Grimfrost Academy - Viking Religion

[Music] [Music] vikings as the late iron age scandinavians are known today left a permanent mark in history they have risen to newfound fame in today's world through popular culture fascinating people across the globe with their gods myths and sagas widely featured in movies video games and tv series viking religion is often portrayed in a simplified manner that can be quite far from the truth stories about their gods and myths are also offered online and offline sometimes owing more to wishful thinking than solid academic research all these different sources can make it very hard to get closer to the truth of what went on in the viking mind fighting aged religion and world view is a very complex subject so we met with professor neil price of uppsala university who is a leading specialist in the viking age and the pre-christian religions of the north he is a distinguished professor of archaeology and currently directs a major swedish research council project on the viking phenomenon professor price is also the author of the viking way that focuses on the pre-christian norse religion and magic based on both literary and archaeological studies it is considered by many as one of the most important contributions to viking studies you will now get a glimpse into what went on in the viking mind their world view the importance of ancestors the nature of their religion gods and the invisible population around them we will take you to old uppsala a mythical place of kings and gods and to valsiada one of the most important burial sites of the time and age we will also bust three common myths about the vikings [Music] the study of old norse religion the ritual spiritual life of the vikings is a massive subject hundreds of scholars have studied it for at least two centuries it's hard to summarize to to get an overview of it mainly because it's so complex it's so varied there is no single religion to get a grip on but what we can do is take a deeper dive in particular aspects of it to explore these different expressions of the viking mind one of the most fundamental questions is where does it come from how old is the belief system of the vikings there are images on rock carvings engraved into the rocks of scandinavia from the bronze age so we're talking thousands of years before the time of the vikings that superficially resemble some of the gods some of the the heroes of the later myths so a large humanoid figure with what looks like a hammer a huge person with a spear those kinds of things is that thor is that odin we simply don't know but it's clear that at least some of the stories of the gods and so on go back further than the time of the vikings there seemed to be elements of roman religion perhaps even the religion of the greeks that have filtered into these ideas that were circulating in the north in the iron age this is not surprising scandinavia was intimately connected with the continent far back in time scandinavian soldiers worked as mercenaries for the romans and brought back ideas and objects and beliefs with them to their homelands when they returned there's been this constant flow of information of perspectives of views of the world and it's not it's not surprising if these things end up in a kind of mishmash so there's little bits of this and that that you can find in norse religion that has come from other places but in the end as an overall package if you like it is something distinctly northern [Music] it's clear that some aspects of viking belief are very very old indeed just to take one example something that literally ties it all together the world tree this is igdrasil the steed of the terrible one it refers to odin this is a great ash tree that links all the different parts of the norse worlds together so asgard where the gods live mid guard our world jertenheim where the giants live oot god hell and all of these others they're joined together by the branches and the roots of the tree there are creatures that live on the trunk and run up and down there is a well at the root where they where the norns live the the women who decide the fate of humans and others so it's it's this world tree that links the the norse um conception of the universe together there's an icelandic scholar who thinks this might actually be the milky way if you uh if you've ever been fortunate enough to to escape the light pollution of our cities and see a really clear night sky the milky way can can fill the the heavens with a a kind of enormous band of cloudy light it's it's not hard to see this as the tree but the idea of a single column a pillar a support that holds up the universe is found in culture after culture across the northern world so many in fact that there isn't any direct connection between them going back millennia in other words it's a very very old idea perhaps even going back to the early stone age that's something that has certainly survived into the world view of the vikings you find it among the sami and others of their neighbors as well so this is just one of many elements that have come together to build this uniquely viking view of the world another question concerns how did the vikings relate to this other world or other worlds and their inhabitants how did they get in touch with them how did they talk to them and communicate we're used in our religions of today to holy buildings churches mosques synagogues whatever along with holy books and holy men and holy women who interpret them the vikings said nothing like that their relationship with this with