Gamla Uppsala

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On a flat plain north of the river, where the land lifts only enough to catch the eye, three grass-covered mounds stand in a row against the sky. Each is the height of a house and broad enough to seat a hall on its crown; between them and a little apart rises a fourth, flatter rise where men once gathered to make law and acclaim kings. A small stone church, white and medieval, sits at the eastern end of the line, its tower no taller than the barrows it keeps company with. The visitor who climbs the easternmost mound and looks back along the three of them is standing on the burnt bones of kings, at the place that pre-Christian Sweden held as the center of the world.

This is Gamla Uppsala — Old Uppsala — the seat of the kings of the Svear and, by the report of a medieval churchman who never saw it, the site of a temple decked entirely in gold where the gods of the North were worshipped with the hanging of men and beasts in a sacred grove.

The seat of the Svear

The plain was a place of power long before any text names it. The three great barrows, the Kungshögar or royal mounds, were raised in the fifth and sixth centuries, in the period Swedish archaeologists call the Vendel age, roughly 550 to 625 for the latest of them. Each was built over a cremation burned at extraordinary heat, the ash and bone then sealed under cobblestones, gravel, sand, and a skin of turf. When the eastern mound was opened in 1846 the excavator Bror Emil Hildebrand found a clay pot of burnt bone amid melted gold, decorated bronze panels, glass beakers, gaming pieces, and combs — and judged the dead to have been a woman, or a young man and a woman together. The western mound, opened in 1874, gave up the remains of a warrior of the highest rank, buried with a Frankish sword inlaid with gold and garnet and with cameos carried from the eastern Mediterranean. These were the graves of people who commanded distance: trade and tribute reached Uppsala from Francia and from the world beyond the Black Sea.

Who lay in them, no inscription says. Later Swedish tradition assigned the mounds to named kings of the Yngling line — Aun, Egil, and Adils, the Ongentheow and Eadgils whose shadows fall across the Old English poem Beowulf — and the identification is folklore rather than fact, useful as a memory of how the place was understood. The Ynglings were held to be the oldest of the royal houses of Scandinavia, and their descent ran, in the genealogies the Icelanders preserved, back to a god. Snorri Sturluson, writing his Ynglinga saga in Iceland around 1230, places the god Freyr — lord of fair weather, harvest, and the wealth of kings — as a ruler at Uppsala under the name Yngvi, the founder from whom the dynasty took its name and its luck. In the saga’s telling Freyr is buried in a mound and his death concealed so that the offerings, and the good seasons they bought, would not cease. The story is euhemerism, a god made into an ancestral king by a Christian author two centuries after the conversion, and it should be read as such. But it preserves the central fact of the site as the pagan Swedes held it: that the royal power at Uppsala and the cult of the gods were one thing, and that the kingship was sacral, bound to the favor of Freyr and the gods beside him.

The plain held more than mounds. Excavations on the terraces have found the post-holes of a great hall raised on a built platform overlooking the barrows — a building perhaps fifty meters long, of the kind from which a king feasted his men and received the gods’ luck on the people’s behalf. Such halls were the engine of early Scandinavian kingship: the place where a lord bound warriors to himself with gifts and drink, where oaths were sworn and the dead toasted, where the sacral and the political were not yet separate functions. To raise a hall on a platform above the royal dead was to make the building a statement in the landscape — the living king set above his buried ancestors, the seat of present power overlooking the source of its legitimacy. Burning bone, melted gold, imported swords, a hall on a height: the archaeology of the plain describes a dynasty that understood itself as standing where the human and the divine drew close. And in 2012 and 2013, when a new railway forced rescue excavation across the fields, archaeologists uncovered something no one had predicted: two immense rows of post-holes, the sockets of wooden columns that had once stood in lines across the landscape. One row ran north to south for nearly a kilometer; another, some five hundred meters long, turned to follow a burial ground. One line held an estimated 144 posts, set five or six meters apart. The columns dated to the fifth century AD — the largest Iron Age construction known in Sweden, a monumental avenue framing the approach to the mounds. What ritual it staged is unknown. That it was built to be walked, and to overwhelm the walker, is plain in the ground.

