Viking Age

Norse paganism in the Viking Age has to be reconstructed almost entirely without its own writing. Neil Price's account works from burials, and the burials are extraordinarily varied: cremations and inhumations, ships buried whole with their equipment, chamber graves, wagon burials, graves with weapons and graves with tools, animals killed and placed with the dead, and in a number of cases people killed and placed with them. That variety is itself evidence. A tradition with a single doctrine about the fate of the dead does not produce so many different treatments of a body, so the archaeology points to a religion of local practice and household obligation rather than of unified teaching.

Other categories of evidence fill in around it. Place names record which gods were worshipped where, and the distribution is uneven in ways that mattered. Runestones record memorials and, towards the end of the period, conversions. Amulets, small figures and the remains of feasting halls indicate where ritual happened. Boat graves and the deposition of weapons in water continue older northern habits, and the great halls excavated at sites such as Lejre and Uppakra show that feasting and ritual were functions of the same building. What none of this supplies is a Viking Age statement of what any of it meant, and the atlas keeps that gap visible rather than filling it from later texts.

Nearly everything most readers know about Norse mythology comes from manuscripts produced in Iceland in the thirteenth century, roughly two hundred years after Iceland became Christian. Snorri Sturluson, who assembled the Prose Edda, was a Christian writing for poets who needed to understand the old references, and he says as much. The poems of the Poetic Edda are anonymous and undated, preserved in a single main manuscript of the same period.

John Lindow's guide is careful throughout to distinguish what a source says from when and by whom it was written, and the distinction changes how the material reads. A myth recorded by a Christian antiquarian may preserve pre Christian tradition faithfully, may be shaped by the framework the writer brought to it, or may be partly his own construction, and often there is no way to tell which. That does not make the Eddas worthless as evidence, and no serious scholarship treats them that way. It does mean that the Viking Age itself, the period when the religion was actually practised, is known largely through the writing of the religion that replaced it, and that the conversion of the Scandinavian kingdoms is therefore both the end of the period and the condition of our knowing anything about it.