Resources History The most popular myth in Norse Paganism
The most popular myth in Norse Paganism
Summary
The myth of a sudden and violent conversion to Christianity is far and away the most widespread and popular myth in Paganism today. But that the myth isn’t true when we compare it to historical fact is not even going to be our emphasis. While we certainly want to show you the history here, we also want to focus on what this myth does for us. What does this myth justify? What narratives does it create and what do those narratives allow us to do?
The most popular myth in Norse Paganism is the myth of a sudden and violent conversion to Christianity.
Yes, it’s more popular than anything you’ll find in the Eddas. It’s featured in more media than the Havamal. It’s been repeated more often than the story about Thor wearing a dress to get his hammer back. It’s so popular that it even transcends boundaries into other kinds of Paganism: Wicca also has its own myth called the “Burning Times” which plays on the exact same themes.
The myth of a sudden and violent conversion to Christianity is far and away the most widespread and popular myth in Paganism today. But that the myth isn’t true when we compare it to historical fact is not even going to be our emphasis. While we certainly want to show you the history here, we also want to focus on what this myth does for us. What does this myth justify? What narratives does it create and what do those narratives allow us to do?
How dare you imply my ancestors all didn’t die fighting the coming of Hvitekrist to the last drop of precious Pagan Blood?
Sorry, kid. It’s far more likely that your ancestors were the ones to forcibly convert others than they all died fighting Krisjuns.
The notion that Germanic people and Scandinavians in particular were victims of a genocide, or victims of colonialism, imperialism or mass forced conversions is not historically accurate. They also were not the last bastion of Paganism against Christianity in Europe. In fact, Germanic Christian groups were absolutely ruthless when it came to the conversion of the Wendish, Baltic, Estonian, Finnish and Sami people.
So, how did we get here? What’s the real history and why do we believe these myths?
That’s what we want to get into today. Why do so many people believe that their ancestors fought against the coming of Christianity as if it were some kind of foreign horde? How did Christianity really come to the Germanic peoples? Why did they give up their Gods? How do I deal with these facts?
Let’s talk about it.
History of the Christian Conversion
The First of the Germanic Peoples to Convert to Christianity were the Goths, and it was a model for the conversions that followed.
At the end of the fifth century, Theodoric and his Ostrogoths held Italy; the Anglo-Saxons ruled most of England; the Visigoths were still migrating through France to Spain; the Vandals were settled in Northern Africa; and the Franks had claimed most of modern France, although the Burgundians held their kingdom in the southeast. By this time, these peoples were familiar with Christianity. In fact, many had already adopted it.
Constantine I had officially permitted Christianity in 313, and even before that date it had spread through the Empire. Christians captured by the Goths spread their faith among them, as did missionaries during times when the Goths were at peace with Rome. The most famous missionary, Ulfila (“Little Wolf”), devised an alphabet for the Gothic language, and he and his associates translated the Bible into Gothic. Most of his translation is lost, but most of the Gospels and a fragment of the Old Testament survive—the only significant surviving text in any East Germanic language.
Christian Goths had suffered some persecution from pagan Goths in 348, when Ulfila was driven into exile, and again in 367-378. But once the Goths had settled within the Empire, between 382 and 395, most of them converted to Christianity (Thompson, The Visigoths in the Time of Ulfilas, pp. 106-107).
Christianity had been proclaimed the state religion of the Empire in 380, and while paganism was not yet outlawed, barbarians with their eyes on a military or civil career would have found it advantageous to convert. This process of migration, partial integration into Roman society through fighting and negotiation, and conversion, seems to have been the model for all those Germanic tribes who settled in Roman lands (Thompson, pp. 128-129).
In 486 at the Battle of Soissons, the Salian Franks under their ruler Clovis (ca. 466–511; Germanic name probably *Hlodoweg) defeated the last remaining part of Gaul that nominally maintained allegiance to Rome. In a series of campaigns that followed, Clovis extended his rule over much of present-day France, pushing the Visigoths into Spain, claiming the northern Alamannic lands to the Rhine and beyond, and absorbing the Rhineland Franks into his own kingdom by killing their kings15 (James, The Franks, pp. 79-91). One of these battles was allegedly the reason for Clovis’s conversion to Christianity. Urged to convert by his wife Clotilde, a Burgundian princess who was already an Athanasian Christian, Clovis allegedly promised to convert when he saw his forces being killed in a battle against the Alamanni. When Clovis won this battle—the Battle of Tolbiac in 496—he followed through on his promise.
