Part Six: Law, Burial, Food and Sacred Practice
Christianisation changed ideas about gods and salvation, but some of its clearest traces appear in much more ordinary places. In laws, at gravesides, around feast tables, and in the treatment of sacred places.
These kinds of evidence can sometimes tell us more about religious change than attempts to decide whether one Norse god was “replaced” by a particular Christian saint. Laws record prohibited behaviour. Archaeology records what people actually did with bodies and objects. Food remains and settlement evidence give us glimpses of practices that literary sources only partially explain.
None of these forms of evidence gives us a perfect view, but together they allow us to watch the religious landscape changing.
When older practices became unlawful
As Christian institutions grew stronger, medieval Scandinavian law increasingly defined which religious practices were permitted.
Norwegian regional laws including the Gulaþing and Frostaþing traditions contain Christian provisions directed against sacrifice and older forms of worship, while Icelandic law developed its own prohibitions involving Pagan religious practice and forms of magic.
These laws were compiled and preserved at different times, and their wording varies considerably. They should never be collapsed into one imaginary decree banning “Viking Paganism” across the whole of Scandinavia.
What they do show is increasing Christian control over public religious behaviour. Sacrifice could be prohibited. Invocations of older powers could become legally dangerous. Certain magical or divinatory practices attracted penalties. Christian observances could become legal obligations.
The existence of a prohibition also gives us an intriguing problem. Governments rarely keep legislating against activities that nobody performs. Repeated condemnation can therefore suggest that older practices, or practices church authorities associated with them, remained persistent enough to concern lawmakers.
Blót and the community
A blót could be far more than an individual quietly leaving an offering for a god.
Literary and archaeological evidence connects sacrifice with feasting, animals, drinking, vows, elite hospitality and gatherings of households or larger communities. The exact form varied according to time and place, but communal religion was bound into social life.
Restricting blót therefore affected more than personal devotion. It affected who gathered people together, which powers received honour, which rituals created communal identity and who held authority over those gatherings.
Feasts themselves didn’t disappear. Christian festivals, church observances and saints’ days provided new rhythms of gathering, while older seasonal customs could survive with altered meanings.
That process can’t always be described as Christians simply taking a Pagan festival and changing the name. Calendars, local traditions and religious meanings could overlap, separate or evolve over many generations.
Continuity doesn’t automatically prove direct replacement.
Why horsemeat became such a sensitive subject
The horse became particularly important during Christianisation because horses could hold a significant place within pre-Christian sacrifice and ritual feasting.
Later Norwegian conversion narratives use the eating of sacrificial horsemeat as a powerful marker of religious allegiance. Those saga scenes were written down considerably later than the events they describe, so their dramatic details deserve caution.
Iceland gives us stronger documentary footing. Ari’s account of the conversion settlement specifically says that the old law concerning the eating of horseflesh was temporarily allowed to continue after Christianity became the public religion.
That doesn’t mean ordinary horsemeat was magically transformed into a universally forbidden Pagan sacrament. The religious associations surrounding horse sacrifice and ritual feasting made the practice particularly sensitive within a Christianising society.
Food can carry identity. Sharing a ritual meal says something about who belongs, which customs are accepted and which powers the community honours. Controlling the feast could therefore become one way of controlling public religion.
The uncomfortable subject of infant exposure
Ari also says that the old law concerning infant exposure initially remained in force under the Icelandic conversion settlement. This needs careful wording because infant exposure shouldn’t be turned into a distinctive Norse Pagan rite. The practice is known from several ancient and medieval societies and could be shaped by poverty, disability, household circumstances and decisions concerning whether a newborn was formally accepted into the family.
Its appearance in Ari’s conversion narrative tells us that Christianisation reached beyond temples, gods and sacrifice. It affected family law, ideas concerning the protection of newborn life and the obligations Christian society placed upon households.
It also reminds us that our picture comes from a later written account. Ari was born decades after the conversion and wrote in a Christian Iceland. His testimony is exceptionally important, but it doesn’t give us a census of what every Icelandic family did before or after the year 1000.
Changing ways of burying the dead
Burial is one of the richest sources of evidence for religious change, and also one of the easiest to oversimplify. There was never one universal Pagan Norse funeral.
Some bodies were cremated. Others were buried intact. Grave goods could include weapons, jewellery, tools, animals, vessels or everyday objects. Ship burial appears in some contexts but was hardly the standard funeral for everyone. Other graves contained comparatively little.
As Christianity became established, burial practices increasingly moved towards inhumation with fewer grave goods and towards burial in recognised Christian cemeteries and churchyards.
The transition was messy. A grave without possessions isn’t automatically Christian. An intact burial isn’t automatically Christian either. Older and newer practices overlap, and wealth, status, local tradition, available space and family decisions could all influence the treatment of the dead.
Recent archaeological work has made that middle ground even more interesting. Conversion-period graves in southern Scandinavia include practices that fit poorly into a simple Pagan-versus-Christian division. Some use wood, charcoal, animal remains and other materials in ways that differ both from earlier Viking Age graves and from the more standardised churchyard burials that followed.
