Such toasts are called minni, and are
paralleled on the Continent by the " drinking to the soul of the dead"
CH.
paralleled on the Continent by the " drinking to the soul of the dead"
CH.
Cambridge Medieval History - v2 - Rise of the Saracens and Foundation of the Western Empire
1' In the Book of Leiiister (twelfth century) Mag
Slecht is said to have been so called because the ancient Irish used to
sacrifice there the first-born of their children and of their flocks, in order
to secure power and peace in all their tribes, and to obtain milk and com
for the support of their families. A careful and discriminating study of
Keltic legends would reveal no small sediment of pre-Christian thought,
just as there are traces of the belief in a " Happy Other-world" and of
the rebirth of heroes, in the Irish Voyage of Bran, and non-Christian
pictures of another world in the Welsh Annwfn, which a medieval
Welsh poem represents as being beneath the earth. Similarly, the Keltic
folk-lore stories of water-bulls, water-horses, water-nymphsA fairies,
sprites, and the like give a clue to the way in which Nature Vas re-
garded by the Kelts of Britain, as of other lands, before Christianity
began its work in these islands.
The contribution of folk-lore research to the study of Keltic Hea! tthen-
dom in Britain is very valuable; for example, in the account which it
gives of such practices as the periodical lighting of bonfires, the custofti
observed at Lent, May-day, and Harvest time, the vestiges of charms and
sacrifices, the observation of omens and the like. By the use of the
comparative method the study of folk-lore may be able to throw not a
little light on the significance of the various practices in question. The
evidence from all directions tends to shew that, in Britain and Ireland,
as on the Continent, Keltic religion regarded substantially all natural
objects as the abodes of divine beings, named and nameless, viewed
sometimes collectively and sometimes individually, and it pictured the
existence beneath this world of another world, whence many of the
## p. 479 (#511) ############################################
Survivals 479
blessings of civilisation were derived, and whose inhabitants could enter
into various relations, friendly and hostile, with those of this world.
There are traces, too, of the conception of local other-worlds, to be found
underneath lakes and parts of the sea, while, both in Irish and Welsh
legend, there are vestiges of a belief in the blissful conditions of life on
certain fabulous islands. In Welsh legend, too, it would appear that the
wild country of Northern Britain was regarded as a haunted region. In
some Welsb medieval poems there are echoes of a belief that the souls of
the departed made their home in the Caledonian forest.
With regard to the priests of Britain and Ireland, we have little
direct knowledge, but, though the Irish drui may conceivably be a
borrowed word from the Gallo-Latin druida, it is most probable that
it is a native word, and, in any case, the part played by the druids in
Irish society as magicians and seers in the legends of Ireland would be
their natural part in pre-Christian times. In Welsh society, too, the
continuance into fairly recent times of the practice of having recourse to
wizards in certain emergencies, points to the antiquity in Welsh life of
the institution of the sorcerer. The best description that can be given
of Britain and Ireland in the days of their heathendom, is that of coun-
tries whose inhabitants could have been seldom free by night or by day
from a sense of being haunted, but whose gloom was relieved by visions
of happy other-lands, into which the privileged might some day enter.
Doubtless, in close conjunction with Keltic heathendom, there was at one
time much oral mythology, the fragments of which can now only with
difficulty be disentangled from the mass of Keltic medieval and modern
folk-lore.
There is one problem upon which no light appears to be available,
namely the religious organisation through which was maintained the
worship of the major Keltic deities, whose names are found in the British
Isles as well as on the Continent, and the distinction, if any, that was
made between their worship and that of the minor local deities. All
that we know is, from the survival of some of their names, that the
tradition of their worship was not entirely lost. At Bath there are
remains of a temple dedicated to Subs, who was identified with Minerva.
At Caerwent and Lydney there are also remains of temples, the latter
dedicated to a Keltic god, Nodens or Nodons. Near Carrawburgh there
was a temple belonging to the British water-goddess Coventina, and at
Benwell in a small temple there were found two altars, one to Anociticus
and the other to Antenociticus. For an account of these temples the
reader is referred to Ward's Romano-British Buildings and Earthworks
(London, Methuen & Co. , 1911).
CH. XV. (b)
## p. 480 (#512) ############################################
480 Germanic Heathenism,
(C)
GERMANIC HEATHENISM.
Attempts to reconstruct the great edifice of ancient Teutonic
religion base themselves on two main sources of information: the
Continental and the Scandinavian. English evidence stands midway
between the two. With the exception of Tacitus, the Continental
writers seldom do more than let fall some chance remark on religious
practices, their chief concern being with other matters—in Classical and
post-Classical times with the wars of these "barbaric" races, and later,
with their conversion to Christianity. We also possess some early laws,
and the histories of those tribes fortunate enough to have inspired a
medieval chronicler, but the laws date in their present shape from
Christian times, and the histories are hardly more sympathetic towards
heathen ideas than are the Lives of martyred saints or the edicts of
Church Councils. The chief sources from Denmark, Norway and Sweden
comprise a great wealth of archaeological information, their early laws,
and Saxo's history of the legendary kings of Denmark, written about
1208. It is Iceland which furnishes us with almost all the literary evidence,
beginning with the mythological poems of the Older Edda, which can in
one sense be termed Icelandic with impunity, in the midst of the conflict
as to their origin, since they only reach us from that country. With
them may be classed the earlier skaldic poems from the Norwegian court.
Then come the Sagas, prose histories of Icelandic families and Norwegian
kings, often dealing with events which occurred before the conversion to
Christianity about a. d. 1000, but not committed to writing till the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Neither source of evidence is perfectly satisfactory. The Scandinavian
Sagas, though originating among a people with an extraordinarily keen
instinct for historic truth, are far from contemporary with the events
they relate. The Continental references to the subject are indeed often
contemporary, but they are the observations of alien eyes, and some of
them are open to the further objection that the superstitions mentioned
may occasionally be mere survivals of the religious legacy of Rome.
Fortunately there is more agreement between these two sources than we
could have dared to expect, and this common factor in both is the more
valuable, since, though one channel of information begins where the other
leaves off, they are yet practically independent of one another. While
fully admitting that there were extremely wide local divergences in the
practices and belief of the various tribes, the following survey of the
\
## p. 481 (#513) ############################################
Thor or Thunor 481
main features of Germanic heathendom is yet based with some confidence
on this common factor, to which a third stratum of evidence, folk-lore,
contributes subsidiary testimony. It has seemed best in almost all cases
to begin with the fuller, though later, Scandinavian sources, in the light
of which it is sometimes possible to interpret the more meagre references
of Continental writers.
A problem confronts us at the outset with regard to the position of
the two chief gods, Odin and Thor, in Scandinavia. Most of the
poetical sources depict Odin as the chief of the gods, as the Allfather of
gods and men, while the prose writings contain frequent indications that
Thor, the Thunder-god (Anglo-Saxon Thunor) stands highest of all in
the popular estimation. There can be no doubt that the Sagas are right
with regard to their own territory. The frequent occurrence of proper
names compounded with Thor (such as Thorolf, Thorstein, etc. ) testifies
to his importance in Scandinavia, especially as we are told that a name
compounded with that of a god was esteemed a safeguard to its bearer.
At least one out of every five immigrants to Iceland in heathen times
bore a name of which Thor formed part. His is certainly a very ancient
cult. His whole equipment is primitive: he is never credited in Scandi-
navian sources with the possession of a sword, a horse or a coat of mail,
but he either walks or drives in a car drawn by goats, and wields the
hammer or axe. The sanctity of this symbol appears to date from very
remote times: in fact the Museum at Stockholm contains a miniature
hammer of amber from the later Stone Age. Another indication of the
antiquity of the cult is afforded by Thor's original identity, not only
with Jupiter and Zeus, but also with Keltic, Old Prussian and Slavonic
thunder-gods. But like these, Thor is much more than a thunder-god.
In Scandinavia he is called the Defender of the World, a title which he
may have earned in his encounter with the "jotnar. " This word usually
denotes daemonic beings, but it seems that it may originally have applied
to the early non-Aryan inhabitants of Scandinavia, whom the Teutonic
settlers drove gradually northwards. We may hazard the conjecture that
the Teutonic invasion, which crept forward from the Stone Age till the
close of heathen times, was made as it were under the auspices of Thor.
He is also the guardian of the land. In Iceland we hear of settlers conse-
crating their land to Thor, and naming it after him. It is interesting to
note that an ancient method of allotting holdings in Sweden was known as
the " hammer-partition," while among the Upper Saxons the throwing of
a hammer was held to legalise possession of land. But this is probably
connected with Thor's guardianship of law and order. The Older Edda
represents him as dealing out justice under the great world-ash Yggdrasill.
Most of the Scandinavian assemblies began on a Thursday—the day named
after Thor—and there seems no doubt that it was he who was invoked under
the name of " the almighty god" by those swearing oaths at the Icelandic
Things. The Russian historian Nestor, of the eleventh century, records
C. MED. H. VOL. II. CH. XV. (c) 31
## p. 482 (#514) ############################################
482 Functions of Thor
that the Scandinavians from Kiev ratified a treaty with the Byzantines
by swearing by their god "Perun," the Slavonic Thor. The Frisians
attributed their laws to a supernatural being with an axe. Among the
Upper Saxons a hammer was the summons to the assembly. In later
times in Iceland a small object called " St Olafs axe" served this purpose.
It is likely that this "axe" was originally a "Thor's hammer,'" for by the
irony of fate, many of the attributes of his old enemy Thor attached
themselves in popular belief to the sainted king Olaf, who rooted out his
worship in Norway. An Icelandic settler invokes him in sea-voyages,
and Adam of Bremen states that the Swedes sacrifice to him in famine
and in pestilence. As regards disease, we have the further testimony of
an Old Norse charm found in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, which appears
to call on Thor to drive away an ailment, and it was until recently a
common Swedish practice to mix in the fodder of cattle powder ground
from the edge of a " Thor's hammer" or flint axe, to avert disease. It is
possible that the miniature T-shaped hammers, often of silver or gold,
of which over fifty are to be seen in the Scandinavian museums, were
worn to shield the wearer from disease, but the protective functions of
Thor were so numerous that the symbols may have served other purposes
as well. It has recently been recorded that Manx and Whitby fishermen
wear the T-shaped bone from the tongue of a sheep to protect them from
drowning; and slaughterers at Berlin wear the same bone suspended from
their necks1. The appearance of the bearded Thor himself, hammer and
all, on a baptismal font in Sweden, has been considered to prove that the
hammer was used at the heathen ceremony of naming a child, and we
have some ground for supposing that it figured at weddings and at
funerals.
Sacrifices to Thor are constantly mentioned, and range from the
daily offerings of the Goth Badagaisus in Italy at the beginning of
the fifth century to a song in his honour composed in the year 1006 by
one of an Icelandic crew starving off" the coast of America. It seems
probable that the sacrifice at the beginning of all Things was to Thor.
At one place of assembly in Iceland we hear of a "stone of Thor" on
which " men were broken," but human sacrifice is so rarely mentioned in
Iceland that the statement is looked upon with suspicion. We must note
that Tacitus fails to mention a Germanic Jupiter. It has been suggested
that he represents Thor by Hercules.
