Germanic and Norse religion

Overview

Germanic religion is the name scholars give to the gods, myths and rituals of the Germanic-speaking peoples of northern Europe before they became Christian. Its best-known form is the Norse religion of Viking-Age Scandinavia, the world of Odin, Thor, Freyja and the world tree Yggdrasil. It had no founder and no scripture. People gave offerings to gods, spirits and the dead in groves, lakes and bogs, and at feasts in chieftains' halls. The peoples converted at different times, from many Goths in the 4th century to the Swedes around 1100 or later. Almost everything written about the old gods comes from outsiders or from Christians, so scholars weigh the texts against archaeology, runes and place-names.^{[3, 10–14]}

History

Offerings in the bogs c. 500 BCE – 400 CE

Long before anything was written down, people in southern Scandinavia sank offerings into lakes and bogs. Around 350 BCE the defenders of the Danish island of Als beat off a seaborne war band and gave its weapons and one of its boats to the bog at Hjortspring, apparently as thanks for victory. Around 205 CE, at Illerup Ådal in Jutland, the deliberately wrecked gear of a defeated army went into a lake. The Roman historian Tacitus, writing about 98 CE and probably without visiting, described sacred groves rather than temples and human sacrifice to a god he called Mercury, whom scholars identify with Wodan, the later Odin.^[15–18]

Goths, Anglo-Saxons and Saxons c. 300 – 800 CE

Two gold horns from Gallehus in Jutland, made around 400 CE and melted down by a thief in 1802, bore images that probably had religious meaning. Germanic peoples who moved into the Roman world turned Christian early: many Goths in the 4th century, when Bishop Wulfila gave them an alphabet and a Bible. Anglo-Saxon settlers brought Woden, Thunor, Tiw and Frige to Britain, where four weekdays still bear their names. A mission from Pope Gregory reached Kent in 597, yet in the early 7th century an East Anglian ruler was given a 27-metre ship grave at Sutton Hoo. Charlemagne burned the Saxons' sacred pillar, the Irminsul, in 772, and a law of the 780s made refusing baptism a capital crime.^[19–24]

The Viking Age c. 750 – 1050

In Scandinavia the old religion lasted longest. Place-names and many small hammer amulets suggest that Thor was the most widely worshipped god, while Odin belonged above all to kings, poets and warriors. Chieftains hosted seasonal sacrificial feasts in great halls, like the one excavated at Tissø on Zealand. The powerful were buried with ships, animals and rich goods: two women at Oseberg in Norway in the 9th century, a man at Gokstad around 900. In 922 the Arab envoy Ibn Fadlan watched Rus traders on the Volga burn their dead chief in his ship, with an enslaved woman killed to join him.^[25–28]

conversion of the North c. 960 – 1100s

Around 965 the Danish king Harald Bluetooth raised a runestone at Jelling claiming that he had made the Danes Christian. In Norway Olaf Tryggvason pressed the faith on his subjects by force in the late 990s, and Olaf Haraldsson made it the only lawful religion in 1024; killed at Stiklestad in 1030, he was soon venerated as a saint. Iceland's assembly agreed in 999 or 1000 that everyone should be baptised, tolerating private sacrifice for a few years. Sweden changed slowly: Adam of Bremen, writing about 1075, reported public sacrifice still held at Uppsala, and the country was hardly Christian before about 1100.^[29–32]

Memory, revival and misuse 1100s – today

christian Icelanders preserved the old poetry. Ari the Learned wrote the first history of the Icelanders in 1122–33, Snorri Sturluson retold the myths for young poets in the 1220s, and the Eddic poems were copied into the Codex Regius around 1270. In the early 20th century small völkisch groups in Germany and Austria claimed to revive the religion of a Nordic race, and racist readings of the gods and symbols persist on the far right. Modern Heathenry, which grew from the 1970s, is a separate tradition; by 2015 most Heathens surveyed rejected racial interpretations, and Iceland's Ásatrú association has denounced neo-Nazism.^[33–35]

Beliefs

Æsir and Vanir · Æsir, Vanir

the two families of gods

Norse sources divide the gods into two families. The Æsir, among them Odin, Thor, Tyr and Frigg, rule and fight; the Vanir, the sea god Njörd and his children Freyr and Freyja, bring wealth and fertility. Myth tells of a war between them that ended in a truce and an exchange of hostages, which brought the Vanir to live among the Æsir.^[36]