the with the others the supernatural others if you like it was very personal there were certainly intermediaries there were ritual specialists for want of a better word people who took charge of casting lots or casting the runes things like that but nonetheless people had a very direct relationship with this world there is something called bluet it it means uh it sometimes translates as a sacrifice but that doesn't really capture it it's a transaction it's a negotiation you usually perform this with with some kind of animal offering the blood is sprinkled using a twig or a bowl something like that we don't know much about the details but in some way it's it's a gesture of of respect and of uh perhaps a request a request for better times or an outcome that you might want something like that [Music] [Music] something that's very clearly important really at the heart of this is it's hard to find a word for it the the scandinavian the old norse word for it was savor it means something like magic or sorcery and it seems to be similar to what anthropologists later called shamanism a set of rituals and practices that involved sending out the soul of the performer um sending out the spirit to ask questions or to communicate with the other worlds with with the their inhabitants um to pursue a particular set of objectives imagine um the the performer of sader the sorcerer if you like as a kind of engineer and the different kinds of norse magic as tools in a toolkit to get the job done and it's those people almost all of whom were women who were the primary communicators between the vikings and this other world a tremendously important job at the centre of the community [Music] [Music] the norse creation myth is incredibly complicated and hugely contradictory it really embodies the problems of studying norse mythology where you have lots of different stories that um are not compatible at all they make no coherent sense at the end of this there is at least clearly two families of gods the isaiah and the vanir the vania seem to be older these are gods that include uh freyja the goddess and her brother freyr whether the the vanira a relic of a an earlier set of beliefs or the beliefs of another people those are just two theories we don't know after a time that after a war actually they combine with the isa gods this is the gods of odin and thor to form a general family that also seems to be generally called the ice here and it's this family of gods that we find throughout norse mythology at the end of the war between the divine families one figure comes to the fore odin often said to be the lord of the gods the highest gods it's not quite true but he's clearly a very very prominent figure a complicated figure a being of contradictions quite a guy at the heart of what odin is what makes him who he is is the life of the mind knowledge wisdom and the quest for those things and not least the price he has to pay in order to get them most of the tales about odin concern this search for truth for the for the inner realities behind the surface whether he's buying the the gifts of poetry whether he's seeing into the future whether he's working out what will happen at the end of the world what will happen to his son why is his son balder so disturbed with nightmares all of these things in their different ways represent odin's ultimate quest to know it all with a clear-eyed recognition of what that is going to cost something very special at the heart of the viking mind today we talk about the norse myths we can buy collections of them in our bookshops conveniently put together in a package that tells us about norse religion but the thing is for the vikings they didn't know they had norse myths what they had was a collection of stories a living world of tales that changed and shifted from one teller to the next and we've kind of fossilized that into a concrete form in in our books simply because that's what survived to us but at the time it was much more organic a wonderfully varied world and they lived inside that world of stories depicting it on the walls of their buildings in in tapestries in carvings in their art on their skin everything everything around them was part of what we would call religion but for them was everyday life [Music] when we think about the great cult sites of the vikings the the ritual centers of the north one of them is more famous than all the others gamla uppsala old absalo where we are now it's mentioned in a lot of sources from the middle ages and onwards and some of the sagas and so on but there's one description above all that is at the center of what we know about this place it's come down to us from a german cleric called adam of bremen who was writing in about 1070 so it's quite late at the very end of the viking age and it's one of the things that makes his description so remarkable because this is a century or more since denmark and norway converted to christianity but here in central sweden paganism appears to still be in full swing what adam describes is a whole suite of different activities there is a sacred grove there is the sacrifice of animals and humans there's a holy well there's all kinds of cult buildings there are enormous ceremonies that happen every few years every nine years um lots of things like this one of the uh the most striking parts of his description is the central temple building and it's from this that a kind of myth of viking temples has grown up according to him it was a great structure entirely covered in gold with the idols of odin thor and freyja inside where