The Norse

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A farm stands at the head of a fjord or on the open Danish flat, its long hall raised in timber, the byre under the same roof, the high seat at the center of the floor where the lord sits between the fire and his men. Around it lie the fields a household can work, the boat drawn up on the shore, the boundary marked and remembered. When a quarrel turns to killing, the men of the district ride to a level place — a bank above a river, a rift in the rock, a field set apart — and there, before witnesses, the law is spoken aloud from memory and the matter judged. Above the hall, above the law-field, above the grave-mounds that hold the household’s dead, stand powers the farmer feeds with blood and ale: the one-eyed lord of the slain, the red-bearded thunderer who guards the fields against the giants, the bright god and goddess who give the year its increase. These are the Norse — the people who farmed and fought and sailed the northern seas in the centuries around the turn of the first millennium, and who held the world to be ordered by gods who would themselves one day die.

The word names a people defined by a language and a set of gods rather than by a single state. The Norse were the inhabitants of medieval Scandinavia — the Danes, the Swedes, the Norwegians, and the people who carried their speech and their gods abroad to Iceland, the northern isles of Britain, and the river-roads of the east. They are distinguished here from the Vikings, the seaborne raiders and traders whose expansion is one chapter of their history, and from the Icelanders, the island commonwealth whose Christian scholars would, two centuries after the conversion, write the old religion down.

A people, a language, a pantheon

There was never a Norse nation. What bound the peoples of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, and their settlements overseas, was a common speech and a common ordering of the unseen world. The language was Old Norse, the northern branch of the Germanic family, mutually intelligible across Scandinavia and spoken — with regional difference — by everyone from the Danish king to the Icelandic crofter. It was a language built for poetry, dense with compound names and able to bear the elaborate metrical forms in which the Norse stored their knowledge of gods and ancestors.

Society was organized from the household upward. The basic unit was the farm, a self-sufficient holding worked by a free householder, his family, his hired men, and the unfree — for Norse society held slaves, the thralls, taken in war and trade. Above the farm stood the chieftain, a man of wealth and following whose power rested on gifts, hospitality, and the warriors a generous hall could attract. Kingship existed but was weak and contested across much of the period; over Denmark and Norway it consolidated only in the tenth and eleventh centuries, while Iceland would have no king at all. Binding these holdings together, in place of a strong state, were three things: kinship, the dense web of obligation that made a man answerable for his relatives and avenged by them; honor, the reputation a free man defended as the ground of his standing; and the law, recited and applied at the thing, the open-air assembly that is described below.

The gods of this people fell into two families. The Aesir were the gods of the hall and the sky — sovereignty, war, and the ordering powers; the Vanir were gods of the earth and sea, of fertility and wealth and prophetic magic. The myths the later sources preserve tell of a primeval war between the two, ended not by conquest but by an exchange of hostages and a merging of the houses, so that Vanir gods came to live among the Aesir. At the head of the Aesir stood Odin, the one-eyed lord of wisdom, poetry, war, and the dead, who gave an eye for a drink from the well of knowledge and hung nine nights on the wind-tossed tree to win the runes. Beside him was Thor, the red-bearded thunderer, hammer in hand, the protector of gods and men against the giants — the god most widely worshipped, by the testimony of place-names and the small hammer-amulets found in graves across the North. From the Vanir came Freyr, lord of fair weather, harvest, and the prosperity of kings, and his sister Freyja, goddess of love, of the battle-slain she shared with Odin, and of the prophetic magic called seidr. There was Tyr, god of law and the oath; Frigg, Odin’s wife and queen of the Aesir; Heimdall, the watchman of the gods; and many more — among them Loki, the shape-shifter and boundary-crosser who is both the gods’ companion and the father of the monsters that will destroy them.

