Children of Ash and Elm

by Neil Price;

  These places and rituals could be activated in different ways at various points in the life course, and also by different sorts of intermediaries between everyday folk and the Others. The Vikings had ritual specialists (for want of a better word) who devoted themselves to opening very particular channels of communication—with the gods in general, or one god in particular; with the elves; with the dísir; and more. They also had many different kinds of sorcery and magic—and people to practise them—for more personal ends that could be achieved in negotiation with things beyond the human.

  For the Vikings, meeting the Others was probably an uncertain or unsettling experience, but it was not an unfamiliar one. In order to understand them, these are encounters we too must entertain.

  The closest equivalent to ‘religion’ found in Old Norse is forn siðr, ‘the old ways’, explicitly contrasting with the new ones brought by the agency of the later Christian kings. However, this is not a formal term for something discrete, but more a way of distinguishing something from its opposite. What did these old ways really entail? Regardless of sectarian differences, many of the world faiths today are at least to some degree religions of the book (in the broadest sense of sacred writings), with orthodoxies and more-or-less rigid rules of behaviour that usually embody concepts of obedience and worship. The latter is important because it also implies unreserved approval of the god(s). The Vikings would have recognised none of this. What we would now isolate as religion was then simply another dimension of daily life, inextricably bound up with every other aspect of existence. This included the gods themselves, who were simply there as an unchanging part of the worlds. Granted, one might need to propitiate them to keep on their good side (and on their terms), but you did not have to like them in the process.

  A concept that I find perfectly captures the essence of Norse spirituality is that of a ‘religiolect’. Just as a dialect encodes a local variant of speech, this term does the same for religion, combining belief and practice in a discrete package that could be activated in particular places or social situations. Specific religiolects might be linked to an ethnic group, the followers of an individual, or a set of contextual circumstances in which specific kinds of spiritual expression were manifested or required. Thus, the main specialist in this field talks of religiolects of the hall, of the farm, of islands, of the coast. One can imagine something similar connected to war, fertility, textile work, or even the linear, time-limited activity-world of long-distance traders. To take a Swedish ethnic example, the Svear and the Götar peoples were probably also different in this respect, and each king’s retinue probably had its own codes of ritual behaviour.

  A religiolect constitutes difference not only in ritual practices, but also potentially in their underlying ethics and dogma. These variations also cut across other aspects of society, including status or sex, the outdoors or the domestic space, and so on. Religiolects are not necessarily exclusive, but can also be—as the term implies—a means of communication. Perhaps they were in play at the frontiers of belief, for example between the Norse and the Sámi. They capture the core of diversity in the Viking mental landscape.

  There is a curious sense in which the very notion of a Norse religion may actually be in part a Christian product. This seems contradictory at first, but has parallels in other cultures where incoming missionaries attempted to supplant traditional beliefs with a regulated church. Something codified, organised, and effectively systemic (everything Norse belief was not) is much easier to oppose, because it is a coherent target and might be suppressed as a single entity. And if this was not already there, then it could be formed in that image. This was the beginning of the process that eventually turned the living, organic story-world of the North into ‘the Norse myths’—a kind of pagan scripture that never actually existed. It does not help that the Christians also seem to have misunderstood much of what they encountered and, in turn, incorporated their misconceptions into the retrospective pagan orthodoxy they created.

  To truly understand the spiritual universe of the Viking Age, it is necessary to dig beneath those later accretions to reach the original strata of belief and practice.

  It can be difficult to approach a spiritual view of things that does not prioritise god(s). Many Christians today still acknowledge saints and their powers of intercession, the very pious might believe in angels as literal truth, and a minority of those especially well versed in the texts might go further to the many other inhabitants of heaven (and the other place) that are in part a product of complicated medieval ecclesiastical hierarchies. However, none of these believers would place any other beings more prominently in human affairs than God.