Those people weren’t necessarily performing a confused half-version of one religion or the other. They may have been developing new ways of understanding death during a world of religious change. Archaeology can show us patterns of behaviour. It can’t interview the person in the grave.
Churches and the changing sacred landscape
Christianisation also changed the physical geography of religion. Churches and cemeteries created permanent centres of Christian ritual, burial and community authority. In some places these were established near older cemeteries, assembly sites or places that may already have carried social or sacred importance.
Later literature also contains stories of Pagan temples being destroyed and churches replacing them. Some such episodes may preserve genuine historical memories. They can’t be applied as a universal rule. We don’t have evidence that every church sits upon a demolished Pagan temple, and there was no need for every older sacred place to be physically destroyed before Christian society could develop.
Some sites were abandoned. Some were reused. Some changed function, and others remained important in local memory long after the rituals performed there had disappeared. The landscape itself became another place where old and new could overlap.
Seiðr, divination and forbidden magic
Magic creates another problem because medieval Christian terminology rarely maps neatly onto the categories modern Pagans use.
Church teaching and Christian law opposed many forms of divination, sorcery, supernatural consultation and ritual activity associated with non-Christian powers. The surviving sources, however, use several terms for different practices.
Seiðr wasn’t automatically identical to every charm, healing act, prophecy or spell. Nor were Sámi spiritual practices, harmful magic, folk healing and divination all one single northern “witchcraft tradition.”
Over the centuries, some practices disappeared while others changed language and context. Charms and healing customs could survive while incorporating Christian crosses, prayers, saints and biblical words.
That kind of survival is rarely pure preservation. People adapt practices to the worlds in which they live. For that reason, saying “Christianity banned seiðr” can be far too broad. Different authorities condemned different behaviours at different times, often using Christian categories that don’t correspond perfectly with the terminology of earlier Norse practice.
Changing practice before changing memory
Law can change faster than memory. Authorities can prohibit sacrifice. A bishop can establish a church. A ruler can demand baptism. Cemeteries can be moved and public ritual reorganised. None of those actions immediately erases the stories someone learned as a child, the name of a place, a seasonal custom or the memory attached to a hill, spring or burial mound.
That helps explain why Christianisation looks gradual even after formal conversion.
Public Pagan sacrifice became increasingly dangerous or illegal. Horsemeat carried problematic ritual associations. Burial practice moved towards Christian cemeteries. Churches reorganised community space. Older supernatural practices survived selectively, sometimes privately and sometimes inside new Christian forms.
The old religion didn’t remain untouched beneath a thin Christian surface. Christian institutions genuinely transformed Scandinavian society. At the same time, they couldn’t erase centuries of cultural memory in a single generation.
At the end of the series
We began this series in Ginnungagap, with heat meeting ice and a world eventually shaped from Ymir.
From there we met Ask and Embla, compared them with the biblical first humans, followed the old stories into Christian manuscripts and then watched Christianity itself move unevenly through Scandinavia.
By the time we reach the medieval laws and churchyards, the world has changed enormously. Yet it hasn’t become blank. Old names survive. Poems survive. Gods remain inside stories copied by Christian scribes. Customs alter and continue. Archaeology reveals burials belonging to people living between familiar categories. Even the laws trying to suppress older practices preserve evidence that those practices existed.
What reaches us today is therefore fragmentary. That is frustrating when we want certainty, but the fragments are still extraordinary. For modern Norse Pagans, perhaps the responsibility is to meet them as they actually are: neither forcing them into a perfect reconstruction of a lost religion nor dismissing them because Christian hands helped preserve them.
We can recognise uncertainty without losing wonder. We can acknowledge change without assuming everything older was erased. And we can value what survived without making the evidence say more than it does. The old world didn’t reach us whole. It reached us in pieces. Our job is to handle those pieces with care.
Source notes
The legal discussion draws upon medieval Scandinavian law traditions including the Norwegian regional laws and Icelandic Christian law, while recognising that surviving texts were compiled at different dates and cannot be treated as one Scandinavian legal code. Ari Þorgilsson’s Íslendingabók chapter 7 is the principal source for the Icelandic conversion settlement, including horseflesh, infant exposure and private sacrifice.
Burial evidence shows considerable regional variation throughout the conversion period. Recent work by Fredrik Fahlander and Julie Lund on tenth- and eleventh-century southern Scandinavian graves has further challenged a simple progression from clearly “Pagan” burials to clearly “Christian” ones, identifying intermediate practices that deserve to be understood in their own right.
Literary evidence concerning destroyed temples, forced conversions, magical practice and ritual horsemeat should be compared with archaeological and legal evidence wherever possible. Later sagas remain valuable sources for cultural memory, but their distance from Viking Age events has to remain visible.
End of the series
From Creation to Christianisation: The Norse World Through Changing Eyes
Six parts, beginning with the creation of the world and ending with the laws, graves and customs through which that world gradually changed.
The surviving evidence can never return the pre-Christian Norse world to us exactly as it was. What it can give us is something more interesting than a tidy reconstruction: traces of people remembering, adapting, resisting, preserving and living through one of the greatest cultural changes in Scandinavian history.