Adam of Bremen

Almost everything known about Adam of Bremen comes from his own book. He arrived at the cathedral chapter of Bremen around 1066, probably from eastern Franconia in what is now southern Germany, and served there as a canon and as master of the cathedral school. Between roughly 1073 and 1076 he composed the Gesta Hammaburgensis Ecclesiae Pontificum, the Deeds of the Bishops of the Church of Hamburg, a four book Latin history of the archdiocese that held the papal commission for the mission to Scandinavia and the Baltic.

The first three books trace the archbishops from the eighth century to Adam's patron Adalbert, whose troubled reign he describes with unusual candor. The fourth book, the Descriptio insularum aquilonis, breaks from episcopal history into geography and ethnography, describing Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the islands of the north together with the customs and religion of their peoples. Adam did not travel far to gather this material. His most important informant was the Danish king Sven Estridsen, at whose court he collected traditions, and he supplemented what he heard with older written geography and mission reports. He continued to add marginal notes, the scholia, until about 1081, after which nothing more is heard of him. The work survived in the chapter library and became a foundation text for the medieval church history of the whole northern world.

The most quoted pages Adam ever wrote are a few chapters of his fourth book describing the sanctuary at Uppsala in Sweden, then still an active center of the old religion. He reports a temple ringed with a golden chain, holding images of three gods: Thor enthroned in the middle as lord of weather and crops, with Wodan the war god and Fricco the giver of peace and pleasure on either side. Every nine years, he says, a great festival drew all the Swedish peoples, and nine males of every living kind were sacrificed, their bodies hung in a grove beside the temple whose every tree was held divine.

No other medieval source describes Scandinavian public cult in anything like this detail, which is exactly why the account must be handled with care. Adam never saw Uppsala. He wrote from hearsay, in a missionary institution with every reason to dramatize the paganism it was sent to abolish, and some details echo literary models and biblical numbers. Archaeology at Gamla Uppsala has found a great hall and burial mounds but no unambiguous temple building matching his description, and historians continue to argue over how much of the picture is observation and how much construction. The atlas therefore records the Gesta as the indispensable and problematic source it is: the chief written witness to Norse religion, written by an outsider who never went north.