As usual among the Germanic-speaking tribes, the ruler was also a religious leader, and if he changed his religion, most of his people would be obliged to follow.
So the Franks nominally became Christians—although, on the one hand, some Franks seem to have adopted Christianity at an earlier date, and on the other hand, folk customs with a distinctly pagan flavor continued for many years after the “official” conversion (James, pp. 121-129). A century later, some Franks near Noyon threatened St. Eligius when they’d had quite enough of his preaching: “Although you are always bothering us, you will never uproot our customs, but we will go on with our rites as we have always done, and we will go on doing so always and forever” (Vita s. Eligii, transl. James, p. 125).
It was through Frankish influence that much of the conversion across the Rhine took place. Frankish rulers encouraged Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries, since the spread of Christianity facilitated the social and administrative unification of Northern Europe under Frankish rule. At the end of the seventh century, the conversion process began to expand towards the North Sea, where the Frankish conquest and the Christianization of the Frisians went hand in hand (Geary, Before France and Germany, p. 215).
The Christian church began to push for conversion of the English in the early seventh century. Missionaries usually targeted kings and nobles, and when a king converted and his retainers followed suit, the realm might be said to have “become Christian.” Political power played a large role in the decision to convert: on the one hand, a king who accepted baptism became the “godson” of the king who sponsored him, and might be expected to be subordinate to his new “father.” On the other hand, a king who accept- ed Christianity might expect military, trade, and financial aid from other Christian kings. In any case, building the infrastructure of organizational Christianity—churches, monasteries, etc.—took longer, and getting every- one in the realm to adopt Christian beliefs and practices took longer still (Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia, pp. 103-104).
The first target for the missionaries was Æthelberht, king of Kent; his queen was a Frankish Christian, and his realm had considerable trade and cultural contacts with the Frankish kingdom. Pope Gregory sent a mission to Æthelberht in 596, led by a monk named Augustine. Æthelberht did not convert immediately, but showed tolerance and hospitality, saying:
Your words and promises are fair indeed; but they are new and uncer- tain, and I cannot accept them and abandon the age-old beliefs that I have held together with the whole English nation. But since you have traveled far, and I can see you are sincere in your desire to impart to us what you believe to be true and excellent, we will not harm you. We will receive you hospitably and take care to supply you with all that you need; nor will we forbid you to preach and win any people you can to your re- ligion (Bede, Ecclesiastical History I.25; transl. Sherley-Price, pp. 75-76).
Pope Gregory later sent more priests, including Mellitus, to whom he also sent a famous letter, instructing him to tear down pagan idols but not temples. Temples were to be reconsecrated as churches, and pagan feast days were to be made into Christian feast days; animals that would have been sacrificed to the gods and goddesses could still be killed and eaten for food at Christian holy days (Bede, Ecclesiastical History I.30; transl. Sherley-Price, pp. 92-93). Æthelberht formally converted around the year 600, and used his influence to encourage the conversion of Kings Sæberht of Essex and Rædwald of East Anglia (the most likely identity of the ruler buried in Mound 1 at Sutton Hoo). Still, it took another generation or two for the rulers to embrace Christianity completely; Rædwald raised a Christian al- tar alongside the harrows of his tribal gods, to the great irritation of the Christian priests (Bede, Ecclesiastical History, II.xv; transl. Sherley-Price, pp. 132-133).
The Saxons to the east remained unconverted; while some of their nobles were sympathetic to Christianity, the non-noble Saxons saw it as a threat to the balance of power. Saxons killed two English missionaries around 695 (Bede, Ecclesiastical History 5.10, transl. Sherley-Price, pp. 280-282), and nearly killed the English missionary Lebuin (Vita Lebuini, transl. Talbot, pp. 230-233). But there had been periodic outbreaks of hostility across the border between the Franks and Saxons, and as the Merovingian dynasty was ending, the new Frankish rulers began pushing eastwards.