After the enumeration of the manifold activities of Thor, there seems
hardly room for the imposing figure of Odin, and indeed in Scandinavia,
besides being the Lord of Valholl, Odin only presides over war, poetry
and magic. Yet in one point he stands nearer to the race of men
than Thor, in that he is regarded as the ancestor of most of the royal
families of Denmark and of England (where the form of the name
is Wodan). It is perhaps hardly correct to speak of Thor and Odin
1 A. C. Haddon, Magic and Fetishism, London, 1906.
## p. 483 (#515) ############################################
Odin or Wodan 483
as ruling over different social spheres, for Thor numbers earls and
others of high degree among his worshippers, but persons of royal
blood and their followers seem to devote themselves to the worship of
Odin—the cult of a royal ancestor. Nomenclature affords interesting
testimony to some such social division. We have seen what a large
proportion of Norwegian proper names contained "Thor" as a com-
ponent part, but we do not find any of these borne by a single
Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English king. Not even among the petty
kings of the period preceding the unification of Norway under King
Harold Fairhair do such names occur. Now we are told that it was just
these petty, often landless, kings who with their followings practised
war as a profession, and it was certainly in Norwegian court circles that
skaldic poetry—an art attributed to Odin—took its origin. If the
position of Odin was at all similar on the Continent, it would be easy
to explain the prominence of this god in all Continental accounts from
Tacitus onwards, for it seems probable that there also each king or prince
was surrounded by a body of warriors devoted to his service, and that
these took the principal part in wars.
In Iceland there is no mention of Odin-worship, though there is one
instance of the "old custom " of throwing a spear over a hostile force, a
rite which originally devoted the enemy to Odin. The existence of the cult
in Norway is vouched for by the custom of drinking a toast consecrated
to him at sacrificial feasts, but we must note that a toast to Odin is only
mentioned at courts. In Sweden, however, Odin is more prominent.
There is a statue of him "like Mars" by the side of Thor in the great
Upsala temple, and the people are said to sacrifice to him in time of war.
A legendary king sacrifices his nine sons to him for long life for himself
—a gift which another story shews it to be within Odin's power to
bestow, if he receives other lives in exchange. It is generally agreed
that he was originally a god of the dead, before he became a god of war,
and it is in the guise of a soul-stealing daemon that he seems to
appear in folk-lore. For Denmark the tales of heroes under Odin's
protection, and the importance of the god in Saxo's stories (where he
sometimes appears himself to demand his victim), form a considerable
body of evidence. Of the Frisians we are told by Alcuin that the island
Walcheren was sacred to a god whom later accounts identify with Mercury.
Mercury is the name under which Odin appears in Tacitus and all Con-
tinental writers, and shews that the god must there have borne much the
same character as is ascribed to him in Scandinavian sources, where he is
described as shifty, and full of guile, skilled in magic and runes, and the
inventor of poetry. To judge from the evidence of place-names, his
cult extended as far south as Salzburg. It is also noteworthy that the
Scandinavian account of his equipment, armed only with a javelin,
corresponds to that of the Germans in the time of Tacitus.
An ancient form of sacrifice to Odin in Scandinavia is the gruesome
ch. xv. (c) 31—2
## p. 484 (#516) ############################################
484 Odin. Frey
"cutting of the blood-eagle" or removal of the lungs of the victim, of
which we hear once or twice, but there seems ground for believing that
the usual ritual frequently combined both hanging and stabbing. In
fact all those who fell in battle were regarded as sacrifices to Odin.
Tacitus tells us that on the eve of the battle between the Chatti and
Hermunduri each side dedicated their opponent's army to Mars and
to Mercury. By this vow both horses and men, in short everything
on the side of the conquered, was given up to destruction. After
their victory over the Romans at Arausio (b. c. 105) the Cimbrians
hung all their captives and destroyed their spoil. The complete destruc-
tion of the legions of Varus, and the total massacre of Britons after an
Anglo-Saxon victory, have been suggested as other instances of the same
wholesale sacrifice. In some places in Denmark immense masses of
heaped up spoil, mostly intentionally damaged, from the fourth century
a. d. , have been found. These must have been offered as a sacrifice after
victory, and have lain undisturbed on the battle-ground owing to a
stringent tabu. A dedication of whole armies to Odin is mentioned in
later Scandinavian Sagas, where it seems to be connected with the idea
that the god needs more warriors in Valholl.
While Odin and Thor, however inimical to each other they may be,
are both regarded as ^Esir (gods) in the mythology of the north—in fact
Thor is made Odin's son—we are told that Frey and his father Njord
were originally hostages from the " Vanir," a rival race. Certainly their
functions in historical times are very different from those of Thor and
Odin. Frey, whose name is derived from a word meaning " lord," is only
known in Scandinavia. He is a god of fertility, with the usual attributes
of such a deity. He is especially honoured by the Swedes, and Adam
of Bremen tells us that his statue stood by the side of Thor in the
temple of Upsala, that sacrifices are made to him at weddings, and that
he grants men peace and pleasure. Tacitus' account of the peaceful,
wealth-loving " Suiones" (Swedes) closely corresponds to what we should
expect of a nation whose chief god was Frey, and places beyond question
the old-established nature of a cult of this kind. In Norway we hear of
toasts drunk to Frey and his father Njord "for prosperity and peace,"
and a sacrificial feast at the beginning of winter, to secure the same
benefits, is associated with Frey in Iceland, where he and Njord are
invoked in legal oaths. A legendary saga relates that Frey, in the
company of a priestess who was regarded as his wife, was in the habit of
peregrinating the country round Upsala in the autumn, for the purpose
of causing plenty. This is the clue which leads us to detect traces of an
allied cult on the Continent. The goddess Nerthus, who is worshipped
according to Tacitus by seven tribes, apparently in Zeeland (possibly
at Naerum, older Niartharum), journeys round her island at certain
seasons in a covered vehicle. During this time peace prevails, and her
presence is celebrated by festivities. The ritual of lustration described
## p. 485 (#517) ############################################
The goddess Nerthus. Other Deities 485
by Tacitus is generally regarded as a rain-charm. From the similarity
of this cult to that of goddesses of fertility all over Europe, we may
assume that Nerthus, like Frey, partook of this character. Amongst
other Teutonic races the earliest parallel to her peregrinations is recorded
by the Byzantine historian Sozomen, in the fifth century, who states
that the Goths lead round a statue in a covered vehicle. From the ninth
century we have the item: "concerning the images which they carry
about the fields," in a list of prohibited superstitions. But ample
evidence for these practices is afforded by the ceremonies, common up to
twenty years ago, connected with Plough Monday in England and with
Frau Holle in Germany.
It is to be noted that the names Nerthus and Njord are identical in all
but gender, and it seems that in Scandinavia Nerthus has changed her sex
and has subsequently been partly ousted by Frey; Njord, however, still
rules over fishery and wealth—two very closely allied ideas among the
Norwegians, to whom a sea teeming with fish was quite as important as the
fertility of the land. It is just possible that it is Njbrd to whom a ninth
century Latin poem refers, under the name of Neptune, as a chief god of
the Normans. Frey seems also to have partially ousted his sister Freyja.
One of the Edda poems is concerned with a certain Ottar, who sacrifices
oxen to Freyja, and whom she on one occasion declares to be her husband
—a parallel case to that of Frey and the priestess mentioned above, but
with the sexes reversed.
Of the numerous other gods mentioned in our sources some may be
either tribal deities, or better-known gods under other names. Such are
the Frisian god Fosite: the twins whom Tacitus equates with Castor and
Pollux, and who are worshipped by the Nahanarvali: the god Saxnot,
or Saxneat, forsworn with Wodan and Thunor in an Old Saxon formula
for converts, and claimed as an ancestor by the English East Saxon royal
family. Other gods, such as Balder and Loki, of whom we only hear in
Scandinavia, have been occasionally regarded as mere mythological figure-
heads. Of the evil-disposed Loki there is indeed no trace of any sort of
cult. It has been suggested that he was a Finnish god. Balder is the
subject of much controversy, some scholars dismissing him from the rank
of deity altogether, while Dr Frazer maintains that the story is a survival
of tree worship, and of the ritual sacrifice of the god. In any case the
only reference to an actual cult of Balder occurs in a late and doubtful
saga. Tyr, who seems to have been a war-god, stands in a different cate-
gory. It is likely that he had once been an important deity all over
Teutonic Europe, though his cult was already overshadowed by that of
Odin at the dawn of historical times. Some modern authorities place
his cult in close connexion with that of Nerthus—for which view certain
local groups of place-names afford support—and regard him as being
originally a god of the sky. A reference by Procopius to Ares, in his
account of the inhabitants of Thule, and by Jornandes to Mars, both of
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 486 (#518) ############################################
486 Female Deities
the sixth century, and both in connexion with human sacrifice, are
usually held to indicate Tyr, as is also the important god Mars of
Tacitus. The identity of Mars and Tyr is established by glossaries
which equate Mars with "Tiw," "Tug," as in Tuesday. In Scandinavia
the word Tyr originally means "god," and in compounds is applied
to Odin.
There is evidence that Frigg, in Northern mythology Odin's wife, was
also widely known among Teutonic nations, but she seems in part to have
been ousted from her place by Freyja, and in part to have suffered that
general decline which must have overtaken the Germanic goddesses since
the time of Tacitus, in whose day female divinities appear to have been
in the ascendancy—we think of his Veleda, Isis, Ausinia, Nerthus. It is
noteworthy that Bede knows of several important goddesses in England,
though all other trace of them has vanished.
One class of female divinities however still held a place in Scandi-
navian belief at least. It seems likely that the term disir—"(supernatural)
female beings "—covered both the valkyries and the norns. The valkyries
in the North were Odin's handmaidens in war, and some trace of such
beings survives in Anglo-Saxon glossaries, where wcelcyrge is used to
translate " Bellona," " Gorgon," etc. , though in the laws the word is merely
equivalent to "sorceress. " The norns seem to have been hereditary
tutelary spirits: they are thought of as causing good or evil fortune to
their owner, and appear in dreams to him, frequently in threes, to warn
him of impending danger. When there is only one attendant spirit she
is called homingja, or "Luck. " Such a being appears to the dying
Hallfred the Unlucky Poet, and to her the Saga-writer evidently ascribes
the ill-luck first of Hallfred and later of his son. It seems possible to
discern an original distinction between these beings and the Jylgju or
"associate," which appears as a mere materialisation, as it were, in animal
form, of the chief characteristic of its owner;—his soul, perhaps, though
it is not the immortal part of him, as it dies on his death. It is
probably closely connected with the werewolf beliefs, and that the con-
ception was common to all Teutonic races is indicated by the Song of
Roland, which makes Charles the Great dream before Roncesvalles of a
fight between a bear and a leopard. The disir are however too capricious
to be called guardian spirits. Those of one family, provoked at the
coming change of faith, are credited with having killed one of its
representatives. We see the reasonableness of the attitude taken up by a
would-be convert, who stipulates that the missionary shall guarantee him
the mighty archangel Michael as his "attendant angel" (fylgju-engiU).
All the three sacrifices to disir on record occur in the autumn, and of
one it is stated that it took place at night. It is noteworthy that the
term disa-thing is used as late as 1322 to denote a festival at Upsala.
A "disar-ha. ll" appears to be an old name for a temple. From Germany
we have a charm which seems rather to invoke the aid of friendly
## p. 487 (#519) ############################################
Fate. Cult of the Dead 487
valkyries, idisi, than of tutelary spirits, but we find many references to
a, personified " Luck," the " Fru Sselde," in medieval German poems, and
we are told of a poor knight accosted by a gigantic being who declares
itself to be his "ill-luck. " He shuts it up in a hollow tree and enjoys
good fortune ever after.
Northern mythology preserves a memory of three Norns who rule
men's destinies, like the Parcae of the Romans, but the words used for
Fate—Anglo-Saxon Wyrd, Old German Wurth, "Weird," literally
"that which happens," Old Norse shop or orlog, "things shaped" or
"laid down of yore "—shew that Fate was not personified, was rather
thought of as a force shaping the destinies of the world to unknown
ends. It was a mystery ever present to the consciousness of the heathen
Germanic races, and their deepest religious conceptions centre round it.
The old Greek idea, that a man might unwittingly be forced by a
retributive Fate to shameful deeds, never haunted the Northern races,
who would have claimed for mankind the completest moral freedom, but
in the physical world the decree of Fate was beyond appeal. A man
might defy Odin, and even fall upon him with mortal weapons, and gain
only a keener tribute of admiration from posterity, but after he had
striven to the utmost against all odds, his world required of him that he
should accept the ruling of Fate without bitterness, and even, if we read
the old tales rightly, with a certain dim recognition of vaster issues at
stake than his own death and defeat.