Odin as a one-eyed wanderer in a broad hat and blue cloak — Georg von Rosen’s painting of 1886, made for a Swedish edition of the Poetic Edda. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

A caution governs everything that follows, and it must be stated at the outset. Almost every coherent account of Norse religion reaches us through Christian hands. The two great compilations — the Poetic Edda, a collection of mythological and heroic poems preserved in a manuscript written around 1270, and the Prose Edda of the Icelandic chieftain and scholar Snorri Sturluson, composed around 1220 — were set down more than two centuries after the public abandonment of the old cult. Snorri was a Christian, a lawspeaker, and a man of Latin learning; in his preface he even traces Odin and the Aesir back to Troy and presents them as deified human kings, a learned medieval gloss that no heathen ever held. The oldest contemporary testimony in the North’s own voice is the runic record, terse and largely commemorative; the oldest outside testimony, the Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus from around 98 CE, describes the continental Germani through Roman categories, naming their chief god as “Mercury” and a second as “Hercules” — figures scholars read as ancestral forms of Odin and Thor. The Norse world as it is reconstructed is therefore a thing recovered through later, foreign, and often hostile witnesses, set against the mute evidence of graves, hoards, and carved stone. The reconstruction is rich and largely coherent. It is not a transparent window.

The gods who must be fed

Within the frame the Norse themselves kept, the gods were neither distant nor secure. They were powers present in the world, mighty but not all-powerful, bound like everything else into a fate that ran past even them. They had to be fed.

The central act of Norse religion was the blot — the offering. The word is cognate with “blood,” and blood was its substance. At the turn of the seasons, at the great festivals, and at need, animals were slaughtered as gifts to the gods: horses above all, but also oxen, pigs, and other beasts. The blood was caught and sprinkled on the altars, the walls of the temple, and the gathered people; the meat was boiled in great cauldrons and eaten in a communal feast, and the ale was blessed and drunk in toasts to the gods and to the dead. The offering was an exchange — the people gave the gods the best of their wealth, and the gods gave back fair seasons, victory, and increase. To share the sacred meat and the consecrated ale was to bind the household to its gods and to one another. At the very greatest sites the offering reached a fearful scale: the eleventh-century churchman Adam of Bremen, describing the temple at Gamla Uppsala, reported a festival held every nine years at which nine males of every kind, men among them, were sacrificed and their bodies hung in a sacred grove. Adam never saw Uppsala; he wrote at second hand and as a hostile witness, and how much of his account is fact and how much a churchman’s horror is debated to this day. That human sacrifice had a place in Norse religion is supported by other sources and by bog finds; the gold temple and its hung grove may be a nightmare drawn larger than the truth.

Over this stood a cosmos shaped like a tree. At the center of the worlds rose Yggdrasil, the great ash whose roots and branches held the realms together — the world of the gods above, the world of men in the middle, the cold realm of the dead below, and the homes of giants, elves, and dwarves besides. The handbooks count nine worlds, though the medieval sources never list them in one tidy enumeration; the schematic “nine worlds” is partly a modern tidying of scattered hints. Beneath one root of the tree, at the well of fate, sat the Norns, three female powers who shaped the lives of gods and men and against whose weaving even Odin could not stand. The dead went to many places: warriors chosen on the field to Odin’s hall, where they would feast and fight until the end; others to Freyja; and the rest along the long, cold road to Hel, the realm below, named for the goddess who ruled it.

The world-tree Yggdrasil rendered as a layered cosmos — Oluf Olufsen Bagge’s engraving from an 1847 English edition of the Prose Edda. Public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

And the whole of it was doomed. The most fully developed eschatology of any Germanic people is Ragnarok, the fate of the powers — a foretold catastrophe in which a great winter falls, the bonds that hold the monsters break, and the gods go out to a last battle they know they cannot win. Odin is swallowed by the wolf Fenrir; Thor kills the world-serpent and falls dead from its venom; Freyr goes down before the fire-giant; the sun is devoured and the earth sinks into the sea. Then, in the seeress’s vision that closes the poem Völuspá, a new green earth rises from the water, and a remnant of gods and a human pair survive to people it again. How much of this is old Germanic doom and how much is colored by Christian apocalypse — for Völuspá was composed near the time of the conversion — is among the longest debates in the field; both currents are present and cannot be cleanly parted. What is not in doubt is the temper the picture gives the religion: the gods themselves are mortal, the world is under sentence, and the worth of a life is measured not by escaping the doom but by meeting it well.

Tyr, god of law and the oath, places his hand in the jaws of the wolf Fenrir so the gods may bind the beast — and loses it when the trick is sprung. Illustration by John Bauer, 1911; public domain (Wikimedia Commons).

