Germanic Peoples

The earliest sustained description of Germanic religion is the Germania of Tacitus, written around the end of the first century of the common era by a man who had not been there. It reports peoples who worship in groves rather than temples, who think it beneath the gods to confine them within walls or to represent them in human likeness, who cast lots with marked twigs and read the flight and calls of birds, and who keep sacred horses at public expense. It names a goddess Nerthus, carried in a covered wagon through the country in a season of peace, whose attendants are drowned when the circuit is done.

Tacitus is also writing a moral tract. The simplicity, chastity and courage he ascribes to the Germani are a rebuke aimed at Rome, so the ethnography and the argument cannot be separated, and that has to be held in mind wherever the Germania is the only witness.

What can be checked against other evidence broadly holds. Archaeology confirms the sacred groves and the deposits of weapons in bogs and lakes, and the divine names Tacitus renders in Latin appear elsewhere in Germanic form: his Mercury is Wodan, his Mars Tiwaz, his Hercules Thunraz. Those three are the gods whose names the Germanic weekday names still carry.

Germanic is a linguistic category before it is anything else. Donald Ringe's reconstruction traces the descent from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic and then to the attested branches, and the peoples the atlas files under this heading, Goths, Vandals, Franks, Saxons, Lombards, Angles, Frisians and the Scandinavians, are grouped by that descent rather than by any shared polity or any shared cult.

The religious inheritance shows the same pattern of relation without unity. A common stock lies behind Old Norse Odin, Old English Woden and Old High German Wodan, and behind Thor, Thunor and Donar, but the traditions had already diverged for centuries before any of them was written down. Philip Shaw's work on Eostre and the matron cults shows how much of what survives is local, is female, and does not fit the Norse pattern that later readers project backwards onto it.

Conversion came piecemeal across roughly seven centuries, from the Gothic mission of Ulfilas in the fourth century to the Scandinavian kingdoms in the tenth and eleventh, and its manner ranged from persuasion to conquest. Because the Norse were converted last and wrote most, Norse mythology has come to stand for the whole of Germanic religion. It is the best documented branch, not the parent of the others.