"" 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.
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.
Cambridge Medieval History - v2 - Rise of the Saracens and Foundation of the Western Empire
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. In fact the almost
universally Latin, or at least non-Keltic names of such British martyrs,
bishops, etc. as have been preserved point to a preponderating Roman
rather than Keltic element in the British Church; though against this
it must also be remembered that, as in the cases of Patricius and
Pelagius, the names known to us may be assumed Christian names
superseding some earlier Keltic names, of which in most cases no record
has come down. Possibly the British Church consisted at first of
converts to Christianity among the Roman invaders, and of such natives
as came into immediate contact with them, and the native element only
gradually gained ground when the Roman troops were withdrawn.
The known facts are too few for a continuous British Church history
to be built upon them. The only early British historian, Gildas, c. 540,
is the author of a diatribe rather than a history. Nennius writing in
the ninth century is uncritical, and too far removed from the events
which he records to be relied upon. Geoffrey of Monmouth writing
in the twelfth century is notoriously untrustworthy and hardly deserves
the name of historian; and all extant Lives of British saints are later
than the Norman Conquest and historically almost valueless.
Yet from these and other sources the following persons and facts
emerge as historical, with probability if not certainty.
(a) Among martyrs: Alban of Verulamium, martyred, as Gildas
asserts, or according to another MS. reading, conjectures, in the per-
secution of Diocletian. But as this persecution is not known to have
reached Britain, it is more probable that the persecution in question was
that of Decius in 250-251, or that of Valerian in 259-260. Bede tells
the story at greater length, and says that the martyrdom took place
at Verulamium, now St Albans. Both Gildas and Bede evidently quote
from some early but now lost Passio S. Albani. The details may be
unhistorical, as is frequently the case in such Passiones, but it would
be unreasonable to doubt the main story, because we have the fifth
century evidence of the Gallican presbyter Constantius who writing a life
of St Germanus describes a visit of Germanus and Lupus to his sepulchre
at St Albans; and the sixth century evidence of a line in the poetry of
the Gaulish Venantius Fortunatus.
(A) Aaron and Julius of Caerleon-upon-Usk. These two martyrs are
likewise mentioned by Gildas, and though there is no early corroborative
evidence as in the case of St Alban they may be regarded as historical
personages. Bede's mention, and all later mentions of them, rested upon
the original statement of Gildas, who does not say that they were
martyred at Caerleon-upon-Usk, though this is not unlikely1.
In the Martyrology of Bede, and in many later Martyrologies and
1 A Marthir or Martyrium of Julius and Aaron is mentioned in a ninth century
charter, JAber Landavcnttin, edit. 1893, p. 225.
C. MED. H. VOL. II. CH. XVI (a). 32
## p. 498 (#530) ############################################
498 British Bishops
Kalendars, 17 Sept. is marked In Britannm [natale] Socratis et
Stephani, and in Baronius' edition of the Roman Martyrology, in 1645,
this has grown to Sanctorum Martyrum Socratis et Stephani. So 7 Feb.
is marked in Augusta [= London] natale Augusti or Auguli episcopi et
martyris. There is no early authority for the existence of these saints,
and nothing is known of their history.
(c) Among bishops: the existence of the following bishops is
known to us:
Three British bishops are recorded to have been present at the
Council of Aries in 314. They were:
1. Eborius episcopus de civitate Eboracensi provincia Britannica.
2. Restitutus episcopus de civitate Londinensi provincia supra-
scripta.
3. Adelfius episcopus de civitate Colonia Londinensium.
These British sees were fixed in Roman cities, York, London, and
Lincoln, if we may suppose that "Londinensium" is a mistake for
"Lindumensium. " Some however would read " Legionensium " and in-
terpret the word of Caerleon-upon-Usk; but this suggestion is negatived
by the fact that Caerleon never was a Roman colony.
"Eborius" has a suspicious look as the name of a bishop de civitate
Eboracensi, but similarity need not here suggest forgery. It is a
latinised form of a common Keltic name. There was a bishop Eburius
in Ireland in St Bridget's time1. They were attended by a priest named
Sacerdos, and a deacon named Arminius. Sacerdos has been thought
to be a suspicious name for a presbyter, but though we have been unable
to find any other instance, it may be pointed out that Priest may be
found as a proper name in the clergy list of to-day.
There is no evidence for the suggestion sometimes made that British
bishops were present at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The only
difficulty in proving a direct negative is the incomplete and unsatis-
factory state of the list of signatories.
Athanasius tells us that British bishops were among the more than
three hundred bishops who voted in his favour at the Council of
Sardica in 345. But he does not mention the names of any of these
bishops, or of their sees.