Of ancestor-worship or worship of the dead there are clear traces both
in Scandinavia and on the Continent. From Scandinavia we hear how
when the god Frey died the Swedes would not burn his body, lest he
should leave them, so they buried him in a barrow and sacrificed to him
ever after. The case of the quite historical Swedish king Erik, of the ninth
century, whom the gods themselves raised to their rank shortly after his
death, may also be quoted. Again, a somewhat legendary king Olaf who
flourished in South Norway in the first half of the ninth century, is made
to say before his death that in his case he does not want people to act as
they sometimes do, to sacrifice to dead men in whom they trusted while
alive. But after he was buried at Geirstad there was a famine, so they
sacrificed to Olaf for plenty and called him the "elf" (alfr) of Geirstad.
And there was competition for the corpse of the contemporary king
Halfdan the Black among the four chief districts of his kingdom: "it
was thought that there was a prospect of plenty for whichever got it,"
and the matter was only settled by dividing the remains into four parts.
So much for kings. But ordinary mortals could also enjoy worship after
death. An Icelandic source tells us of one Grim, the first settler in the
Faroe Islands, who had sacrifices made to him after death. It was the
custom at sacrificial feasts to drink to one's dead kinsmen, those who
had been buried in barrows.
Such toasts are called minni, and are
paralleled on the Continent by the " drinking to the soul of the dead"
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 488 (#520) ############################################
488 Chthonic Deities
forbidden by a ninth century Church capitulary. But there is more definite
evidence than this. The Norwegian laws expressly forbid worship at
barrows, a custom remembered by the saga of the island of Gotland, and
Charles the Great forbids burial in them. Almost every Capitulary and
Church Council in Germany (though not in England) forbids sacrilege at
sepulchres, "laying food and wine on the tumuli of the dead," or par-
taking of food offered at such places. Among the Saxons, and probably
among other tribes, the festival for the dead was celebrated in the
autumn. At the beginning of the fifth century the poet Claudian
speaks of worship of ancestors among the Getae.
In Iceland some families are said to have believed that after death
they entered into a hill, which they accordingly worshipped. In this
connexion "elf" is again used, and it seems reasonable to assume that
whatever other signification this word may have had later, it must also
have meant the spirit of a dead man. Now in Sweden the cult of the
forgotten dead may be said to live on to this day, for the peasants still
place offerings in the saucer-shaped depressions on some megalithic
graves, and here, in heathen times, we find mention of sacrifice to elves,
not at a festive gathering, but offered by each household within its own
four walls. It took place in the late evening or night, a circumstance
which strongly reminds us of Greek sacrifices to "heroes. "
There is yet another class of Scandinavian deities, who may be classed
as chthonic. These are the landvcettir, guardian spirits of the land.
That they were highly esteemed is evident from the beginning of the
Icelandic heathen laws, which enacted that no ship was to approach land
with a figure-head on its prow, lest the "landvaettir" should be alarmed
thereat. In Saxo men are warned not to provoke the guardian gods of
a certain place, and that it was perilous to do so transpires from the fear
with which a certain spot in Iceland was regarded "because of the
landvrettir," since a murder had been committed there. The nearest
approach to worship of these beings appears in a curious story of the
Icelander Egill in Norway, in the year 934. He sets up a horse's head
on a stake (a common insult to an enemy) and utters what appears to be
a formula: "I turn this mark of contumely against the landvcettir who
inhabit this land, that all of them may go astray: none find nor happen
upon her home, till they have driven King Erik and Gunnhild out of
the land. " It has been suggested that the "Matronae" or " Matres"
with German names, monuments to whom were erected by German
soldiers in the service of Rome, were guardian spirits of their native
land. Northern mythology tells us further of a female daemon of the
sea, Ran, who claims the drowned. We know of no direct sacrifices to
her, but there are traces of prophylactic sacrifice to some daemonic
being of the sea. The Frisians sacrificed human victims before expedi-
tions by sea, as did also the Normans, according to Dudo, though
he attributes the sacrifice to Thor. In Norway there are references to
## p. 489 (#521) ############################################
Inanimate Objects of Worship. Festivals 489
the placing of a human victim on the rollers of a ship about to be
launched.
Of inanimate objects of worship, besides sacred groves, which will be
discussed later, there are sacred springs. Close to the temple at Upsala
was a sacred spring, in which we are told that human victims were
drowned, and the story should not be too hastily dismissed, since sacred
springs are found within the precincts of many old churches all over
Germany and England. The occasional practice of Germanic tribes, men-
tioned by Classical authors, of throwing conquered enemies and valuables
into rivers, was probably a recognised form of worship of some god—
possibly of Odin. From the frequency of holy springs, wells, and lakes,
bearing names compounded with As (heathen god), Thor, or Odin, we
may assume that they were sometimes sacred to the greater gods, as were
probably the sacred salt springs mentioned by Tacitus. On the other
hand, Procopius in the sixth century says that the Scandinavians worship,
besides other gods, minor spirits in the waters of springs and rivers.
Knut's Laws in England, and Church Edicts on the Continent, refer to
the worship of rivers and water-wells, and further mention the worship of
stones, also known in Scandinavia.
Having now passed in review, however briefly, the chief objects
of worship among the Germanic races, it behoves us to consider the
manner of that worship. In the North there were three main sacrificial
festivals. One, in the autumn, is said to have been "for peace and
plenty," the second, at Yule, "for growth,11 the third, at the approach
of summer, was for victory. On the Continent the autumn festival and
that at midwinter appear, as in Scandinavia, to have been the most
important. We hear very little of a midsummer festival, but its
existence is vouched for by the widespread festivities in all Teutonic
countries on that day. In Denmark and Sweden special festivals appear
to have taken place at Lejre and Upsala respectively every nine years,
at which a great number of animals and even men were sacrificed.
The ritual of sacrifice is mainly known to us from the North. The
officiating priest fills the sacrificial bowl and reddens the altar with the
blood of the victim, scattering some of its contents over the worshippers
and the walls of the temple by means of sacrificial twigs. The blood is
in fact offered to the gods, or cements a bond between them and the
worshippers: the flesh is cooked and eaten. In Scandinavia horses were
much valued as sacrifices, so that to eat horse-flesh was regarded as a
heathen practice, and Tacitus also knows of sacrifice of horses. Ex-
cavations of Icelandic temples, however, reveal a preponderance of the
bones of other domestic animals. In England and on the Continent
cattle were frequent offerings. Gregory the Great decided to allow the
English to eat oxen ad laudem Dei, just outside their churches, since they
had been accustomed to sacrificing them " to demons. " Human sacrifice
seems to have persisted in Sweden till quite a late period. In 1026 a little
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 490 (#522) ############################################
490 Sacrificial Customs
party of Norwegians declared that they narrowly escaped being utilised for
that purpose on an expedition to Sweden; and the Saga of the island of
Gotland remembers the custom. On the Continent, too, human sacrifice
seems to have continued as long as heathenism, and we even hear of an
outburst of it among the converted Franks. In Friesland human beings
seem frequently to have been sacrificed by drowning. Except perhaps
in the last-named country, the victims were almost invariably prisoners
taken in war, slaves, or outlaws.
If the sacrifice was a public one—and probably in any case—it was
followed by a feast, which lasted till the ale gave out, and no longer.
A Norwegian archbishop reveals the importance of the ale even at
Christian festivals when he finds it necessary to ordain that a wedding
can yet be held, even though there be nothing but whey to celebrate it
with, and other Norwegian ecclesiastical ordinances enact that every
farmer shall brew so much ale in preparation for the various Church
festivals. The drinking itself began with sacrifice in the form of toasts
drunk to the gods, and this seems also to have been the case in Germany,
for we hear of " drinking wine for the love of the devil. " Jonas of Bobbio
relates how he found a party of men sitting round an immense vessel of
ale, who described themselves as worshipping Wodan. We also hear of an
individual in a temple " opima libamina exhibens usque ad vomitum cibo
potuque replebatur. " Centuries earlier, Tacitus tells us that when the
Romans surprised the Germans at a religious festival they cut down an
intoxicated foe. It seems that songs and dances were common at such
times, and we hear of the wearing of animal masks at Yule and at funeral
and memorial feasts1. Several other Scandinavian festivals are worthy
of notice, such as the "greeting ale" and the " ale of departure. ,, Even
when a Norwegian chief is about to flee from the swift vengeance of
Harold Fairhair, the " departure ale " has yet to be brewed. Still clearer
traces of sacrifice are discernible in the feast, for which the Norwegian
laws stipulate, on the occasion of granting rights in the family to an
illegitimate son, and also in that made by a slave on his liberation.
During the course of the great Scandinavian festivals, as well as
at other times, it appears to have been the custom for private individuals
to offer sacrifice for the purpose of propitiation or of learning their future.
The means employed in this latter case seem sometimes to have been the
sanctified twigs mentioned above. Tacitus knows of divination by twigs
and also mentions various other forms of augury. In Friesland the cast-
ing of lots seems to have played a particularly important part, and was
employed to select men for sacrifices.
We have already had occasion to refer to officiating priests. The
1 Even after the Reformation a Danish bishop finds it necessary to combat the
deep-rooted popular belief, that the more the guests drank at a funeral, the better
the dead man fared in the other world; and a French traveller says that at such
feasts the Danes drink to the souls of the dead, ce qui leurfait grand Wen.
## p. 491 (#523) ############################################
Priests. Kings. Priestesses 491
term, though permissible, is somewhat misleading, as the existence of a
special class or caste of priests in Scandinavia is much disputed, and there
seems to be considerable divergence on this point among the various
Germanic races at different times. In Iceland any leading settler who
built or came into possession of a temple officiated in it himself, and was
called a goSi (pi. gotiar), the connexion of which with goS (god) sug-
gests that the priestly function was older than the temporal authority.
In Norway the balance of probability seems to lie with the theory that
the earls and local chiefs (hersar), and probably also the petty kings, each
administered the chief temple of his district, perhaps with a gd6i or
gyftja, priestess (probably of his own family), to help him. In Sweden,
where worship was more centralised and systematised, there is some slight
evidence for the existence of gotSar, but it is clear that the king was the
high-priest of the people. It is recorded from prehistoric times that when
one of their kings failed to sacrifice the people attributed to him a famine
which ensued, and sacrificed him " for plenty. " As late as the eleventh
century they expelled their Christian king for refusal to sacrifice, and the
idea of the king's responsibility for bad weather,. for instance, can be
traced as late as the reign of Gustavus Vasa.
This idea of royal responsibility for national misfortunes is paralleled
among the Burgundians in the fourth century. For Denmark the only
evidence is the occurrence of the word gdSi on two Runic stones of about
the ninth and tenth centuries. In England there must have been a more
specialised priestly caste, with disabilities unknown to the Norwegians,
for Bede tells us that heathen priests might not bear arms. For
the Continent we have extremely little evidence. An Old German
glossary translates cotinc (formed from cot, god), not by presbyter but by
tribunus, and on the other hand the Old German iwart," guardian of law,11
and the Frisian and Low German asega, eosega, " law-sayer,11 are used to
denote " priest"; so we may perhaps assume that the functions of priest
were not very highly specialised at the close of heathendom. Tacitus
knows of a regular priesthood, whose only administrative function con-
sists in opening public assemblies (probably with a sacrifice, as in Iceland)
and in playing some part in their procedure. We hear occasionally of a
chief-priest, as among the Northumbrians, and among the Burgundians.
Among the latter he was called sinistus, and it is worth noting that
sinistans is the word chosen by Ulfilas for " elders. 11
Priestesses are rarely mentioned in the North, though they seem
to have been common among the Germans of Tacitus1 time.