Beside the sacrificial cult ran a stranger practice. Seidr was a magic of prophecy and of the altering of fate — by it a practitioner could see what was to come, and could send sickness, ill luck, or death, or take wit and strength from one and give it to another. Its fullest description shows a völva, a seeress, seated on a high platform, fed a special meal, and brought to her knowledge by the chanting of women around her. Seidr was strongly associated with women: its principal practitioners were female, and male practice carried the charge of ergi, unmanliness, among the gravest insults a free man could suffer — so grave it was actionable at law. That Odin himself was a master of the art is the tradition’s great paradox: the highest god is also the crosser of the boundary that shames men. Whether seidr is best understood as a northern form of the circumpolar shamanism found among the neighboring Sámi, with whom the Norse shared a long frontier of exchange, has been argued for a century and is not settled. The strong gendering of the practice is firmly attested; what that gendering meant in lived practice is reconstructed from late and often hostile sources.

Cutting across all of this were the runes — the angular letters of the Germanic alphabet, named the futhark for the sounds of its first characters. The runes were the North’s own writing, carved on stone, wood, bone, and metal from the early centuries of the common era; the elder twenty-four-character row gave way around 800 to a reduced sixteen-character row that ran through the Viking age. Most surviving inscriptions are plain and practical — a name, an owner’s claim, above all a memorial: “X raised this stone after Y.” But a minority carry curses and charms, and the poems hold the runes to be more than letters. In the myth Odin does not invent them but seizes them, screaming, out of his ordeal on the tree; they are powers taken up, not signs made. The literary picture of rune-magic — runes carved to heal, to curse, to ward — belongs to the poems and the sagas, and must be held apart from the sober epigraphic record of the stones themselves. It must be held apart, too, from the modern occult “rune systems” invented in the twentieth century, which have no continuity with the historical futhark at all.

The Viking-age picture stone from Tjängvide, Gotland: a rider on an eight-legged horse — read as Odin on Sleipnir — met by a figure with a horn, above a ship under sail. Photograph by Berig, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

The honor of free men and the law of the thing

The Norse held no scripture and recognized no priesthood set apart from secular life; the man who led the sacrifice was often the same chieftain who led in war and spoke at the assembly. The binding force of the society lay not in a church but in a code — the honor of the free man — and in an institution that regulated it: the thing.

Honor was the currency of a free man’s worth, and an injury to it demanded redress. The mechanism of redress was the feud — the obligation falling on a man and his kin to avenge a killing or an insult, an obligation that could run down the generations and consume whole families. Left unchecked, the feud was ruinous, and the Norse knew it. Against it stood the law. At fixed seasons the free men of a district, and at the higher level of a whole region, gathered at the thing, an open-air assembly held at a customary place. There the law was not read from a book but recited aloud from memory by the lawspeaker, who held the whole code in his head; there disputes were pleaded and judged, outlawries declared, and settlements reached — often a payment of compensation, the wergild, that bought off the duty of vengeance and closed a feud before it widened. The assembly had no police and no executive; its judgments rested on the consent of the assembled free men and on the social pressure they could bring. It was at once court, parliament, and the great periodic gathering of a scattered people. Iceland’s thing, held on a great rift in the rock, governed an entire commonwealth without a king for three centuries on this principle. The combination — a fierce ethic of personal honor, a feud that honor demanded, and a public law that worked to contain the feud — is the social signature of the Norse world, and the engine that drives the family sagas the Icelanders would later write.

The conversion, and the writing-down

The old religion did not die slowly of neglect. It was ended, across the tenth and eleventh centuries, by a deliberate and largely top-down conversion to Christianity. In Denmark the king Harald Bluetooth declared himself Christian and his people converted around 965, recording the act on a great runestone at Jelling that names him as the king who “made the Danes Christian.” In Norway the kings Olaf Tryggvason and, after him, Olaf Haraldsson drove conversion through the later tenth and early eleventh centuries, often by force — burning temples, breaking idols, and compelling chieftains to choose baptism or war. Sweden held to the old gods longest, with Uppsala its stronghold, and converted only gradually across the eleventh and into the twelfth century. Iceland’s conversion, around the year 1000, was the most remarkable: facing the threat of civil war between heathen and Christian factions, the assembly entrusted the decision to a single arbitrator, the lawspeaker, who withdrew, lay a day and a night under his cloak, and emerged to rule that all Icelanders should accept baptism — while quietly allowing certain old practices to continue in private for a time. A pagan people legislated its own conversion by a vote of its parliament.