There were British bishops among the four hundred or more who
met at the Council of Ariminum in 359. We know this on the authority
of Sulpicius Severus, who unfortunately mentions neither the names nor
the numbers of these bishops nor of their sees, yet adds that "there
were three bishops from Britain who, because they lacked private means,
made use of the public bounty, refusing contributions offered to them
by the rest. 11 The public bounty refers to the provision for their enter-
tainment (annonas et cellaria) which the emperor had ordered to be
offered at the public expense.
1 Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae, Edinburgh, 1888, col. 66.
## p. 499 (#531) ############################################
British Saints 499
(d) Another British bishop whose name has come down to us is
Riocatus who made two journeys from Britain to Gaul to see Faustus,
a Breton and bishop of Riez (died c. 492), and carried certain works of
Faustus back to Britain.
(e) There is extant a book addressed by a British bishop named
Fastidius to a widow named Fatalis in the first half of the fifth century.
He is mentioned by Gennadius, but his see is not named, de Viris
illustr. cap. 57. His book De Vita Christiana is printed in Migne,
Pat. Lot. 102, 4.
The only other bishops known to us by name before a. d. 600 are the
famous Welsh bishops.
(f) There are in existence lists of early British, Welsh, Manx, and
Cornish bishops, for the majority of whom no certain evidence can be
produced1. Some of them, such as St David, first bishop of Menevia;
St Dubritius, first bishop of Llandaff, and his immediate successors Teilo
and Oudoceus; Kentigern and Asaph, the first two bishops of St Asaph;
Daniel, first bishop of Bangor, together with a few less known names
on the lists, are historical personages, but these belong to the sixth
and seventh century Welsh Church and stand partly outside the period
covered by this article.
It must not be forgotten that Patrick and Ninian, bishop of Candida
Casa (Whithern), were Britons, but their history belongs rather to
Ireland and Scotland than to England. The following facts may be
also worth recording as events of the sixth century.
Two bishops of the Britons came from Alba to sanctify St Bridget'.
Fifty bishops of the Britons of Cell Muine visited St Moedoc of Ferns*.
These figures indicate that the British episcopate, like that of other
parts of the Keltic Church, was monastic and numerous, rather than
diocesan and limited in number.
The Keltic saints of Britain like those of Ireland were great travellers.
Gildas asserts this. Falladius in his Historia Lausiaca speaks of British
pilgrims in Syria, and Theodoret writing c. 440 speaks of their arrival
in the Holy Land. These early independent outside testimonies make
it possible to believe many otherwise incredible stories in later Vitae
Sanctorum, e. g. that David, Teilo, and Padarn went to Jerusalem where
David received episcopal consecration, and that the Cornish St Keby
(Cuby) made a pilgrimage to the same city. References to British
travellers in Rome and Italy cease to excite wonder after this. It does
not of course follow that the Jerusalem stories are true, only that they
are within the bounds of possibility. The legends are late, and they
were probably invented to give independence and prestige to the Keltic
episcopate, as compared with the later episcopate of the English Church.
1 These lists may be seen in Stubbs (W. ), Begistrum Sacrum Anglicanum, 2nd edit.
Oxford, 1897. Appendix vn.
s Leabhar Breac, fol. 62 a. s Ibid. fol. 81.
ch. xvi (a). 32—2
## p. 500 (#532) ############################################
500 Orthodoxy of the Britons
There is no serious doubt about the orthodoxy of the British Church.
Gildas accuses its clergy of immorality, and of venality, not of heresy.
On the other hand testimony to its orthodoxy is plentiful. Athanasius
stated that the British Churches had signified by letter to him their
adhesion to the Nicene faith. Chrysostom said that "even the British
Isles have felt the power of the word, for there too churches and altars
have been erected. There too, as on the shores of the Euxine or in the
South, men may be heard discussing points in Scripture, with differing
voices but not with differing belief, with varying tongues but not with
varying faith. " Jerome asserted that " Britain in common with Rome,
Gaul, Africa, Persia, the East, and India, adores one Christ, observes
one rule of faith. " Venantius Fortunatus speaks of Britain cherishing
the faith, and Wilfrid himself, though openly hostile to the British
Church, asserted before a Council held in Rome in 680 that the true
Catholic faith prevailed throughout the British, Irish, and Pictish as well
as the English race, thus claiming for the whole Keltic Church in these
islands what Columbanus claimed for his own Irish Church, when he told
Pope Boniface that it was not schismatical or heretical, but that it held
the whole Catholic faith1.