  The Vikings did not ignore their gods, by any means, and they certainly had rituals of acknowledgement and need, ‘coming to terms’ with them. This could be an ad hoc and private process that depended on the individual, like saying a silent prayer. At the level of the body politic, however, there were also ‘cultic structures’ (the neutral-sounding term archaeologists use to avoid saying ‘temple’) where such rites were enacted, and ritual specialists to assist. Again, terminology is found wanting because these men and women—especially women—were not ‘priests’ but instead prominent members of the community whose abilities or connections meant they took on roles as spiritual intermediaries in addition to, or because of, their general social standing.

  The ‘new elites’, whose rise to power in the fifth and sixth centuries in part began the long trajectory of social change that culminated in the Viking Age, had a clearly articulated ideology that served to legitimise their position. One key component of this was their claim of genealogical descent from Odin, Freyr, and the rest. The divine right of kings used to be a literal notion, and it was not confined to Christian monarchs. At the highest level, these sacral kings were themselves agents in the two-way communications with the other worlds, and in some circumstances might personally take on transubstantiated aspects of the gods. In times of dire need and popular unrest—after a succession of failed harvests, for example—the kings might also find themselves being sacrificed by the popular assemblies, given as offerings to their erstwhile patrons in Asgard.

  In everyday life, however, people were more concerned with getting along with the invisible population of spirits and nature-beings. All these creatures also required placation, even a form of spiritual bribery. These were transactional, pragmatic relations enacted in a numinous landscape of otherworldly power through which every Viking-Age person had to make their way. The special cultic buildings and constructions for the gods could also serve as portals of access to this teeming world, but there were special festivals dedicated to their service (such as the álfa- and dísablót), as well as many rituals held in the open air. This, of course, was where these beings lived, and at times it was only polite to come to them.

  What did these cult sites look like, and what happened inside them? The written sources preserve the term hörgr, which seems to describe small buildings or enclosures where rituals were performed to the gods. Excavations over the years at high-status manorial residences—the great hall complexes—have several times revealed square structures adjacent to the main building and often bounded by a fence. They are clearly not domestic dwellings, and they are often either very clean (and thus obviously kept that way) or else saturated with buried offerings of various kinds. They have been found in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, and the list of sites is growing all the time. The spatial proximity of these special buildings to the great halls, inside the overall site boundary but also within their own enclosures, almost suggests a function as ‘private chapels’ of a kind more familiar from the Christian aristocracies. This does not mean the populace had nowhere to commune with the powers, but it would serve to reinforce the militarised hierarchies on which these societies were built, and also to emphasise the rulers’ claims of a personal relationship with the gods—the lord needs to talk with All-Father alone.

  One of these sites is truly extraord
inary, not least for its longevity of occupation and degree of preservation. At Uppåkra, in the southern Swedish province of Skåne (which in the Viking Age was part of Denmark), a massive settlement has been excavated that seems to have been a proto-urban power centre and an immediate precursor to what would later become Lund (itself a sacral place-name). Alongside the halls and other structures was a rectangular building that was very cramped inside but also very tall—its roof-bearing interior posts extended for metres into the ground and were essentially tree trunks. The structure almost certainly had either a second floor or perhaps a tower-like projection in the centre, reminiscent of the multiple tiers of the Christian stave churches that still survive in Norway (this may not be coincidental). It had three doors, a functionally unnecessary number that implies they had different purposes or social restrictions; one of them also had a porch-like extension.

  The roof-posts and walls of the Uppåkra building were apparently covered in gold foils; more than two hundred of them were found in the postholes and along the wall lines. They would have glittered in the dark, catching the light of the massive central fireplace. It would have been very hot. Inside the main room an iron ‘oath-ring’ was found, known from written sources as the object on which the most sacred vows were sworn; a second example was recovered outside the building. Buried in the floor was a glass bowl imported from the Black Sea, fragments of several more, and many pieces of gold objects and jewellery, all apparently deposited as offerings during the lifetime of the building. Next to the hearth was a bronze and silver beaker bound in bands of decorated gold—an object of great ritual power. Not only were all these things left there when the structure was finally abandoned, but nobody ever subsequently dared to steal them. The Uppåkra ‘temple’ (for once the word may be justified) was flanked to the north and south by weapon offerings—mainly broken spears and shields—and other sacrificial deposits that included human remains. Situated at the core of the Uppåkra complex, in a sense functioning also as a reception room like the central chamber of the hall, the cult building had an extraordinary lifespan: its first construction phases date to the third century CE, it went through at least six rebuilds on the same spot, and then continued in use until the Viking Age.