The Jelling stones in Denmark: the larger, raised by Harald Bluetooth around 965, records that he “made the Danes Christian” and bears one of the earliest northern images of Christ. Photograph by Erik Christensen, CC BY-SA 3.0 (Wikimedia Commons).

The conversion closed the open practice of the blot and the cult of the Aesir. But its timing produced a paradox without which little of the old religion would be known. Because the conversion came late, and because the converted descendants — the Icelanders above all — kept a fierce antiquarian interest in the deeds and verses of their heathen ancestors, it was Christian Norse scholars who, generations after the gods came down from their thrones, wrote the myths down. Snorri Sturluson composed his handbook of the old mythology so that poets might still understand the inherited language of skaldic verse, with its allusions to Odin’s theft of the mead of poetry and Thor’s fishing for the world-serpent. The anonymous compilers of the Poetic Edda gathered the old mythological and heroic lays into a single book. The very faith that ended the religion preserved its literature. What is known of Yggdrasil and Ragnarok, of Odin’s hanging and the binding of Fenrir, is known because Christians thought it worth the vellum — which is also why the record carries, throughout, the fingerprints of the hands that saved it.

The afterlife of the North

For five centuries after the conversion the old gods survived chiefly as figures in the literature the Icelanders had preserved, read by scholars and poets but worshipped by no one. Then, from the eighteenth century onward, the Norse returned to the European imagination with extraordinary force. Antiquarians and translators carried the Eddas into the modern languages; the Romantic movement, hungry for a native northern past to set against the classical inheritance of Greece and Rome, seized on the Norse gods as the ancestral mythology of the Germanic peoples. Composers, painters, and poets remade them. The most consequential remaking was Richard Wagner’s operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen, staged in full at Bayreuth in 1876, which drew on Norse and Germanic legend to fashion a modern mythology of gods, gold, and doom — and whose costumes, designed by Carl Emil Doepler, fixed in the popular mind the entirely unhistorical image of the horned-helmeted Norseman, an invention of the nineteenth-century stage that no Viking ever wore. In the twentieth century the philologist J. R. R. Tolkien, steeped in Old Norse and Old English, drew names, dwarves, a wandering one-eyed wizard, and a whole northern temper into a fiction that carried the imaginative world of the North to a vast new readership.

Out of the same revival, but along a different road, came the modern reconstruction of the religion itself. From the early 1970s — formally in Iceland in 1972, and at much the same time in Britain, Scandinavia, and North America — communities arose seeking to practice a polytheist worship of the old gods, variously called Heathenry, Asatru, or Forn Sed. This is openly a reconstruction, drawing on the medieval texts and on scholarship rather than on any unbroken line from the heathen past; its adherents number in the tens of thousands worldwide. Most of its currents are inclusive and explicitly anti-racist.

For the Norse afterlife has a darker strand that any honest account must name. From the late nineteenth century, racial and nationalist movements seized on Norse and Germanic symbols — the runes above all — and read the pagan North as the inheritance of a particular race. This appropriation reached its extreme in the symbolism of the Third Reich, which deployed runic and Germanic imagery in the service of its ideology, and it persists in present-day racist movements that fly Norse signs as ethnic banners. The historical religion and this appropriation are wholly distinct things, and the line between them is one that modern inclusive Heathenry has worked to draw with deliberate sharpness, defining itself against the racialist reading and asserting that the old gods belong to no race and no nation. The contest over the symbols is itself part of the Norse afterlife — the same runes, the same gods, claimed by communities who reject one another absolutely.

What endures, beneath the contest, is the shape of a vision: a people who held the gods themselves to be mortal, who measured a life by how it met a doom it could not escape, who fed the powers with blood and ale and bound their feuds with law spoken aloud on a field of stones, and whose Christian children loved the old verses enough to carry the doomed gods, in writing, past the end of their world.

→ Related: Odin · Thor · Freyr · Freyja · Frigg · Heimdall · Fenrir · Jormungandr · Yggdrasil · Loki · Baldr · Tyr God · Hel Goddess · The Norns · Gamla Uppsala · Thingvellir · Jelling · Hedeby · The Vikings · The Icelanders · Druids