The well-known statement of Tacitus, that the Germani do not
confine their gods within walls, but dedicate groves and trees to them,
does not seem to have been of universal application even in his own day.
But it is quite certain that he is right in the main with regard to the
prevalence of grove- and tree-sanctuaries. The frequent occurrence of
such place-names as the German Heiligenloh, Heiligenforst, and the
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 492 (#524) ############################################
492 Sanctuaries
Scandinavian Lund (the latter often compounded with the names of
Odin, Thor and Frey) would alone suffice to prove the earlier existence
of groves, "grim with ancient religious rites," as Claudian describes
them. Of sacred trees, perhaps the most famous was the robor Jozris
in Hesse. An interesting old Scandinavian proverb, recorded in Iceland,
may be quoted here: "One must worship an oak, if one is to live under
it. " After the erection of a temple the sacred tree may have lived on
beside it, and indeed probably conditioned the form of the temple itself.
The Icelandic temple, as we know from recent excavations, consisted of
a hall, like the hall of the ordinary dwelling-house, and at its further
end a smaller building, with slightly rounded corners, which'was the real
sanctuary, with the altar in the middle and the images of the gods,
generally three in number, standing round it. The outer hall, with its
sacred pillars and its row of fires down the middle, is thought to have
been a later addition for the convenience of worshippers, but the form of
the inner building is considered to shew descent from the tree-sanctuary.
It has been suggested that the round churches, only found on Germanic
territory, are the lineal descendants of the heathen temple, and hence of
the tree-sanctuary.
Besides the images, the inner temple contained the sacrificial bowl
and twigs, and the sacred ring which the priest wore on his arm at all
assemblies, and on which oaths were sworn. Both temple and images
appear to have been very highly decorated, sometimes even with gold and
silver.
Two other types of sanctuary deserve mention. On the Continent
we hear of pillars, apparently called Irminsul (translated universalis
columna), which may well have been a side-development from the tree-
sanctuary. Charles the Great destroyed the most famous of these, in
Westphalia. The northern hbrg is frequently assumed to have been a
stone altar or "high place. 11 But the Norwegian laws speak of " making
a house and calling it a horg. "" It is only mentioned in connexion with
female deities, or with Njord, but the occurrence of "Thorsharg"
and " Odinsharg" as place-names in Sweden renders it doubtful whether
it could have been limited to the use of female (or originally female)
deities, at any rate in Sweden. The cognate Old German haruc is
sometimes translated lucus or nemus, sometimes only by the vague
fanum; while the Anglo-Saxon hearg seems to be a comprehensive term
for any kind of sanctuary, almost corresponding to the Scandinavian
ve, though this includes Things.
In Scandinavia the violater of any sanctuary is called "wolf in holy
places," and becomes an outlaw in his own land, though we note that he
may be well received in other Scandinavian countries. In Friesland those
who broke into a temple to rob it were sacrificed to the god whom they
had offended. It is difficult to say how far, on the other hand, the
sanctuaries offered a refuge to accused persons and criminals. The abuse
## p. 493 (#525) ############################################
Funeral Customs. Life after Death 493
of the right of asylum in medieval churches—many of them only trans-
formed temples—suggests that this was a prominent characteristic of
heathen temples. On the other hand we learn from an Icelandic Saga
that the god Frey would not tolerate the presence of an outlaw even in
the neighbourhood of his temple.
It will now be convenient to consider the funeral customs of the
Teutonic races. Excavations in Scandinavia as well as literary records shew
that towards the close of heathen times the great majority of the dead
were interred in barrows, often in their ships, with some of their valuables,
and occasionally with horses, dogs and other animals. Slaves sometimes
accompany their master or mistress. Leo Diaconus informs us that in
the tenth century the Swedes in the Byzantine Empire used to kill their
captives and burn their bodies with those of their own slain, apparently
with the idea of providing their friends with servants in the next world.
The practice of suttee was not unknown, though very rare. In some
cases everything found in the barrow has been burnt, but inhumation is
the commoner practice. It is noteworthy that weapons are rarely found
in the period preceding about a. d. 500, while after that time, in the
Viking Age, weapons form the most important part of the goods placed
in the grave. It is sometimes shewn in our sources that all these objects,
including the ship, or occasionally a chariot, are provided with the
intention of supplying the dead with what they will need in the next
world, or with the means of getting there.
Besides a few indications of a belief in rebirth, there are no less than
three forms of life after death in Scandinavian belief alone. We will
begin with the most famous, Valholl (the hall of the slain), where those
who fell in battle feasted and fought into eternity. But when we come
to apply the commonly accepted theory that all those slain in fight passed
into Valholl, we find it impossible to make it fit the facts as reported to
us. A number of the Edda poems seem to know nothing about Valholl,
and despatch their mightiest warriors to the dreary abode of Hel, and
the same treatment is frequently meted out in the sagas. The likeliest
explanation seems to be that Valholl was intimately bound up with the
cult of Odin, which, as we have seen, probably entered into the lives of
a comparatively small class, and was very recent in the North. The
influence of the cult may perhaps be traced in the sudden appearance
of weapons in graves about the fifth century. The great historical
importance of the Valholl idea lies in the stimulus it gave to desperate
courage in battle. The influence of a similar belief1 among the Japanese
of our own day was evident in their war with Russia. It was no doubt
belief in some such palace of the dead, only to be reached by those
who died of wounds, which induced the aged among the Heruli to accept
a voluntary death inflicted by stabbing, and it has been shewn that the
formal "marking" of a dying man, mentioned two or three times in
1 Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, an Interpretation, p. 507.
ch. xv. (c)
## p. 494 (#526) ############################################
494. The continued Presence of the Dead
the North, is probably a substitute for the older custom of the Heruli
in the fifth or sixth century.
Hel answers to the Greek Hades, a shadowy region of which we hear
very little in the Sagas, where the word hel does indeed frequently occur,
but usually merely with the signification of " death. 11
We have already seen that the conception of a future life spent by
the ghost in or near its burial-place was by far the commonest, not
only in Scandinavia, but all over Germanic territory. It would not
be surprising to find that this, evidently the oldest belief about the dead,
was connected with the faith of Thor, and some testimony to that effect
is afforded by the inscriptions on a Runic grave-monument in Denmark:
"May Thor consecrate these mounds,11 or in two other cases "these runes. "
In Sweden we find an inscription which has been translated "Thor give
peace. " The sign of the hammer occurs on several other monuments, no
doubt with a similar force. With regard to the variant of this belief,
the "dying into mountains,11 all the evidence seems to connect it with
Thor. In two cases out of the four on record we are explicitly informed
that the persons "believed in Thor. 11 In the third case, that of the
kinsmen of one Aud, we know no further detail of their religion except
in the case of Aud^ brother, of whom it is stated that "he believed in
Christ, but invoked Thor in voyages and difficulties, and whenever he
thought it mattered most. 11
It is clearly this belief in the continued presence of the dead which
caused the widespread worship of them already discussed, and it is this
belief, too, which has peopled all Germanic territory with ghosts, whether
malignant trolls, slayers of the living, or friendly spirits.
Like all other religions, that of the Germanic peoples was a mass of
mixed elements, a jumble of many different stages of culture. Primitive
magical rites were no doubt freely practised, and in view of the age-
long survival of such rites in rustic festivals and rustic faith, it would be
the greatest mistake to belittle their importance in earlier Germanic life.
But our sources refer to them so little that we are justified in suspecting
the mass of these practices to be already declining into the observances
of popular superstition, with possibly nearly as little conscious religious
significance as to-day.
There were still traces of an early grim idea of placation by sacrifice:
the god of the dead, or the daemonic being who inhabits the sea, demands
a human life, and one must be offered that others may be safe. But except
for a few legendary instances, we see that the Germanic peoples have
progressed so far in corporate sense that the community only offers
the lives of those outside its pale—outlaws or captives to whom it
knows no obligations. Only in Friesland is there any definite evidence
that members of the community were immolated.
But the prevalent idea of sacrifice is a more comfortable one. Gifts
are made to the gods, who requite them with favours, an idea which
## p. 495 (#527) ############################################
Ideas underlying Germanic Religion 495
reflects the manners of the time, with its system of gifts and counter-
gifts, and which shews that the gods were thought of as recognising
a social bond linking them to their worshippers.
The cult of the dead reveals a sense rather of piety than of fear, for
we never find that the Scandinavians, at any rate, sank to the placation
of evil ghosts by sacrifice. They adopt other, somewhat matter-of-fact
precautions against them, such as taking the corpse out through a hole
in the wall of the house, burning and scattering the ashes, or decapitating
the ghost, though perhaps there never was a prototype in heathen times
of the delightfully ironic scene in one of the Icelandic sagas, where the
living, ousted from the fireside by the dead, hold a court of law over them
and banish them by the verdict of a jury.
On the whole, we are left with the impression that Germanic heathen-
dom was as far from being a religion of dread as it was from the formalism,
impregnated with magical ideas, which pervaded the religious system of the
Romans. Though the gods could be angry and cause famine and plague
and defeat, they were at any rate occasionally the objects of real trust and
affection, and their acknowledged favouritism is not imputed to them
as injustice. Only near the end of the heathen period do we find any
repugnance to the idea of allegiance to non-moral gods.
Perhaps the finest flower of Germanic heathendom should be sought
in the period just before its extinction—in the Viking Age, so often
accused of godlessness. In the conception of Ragnarok, which fired the
imagination of the North, we find the idea of fellowship with the
gods: fellowship, not in feasting and victory, but in stress and storm.
For the gods too are in the hands of Destiny, of a Fate ever moving
towards the end of the world, when they and the armies of the valiant
dead together make a vain stand against the race of daemonic beings,
monstrous shapes of disorder and destruction, loosed in the shattering
of the earth which precedes that Titanic struggle. The great bequests
of the heathen Germanic peoples to the new order, their courage, and
their ideal of loyalty to a leader, find their highest expression in this
vision of preordained defeat.
CH. xv. (c)
## p. 496 (#528) ############################################
406
CHAPTER XVI (a).
THE CONVERSION OF THE KELTS.
(1) ROMAN BRITAIN.
By the British Church is meant the Christian Church which existed
in England and Wales, before the foundation of the English Church
by Augustine of Canterbury, and after that event to a limited extent in
Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, and Strathclyde.
How, when, where, and by whom was it founded? To these questions
no answer is forthcoming. The legends connecting various Apostles,
and other scriptural personages, especially Joseph of Arimathaea, with
Britain may be dismissed at once. They first appear in very late
writings, and have no historical foundations.
We next come to a story which has obtained some considerable
credence because it is found in the pages of Bede. It is to the effect that
in the year a. d. 156 a British king named Lucius (Lies ap Coel) appealed
to Pope Eleutherus to be instructed in the Christian religion, that
the application was granted,, and that the king and nation were then
converted to Christianity. The story first appears in a sixth century
recension of the Liber Pontifiealis at Rome, whence Bede must have
borrowed it. It was unknown to the British historian Gildas, and it
has no other support. Bede's version of it involves chronological errors,
and Professor Harnack has recently driven the last nail into its coffin
by his brilliant suggestion or discovery that Lucius was not a British
king at all, but king of Birtha (confused with Britannia) in Edessa,
a Mesopotamian realm whose sovereign was Lucius Aelius Septimus
Megas Abgarus IX1.
But there is indirect and outside evidence that Christianity had
penetrated Britain at the end of the second century. The evidence is
patristic in its source, and general in its character. Tertullian writing
c. 208 speaks of places in Britain inaccessible to the Romans, yet subject
to Christ; and Origen writing about thirty years later refers in two
passages to the British people having come under the influence of
Christianity. But how did they so come? In the absence of precise
information, the most probable supposition is that Christianity came
through Gaul, between which country and Britain commercial intercourse
» E. H. B. xxii. pp. 767-70.
