Fascinating insights into the nature and reality of the early missions can be had from sources such as Widukind’s History of the Saxons, written around 968, which describes the conversion of a later Danish king. From the ambiguous way in which he charts the context of the royal baptism, it is clear that while the Danes are in many senses Christians, they also happily retain many of their earlier beliefs. The task of the missions was not conversion, as such, but the practical demonstration of Christ’s power through action.
There is a remarkable glimpse of how this worked in practice through a document known as Heliand, ‘The Saviour’. Written in Old Saxon during the first half of the ninth century, it is a paraphrase of the gospel for a Germanic audience, tweaked for their sensibilities and pitched almost as a Norse saga though with biblical heroes. Thus we read of Jesus’s birth in Galileeland, his later travels to Jerusalemburg, and how the Lord lives in a great hall in the sky (clearly Valhöll). The Lord’s Prayer is in ‘secret runes’, Peter is given command over the gates of Hel (with one L), and so on. Satan’s temptation of Christ takes place in a northern wilderness filled with vague forces, ‘powerful beings’ that seem to live among the trees, and one wonders what this implies of the traditional Northern beliefs that were known to the Christian clerics. By the same token, Jesus’s disciples are ‘warrior-companions’, framed in the language of a warlord’s retinue, and the Last Supper is the ‘final mead-hall feast’. Even God is called by Odinnic epithets such as ‘Victory-Chieftain’ and ‘All-Ruler’. This is the kind of message that was taken into Scandinavia by the first missionaries-a doctrine meshed with the ancestral stories of the North and following a model found in many other conversion histories.
It has sometimes been suggested that the Scandinavians’ adoption of Christianity was mostly a veneer-lip service to the outward trappings of belief combined with regular church attendance, but in reality merely a thin covering over the old ways that persisted beneath. In all the debate concerning afterlives and the varying destinations offered by the traditional customs and the new religion, one wonders whether Viking-Age people might actually have decided where they wished to go after death. If so, what did they make of a faith in which the fate of a person’s immortal soul was dependent on living a certain kind of life? It is hard to overstate how alien this concept may have seemed, although a cornerstone of many world faiths today.
The religious context of the sources is crucial here and affects the material culture as well. Much of what is known about the pre-Christian thought-world of the Vikings comes to us through the writings of, precisely, Christians. Even the framing story of this book-the creation of Ash and Elm-is relevant to the retrospective filter: how much of a coincidence is it that the ‘first couple’ in Norse cosmology have names beginning with A and E? Although the meaning of Askr/Ash is unequivocal, Embla is less certain. ‘Elm’ is the most commonly accepted translation, but the actual noun for an elm tree (almr) is masculine, and the etymology is convoluted. ‘Vine’ is another possibility, though this requires an ultimate derivation from Greek, and from there the scholarly debate starts to meander into the thickets of postulated Indo-European linguistic heritage. This kind of unresolved confusion-the ambiguities, contradictions, and possibilities-are all typical of the Viking-Age spiritual palimpsest, as we see dimly in the rear-view from more than a millennium in its future.
Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm
2087
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