was this temple did it actually exist people have looked at it for for a century or more there was an idea that it must be under the church the medieval church built in the center of the site because wasn't it logical that the church would would stand on the place where this great cult building had once been when the church was excavated in the 1920s there were different kinds of postholes found under the floor and everyone started playing a game where you can join the dots of these things and and put together all kinds of strange buildings the problem is that these post holes are from different periods in time so you can't join them up to make any kind of coherent building we simply don't know what was underneath the church was there a cult site there or not but there is a clue in adam's description of the the uppsala temple he's writing in latin and the word he uses for the space where the idols of the gods are kept is triclinium and that word means dining room and bear in mind adam is translating into latin presumably it's something like a feasting hall and one of the things we know is here at gamlapsala is the great feasting hall of the uppsala kings this is a replica of one from lyra in denmark it's kind of denmark's equivalent of gamlabsala but the appearance is quite similar and one of the ideas that's coming through a lot now that it's finding a very wide acceptance among researchers is that actually it's the feasting halls themselves that are the holy buildings of the vikings where you have the the kings and the rulers of the halls holding court here part of their function is as the representatives of the gods on earth in other words it's within the feasting halls of the lords that these ceremonies are taking place so it may be that it's the gambelapsala hall effectively a kind of palace itself that is the building that arden is describing he has lots of um rather lurid details perhaps not lurid enough towards the end of his description he says that everything that went on here was accompanied by festivities so obscene that it's best to pass over them in silence and and i kind of wish he hadn't but that's what we're left with [Music] is [Music] old uppsala is an important archaeological site located outside the city of uppsala today dominated by three huge burial mounds it was once the seat of swedish kings and one of the most important religious economic and political centers in scandinavia okay let's bust a few myths number one all dead viking warriors went to odin in valhalla valhall that's not true first only the best of the warriors went to this special afterlife and not all of them went to valhalla the hall of the slain half of them ended up with freyja chosen by her for her hall at ces room near this is what we get from the edict poems that contain a lot of our our knowledge of norse mythology in fact most people men and women so far as we know went to heel which was not at all the bad place that it sounds like it wasn't a viking hell it seems that this is where the majority of all of them went myth number two all the valkyries were beautiful warrior women that's not true either that image comes from the later poetry and the sagas the idea of the valkyrie is a sort of exciting subversion of medieval romance if you go back to the valkyries names recorded in the early poetry the the poetry sung by the scalds in the hall they seem to be personifications of battle in its rawest most terrible form so their names mean things like sword time spear noise all kinds of words for for terror and death and violence and loud noise the chaos of a viking battle and these viking valkyries didn't the original valkyries if you like they didn't swoop gracefully down onto a battlefield to carry away dead heroes they were unleashed on it personifications of just how bad viking hand-to-hand combat really was myth number three that the norse gods represented functions thor as the god of thunder for example odin as the god of war that's not true they were not gods of anything they were personalities odin was the magician the sorcerer the inspiration for kings the poet the protector of outcasts a lover a seducer a trickster all of these things thor was strength violence war yes prosperity all kinds of things people would have identified with the personalities of the gods according to their moods according to their needs rather than their functions which we have really put on them [Music] the gods lived in asgard the the place of the icia the family of the gods up in the sky connected to our world by the bridge of the rainbow asgard seems to have been pretty much a kind of god size replica of the middle place of the human world but still quite distant we should not think of of people praying to the gods all the time or or going to regular rituals instead for for most people of the viking age it was much more common to interact with all the other creatures the other kinds of beings with which they shared the world this world a kind of invisible population that's actually much more familiar to us today through folklore and fantasy fiction still at gamlipsala here we are on the other side of the great mound ridge and it's a good place to talk about the other inhabitants of the viking mental world because the people of the viking age shared their lives with an invisible population of beings creatures and spirits familiar to us today from folklore the works of people like tolkien fantasy fiction but in the viking age very real these are the elves the dwarves spirits of the land of the rock of the air of the water