## p. 497 (#529) ############################################
Introduction of Christianity 497
was active. There may also have been individual Christians among the
Roman soldiers who were then stationed in Britain.
Slecht is said to have been so called because the ancient Irish used to
sacrifice there the first-born of their children and of their flocks, in order
to secure power and peace in all their tribes, and to obtain milk and com
for the support of their families. A careful and discriminating study of
Keltic legends would reveal no small sediment of pre-Christian thought,
just as there are traces of the belief in a " Happy Other-world" and of
the rebirth of heroes, in the Irish Voyage of Bran, and non-Christian
pictures of another world in the Welsh Annwfn, which a medieval
Welsh poem represents as being beneath the earth. Similarly, the Keltic
folk-lore stories of water-bulls, water-horses, water-nymphsA fairies,
sprites, and the like give a clue to the way in which Nature Vas re-
garded by the Kelts of Britain, as of other lands, before Christianity
began its work in these islands.
The contribution of folk-lore research to the study of Keltic Hea! tthen-
dom in Britain is very valuable; for example, in the account which it
gives of such practices as the periodical lighting of bonfires, the custofti
observed at Lent, May-day, and Harvest time, the vestiges of charms and
sacrifices, the observation of omens and the like. By the use of the
comparative method the study of folk-lore may be able to throw not a
little light on the significance of the various practices in question. The
evidence from all directions tends to shew that, in Britain and Ireland,
as on the Continent, Keltic religion regarded substantially all natural
objects as the abodes of divine beings, named and nameless, viewed
sometimes collectively and sometimes individually, and it pictured the
existence beneath this world of another world, whence many of the
## p. 479 (#511) ############################################
Survivals 479
blessings of civilisation were derived, and whose inhabitants could enter
into various relations, friendly and hostile, with those of this world.
There are traces, too, of the conception of local other-worlds, to be found
underneath lakes and parts of the sea, while, both in Irish and Welsh
legend, there are vestiges of a belief in the blissful conditions of life on
certain fabulous islands. In Welsh legend, too, it would appear that the
wild country of Northern Britain was regarded as a haunted region. In
some Welsb medieval poems there are echoes of a belief that the souls of
the departed made their home in the Caledonian forest.
With regard to the priests of Britain and Ireland, we have little
direct knowledge, but, though the Irish drui may conceivably be a
borrowed word from the Gallo-Latin druida, it is most probable that
it is a native word, and, in any case, the part played by the druids in
Irish society as magicians and seers in the legends of Ireland would be
their natural part in pre-Christian times. In Welsh society, too, the
continuance into fairly recent times of the practice of having recourse to
wizards in certain emergencies, points to the antiquity in Welsh life of
the institution of the sorcerer. The best description that can be given
of Britain and Ireland in the days of their heathendom, is that of coun-
tries whose inhabitants could have been seldom free by night or by day
from a sense of being haunted, but whose gloom was relieved by visions
of happy other-lands, into which the privileged might some day enter.
Doubtless, in close conjunction with Keltic heathendom, there was at one
time much oral mythology, the fragments of which can now only with
difficulty be disentangled from the mass of Keltic medieval and modern
folk-lore.
There is one problem upon which no light appears to be available,
namely the religious organisation through which was maintained the
worship of the major Keltic deities, whose names are found in the British
Isles as well as on the Continent, and the distinction, if any, that was
made between their worship and that of the minor local deities. All
that we know is, from the survival of some of their names, that the
tradition of their worship was not entirely lost. At Bath there are
remains of a temple dedicated to Subs, who was identified with Minerva.
At Caerwent and Lydney there are also remains of temples, the latter
dedicated to a Keltic god, Nodens or Nodons. Near Carrawburgh there
was a temple belonging to the British water-goddess Coventina, and at
Benwell in a small temple there were found two altars, one to Anociticus
and the other to Antenociticus. For an account of these temples the
reader is referred to Ward's Romano-British Buildings and Earthworks
(London, Methuen & Co. , 1911).
CH. XV. (b)
## p. 480 (#512) ############################################
480 Germanic Heathenism,
(C)
GERMANIC HEATHENISM.
Attempts to reconstruct the great edifice of ancient Teutonic
religion base themselves on two main sources of information: the
Continental and the Scandinavian. English evidence stands midway
between the two. With the exception of Tacitus, the Continental
writers seldom do more than let fall some chance remark on religious
practices, their chief concern being with other matters—in Classical and
post-Classical times with the wars of these "barbaric" races, and later,
with their conversion to Christianity. We also possess some early laws,
and the histories of those tribes fortunate enough to have inspired a
medieval chronicler, but the laws date in their present shape from
Christian times, and the histories are hardly more sympathetic towards
heathen ideas than are the Lives of martyred saints or the edicts of
Church Councils. The chief sources from Denmark, Norway and Sweden
comprise a great wealth of archaeological information, their early laws,
and Saxo's history of the legendary kings of Denmark, written about
1208. It is Iceland which furnishes us with almost all the literary evidence,
beginning with the mythological poems of the Older Edda, which can in
one sense be termed Icelandic with impunity, in the midst of the conflict
as to their origin, since they only reach us from that country. With
them may be classed the earlier skaldic poems from the Norwegian court.
Then come the Sagas, prose histories of Icelandic families and Norwegian
kings, often dealing with events which occurred before the conversion to
Christianity about a. d. 1000, but not committed to writing till the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
Neither source of evidence is perfectly satisfactory. The Scandinavian
Sagas, though originating among a people with an extraordinarily keen
instinct for historic truth, are far from contemporary with the events
they relate. The Continental references to the subject are indeed often
contemporary, but they are the observations of alien eyes, and some of
them are open to the further objection that the superstitions mentioned
may occasionally be mere survivals of the religious legacy of Rome.
Fortunately there is more agreement between these two sources than we
could have dared to expect, and this common factor in both is the more
valuable, since, though one channel of information begins where the other
leaves off, they are yet practically independent of one another. While
fully admitting that there were extremely wide local divergences in the
practices and belief of the various tribes, the following survey of the
\
## p. 481 (#513) ############################################
Thor or Thunor 481
main features of Germanic heathendom is yet based with some confidence
on this common factor, to which a third stratum of evidence, folk-lore,
contributes subsidiary testimony. It has seemed best in almost all cases
to begin with the fuller, though later, Scandinavian sources, in the light
of which it is sometimes possible to interpret the more meagre references
of Continental writers.
A problem confronts us at the outset with regard to the position of
the two chief gods, Odin and Thor, in Scandinavia. Most of the
poetical sources depict Odin as the chief of the gods, as the Allfather of
gods and men, while the prose writings contain frequent indications that
Thor, the Thunder-god (Anglo-Saxon Thunor) stands highest of all in
the popular estimation. There can be no doubt that the Sagas are right
with regard to their own territory. The frequent occurrence of proper
names compounded with Thor (such as Thorolf, Thorstein, etc. ) testifies
to his importance in Scandinavia, especially as we are told that a name
compounded with that of a god was esteemed a safeguard to its bearer.
At least one out of every five immigrants to Iceland in heathen times
bore a name of which Thor formed part. His is certainly a very ancient
cult. His whole equipment is primitive: he is never credited in Scandi-
navian sources with the possession of a sword, a horse or a coat of mail,
but he either walks or drives in a car drawn by goats, and wields the
hammer or axe. The sanctity of this symbol appears to date from very
remote times: in fact the Museum at Stockholm contains a miniature
hammer of amber from the later Stone Age. Another indication of the
antiquity of the cult is afforded by Thor's original identity, not only
with Jupiter and Zeus, but also with Keltic, Old Prussian and Slavonic
thunder-gods. But like these, Thor is much more than a thunder-god.
In Scandinavia he is called the Defender of the World, a title which he
may have earned in his encounter with the "jotnar. " This word usually
denotes daemonic beings, but it seems that it may originally have applied
to the early non-Aryan inhabitants of Scandinavia, whom the Teutonic
settlers drove gradually northwards. We may hazard the conjecture that
the Teutonic invasion, which crept forward from the Stone Age till the
close of heathen times, was made as it were under the auspices of Thor.
He is also the guardian of the land. In Iceland we hear of settlers conse-
crating their land to Thor, and naming it after him. It is interesting to
note that an ancient method of allotting holdings in Sweden was known as
the " hammer-partition," while among the Upper Saxons the throwing of
a hammer was held to legalise possession of land. But this is probably
connected with Thor's guardianship of law and order. The Older Edda
represents him as dealing out justice under the great world-ash Yggdrasill.
Most of the Scandinavian assemblies began on a Thursday—the day named
after Thor—and there seems no doubt that it was he who was invoked under
the name of " the almighty god" by those swearing oaths at the Icelandic
Things. The Russian historian Nestor, of the eleventh century, records
C. MED. H. VOL. II. CH. XV. (c) 31
## p. 482 (#514) ############################################
482 Functions of Thor
that the Scandinavians from Kiev ratified a treaty with the Byzantines
by swearing by their god "Perun," the Slavonic Thor. The Frisians
attributed their laws to a supernatural being with an axe. Among the
Upper Saxons a hammer was the summons to the assembly. In later
times in Iceland a small object called " St Olafs axe" served this purpose.
It is likely that this "axe" was originally a "Thor's hammer,'" for by the
irony of fate, many of the attributes of his old enemy Thor attached
themselves in popular belief to the sainted king Olaf, who rooted out his
worship in Norway. An Icelandic settler invokes him in sea-voyages,
and Adam of Bremen states that the Swedes sacrifice to him in famine
and in pestilence. As regards disease, we have the further testimony of
an Old Norse charm found in an Anglo-Saxon manuscript, which appears
to call on Thor to drive away an ailment, and it was until recently a
common Swedish practice to mix in the fodder of cattle powder ground
from the edge of a " Thor's hammer" or flint axe, to avert disease. It is
possible that the miniature T-shaped hammers, often of silver or gold,
of which over fifty are to be seen in the Scandinavian museums, were
worn to shield the wearer from disease, but the protective functions of
Thor were so numerous that the symbols may have served other purposes
as well. It has recently been recorded that Manx and Whitby fishermen
wear the T-shaped bone from the tongue of a sheep to protect them from
drowning; and slaughterers at Berlin wear the same bone suspended from
their necks1. The appearance of the bearded Thor himself, hammer and
all, on a baptismal font in Sweden, has been considered to prove that the
hammer was used at the heathen ceremony of naming a child, and we
have some ground for supposing that it figured at weddings and at
funerals.
Sacrifices to Thor are constantly mentioned, and range from the
daily offerings of the Goth Badagaisus in Italy at the beginning of
the fifth century to a song in his honour composed in the year 1006 by
one of an Icelandic crew starving off" the coast of America. It seems
probable that the sacrifice at the beginning of all Things was to Thor.
At one place of assembly in Iceland we hear of a "stone of Thor" on
which " men were broken," but human sacrifice is so rarely mentioned in
Iceland that the statement is looked upon with suspicion. We must note
that Tacitus fails to mention a Germanic Jupiter. It has been suggested
that he represents Thor by Hercules.
After the enumeration of the manifold activities of Thor, there seems
hardly room for the imposing figure of Odin, and indeed in Scandinavia,
besides being the Lord of Valholl, Odin only presides over war, poetry
and magic. Yet in one point he stands nearer to the race of men
than Thor, in that he is regarded as the ancestor of most of the royal
families of Denmark and of England (where the form of the name
is Wodan). It is perhaps hardly correct to speak of Thor and Odin
1 A. C. Haddon, Magic and Fetishism, London, 1906.
## p. 483 (#515) ############################################
Odin or Wodan 483
as ruling over different social spheres, for Thor numbers earls and
others of high degree among his worshippers, but persons of royal
blood and their followers seem to devote themselves to the worship of
Odin—the cult of a royal ancestor. Nomenclature affords interesting
testimony to some such social division. We have seen what a large
proportion of Norwegian proper names contained "Thor" as a com-
ponent part, but we do not find any of these borne by a single
Norwegian, Swedish, Danish or English king. Not even among the petty
kings of the period preceding the unification of Norway under King
Harold Fairhair do such names occur. Now we are told that it was just
these petty, often landless, kings who with their followings practised
war as a profession, and it was certainly in Norwegian court circles that
skaldic poetry—an art attributed to Odin—took its origin. If the
position of Odin was at all similar on the Continent, it would be easy
to explain the prominence of this god in all Continental accounts from
Tacitus onwards, for it seems probable that there also each king or prince
was surrounded by a body of warriors devoted to his service, and that
these took the principal part in wars.
