Norse Religion

Norse religion grew out of the older beliefs of the Germanic peoples of northern Europe. Roman writers such as Tacitus, at the end of the first century CE, already described Germanic tribes honouring gods whom they compared to Mercury, Hercules and Mars, and gods with names related to Odin, Thor and Týr appear among the Anglo-Saxons and the continental Germans. By the Viking Age, roughly 750 to 1100, Scandinavians carried their religion across a vast area, from Dublin and Normandy to Iceland, Greenland and the rivers of Russia.

There was no church, no fixed creed and no holy book. Religion was woven into everyday life: into the household, the farm, the law assembly and the chieftain’s hall. It was also local. A farmer in western Norway, a trader in Birka and a settler in Iceland might honour different gods in different ways, and practice certainly changed over the six centuries this page covers.

The great difficulty for historians is the sources. The Vikings wrote little except short runic inscriptions. The rich mythology that readers know today comes mostly from Iceland, written down in the thirteenth century, two hundred years and more after the island became Christian. Snorri Sturluson’s Prose Edda, composed around 1220, was a handbook for poets, and he framed the gods as ancient human kings mistaken for deities. The poems of the Poetic Edda, preserved in a manuscript of around 1270, are older in origin, but how much older is debated. Outside observers, from Ibn Fadlan to Adam of Bremen, had their own purposes. Archaeology supplies firmer evidence, but it rarely explains what people meant by what they did.

Norse poems describe a cosmos of several worlds held together by Yggdrasil, a great ash tree. Humans live in Midgard, the gods in Asgard, and giants, elves, dwarfs and the dead each have their own realms. The gods belong to two families, the Æsir, led by Odin, and the Vanir, gods of fertility such as Njörðr, Freyr and Freyja, who in the myths fought a war and then made peace by exchanging hostages.

The gods are powerful but not all-knowing or eternal. Odin seeks wisdom at great cost, giving an eye for a drink from the well of Mímir and, in the poem Hávamál, hanging for nine nights on the tree to win the runes. Thor guards the world against the giants, the forces of chaos. The texts tell how the beloved god Baldr is killed through Loki’s scheming, a loss that foreshadows Ragnarök, the final battle in which gods and giants destroy one another and the world sinks into the sea, before a new earth rises green from the waters.

The poems also tell how the world began. In the beginning there was only Ginnungagap, a yawning void between realms of ice and fire. From their meeting came the giant Ymir, whom Odin and his brothers killed, shaping the earth from his flesh, the sea from his blood and the sky from his skull. The gods then made the first humans, Ask and Embla, from two pieces of driftwood. Over gods and humans alike stood fate, spun by the Norns, three female beings who sit by the well at the root of Yggdrasil. Even the gods cannot escape what is fated, and the myths give courage and honour, not victory, as the measure of a life.

Ideas about death were varied. The poems speak of Valhalla, Odin’s hall for chosen warriors, and of Freyja’s Fólkvangr, but also of Hel, the realm where most of the dead went, and of the dead living on in their burial mounds. Alongside the great gods, people honoured the landvættir, the spirits of the land, the elves and the female guardian spirits called dísir, beings who mattered more in daily life than the myths might suggest.

The heart of worship was the blót, a sacrificial feast. Animals, above all horses, cattle and pigs, were slaughtered, the meat was cooked and shared, and the gathering drank toasts to the gods for good harvests, peace and victory. The chieftain or king usually led the rite, and in Iceland the local leader called a goði combined religious and political authority. Archaeologists have found the remains of such feasts at halls like Hofstaðir in Iceland and at long-lived cult buildings like the one at Uppåkra in southern Sweden.

Worship also took place outdoors, at groves, springs, stones and lakes, where people deposited weapons, jewellery and other gifts. The most famous description of a temple, Adam of Bremen’s account of Uppsala, written around 1075, tells of a golden building with images of Thor, Wodan and Fricco and of a great festival every nine years with sacrifices of animals and humans. Adam never visited Uppsala and relied on informants; many historians treat his account as exaggerated, and excavations have found large halls but no certain trace of the temple he describes. Human sacrifice is mentioned in several written sources and may be indicated by some burials, but its scale is debated.

Funerals were a major rite. The dead were cremated or buried, sometimes in ships, with food, animals, tools and weapons. Ibn Fadlan’s account of a Rus chieftain’s funeral on the Volga in 922, which includes the killing of an enslaved woman, is a rare eyewitness report, though written by an outsider who did not speak the language.

Christianity reached Scandinavia through missionaries, trade and royal politics. In Denmark King Harald Bluetooth accepted baptism around 965. In Norway Olaf Tryggvason and later Olaf Haraldsson, who died in battle at Stiklestad in 1030 and was soon venerated as a saint, imposed the new faith, often by force. In Iceland the Althing, facing division and pressure from Norway, agreed in 1000 to accept Christianity after the pagan lawspeaker Þorgeir ruled for it; private sacrifice was at first still allowed. Sweden converted more slowly, and the old cult at Uppsala probably ended in the late eleventh or early twelfth century.

The change was gradual. Graves of the tenth century mix pagan and Christian objects, and a famous mould from Denmark could cast both hammers and crosses. Conversion brought writing, churches and links with Latin Europe, and it was Christian Icelanders who preserved the myths, out of pride in their past and for the art of poetry.

The old gods survive in many ways. In English, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday carry the names of Týr, Woden, Thor and Frigg, and Scandinavian place names still recall gods and sanctuaries. Yule, once a pagan midwinter feast, became the Scandinavian word for Christmas. From the seventeenth century, scholars in Denmark and Sweden rediscovered the Icelandic manuscripts, and in the nineteenth century the Norse gods became symbols of national romanticism across northern Europe. The myths inspired Wagner, Tolkien, comics and films. In Iceland and elsewhere, modern revivalists called Ásatrú or Heathens honour the Norse gods today, drawing on the sources in their own ways.