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. In fact the almost
universally Latin, or at least non-Keltic names of such British martyrs,
bishops, etc. as have been preserved point to a preponderating Roman
rather than Keltic element in the British Church; though against this
it must also be remembered that, as in the cases of Patricius and
Pelagius, the names known to us may be assumed Christian names
superseding some earlier Keltic names, of which in most cases no record
has come down. Possibly the British Church consisted at first of
converts to Christianity among the Roman invaders, and of such natives
as came into immediate contact with them, and the native element only
gradually gained ground when the Roman troops were withdrawn.
The known facts are too few for a continuous British Church history
to be built upon them. The only early British historian, Gildas, c. 540,
is the author of a diatribe rather than a history. Nennius writing in
the ninth century is uncritical, and too far removed from the events
which he records to be relied upon. Geoffrey of Monmouth writing
in the twelfth century is notoriously untrustworthy and hardly deserves
the name of historian; and all extant Lives of British saints are later
than the Norman Conquest and historically almost valueless.
Yet from these and other sources the following persons and facts
emerge as historical, with probability if not certainty.
(a) Among martyrs: Alban of Verulamium, martyred, as Gildas
asserts, or according to another MS. reading, conjectures, in the per-
secution of Diocletian. But as this persecution is not known to have
reached Britain, it is more probable that the persecution in question was
that of Decius in 250-251, or that of Valerian in 259-260. Bede tells
the story at greater length, and says that the martyrdom took place
at Verulamium, now St Albans. Both Gildas and Bede evidently quote
from some early but now lost Passio S. Albani. The details may be
unhistorical, as is frequently the case in such Passiones, but it would
be unreasonable to doubt the main story, because we have the fifth
century evidence of the Gallican presbyter Constantius who writing a life
of St Germanus describes a visit of Germanus and Lupus to his sepulchre
at St Albans; and the sixth century evidence of a line in the poetry of
the Gaulish Venantius Fortunatus.
(A) Aaron and Julius of Caerleon-upon-Usk. These two martyrs are
likewise mentioned by Gildas, and though there is no early corroborative
evidence as in the case of St Alban they may be regarded as historical
personages. Bede's mention, and all later mentions of them, rested upon
the original statement of Gildas, who does not say that they were
martyred at Caerleon-upon-Usk, though this is not unlikely1.
In the Martyrology of Bede, and in many later Martyrologies and
1 A Marthir or Martyrium of Julius and Aaron is mentioned in a ninth century
charter, JAber Landavcnttin, edit. 1893, p. 225.
C. MED. H. VOL. II. CH. XVI (a). 32
## p. 498 (#530) ############################################
498 British Bishops
Kalendars, 17 Sept. is marked In Britannm [natale] Socratis et
Stephani, and in Baronius' edition of the Roman Martyrology, in 1645,
this has grown to Sanctorum Martyrum Socratis et Stephani. So 7 Feb.
is marked in Augusta [= London] natale Augusti or Auguli episcopi et
martyris. There is no early authority for the existence of these saints,
and nothing is known of their history.
(c) Among bishops: the existence of the following bishops is
known to us:
Three British bishops are recorded to have been present at the
Council of Aries in 314. They were:
1. Eborius episcopus de civitate Eboracensi provincia Britannica.
2. Restitutus episcopus de civitate Londinensi provincia supra-
scripta.
3. Adelfius episcopus de civitate Colonia Londinensium.
These British sees were fixed in Roman cities, York, London, and
Lincoln, if we may suppose that "Londinensium" is a mistake for
"Lindumensium. " Some however would read " Legionensium " and in-
terpret the word of Caerleon-upon-Usk; but this suggestion is negatived
by the fact that Caerleon never was a Roman colony.
"Eborius" has a suspicious look as the name of a bishop de civitate
Eboracensi, but similarity need not here suggest forgery. It is a
latinised form of a common Keltic name. There was a bishop Eburius
in Ireland in St Bridget's time1. They were attended by a priest named
Sacerdos, and a deacon named Arminius. Sacerdos has been thought
to be a suspicious name for a presbyter, but though we have been unable
to find any other instance, it may be pointed out that Priest may be
found as a proper name in the clergy list of to-day.
There is no evidence for the suggestion sometimes made that British
bishops were present at the Council of Nicaea in 325. The only
difficulty in proving a direct negative is the incomplete and unsatis-
factory state of the list of signatories.
Athanasius tells us that British bishops were among the more than
three hundred bishops who voted in his favour at the Council of
Sardica in 345. But he does not mention the names of any of these
bishops, or of their sees.