The three Kungshögar (royal mounds), raised over cremated kings of the Svear in the fifth and sixth centuries, with the medieval church at the line’s end. Photograph by Szilas, public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The gold temple and the grove

The famous account of Uppsala comes from a man who never went there. Around 1075 the cleric Adam of Bremen, writing a history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen, the Gesta Hammaburgensis ecclesiae pontificum, devoted a passage of his fourth book to the Swedes and their cult. He worked from informants — Danish report, the testimony of the Danish king Svein Estridsson, and whatever reached him at second hand — and he wrote as a churchman describing the rites of a people his archbishopric meant to convert. The result is the single most detailed description of a Norse cult center in any source, and the most disputed.

Adam describes a temple at Uppsala “entirely decked out in gold,” set in a place ringed by hills like an amphitheater, a golden chain hung about its gables. Inside stood the images of three gods on a triple throne. “The people worship the statues of three gods,” Adam writes, “in such wise that the mightiest of them, Thor, occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber; Wodan and Frikko have places on either side.” Thor in the center governed the sky — thunder, weather, the crops — and bore a scepter Adam likened to a Roman Jove’s. Odin, whose name Adam glossed as “fury,” stood armored for war. Freyr, whom Adam calls Frikko, was carved with an immense erect phallus and gave peace and pleasure to mortals; to him men sacrificed at weddings, to Odin in war, to Thor in famine and plague. Each god had his priests.

Then the part that horrified Adam. Every nine years, he reports, a great festival drew people from all the provinces of Sweden, and none might stay away; even Christians had to buy their exemption. Over nine days a sacrifice was made of nine males of every living kind — men among them, with horses and dogs — and the blood was offered to placate the gods. The bodies were hung in the trees of a grove beside the temple, a grove so holy that every tree in it was reckoned divine from the death and rot that touched it. Adam’s informant, he says, had been told by a Christian who saw it that seventy-two bodies hung there together. The chants sung over the sacrifices Adam will not record: they were, he writes, manifold and unseemly, and better passed over in silence. Nearby stood a great evergreen tree whose species no one knew, and a well into which a living man was plunged — and if he did not surface, the people’s wish was granted.

Within the frame the Swedes themselves kept, the rite had a logic that needs no apology. The gods who gave fair seasons, victory, and increase had to be fed, and the greatest gifts purchased the greatest favor; the nine-year cycle and the nine victims of every kind set the offering on the scale of the whole people, not a single farmstead. Blood given placated; the hung bodies, rotting in the grove, sanctified the trees that held them, so that the wood itself became holy ground. The man plunged in the well was a question put to the gods, his sinking or surfacing their answer. None of this is incoherent. It is a cult of exchange between the people and powers they held to be real and present, scaled to the importance of what was asked. That a churchman found it monstrous is a fact about the churchman as much as the rite.

Whether any of this is true has been argued for more than three centuries, and the argument is not settled. The case against Adam is strong. He never visited; he wrote at a remove, in a polemical genre, with reason to make the heathen lurid. Some scholars read the whole temple as a literary construction — Henrik Janson has argued the passage reflects the church politics of Adam’s own day more than the religion of the Swedes, and noted that more than a thousand Christian rune-stones show Christianity already rooted in Sweden before Adam set pen to parchment. The well, the evergreen tree, and the temple form a tidy cosmic image — tree, water, sanctuary — that recurs as a learned topos and may owe as much to Adam’s reading as to Uppsala’s ground. His numbers are suspiciously round; the very gold may be rhetorical.

