Offerings on the platforms most commonly include cattle, but also pigs, dogs, and especially horses. Most of them were killed with blows to the head, in some cases even with stone axes that date from the Neolithic, made thousands of years before the Vikings. Tools like these were evidently picked up in the fields by Viking-Age people just as they are still found in the countryside today, and there is folklore connecting them with the god Thor. Seeing them as ‘thunderbolts’, the Vikings may have believed these ancient stone weapons contained special powers, making them an especially charged
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