In Iceland there is no mention of Odin-worship, though there is one
instance of the "old custom " of throwing a spear over a hostile force, a
rite which originally devoted the enemy to Odin. The existence of the cult
in Norway is vouched for by the custom of drinking a toast consecrated
to him at sacrificial feasts, but we must note that a toast to Odin is only
mentioned at courts. In Sweden, however, Odin is more prominent.
There is a statue of him "like Mars" by the side of Thor in the great
Upsala temple, and the people are said to sacrifice to him in time of war.
A legendary king sacrifices his nine sons to him for long life for himself
—a gift which another story shews it to be within Odin's power to
bestow, if he receives other lives in exchange. It is generally agreed
that he was originally a god of the dead, before he became a god of war,
and it is in the guise of a soul-stealing daemon that he seems to
appear in folk-lore. For Denmark the tales of heroes under Odin's
protection, and the importance of the god in Saxo's stories (where he
sometimes appears himself to demand his victim), form a considerable
body of evidence. Of the Frisians we are told by Alcuin that the island
Walcheren was sacred to a god whom later accounts identify with Mercury.
Mercury is the name under which Odin appears in Tacitus and all Con-
tinental writers, and shews that the god must there have borne much the
same character as is ascribed to him in Scandinavian sources, where he is
described as shifty, and full of guile, skilled in magic and runes, and the
inventor of poetry. To judge from the evidence of place-names, his
cult extended as far south as Salzburg. It is also noteworthy that the
Scandinavian account of his equipment, armed only with a javelin,
corresponds to that of the Germans in the time of Tacitus.
An ancient form of sacrifice to Odin in Scandinavia is the gruesome
ch. xv. (c) 31—2
## p. 484 (#516) ############################################
484 Odin. Frey
"cutting of the blood-eagle" or removal of the lungs of the victim, of
which we hear once or twice, but there seems ground for believing that
the usual ritual frequently combined both hanging and stabbing. In
fact all those who fell in battle were regarded as sacrifices to Odin.
Tacitus tells us that on the eve of the battle between the Chatti and
Hermunduri each side dedicated their opponent's army to Mars and
to Mercury. By this vow both horses and men, in short everything
on the side of the conquered, was given up to destruction. After
their victory over the Romans at Arausio (b. c. 105) the Cimbrians
hung all their captives and destroyed their spoil. The complete destruc-
tion of the legions of Varus, and the total massacre of Britons after an
Anglo-Saxon victory, have been suggested as other instances of the same
wholesale sacrifice. In some places in Denmark immense masses of
heaped up spoil, mostly intentionally damaged, from the fourth century
a. d. , have been found. These must have been offered as a sacrifice after
victory, and have lain undisturbed on the battle-ground owing to a
stringent tabu. A dedication of whole armies to Odin is mentioned in
later Scandinavian Sagas, where it seems to be connected with the idea
that the god needs more warriors in Valholl.
While Odin and Thor, however inimical to each other they may be,
are both regarded as ^Esir (gods) in the mythology of the north—in fact
Thor is made Odin's son—we are told that Frey and his father Njord
were originally hostages from the " Vanir," a rival race. Certainly their
functions in historical times are very different from those of Thor and
Odin. Frey, whose name is derived from a word meaning " lord," is only
known in Scandinavia. He is a god of fertility, with the usual attributes
of such a deity. He is especially honoured by the Swedes, and Adam
of Bremen tells us that his statue stood by the side of Thor in the
temple of Upsala, that sacrifices are made to him at weddings, and that
he grants men peace and pleasure. Tacitus' account of the peaceful,
wealth-loving " Suiones" (Swedes) closely corresponds to what we should
expect of a nation whose chief god was Frey, and places beyond question
the old-established nature of a cult of this kind. In Norway we hear of
toasts drunk to Frey and his father Njord "for prosperity and peace,"
and a sacrificial feast at the beginning of winter, to secure the same
benefits, is associated with Frey in Iceland, where he and Njord are
invoked in legal oaths. A legendary saga relates that Frey, in the
company of a priestess who was regarded as his wife, was in the habit of
peregrinating the country round Upsala in the autumn, for the purpose
of causing plenty. This is the clue which leads us to detect traces of an
allied cult on the Continent. The goddess Nerthus, who is worshipped
according to Tacitus by seven tribes, apparently in Zeeland (possibly
at Naerum, older Niartharum), journeys round her island at certain
seasons in a covered vehicle. During this time peace prevails, and her
presence is celebrated by festivities. The ritual of lustration described
## p. 485 (#517) ############################################
The goddess Nerthus. Other Deities 485
by Tacitus is generally regarded as a rain-charm. From the similarity
of this cult to that of goddesses of fertility all over Europe, we may
assume that Nerthus, like Frey, partook of this character. Amongst
other Teutonic races the earliest parallel to her peregrinations is recorded
by the Byzantine historian Sozomen, in the fifth century, who states
that the Goths lead round a statue in a covered vehicle. From the ninth
century we have the item: "concerning the images which they carry
about the fields," in a list of prohibited superstitions. But ample
evidence for these practices is afforded by the ceremonies, common up to
twenty years ago, connected with Plough Monday in England and with
Frau Holle in Germany.
It is to be noted that the names Nerthus and Njord are identical in all
but gender, and it seems that in Scandinavia Nerthus has changed her sex
and has subsequently been partly ousted by Frey; Njord, however, still
rules over fishery and wealth—two very closely allied ideas among the
Norwegians, to whom a sea teeming with fish was quite as important as the
fertility of the land. It is just possible that it is Njbrd to whom a ninth
century Latin poem refers, under the name of Neptune, as a chief god of
the Normans. Frey seems also to have partially ousted his sister Freyja.
One of the Edda poems is concerned with a certain Ottar, who sacrifices
oxen to Freyja, and whom she on one occasion declares to be her husband
—a parallel case to that of Frey and the priestess mentioned above, but
with the sexes reversed.
Of the numerous other gods mentioned in our sources some may be
either tribal deities, or better-known gods under other names. Such are
the Frisian god Fosite: the twins whom Tacitus equates with Castor and
Pollux, and who are worshipped by the Nahanarvali: the god Saxnot,
or Saxneat, forsworn with Wodan and Thunor in an Old Saxon formula
for converts, and claimed as an ancestor by the English East Saxon royal
family. Other gods, such as Balder and Loki, of whom we only hear in
Scandinavia, have been occasionally regarded as mere mythological figure-
heads. Of the evil-disposed Loki there is indeed no trace of any sort of
cult. It has been suggested that he was a Finnish god. Balder is the
subject of much controversy, some scholars dismissing him from the rank
of deity altogether, while Dr Frazer maintains that the story is a survival
of tree worship, and of the ritual sacrifice of the god. In any case the
only reference to an actual cult of Balder occurs in a late and doubtful
saga. Tyr, who seems to have been a war-god, stands in a different cate-
gory. It is likely that he had once been an important deity all over
Teutonic Europe, though his cult was already overshadowed by that of
Odin at the dawn of historical times. Some modern authorities place
his cult in close connexion with that of Nerthus—for which view certain
local groups of place-names afford support—and regard him as being
originally a god of the sky. A reference by Procopius to Ares, in his
account of the inhabitants of Thule, and by Jornandes to Mars, both of
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 486 (#518) ############################################
486 Female Deities
the sixth century, and both in connexion with human sacrifice, are
usually held to indicate Tyr, as is also the important god Mars of
Tacitus. The identity of Mars and Tyr is established by glossaries
which equate Mars with "Tiw," "Tug," as in Tuesday. In Scandinavia
the word Tyr originally means "god," and in compounds is applied
to Odin.
There is evidence that Frigg, in Northern mythology Odin's wife, was
also widely known among Teutonic nations, but she seems in part to have
been ousted from her place by Freyja, and in part to have suffered that
general decline which must have overtaken the Germanic goddesses since
the time of Tacitus, in whose day female divinities appear to have been
in the ascendancy—we think of his Veleda, Isis, Ausinia, Nerthus. It is
noteworthy that Bede knows of several important goddesses in England,
though all other trace of them has vanished.
One class of female divinities however still held a place in Scandi-
navian belief at least. It seems likely that the term disir—"(supernatural)
female beings "—covered both the valkyries and the norns. The valkyries
in the North were Odin's handmaidens in war, and some trace of such
beings survives in Anglo-Saxon glossaries, where wcelcyrge is used to
translate " Bellona," " Gorgon," etc. , though in the laws the word is merely
equivalent to "sorceress. " The norns seem to have been hereditary
tutelary spirits: they are thought of as causing good or evil fortune to
their owner, and appear in dreams to him, frequently in threes, to warn
him of impending danger. When there is only one attendant spirit she
is called homingja, or "Luck. " Such a being appears to the dying
Hallfred the Unlucky Poet, and to her the Saga-writer evidently ascribes
the ill-luck first of Hallfred and later of his son. It seems possible to
discern an original distinction between these beings and the Jylgju or
"associate," which appears as a mere materialisation, as it were, in animal
form, of the chief characteristic of its owner;—his soul, perhaps, though
it is not the immortal part of him, as it dies on his death. It is
probably closely connected with the werewolf beliefs, and that the con-
ception was common to all Teutonic races is indicated by the Song of
Roland, which makes Charles the Great dream before Roncesvalles of a
fight between a bear and a leopard. The disir are however too capricious
to be called guardian spirits. Those of one family, provoked at the
coming change of faith, are credited with having killed one of its
representatives. We see the reasonableness of the attitude taken up by a
would-be convert, who stipulates that the missionary shall guarantee him
the mighty archangel Michael as his "attendant angel" (fylgju-engiU).
All the three sacrifices to disir on record occur in the autumn, and of
one it is stated that it took place at night. It is noteworthy that the
term disa-thing is used as late as 1322 to denote a festival at Upsala.
A "disar-ha. ll" appears to be an old name for a temple. From Germany
we have a charm which seems rather to invoke the aid of friendly
## p. 487 (#519) ############################################
Fate. Cult of the Dead 487
valkyries, idisi, than of tutelary spirits, but we find many references to
a, personified " Luck," the " Fru Sselde," in medieval German poems, and
we are told of a poor knight accosted by a gigantic being who declares
itself to be his "ill-luck. " He shuts it up in a hollow tree and enjoys
good fortune ever after.
Northern mythology preserves a memory of three Norns who rule
men's destinies, like the Parcae of the Romans, but the words used for
Fate—Anglo-Saxon Wyrd, Old German Wurth, "Weird," literally
"that which happens," Old Norse shop or orlog, "things shaped" or
"laid down of yore "—shew that Fate was not personified, was rather
thought of as a force shaping the destinies of the world to unknown
ends. It was a mystery ever present to the consciousness of the heathen
Germanic races, and their deepest religious conceptions centre round it.
The old Greek idea, that a man might unwittingly be forced by a
retributive Fate to shameful deeds, never haunted the Northern races,
who would have claimed for mankind the completest moral freedom, but
in the physical world the decree of Fate was beyond appeal. A man
might defy Odin, and even fall upon him with mortal weapons, and gain
only a keener tribute of admiration from posterity, but after he had
striven to the utmost against all odds, his world required of him that he
should accept the ruling of Fate without bitterness, and even, if we read
the old tales rightly, with a certain dim recognition of vaster issues at
stake than his own death and defeat.