And yet the case for a cult center is not in doubt, only the building Adam drew. Excavation under and around the medieval church has turned up post-holes, some of them taken in the twentieth century for a temple beneath the church — though Neil Price and Magnus Alkarp showed in 2005 that these belong to several phases of construction and prove no single great hall on that spot. What the ground does show is unambiguous in outline: a monumental royal hall, the colossal post-rows, and ritual deposits of animal and, in places, human remains across the site. Whatever stood at Uppsala, it was a place where kingship and cult met and where blood was offered. Adam’s gold temple may be a churchman’s nightmare of that place. It is not an invention from nothing.

The straw bed and the burning hall

The cult outlasted the Vikings’ first century of raiding, but not by long. Through the eleventh century the Swedish kingship moved by degrees toward the new faith, and Uppsala became the ground on which the two religions met head-on. The Icelandic sources remember the crisis in a single vivid episode. King Inge the Elder, a Christian, refused to perform the sacrifices the people demanded at Uppsala. For this he was driven from the kingdom, and the assembly raised in his place his pagan kinsman, called Blot-Sweyn — Sweyn-of-the-sacrifice — on condition that the old rites continue. After three years Inge returned, surrounded Sweyn’s hall by night with his retainers, set it alight, and killed the heathen king as he fled the fire. The story, late and shaped for effect, marks the moment the balance tipped: a Christian king who would burn a hall before he would feed the gods.

After that the place changed hands between the faiths without quite ceasing to matter. A Christian church was raised at the eastern end of the mounds, on or beside the ground the old cult had held, so that the new God took possession of the holy plain rather than abandoning it to ruin. In 1164 Gamla Uppsala became the seat of Sweden’s first archbishop — the highest church office in the realm planted, deliberately, on the most sacred site of the religion it had replaced. The grove, if it ever stood, was gone; the gods came down from their thrones. But the mounds could not be unmade, and the memory of what they meant did not die with the sacrifices.

The medieval church at Gamla Uppsala, seen from the eastern royal mound. A Christian church was raised at the line of the barrows, and in 1164 the site became Sweden’s first archbishopric. Photograph by Szilas, public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

The mounds as memory

When the archbishop’s seat moved a few kilometers south in the thirteenth century to the town that is modern Uppsala, the old plain kept the name Gamla — Old — Uppsala, and slipped into the role it has held ever since: the visible monument of Sweden’s pagan past. The mounds were too large and too storied to ignore. Antiquarians of the Swedish great-power age made them national relics; in the seventeenth century the scholar Olof Rudbeck the Elder, in his vast and fantastical Atlantica, pressed Uppsala into service as the cradle of civilization and the lost Atlantis itself, a reading long since abandoned but a measure of how much weight the place could be made to bear. Kings were entertained on the crown of the great eastern mound at a built-up flat the locals called the king’s seat. The barrows became the image of Swedish antiquity reproduced in engravings, romantic paintings, and the iconography of a nation looking for its deepest roots.

The same nineteenth and twentieth centuries that romanticized the mounds also dug into them. Hildebrand’s excavations of 1846 and 1874 put the folklore of named kings to the test of the spade and found instead the cremated rich of the Vendel age; the rescue digs of 2012 and 2013 turned the medieval temple-story against the ground and found no gold temple but a monumental avenue no source had mentioned. The pattern is the abiding one at Uppsala. The written account — Adam’s grove, Snorri’s buried god, the antiquarians’ Atlantis — keeps proposing what the place was, and the excavation keeps answering with something both less lurid and stranger: real kings really burned, a real hall, a kilometer of vanished columns.

The site is protected now and crossed by paths, with a museum at its edge and the church still in use. Practitioners of the revived Norse religion that emerged in the late twentieth century — the inclusive, polytheist movement variously called Heathenry or Asatru — number Gamla Uppsala among the places they hold sacred, and gather there. The mounds have also been claimed, as Norse sites and symbols often are, by far-right and racialist movements that read the pagan North as an ethnic inheritance; the reclamation of the same ground by Heathen communities who reject that reading is part of the place’s living contest. None of it disturbs the barrows. They keep their dead, and their silence, on the plain where the kings of the Svear once stood between the gods and the people of Sweden.

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