Author: Shae3669

Haustmánuður arrives when the change in the air can no longer be ignored. The days are shortening, summer’s warmth is beginning to loosen its hold and the landscape is settling into its autumn colours. There may still be mild days, but winter no longer feels so far away. In the old Icelandic calendar, Haustmánuður was […]

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 […]

Part Five: Christianisation Was Not One Event When we compress several centuries into a few paragraphs, the conversion of Scandinavia can sound remarkably simple. Missionaries arrive, kings convert, Paganism is prohibited and suddenly the Viking world is Christian. History rarely behaves that neatly. Christianisation happened at different times and moved at different speeds across Denmark, […]

From Creation to Christianisation: The Norse World Through Changing Eyes Part Four: Ask and Embla — What Makes a Human? We have already met Ask and Embla in the earlier parts of this series, first as the human pair placed within Miðgarðr and then as the ancestors whose missing generations the Norse sources never bother […]

Part Three: What Christian Writers Did With Norse Myth Most of the surviving literary narratives through which we know Norse mythology were written down after the conversion of Scandinavia. That doesn’t place a giant question mark over the existence of the older religion. Skaldic poetry, runic inscriptions, images, archaeology and place-names all provide evidence that […]

Part Two: The Problem of the First Humans Adam, Eve, Cain — and the Silence After Ask and Embla In Part One we compared the beginnings of the biblical and Norse worlds, ending with Adam and Eve on one side and Ask and Embla on the other. Both traditions eventually place an original human pair […]

Part One: Two Different Ways of Imagining Creation Norse Creation and the World Beside Genesis Christianity appears throughout this series because it eventually became the dominant religion across Scandinavia, changing laws, public worship, burial customs and the world in which older Norse stories were preserved. Comparing the two traditions can help us see more clearly […]

As the days grow shorter and the air takes on a sharper chill, we reach one of those points in the year when the seasonal change becomes difficult to ignore. Summer is loosening its hold, harvest work is drawing towards its end, and winter, although not quite here yet, no longer feels very far away. […]

Horse Sacrifice, Household Ritual and the Strangest Dinner Guest in Norse Literature Today’s story comes with an adults-only warning! This story contains horse anatomy, ritual handling of said anatomy, medieval sexual humour, an unusually enthusiastic old woman and a disguised Christian king who turns up uninvited and ruins everyone’s evening. It may also permanently change […]

Some Norse myths shout with thunder, battle, and monsters. Others speak in names. Hyndluljóð, The Lay of Hyndla, is one of those quieter but deeply powerful poems. It’s an Old Norse poem, often considered part of the Poetic Edda, found in the Flateyjarbók manuscript. It features the goddess Freyja coercing the giantess Hyndla to recite […]