  Some ostensibly secular buildings also seem to have had religious purposes, especially the great halls of the leading families. There is now a growing consensus that major landowners and local chieftains may themselves have played a role in cultic ritual, and that the feasting halls of their estates could on occasion host sacrifices and other ceremonies. The Old Norse word for such places was hof, a term that in the modern Scandinavian languages has come to mean a royal court. We find it in Viking-Age place-names such as Hofstaðir in Iceland, where evidence was found for animal offerings. This integration of the hall and ‘temple’ functions seems to have become the norm during the Viking period, as the formerly separated ‘private chapels’ effectively merged with the residences of the elites.

  It may have been something like these buildings, combined with the sheer visual force of Uppåkra, that Adam of Bremen had in mind when he wrote what has become one of the most famous descriptions of the Viking Age. This is the same Adam who wrote of polygyny among the Scandinavians, but his gift to Viking scholars rests largely on another passage in the same work. Adam was a cleric in the service of Archbishop Adalbert of Hamburg; around 1070, while working at the monastery of Bremen in northern Germany, he compiled an official history of the archdiocese, which included its missionary activities in the North. He had many sources, but one of them was the Danish king Svein Ástríðarsson, who passed on first-hand details. It is uncertain to what degree he, or Adam, had a Christian agenda of anti-pagan propaganda. The account includes a lengthy description of the great temple at Uppsala, a huge building hung about with golden chains and containing wooden idols:

  That folk [the Svear] has a very famous temple called Ubsola, situated not far from the city of Sictona. In this temple, entirely decked out in gold, the people worship the statues of three gods in such wise that the mightiest of them, Thor, occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber; Wodan and Fricco have places on either side. The significance of these gods is as follows: Thor, they say, presides over the air, which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops. The other, Wodan—that is, the Furious—carries on war and imparts to man strength against his enemies. The third is Fricco, who bestows peace and pleasure on mortals. His likeness, too, they fashion with an immense phallus. But Wodan they chisel armed, as our people are wont to represent Mars. Thor with his sceptre apparently resembles Jove. The people also worship heroes made gods, whom they endow with immortality because of their remarkable exploits, as one reads in the Vita of Saint Ansgar they did in the case of King Eric.

  He also includes a detail relating to the notion of the halls as temples, in that the Latin word he uses for the room where the rituals took place is triclinium, ordinarily the term for the dining chamber of a house—which may have been precisely what he meant.

  It is a lengthy treatment in which he also goes on to detail an evergreen tree with great spreading branches, divinatory human sacrifice in a holy well, and a sacred grove. Adam also describes the ritual calendar of Uppsala and a natural ‘theatre’ surrounded by ‘mountains’ where the rites were held. The latter may correlate to the plain enclosed by the sweeping curve of the cemetery ridge on which the royal burial mounds were raised—not quite mountains, but nonetheless towering over the surroundings. Adam also mentions that all this was accompanied by festivities so obscene that “it is best to pass over them in silence” (damn).

  An entire scholarly industry has tried to parse Adam’s text over the years, with varying degrees of credulity and dismissal, but in recent decades the parallels between what he describes and archaeologists’ discoveries are growing ever closer. Even the rituals that so worried him seem remarkably like the erotic magic and sexual celebrations that attend gods such as Freyja and Freyr, which would have been enough to send any Christian off to confession. The current feeling is that his account can be trusted in broad terms, although some scholars still strongly disagree. Adam’s description also has similarities with Thietmar of Merseburg’s account of tenth-century blood sacrifices on an even larger scale at Lejre, the Danish counterpart to Uppsala. These were not isolated phenomena.