of the frost of fire also trolls ogres all kinds of things like this a teeming world of invisible beings and actually i think that it was this world that was probably more important to people in their daily lives than the larger more distant world of the gods so i don't think you would have met odin on a saturday night for example but you'd have been very careful indeed to put some butter on that stone behind your house for the elves to make sure that they they would look after you that they'd help your crops to grow that your animals wouldn't get sick all of these kinds of things they also held special festivals um alfabloot for example a kind of offering right in the halls um in other places to to to keep all of these invisible creatures on their side to make sure that they would live in harmony with them it's important not to see this as a kind of cozy nature worship the natural world of the vikings was a rather terrifying place it was something they had to deal with something they had to keep on the right side of if they wanted to prosper or even just survive but it's something that lived a long while after the shift to christianity surviving in folk tales and stories and even in some parts of scandinavia today people still talk about the the creatures in the forest the things that live under the ground and so on that part of the viking world the viking mind is still with us today so in the middle of the grave field of valsyarda it's a few kilometers north of gamlibzala and it's a good place to think about the ancestors the ancestral dead this is a place where people have been burying their dead for hundreds of years before the viking age and right the way through to the 11th century the end of the viking period it was very important to be close to your family dead people were buried around the farmstead around the the landscape of the farm and what you get here is burial mounds marking generation after generation of the leading families of this area the interesting thing about this is that not everybody got a grave we know that there's a significant proportion academics argue about exactly how much anything sort of 30 percent to 50 percent of the population that doesn't seem to have received a permanent grave so if you got a grave at all you were an important person you were someone to be remembered and this idea of communicating with the past of your family with your ancestors is really important so if not everyone becomes an ancestor who does why it seems that the ancestors are kind of role models for not only for for living people but perhaps almost for the dead as well when you become an ancestor you become part of that world of stories the the myth world that the vikings constructed around themselves even adam of bremen when he talks about the the the gods being worshipped at gamlipsana in the temple and so on he says they also worship heroes who have become immortal he's talking about ancestors so even he understands that this this ancestral dead are part of the world of gods with the invisible population around them they're part of this myth world so people not only lived through it lived in it they died into it as well speaking of ancestors on the ridge behind me are the great boat graves of valcierda if you ever seen a cover of a book about the vikings with a a helmet on the front with with elaborate decorations it's probably not a viking helmet at all it's one from here this is the centuries just before the time of the vikings so the the the late 500s the 600s the 700s and along this line of the ridge a series of boats dug into the side of the hill facing towards the river just behind me boat graves packed with objects with with weapons and armor equipment from the hall from the kitchen there's all these lots of animals sacrificed around them they're like little little dramas in miniature if you imagine how one of these graves was created imagine a sort of funerary play a piece of theater enacted at the graveside each one telling a story putting this dead person in this place at this time into that larger narrative of the ancestors not only for the benefit of that dead person but for the community that buried them as well so that was just a few words the tiniest window opening onto the world of viking religion it's one of my special fields i i think is one of the most exciting aspects of of the viking period it's important to to to correct misconceptions about viking religion it's also important to understand how much we don't know and personally i think the the fewer illusions we have nonetheless the more exciting the the mysteries that remain there's lots more to know thank you for [Music] listening [Applause] [Music] um [Music] is

Channel: Grimfrost

Views: 375,439

Rating: 4.9480844 out of 5

Keywords: viking, vikings, viking religion, blot, seid, old uppsala, gamla uppsala, valsgarde, viking ritual

Id: ruQw7ieoGJM

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/OspreyRune]

Definitely have to come check this out when I'm in a position to watch videos.

[u/Psychological_Pay_36]

Will check this out! Cheers

[u/[deleted]]

This was fantastic. Properly informed, pitched at a perfect level, incredibly informative. Highly recommended.

[u/Ivelisse787]

Thanks for this video, this is helpful for those like me who aren't related with the culture but wants to learn and erase misconceptions. For me the age of Vikings was an important contribution for the world. The people needs to learn more about them.

[u/klaslaget]

I have to watch this when I don’t have work I’m the morning