse society during the Late Scandinavian Iron Age. Since Jacob Grimm’s socio-linguistical ‘Deutsches Wörterbuch’, published in 1835, the term is linked to the Balto-Finnic shaman tradition of the Sami people. The Finnish word ‘seita’ refers to a human-shaped tree. Jordanes, in his ‘Origins and Deeds of the Goths’ gives an account of the origins of the Huns from a union of witches. King Filimer expelled these witches from the army of the Goths
. Jordanes gives them the Gothic name ‘haliurunnae’. In the old English: hellrúna means ‘witch’, in old German: hellirúna means ‘necromancy’.
The sculpture depicts a woman tied to a tree, stripped off from her clothes, awaiting for somewhat sacrificial/penalty ritual to begin. The nakedness suggests a carnal sin, the red hair - witchcraft/ demonic indulgence. The contradiction comes from the comfortable, relaxed posture of the body and serene expression on the face, violating our expectations, associating sin with remorse.
Femininity
‘In some accounts, as in the prototypical genesis story, that of Adam and Eve, in some Medieval Islamic accounts of Sarah and Hagar, the Saxon origin story told by Widukind of Corvey, or the story of the Lombard hero Alboin, women are the source of sin and conflict. In the Aeneid Dido, founder of Carthage, is at the heart of the conflict with Aeneas and thus, ultimately, responsible for the disastrous fate of her city. But there are other, more complex women: magical women such as Gambara, mother of the first Lombards, and Libuse, Kazi, and Tethka, the three magical sisters in Cosmas of Prague’s account of the origins of the Czechs; women who engender races of monsters by consorting with demons such as Lilith, and the Gothic Haliurunnae from whom sprang the Huns; saintly women like Clothild or Dubrovca who were responsible for converting their husbands and thus their peoples in the tradition of St. Helen. There were monstrous women like the mother of the Scyths in Herodotus, or Melusine who were part serpent part human. And there was Mary, in the Jewish tradition a fallen woman who foisted off her bastard child by a Roman soldier on her gullible husband, in Islam, “above the women of all created beings”, and in Christianity the Mother of all faithful. The representations of women in stories of beginnings, as Amazons or saints, monsters or troublemakers, are too complex to categorize. Whenever they appear, women are problematic and contradictory figures.’
Patrick Geary ‘CUR IN FEMINAS TAMDIU PERSEVERAT?’
Vienna, 2004