Of ancestor-worship or worship of the dead there are clear traces both
in Scandinavia and on the Continent. From Scandinavia we hear how
when the god Frey died the Swedes would not burn his body, lest he
should leave them, so they buried him in a barrow and sacrificed to him
ever after. The case of the quite historical Swedish king Erik, of the ninth
century, whom the gods themselves raised to their rank shortly after his
death, may also be quoted. Again, a somewhat legendary king Olaf who
flourished in South Norway in the first half of the ninth century, is made
to say before his death that in his case he does not want people to act as
they sometimes do, to sacrifice to dead men in whom they trusted while
alive. But after he was buried at Geirstad there was a famine, so they
sacrificed to Olaf for plenty and called him the "elf" (alfr) of Geirstad.
And there was competition for the corpse of the contemporary king
Halfdan the Black among the four chief districts of his kingdom: "it
was thought that there was a prospect of plenty for whichever got it,"
and the matter was only settled by dividing the remains into four parts.
So much for kings. But ordinary mortals could also enjoy worship after
death. An Icelandic source tells us of one Grim, the first settler in the
Faroe Islands, who had sacrifices made to him after death. It was the
custom at sacrificial feasts to drink to one's dead kinsmen, those who
had been buried in barrows.
Such toasts are called minni, and are
paralleled on the Continent by the " drinking to the soul of the dead"
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 488 (#520) ############################################
488 Chthonic Deities
forbidden by a ninth century Church capitulary. But there is more definite
evidence than this. The Norwegian laws expressly forbid worship at
barrows, a custom remembered by the saga of the island of Gotland, and
Charles the Great forbids burial in them. Almost every Capitulary and
Church Council in Germany (though not in England) forbids sacrilege at
sepulchres, "laying food and wine on the tumuli of the dead," or par-
taking of food offered at such places. Among the Saxons, and probably
among other tribes, the festival for the dead was celebrated in the
autumn. At the beginning of the fifth century the poet Claudian
speaks of worship of ancestors among the Getae.
In Iceland some families are said to have believed that after death
they entered into a hill, which they accordingly worshipped. In this
connexion "elf" is again used, and it seems reasonable to assume that
whatever other signification this word may have had later, it must also
have meant the spirit of a dead man. Now in Sweden the cult of the
forgotten dead may be said to live on to this day, for the peasants still
place offerings in the saucer-shaped depressions on some megalithic
graves, and here, in heathen times, we find mention of sacrifice to elves,
not at a festive gathering, but offered by each household within its own
four walls. It took place in the late evening or night, a circumstance
which strongly reminds us of Greek sacrifices to "heroes. "
There is yet another class of Scandinavian deities, who may be classed
as chthonic. These are the landvcettir, guardian spirits of the land.
That they were highly esteemed is evident from the beginning of the
Icelandic heathen laws, which enacted that no ship was to approach land
with a figure-head on its prow, lest the "landvaettir" should be alarmed
thereat. In Saxo men are warned not to provoke the guardian gods of
a certain place, and that it was perilous to do so transpires from the fear
with which a certain spot in Iceland was regarded "because of the
landvrettir," since a murder had been committed there. The nearest
approach to worship of these beings appears in a curious story of the
Icelander Egill in Norway, in the year 934. He sets up a horse's head
on a stake (a common insult to an enemy) and utters what appears to be
a formula: "I turn this mark of contumely against the landvcettir who
inhabit this land, that all of them may go astray: none find nor happen
upon her home, till they have driven King Erik and Gunnhild out of
the land. " It has been suggested that the "Matronae" or " Matres"
with German names, monuments to whom were erected by German
soldiers in the service of Rome, were guardian spirits of their native
land. Northern mythology tells us further of a female daemon of the
sea, Ran, who claims the drowned. We know of no direct sacrifices to
her, but there are traces of prophylactic sacrifice to some daemonic
being of the sea. The Frisians sacrificed human victims before expedi-
tions by sea, as did also the Normans, according to Dudo, though
he attributes the sacrifice to Thor. In Norway there are references to
## p. 489 (#521) ############################################
Inanimate Objects of Worship. Festivals 489
the placing of a human victim on the rollers of a ship about to be
launched.
Of inanimate objects of worship, besides sacred groves, which will be
discussed later, there are sacred springs. Close to the temple at Upsala
was a sacred spring, in which we are told that human victims were
drowned, and the story should not be too hastily dismissed, since sacred
springs are found within the precincts of many old churches all over
Germany and England. The occasional practice of Germanic tribes, men-
tioned by Classical authors, of throwing conquered enemies and valuables
into rivers, was probably a recognised form of worship of some god—
possibly of Odin. From the frequency of holy springs, wells, and lakes,
bearing names compounded with As (heathen god), Thor, or Odin, we
may assume that they were sometimes sacred to the greater gods, as were
probably the sacred salt springs mentioned by Tacitus. On the other
hand, Procopius in the sixth century says that the Scandinavians worship,
besides other gods, minor spirits in the waters of springs and rivers.
Knut's Laws in England, and Church Edicts on the Continent, refer to
the worship of rivers and water-wells, and further mention the worship of
stones, also known in Scandinavia.
Having now passed in review, however briefly, the chief objects
of worship among the Germanic races, it behoves us to consider the
manner of that worship. In the North there were three main sacrificial
festivals. One, in the autumn, is said to have been "for peace and
plenty," the second, at Yule, "for growth,11 the third, at the approach
of summer, was for victory. On the Continent the autumn festival and
that at midwinter appear, as in Scandinavia, to have been the most
important. We hear very little of a midsummer festival, but its
existence is vouched for by the widespread festivities in all Teutonic
countries on that day. In Denmark and Sweden special festivals appear
to have taken place at Lejre and Upsala respectively every nine years,
at which a great number of animals and even men were sacrificed.
The ritual of sacrifice is mainly known to us from the North. The
officiating priest fills the sacrificial bowl and reddens the altar with the
blood of the victim, scattering some of its contents over the worshippers
and the walls of the temple by means of sacrificial twigs. The blood is
in fact offered to the gods, or cements a bond between them and the
worshippers: the flesh is cooked and eaten. In Scandinavia horses were
much valued as sacrifices, so that to eat horse-flesh was regarded as a
heathen practice, and Tacitus also knows of sacrifice of horses. Ex-
cavations of Icelandic temples, however, reveal a preponderance of the
bones of other domestic animals. In England and on the Continent
cattle were frequent offerings. Gregory the Great decided to allow the
English to eat oxen ad laudem Dei, just outside their churches, since they
had been accustomed to sacrificing them " to demons. " Human sacrifice
seems to have persisted in Sweden till quite a late period. In 1026 a little
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 490 (#522) ############################################
490 Sacrificial Customs
party of Norwegians declared that they narrowly escaped being utilised for
that purpose on an expedition to Sweden; and the Saga of the island of
Gotland remembers the custom. On the Continent, too, human sacrifice
seems to have continued as long as heathenism, and we even hear of an
outburst of it among the converted Franks. In Friesland human beings
seem frequently to have been sacrificed by drowning. Except perhaps
in the last-named country, the victims were almost invariably prisoners
taken in war, slaves, or outlaws.
If the sacrifice was a public one—and probably in any case—it was
followed by a feast, which lasted till the ale gave out, and no longer.
A Norwegian archbishop reveals the importance of the ale even at
Christian festivals when he finds it necessary to ordain that a wedding
can yet be held, even though there be nothing but whey to celebrate it
with, and other Norwegian ecclesiastical ordinances enact that every
farmer shall brew so much ale in preparation for the various Church
festivals. The drinking itself began with sacrifice in the form of toasts
drunk to the gods, and this seems also to have been the case in Germany,
for we hear of " drinking wine for the love of the devil. " Jonas of Bobbio
relates how he found a party of men sitting round an immense vessel of
ale, who described themselves as worshipping Wodan. We also hear of an
individual in a temple " opima libamina exhibens usque ad vomitum cibo
potuque replebatur. " Centuries earlier, Tacitus tells us that when the
Romans surprised the Germans at a religious festival they cut down an
intoxicated foe. It seems that songs and dances were common at such
times, and we hear of the wearing of animal masks at Yule and at funeral
and memorial feasts1. Several other Scandinavian festivals are worthy
of notice, such as the "greeting ale" and the " ale of departure. ,, Even
when a Norwegian chief is about to flee from the swift vengeance of
Harold Fairhair, the " departure ale " has yet to be brewed. Still clearer
traces of sacrifice are discernible in the feast, for which the Norwegian
laws stipulate, on the occasion of granting rights in the family to an
illegitimate son, and also in that made by a slave on his liberation.
During the course of the great Scandinavian festivals, as well as
at other times, it appears to have been the custom for private individuals
to offer sacrifice for the purpose of propitiation or of learning their future.
The means employed in this latter case seem sometimes to have been the
sanctified twigs mentioned above. Tacitus knows of divination by twigs
and also mentions various other forms of augury. In Friesland the cast-
ing of lots seems to have played a particularly important part, and was
employed to select men for sacrifices.
We have already had occasion to refer to officiating priests. The
1 Even after the Reformation a Danish bishop finds it necessary to combat the
deep-rooted popular belief, that the more the guests drank at a funeral, the better
the dead man fared in the other world; and a French traveller says that at such
feasts the Danes drink to the souls of the dead, ce qui leurfait grand Wen.
## p. 491 (#523) ############################################
Priests. Kings. Priestesses 491
term, though permissible, is somewhat misleading, as the existence of a
special class or caste of priests in Scandinavia is much disputed, and there
seems to be considerable divergence on this point among the various
Germanic races at different times. In Iceland any leading settler who
built or came into possession of a temple officiated in it himself, and was
called a goSi (pi. gotiar), the connexion of which with goS (god) sug-
gests that the priestly function was older than the temporal authority.
In Norway the balance of probability seems to lie with the theory that
the earls and local chiefs (hersar), and probably also the petty kings, each
administered the chief temple of his district, perhaps with a gd6i or
gyftja, priestess (probably of his own family), to help him. In Sweden,
where worship was more centralised and systematised, there is some slight
evidence for the existence of gotSar, but it is clear that the king was the
high-priest of the people. It is recorded from prehistoric times that when
one of their kings failed to sacrifice the people attributed to him a famine
which ensued, and sacrificed him " for plenty. " As late as the eleventh
century they expelled their Christian king for refusal to sacrifice, and the
idea of the king's responsibility for bad weather,. for instance, can be
traced as late as the reign of Gustavus Vasa.
This idea of royal responsibility for national misfortunes is paralleled
among the Burgundians in the fourth century. For Denmark the only
evidence is the occurrence of the word gdSi on two Runic stones of about
the ninth and tenth centuries. In England there must have been a more
specialised priestly caste, with disabilities unknown to the Norwegians,
for Bede tells us that heathen priests might not bear arms. For
the Continent we have extremely little evidence. An Old German
glossary translates cotinc (formed from cot, god), not by presbyter but by
tribunus, and on the other hand the Old German iwart," guardian of law,11
and the Frisian and Low German asega, eosega, " law-sayer,11 are used to
denote " priest"; so we may perhaps assume that the functions of priest
were not very highly specialised at the close of heathendom. Tacitus
knows of a regular priesthood, whose only administrative function con-
sists in opening public assemblies (probably with a sacrifice, as in Iceland)
and in playing some part in their procedure. We hear occasionally of a
chief-priest, as among the Northumbrians, and among the Burgundians.
Among the latter he was called sinistus, and it is worth noting that
sinistans is the word chosen by Ulfilas for " elders. 11
Priestesses are rarely mentioned in the North, though they seem
to have been common among the Germans of Tacitus1 time.
The well-known statement of Tacitus, that the Germani do not
confine their gods within walls, but dedicate groves and trees to them,
does not seem to have been of universal application even in his own day.
