The Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

by Neil Price

There is a curious sense in which the very notion of a Norse religion may actually be in part a Christian product. This seems contradictory at first, but has parallels in other cultures where incoming missionaries attempted to supplant traditional beliefs with a regulated church. Something codified, organised, and effectively systemic (everything Norse belief was not) is much easier to oppose, because it is a coherent target and might be suppressed as a single entity. And if this was not already there, then it could be formed in that image. This was the beginning of the process that eventually turned the living, organic story-world of the North into ‘the Norse myths’—a kind of pagan scripture that never actually existed. It does not help that the Christians also seem to have misunderstood much of what they encountered and, in turn, incorporated their misconceptions into the retrospective pagan orthodoxy they created.