Yggdrasil · Yggdrasill

the world tree

At the centre of the cosmos stands a vast evergreen ash whose roots reach the realms of the dead, the frost giants and humans; the poems and Snorri count nine worlds around it. In the poem Hávamál Odin hangs on the tree for nine nights, wounded by a spear, to win the secret of the runes.^[37–38]

Gods and giants · jǫtnar

giants

The gods' great opponents are the giants, who live at the edges of the world and threaten gods and humans alike. Thor, armed with his hammer, is the gods' champion against them in story after story. The line between the two races is not sharp, though: Loki, counted among the gods, is the son of a giant.^[39]

Death and the afterlife · Valhǫll, Hel

There was no single teaching about death. Poems say that Odin took half of those slain in battle to Valhalla, the hall of the fallen, to train for the last battle, and Freyja took the other half. Other sources send the dead to Hel, a gloomy underworld, or picture them living on in the grave, where a restless corpse might trouble the living.^[40–42]

Ragnarök · Ragnarǫk

fate of the gods

The poem Völuspá and Snorri foretell the end of the gods' world. Loki and the wolf Fenrir break free, giants attack, Odin dies in the wolf's jaws, and Thor and the World Serpent kill each other. The earth then sinks into the sea and rises again green and renewed. Scholars see Christian colouring in Völuspá, probably composed in Iceland around 1000.^[43–44]

Practice

Blót: sacrifice and feast · blót

The central rite was the blót, an offering made so that the gods would give something back: good seasons, fertility or victory. Animals, especially horses and cattle, were slaughtered, their blood sprinkled on altars and people, and the meat eaten at a feast with toasts to the gods. Roman writers and Adam of Bremen also report human sacrifice.^[45]

Holy places · hǫrgr, vé, hof

Much worship took place in the open: in groves, by waterfalls and lakes, and at the hörgr, a stone cairn used as an altar. Consecrated sites, vé, survive in place-names such as Odense, Odin's shrine. Whether there were true temples is debated: sagas describe them, but archaeologists have found only a few small cult houses, and many rites probably took place in chieftains' halls.^[46–47]

Seeresses and seiðr · vǫlva, seiðr

Seeresses, völur, were respected specialists called in to foresee the future when a household or district was in trouble. A saga describes one seated on a high seat with a staff while singers helped her into a trance. Myth links this trance magic, seiðr, with Freyja and the Vanir, and says Freyja taught it to Odin.^[48–49]

Burial

The dead were cremated or buried, often with weapons, tools, food, animals and sometimes servants. The greatest were laid in ships under mounds, as at Oseberg, Gokstad and Sutton Hoo. Ship graves may express a journey to the otherworld, but scholars also read them as statements of rank and power made by the mourners.^[50–51]

Runes · rúnar

Germanic peoples wrote in runes from the early centuries CE, cutting them into weapons, jewellery and stone. Myth says Odin won them by sacrifice, and ancient and later writers credited them with magical power, but historians increasingly see this as later elaboration, since most surviving inscriptions are practical messages or memorials. Viking-Age runestones mostly honoured the dead, and some, like Harald's at Jelling, proclaimed the new faith.^{[38, 52–53]}

Holy days

Winter Nights · vetrnætr

Start of winter in the Norse year (autumn)

Sagas describe a sacrifice at the start of winter for a good season, and private household offerings around this time to the dísir, female guardian spirits, and to the elves.^[54]

Yule · jól

Midwinter (December–January)

A midwinter feast of ale and sacrifice that, by Snorri's account, once lasted three days. Snorri's saga credits the Christian king Haakon the Good with moving it to coincide with Christmas by law; Yule became a name for Christmas itself.^[55]

Uppsala festival

Every nine years (season uncertain)

Adam of Bremen describes a festival for all Swedes every ninth year, at which male animals and humans were hanged in a grove beside the temple. Scholars debate how much is eyewitness report and how much Christian stereotype.^[56]

People

Scripture

Germania

c. 98 CE

A short Latin study of the Germanic tribes by the Roman historian Tacitus, and the earliest substantial account of their religion: sacred groves, sacrifices to gods given Roman names, and the procession of the earth goddess Nerthus. He drew on reports and older books.^[64]