  In the Old Norse texts, we also find the vé, a kind of sanctuary encountered in place-names that appears to have left archaeological traces. At Lilla Ullevi (the ‘Little vé of Ull’) in Swedish Uppland, a rectangular, curbed packing of stones has been found with two linear stone projections that appear to form a kind of forecourt, the whole situated at the edge of a prominent hill. There is evidence for post-built platforms and standing pillars around it, making a further line of enclosure and separation. Around these structures were ritual depositions of buried objects—one assumes gifts to the powers—in the form of weapons, strike-a-lights, and more than sixty amulet rings. These offerings appear to have been made at the very start of the Viking period, with activities on the site stretching back at least a century before that.

  A second such Swedish sanctuary has been excavated at Götavi (the ‘Gods’ vé’) in Närke, with even more remarkable features. The name also implies it had a wider spiritual clientele than the sites named after only a single deity—perhaps, like the Pantheon in Rome, a ‘temple’ of all the Aesir? In the middle of an open and rather marshy plain, nine parallel lines of substantial stone packings had been laid out and then buried beneath a layer of clay. The resulting rectangular construction appears to have had a slightly bowl-shaped depression at the centre and been bounded by a fence. Chemical analyses show that a great deal of blood had been spilled within the enclosure, especially near one end, where great posts had been erected. A connection to animal (and perhaps human) sacrifice seems clear. Around the perimeter of the clay platform, over a long period of time, many fires had been lit. Whatever exactly happened inside
the enclosure would have been screened by a wall of smoke, at the same time as the ongoing rituals would have been visible from a considerable distance. This apparent intention to separate the ‘initiated’ (or whatever one should call them) from a wider group is also reflected in the site’s situation, as the clay platform would have essentially formed an island in the boggy ground—not a true swamp, by any means, but nonetheless terrain treacherous enough to make access difficult, a place to carefully watch one’s feet.

  14. Meeting the gods. The open-air ritual site at Lilla Ullevi, Uppland, Sweden. Offerings were dug down into the ground, both in front of the stone platform and around its sides; posts stood beside it. A typically enigmatic ‘cult site’ from the late Iron Age. Photo by Max Marcus / Hawkeye, used by kind permission.

  Unlike Lilla Ullevi, the sanctuary at Götavi is astonishingly late in date, with indications that it was still in use during the eleventh century when, for example, Denmark had already been Christian for more than a century. This would seem to bear out the many literary traditions (and Adam of Bremen) depicting Sweden as resistant to Christian influence for much longer than the rest of Scandinavia.

  The nine stone packings at Götavi also raise an important and recurring component of the Viking mind: the sacred number. Nine—and its square root, three—appears numerous times in the mythological tales of the Norse. The sea-deities Aegir and Rán have nine daughters, the spirits of the waves; Heimdall has nine mothers; the giant Baugi has nine thralls; the beautiful Menglod has nine attendants, while her mother, Gróa, protects her with nine charms; Odin has eighteen spells—twice nine; Thrivaldi, another giant who is slain by Thor, has nine heads. Freyr waits for his lover and later wife, Gerthr, for nine nights, the same length of time that Odin hangs on the tree in self-sacrifice, and sweats between the fires in Grímnir’s Sayings, and makes his long ride to Hel on Sleipnir. In Valhöll, on every ninth night eight rings drop from the great gold ring, Draupnir (thus making nine in all), the source of Odin’s wealth. The Muspell princess Laegjárn has a chest that must be closed with nine locks, one by one. The list goes on and on, and is replicated in the human world of Midgard: according to Adam, the great sacrifices at Uppsala last for nine days and are held every nine years, and nine creatures of each kind are killed. (In assessing the veracity of Adam’s text, by the way, one might ask how he could have invented just that little detail to fit so well with a wider picture he could not have known about.)