A Christian Bishop's Secondhand Account

Adam of Bremen never visited Uppsala himself. He compiled his account from informants, including, by his own claim, a Christian eyewitness who had reportedly counted seventy-two bodies hung in the grove, and he wrote as a cleric of the archdiocese responsible for missionary efforts in Scandinavia, with an obvious interest in portraying the paganism his church was working to displace as both impressively organized and appropriately shocking to a Christian readership. Modern historians treat his account, accordingly, as valuable but not straightforwardly reliable, likely combining genuine informant testimony about a real and significant cult site with rhetorical elaboration suited to Adam's own purposes, and archaeological work at Gamla Uppsala has confirmed the site's importance as a major cult and burial center across the Iron Age and Viking Age without being able to confirm every specific of Adam's description.

Whatever the precise historical accuracy of the nine-year cycle and the exact numbers involved, Adam's account remains the fullest surviving description of any Norse pagan sacrificial festival, and its combination of periodic timing, animal and reportedly human sacrifice, and a dedicated sacred grove attached to a major temple complex is treated by scholars of Norse religion as broadly consistent with what other, more fragmentary sources suggest about how the largest Scandinavian cult centers conducted their most important collective rites.