Poetic Edda · Eddukvæði

manuscript c. 1270

Mythological and heroic poems preserved mainly in the Codex Regius, an Icelandic manuscript of about 1270. The anonymous poems are older, though how much older is disputed. They include Völuspá, from creation to Ragnarök, and Hávamál, wisdom ascribed to Odin.^[65]

Prose Edda · Snorra Edda

c. 1220s

Snorri Sturluson's handbook for poets, written in Iceland in the 1220s. Its first part retells the myths from creation to Ragnarök, the fullest account of Norse myth, but its Christian author frames the gods with a prologue drawn from church learning.^[66]

Deeds of the Bishops of Hamburg · Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum

c. 1075

Adam of Bremen's church history. Its fourth book, on the northern lands, gives the only detailed description of the temple and nine-yearly sacrifices at Uppsala, written while many Swedes still kept the old religion. Adam relied on informants.^[67]

Places

Gamla Uppsala

SWE

Political and religious centre of the early Svear kingdom, with great mounds of the 6th and 7th centuries. Adam of Bremen placed his golden temple here; excavations have not confirmed it, though finds of Thor's-hammer amulets show the old religion was practised.^[68]

Jelling

DNK · UNESCO World Heritage, 1994

Royal seat of Gorm and his son Harald Bluetooth, now a World Heritage site. Two great mounds, Gorm's runestone for Queen Thyra, Harald's stone of about 965 with Scandinavia's oldest image of Christ, and the church mark the passage from paganism to Christianity.^[69]

Sutton Hoo

GBR

Anglo-Saxon burial ground in Suffolk where, in 1939, excavators found the imprint of a 27-metre ship holding the richest early medieval grave in Europe, probably a king's of the early 7th century; Raedwald of East Anglia is the favoured candidate.^[70]

Þingvellir

ISL · UNESCO World Heritage, 2004

Open-air meeting place of Iceland's assembly, the Althing, from about 930. Here in 999 or 1000, by Ari's account, the still-pagan lawspeaker Thorgeir ruled that all Icelanders should share one law and be baptised.^[71]

Where it spread

How we know

Written down by Christians

The richest sources, the Eddas and sagas, survive in Icelandic manuscripts of the 12th to 14th centuries, written about two centuries after the conversion by people who could not have held the myths sacred. Snorri set the gods within a Christian prologue, and Völuspá shows Christian influence. Sagas mix history with fiction and must be judged one by one, so scholars treat detailed myths as late literary versions.^[72]

Outsiders' reports

Earlier texts come from outside. Tacitus gave Germanic gods Roman names. Adam of Bremen never went to Sweden, and his account of Uppsala is hotly debated: some scholars trust his eyewitness informant, others see Christian stereotypes of paganism, perhaps even an echo of the biblical temple of Solomon. Ibn Fadlan saw a single Rus funeral on the Volga, far from Scandinavia.^{[28, 73–74]}

Archaeology, runes and names

Finds escape the filter of later writers but are hard to read: a ship grave may express belief in a journey or simply rank. Place-names show which gods were honoured where, though names travelled with settlers and do not prove a cult on the spot. The great temples the texts lead us to expect have mostly not appeared, which keeps the debate about cult buildings open.^{[47, 51, 75]}

Common misconceptions

Glossary

Blót · blót

Sacrifice: an offering of animals, food or drink to gods or spirits, usually followed by a shared feast.^[78]

Hörgr · hǫrgr

A cairn or heap of stones used as an altar, often on open ground; the word was sometimes used for a roofed shrine.^[79]

Hof · hof

The saga word for a temple or cult building; it seems to belong to the later pagan period, and what such buildings looked like is debated.^[80]

Vé · vé

A consecrated place or shrine, found in place-names such as Odense, Odin's shrine.^[81]

Völva · vǫlva

A seeress who foretold the future in a trance, often holding a staff; a respected figure consulted in times of trouble.^[82]

Seiðr · seiðr

Trance magic used for prophecy and influence, linked in myth with Freyja and the Vanir and regarded as disreputable, even unmanly, for men.^[83]

Rune · rún

A letter of the alphabet used by Germanic peoples from the early centuries CE for inscriptions on objects and stones.^[84]

Interpretatio Romana

The Roman habit of calling foreign gods by Roman names, as when Tacitus called the Germanic Wodan Mercury.^[85]