There were British bishops among the four hundred or more who
met at the Council of Ariminum in 359. We know this on the authority
of Sulpicius Severus, who unfortunately mentions neither the names nor
the numbers of these bishops nor of their sees, yet adds that "there
were three bishops from Britain who, because they lacked private means,
made use of the public bounty, refusing contributions offered to them
by the rest. 11 The public bounty refers to the provision for their enter-
tainment (annonas et cellaria) which the emperor had ordered to be
offered at the public expense.
1 Acta Sanctorum Hiberniae, Edinburgh, 1888, col. 66.
## p. 499 (#531) ############################################
British Saints 499
(d) Another British bishop whose name has come down to us is
Riocatus who made two journeys from Britain to Gaul to see Faustus,
a Breton and bishop of Riez (died c. 492), and carried certain works of
Faustus back to Britain.
(e) There is extant a book addressed by a British bishop named
Fastidius to a widow named Fatalis in the first half of the fifth century.
He is mentioned by Gennadius, but his see is not named, de Viris
illustr. cap. 57. His book De Vita Christiana is printed in Migne,
Pat. Lot. 102, 4.
The only other bishops known to us by name before a. d. 600 are the
famous Welsh bishops.
(f) There are in existence lists of early British, Welsh, Manx, and
Cornish bishops, for the majority of whom no certain evidence can be
produced1. Some of them, such as St David, first bishop of Menevia;
St Dubritius, first bishop of Llandaff, and his immediate successors Teilo
and Oudoceus; Kentigern and Asaph, the first two bishops of St Asaph;
Daniel, first bishop of Bangor, together with a few less known names
on the lists, are historical personages, but these belong to the sixth
and seventh century Welsh Church and stand partly outside the period
covered by this article.
It must not be forgotten that Patrick and Ninian, bishop of Candida
Casa (Whithern), were Britons, but their history belongs rather to
Ireland and Scotland than to England. The following facts may be
also worth recording as events of the sixth century.
Two bishops of the Britons came from Alba to sanctify St Bridget'.
Fifty bishops of the Britons of Cell Muine visited St Moedoc of Ferns*.
These figures indicate that the British episcopate, like that of other
parts of the Keltic Church, was monastic and numerous, rather than
diocesan and limited in number.
The Keltic saints of Britain like those of Ireland were great travellers.
Gildas asserts this. Falladius in his Historia Lausiaca speaks of British
pilgrims in Syria, and Theodoret writing c. 440 speaks of their arrival
in the Holy Land. These early independent outside testimonies make
it possible to believe many otherwise incredible stories in later Vitae
Sanctorum, e. g. that David, Teilo, and Padarn went to Jerusalem where
David received episcopal consecration, and that the Cornish St Keby
(Cuby) made a pilgrimage to the same city. References to British
travellers in Rome and Italy cease to excite wonder after this. It does
not of course follow that the Jerusalem stories are true, only that they
are within the bounds of possibility. The legends are late, and they
were probably invented to give independence and prestige to the Keltic
episcopate, as compared with the later episcopate of the English Church.
1 These lists may be seen in Stubbs (W. ), Begistrum Sacrum Anglicanum, 2nd edit.
Oxford, 1897. Appendix vn.
s Leabhar Breac, fol. 62 a. s Ibid. fol. 81.
ch. xvi (a). 32—2
## p. 500 (#532) ############################################
500 Orthodoxy of the Britons
There is no serious doubt about the orthodoxy of the British Church.
Gildas accuses its clergy of immorality, and of venality, not of heresy.
On the other hand testimony to its orthodoxy is plentiful. Athanasius
stated that the British Churches had signified by letter to him their
adhesion to the Nicene faith. Chrysostom said that "even the British
Isles have felt the power of the word, for there too churches and altars
have been erected. There too, as on the shores of the Euxine or in the
South, men may be heard discussing points in Scripture, with differing
voices but not with differing belief, with varying tongues but not with
varying faith. " Jerome asserted that " Britain in common with Rome,
Gaul, Africa, Persia, the East, and India, adores one Christ, observes
one rule of faith. " Venantius Fortunatus speaks of Britain cherishing
the faith, and Wilfrid himself, though openly hostile to the British
Church, asserted before a Council held in Rome in 680 that the true
Catholic faith prevailed throughout the British, Irish, and Pictish as well
as the English race, thus claiming for the whole Keltic Church in these
islands what Columbanus claimed for his own Irish Church, when he told
Pope Boniface that it was not schismatical or heretical, but that it held
the whole Catholic faith1.