But it is quite certain that he is right in the main with regard to the
prevalence of grove- and tree-sanctuaries. The frequent occurrence of
such place-names as the German Heiligenloh, Heiligenforst, and the
CH. XV. (c)
## p. 492 (#524) ############################################
492 Sanctuaries
Scandinavian Lund (the latter often compounded with the names of
Odin, Thor and Frey) would alone suffice to prove the earlier existence
of groves, "grim with ancient religious rites," as Claudian describes
them. Of sacred trees, perhaps the most famous was the robor Jozris
in Hesse. An interesting old Scandinavian proverb, recorded in Iceland,
may be quoted here: "One must worship an oak, if one is to live under
it. " After the erection of a temple the sacred tree may have lived on
beside it, and indeed probably conditioned the form of the temple itself.
The Icelandic temple, as we know from recent excavations, consisted of
a hall, like the hall of the ordinary dwelling-house, and at its further
end a smaller building, with slightly rounded corners, which'was the real
sanctuary, with the altar in the middle and the images of the gods,
generally three in number, standing round it. The outer hall, with its
sacred pillars and its row of fires down the middle, is thought to have
been a later addition for the convenience of worshippers, but the form of
the inner building is considered to shew descent from the tree-sanctuary.
It has been suggested that the round churches, only found on Germanic
territory, are the lineal descendants of the heathen temple, and hence of
the tree-sanctuary.
Besides the images, the inner temple contained the sacrificial bowl
and twigs, and the sacred ring which the priest wore on his arm at all
assemblies, and on which oaths were sworn. Both temple and images
appear to have been very highly decorated, sometimes even with gold and
silver.
Two other types of sanctuary deserve mention. On the Continent
we hear of pillars, apparently called Irminsul (translated universalis
columna), which may well have been a side-development from the tree-
sanctuary. Charles the Great destroyed the most famous of these, in
Westphalia. The northern hbrg is frequently assumed to have been a
stone altar or "high place. 11 But the Norwegian laws speak of " making
a house and calling it a horg. "" It is only mentioned in connexion with
female deities, or with Njord, but the occurrence of "Thorsharg"
and " Odinsharg" as place-names in Sweden renders it doubtful whether
it could have been limited to the use of female (or originally female)
deities, at any rate in Sweden. The cognate Old German haruc is
sometimes translated lucus or nemus, sometimes only by the vague
fanum; while the Anglo-Saxon hearg seems to be a comprehensive term
for any kind of sanctuary, almost corresponding to the Scandinavian
ve, though this includes Things.
In Scandinavia the violater of any sanctuary is called "wolf in holy
places," and becomes an outlaw in his own land, though we note that he
may be well received in other Scandinavian countries. In Friesland those
who broke into a temple to rob it were sacrificed to the god whom they
had offended. It is difficult to say how far, on the other hand, the
sanctuaries offered a refuge to accused persons and criminals. The abuse
## p. 493 (#525) ############################################
Funeral Customs. Life after Death 493
of the right of asylum in medieval churches—many of them only trans-
formed temples—suggests that this was a prominent characteristic of
heathen temples. On the other hand we learn from an Icelandic Saga
that the god Frey would not tolerate the presence of an outlaw even in
the neighbourhood of his temple.
It will now be convenient to consider the funeral customs of the
Teutonic races. Excavations in Scandinavia as well as literary records shew
that towards the close of heathen times the great majority of the dead
were interred in barrows, often in their ships, with some of their valuables,
and occasionally with horses, dogs and other animals. Slaves sometimes
accompany their master or mistress. Leo Diaconus informs us that in
the tenth century the Swedes in the Byzantine Empire used to kill their
captives and burn their bodies with those of their own slain, apparently
with the idea of providing their friends with servants in the next world.
The practice of suttee was not unknown, though very rare. In some
cases everything found in the barrow has been burnt, but inhumation is
the commoner practice. It is noteworthy that weapons are rarely found
in the period preceding about a. d. 500, while after that time, in the
Viking Age, weapons form the most important part of the goods placed
in the grave. It is sometimes shewn in our sources that all these objects,
including the ship, or occasionally a chariot, are provided with the
intention of supplying the dead with what they will need in the next
world, or with the means of getting there.
Besides a few indications of a belief in rebirth, there are no less than
three forms of life after death in Scandinavian belief alone. We will
begin with the most famous, Valholl (the hall of the slain), where those
who fell in battle feasted and fought into eternity. But when we come
to apply the commonly accepted theory that all those slain in fight passed
into Valholl, we find it impossible to make it fit the facts as reported to
us. A number of the Edda poems seem to know nothing about Valholl,
and despatch their mightiest warriors to the dreary abode of Hel, and
the same treatment is frequently meted out in the sagas. The likeliest
explanation seems to be that Valholl was intimately bound up with the
cult of Odin, which, as we have seen, probably entered into the lives of
a comparatively small class, and was very recent in the North. The
influence of the cult may perhaps be traced in the sudden appearance
of weapons in graves about the fifth century. The great historical
importance of the Valholl idea lies in the stimulus it gave to desperate
courage in battle. The influence of a similar belief1 among the Japanese
of our own day was evident in their war with Russia. It was no doubt
belief in some such palace of the dead, only to be reached by those
who died of wounds, which induced the aged among the Heruli to accept
a voluntary death inflicted by stabbing, and it has been shewn that the
formal "marking" of a dying man, mentioned two or three times in
1 Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, an Interpretation, p. 507.
ch. xv. (c)
## p. 494 (#526) ############################################
494. The continued Presence of the Dead
the North, is probably a substitute for the older custom of the Heruli
in the fifth or sixth century.
Hel answers to the Greek Hades, a shadowy region of which we hear
very little in the Sagas, where the word hel does indeed frequently occur,
but usually merely with the signification of " death. 11
We have already seen that the conception of a future life spent by
the ghost in or near its burial-place was by far the commonest, not
only in Scandinavia, but all over Germanic territory. It would not
be surprising to find that this, evidently the oldest belief about the dead,
was connected with the faith of Thor, and some testimony to that effect
is afforded by the inscriptions on a Runic grave-monument in Denmark:
"May Thor consecrate these mounds,11 or in two other cases "these runes. "
In Sweden we find an inscription which has been translated "Thor give
peace. " The sign of the hammer occurs on several other monuments, no
doubt with a similar force. With regard to the variant of this belief,
the "dying into mountains,11 all the evidence seems to connect it with
Thor. In two cases out of the four on record we are explicitly informed
that the persons "believed in Thor. 11 In the third case, that of the
kinsmen of one Aud, we know no further detail of their religion except
in the case of Aud^ brother, of whom it is stated that "he believed in
Christ, but invoked Thor in voyages and difficulties, and whenever he
thought it mattered most. 11
It is clearly this belief in the continued presence of the dead which
caused the widespread worship of them already discussed, and it is this
belief, too, which has peopled all Germanic territory with ghosts, whether
malignant trolls, slayers of the living, or friendly spirits.
Like all other religions, that of the Germanic peoples was a mass of
mixed elements, a jumble of many different stages of culture. Primitive
magical rites were no doubt freely practised, and in view of the age-
long survival of such rites in rustic festivals and rustic faith, it would be
the greatest mistake to belittle their importance in earlier Germanic life.
But our sources refer to them so little that we are justified in suspecting
the mass of these practices to be already declining into the observances
of popular superstition, with possibly nearly as little conscious religious
significance as to-day.
There were still traces of an early grim idea of placation by sacrifice:
the god of the dead, or the daemonic being who inhabits the sea, demands
a human life, and one must be offered that others may be safe. But except
for a few legendary instances, we see that the Germanic peoples have
progressed so far in corporate sense that the community only offers
the lives of those outside its pale—outlaws or captives to whom it
knows no obligations. Only in Friesland is there any definite evidence
that members of the community were immolated.
But the prevalent idea of sacrifice is a more comfortable one. Gifts
are made to the gods, who requite them with favours, an idea which
## p. 495 (#527) ############################################
Ideas underlying Germanic Religion 495
reflects the manners of the time, with its system of gifts and counter-
gifts, and which shews that the gods were thought of as recognising
a social bond linking them to their worshippers.
The cult of the dead reveals a sense rather of piety than of fear, for
we never find that the Scandinavians, at any rate, sank to the placation
of evil ghosts by sacrifice. They adopt other, somewhat matter-of-fact
precautions against them, such as taking the corpse out through a hole
in the wall of the house, burning and scattering the ashes, or decapitating
the ghost, though perhaps there never was a prototype in heathen times
of the delightfully ironic scene in one of the Icelandic sagas, where the
living, ousted from the fireside by the dead, hold a court of law over them
and banish them by the verdict of a jury.
On the whole, we are left with the impression that Germanic heathen-
dom was as far from being a religion of dread as it was from the formalism,
impregnated with magical ideas, which pervaded the religious system of the
Romans. Though the gods could be angry and cause famine and plague
and defeat, they were at any rate occasionally the objects of real trust and
affection, and their acknowledged favouritism is not imputed to them
as injustice. Only near the end of the heathen period do we find any
repugnance to the idea of allegiance to non-moral gods.
Perhaps the finest flower of Germanic heathendom should be sought
in the period just before its extinction—in the Viking Age, so often
accused of godlessness. In the conception of Ragnarok, which fired the
imagination of the North, we find the idea of fellowship with the
gods: fellowship, not in feasting and victory, but in stress and storm.
For the gods too are in the hands of Destiny, of a Fate ever moving
towards the end of the world, when they and the armies of the valiant
dead together make a vain stand against the race of daemonic beings,
monstrous shapes of disorder and destruction, loosed in the shattering
of the earth which precedes that Titanic struggle. The great bequests
of the heathen Germanic peoples to the new order, their courage, and
their ideal of loyalty to a leader, find their highest expression in this
vision of preordained defeat.
CH. xv. (c)
## p. 496 (#528) ############################################
406
CHAPTER XVI (a).
THE CONVERSION OF THE KELTS.
(1) ROMAN BRITAIN.
By the British Church is meant the Christian Church which existed
in England and Wales, before the foundation of the English Church
by Augustine of Canterbury, and after that event to a limited extent in
Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria, and Strathclyde.
How, when, where, and by whom was it founded? To these questions
no answer is forthcoming. The legends connecting various Apostles,
and other scriptural personages, especially Joseph of Arimathaea, with
Britain may be dismissed at once. They first appear in very late
writings, and have no historical foundations.
We next come to a story which has obtained some considerable
credence because it is found in the pages of Bede. It is to the effect that
in the year a. d. 156 a British king named Lucius (Lies ap Coel) appealed
to Pope Eleutherus to be instructed in the Christian religion, that
the application was granted,, and that the king and nation were then
converted to Christianity. The story first appears in a sixth century
recension of the Liber Pontifiealis at Rome, whence Bede must have
borrowed it. It was unknown to the British historian Gildas, and it
has no other support. Bede's version of it involves chronological errors,
and Professor Harnack has recently driven the last nail into its coffin
by his brilliant suggestion or discovery that Lucius was not a British
king at all, but king of Birtha (confused with Britannia) in Edessa,
a Mesopotamian realm whose sovereign was Lucius Aelius Septimus
Megas Abgarus IX1.
But there is indirect and outside evidence that Christianity had
penetrated Britain at the end of the second century. The evidence is
patristic in its source, and general in its character. Tertullian writing
c. 208 speaks of places in Britain inaccessible to the Romans, yet subject
to Christ; and Origen writing about thirty years later refers in two
passages to the British people having come under the influence of
Christianity. But how did they so come? In the absence of precise
information, the most probable supposition is that Christianity came
through Gaul, between which country and Britain commercial intercourse
» E. H. B. xxii. pp. 767-70.
## p. 497 (#529) ############################################
Introduction of Christianity 497
was active. There may also have been individual Christians among the
Roman soldiers who were then stationed in Britain.
