Anglo-Saxon Paganism

David Wilson is an archaeologist, and this academic book, published by Routledge, surveys what is actually known about pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon religion from archaeological and limited textual evidence, since almost no contemporary written record of Anglo-Saxon paganism survives from practitioners themselves. Its strength is methodological honesty, Wilson works carefully from burial evidence, place names and scattered later references while being explicit about how much of Anglo-Saxon pagan belief and practice remains genuinely unknown or reconstructed by inference. Its limit is exactly that same evidentiary gap, since the primary sources are so sparse, much of the book's picture is necessarily more tentative than a religion with surviving scripture or contemporary written testimony would allow.