Charlemagne (748-814) embarked on nearly continuous wars against the Saxons. In 772, he destroyed the Saxon religious center, the Irminsul (“Great Pillar”), and in 776 he carried out a forced mass baptism in the Lippe River near Paderborn. Yet every baptism was followed by a new revolt, many of which were led by the Saxon noble Widukind.
Charlemagne’s measures grew increasingly harsh. After his victory at Verden in 782, Charlemagne massacred 4500 prisoners of war and imposed harsh laws on the survivors; his Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae mandated death for any Saxon who refused baptism, and stiff fines for any who practiced Heathen rites (Dutton, Carolingian Civilization, pp. 59-60).
This was still not enough to pacify the Saxons. Widukind himself was allegedly baptized in 785, and was paid off afterwards with lavish gifts. But the non-noble classes of the Saxons found Frankish rule and Christian demands intolerable. Alcuin, the Anglo-Saxon scholar at Charlemagne’s court, pointed out that “If the light yoke and sweet burden of Christ were to be preached to the most obstinate people of the Saxons with as much determination as the payment of tithes has been exact- ed, or as the force of the legal decree has been applied for faults of the most trifling sorts imaginable, perhaps they would not be averse to their baptismal vows” (quoted in Goldberg, “Popular Revolt,” p. 478).
Saxon rebellions kept breaking out until 804, when Charlemagne deported all Saxons who lived north of the Elbe River, giving their lands to his Slavic allies (Goldberg, pp. 475-477). Even then, Christians complained about the difficulty of getting the Saxon lower classes to abandon their pagan ways. These Saxon lower classes revolted one last time against their Christian overlords in 841, the Stellinga revolt, asserting both their old legal freedoms and their old religion (Goldberg, pp. 479-480). As Charlemagne’s biographer Einhard reported, “No war ever undertaken by the Frankish people was more prolonged, more full of atrocities or more demanding of effort” (Vita Karoli Magni 7, transl. Thorpe, Two Lives of Charlemagne, p. 61).
Christianity for Charlemagne, as it turns out, was more a tool used as a post-hoc justification for a military campaign against troublesome neighbors than an actual causus belli.
In Scandinavia, you see a lot more political intrigue than invading hordes pulling up boats full of crucifixes. While there were battles fought, the battles were political in nature and not explicitly religious crusades. Also, most of these early attempts at conversion of Scandinavia were thwarted because a would-be King stepped on some of the wrong toes, not because of any anti-Christian fervor.
Olaf Tryggvason, who had adopted Christianity as part of a peace agreement to get him to stop pillaging England (Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia, pp. 115-116), may not have been a very devout Christian—Adam of Bremen reports rumors that he never was one, and mentions that he was so devoted to taking omens from birds that he was nicknamed Craccaben, “Crow Bone” (Krákabein in Norse; History of the Archbishops II.xl, transl. Tschan, p. 82).
But whatever his personal convictions might have been, Olaf found Christianity politically expedient as a tool for gaining and keeping power. According to his saga in Heimskringla, his missionary methods included bribery, followed by torture if the bribery failed. For example, Olaf tried to convert the chieftain Eyvindr Kinnrifi with flattery and offers of gifts; when Eyvindr remained resolute, Olaf resorted to threats, and finally tortured him by setting a brazier of glowing coals on his belly, which burst from the heat (Óláfs Saga Tryggvasonar 76).
It’s hard to know how much of this violence was motivated purely by power politics and how much might have come from sincere devotion. What seems clear is that such methods won Olaf no friends. The magnates of the kingdom revolted, and Olaf died by the hands of his enemies in the naval Battle of Svold, in 1000 CE. Queen Sigríðr storráða (often translated “Sigrid the Haughty” but perhaps better rendered as “Sigrid the Strong-Willed”) organized the alliance that brought Olaf down. She herself is well remembered for Olaf Tryggvason’s courtship of her; she refused to convert to Christianity, but offered to allow him to retain his own faith. His response was to strike her in the face and call her a “heathen bitch,” which brought their courtship, and ultimately his kingship, to rather sharp ends.
By the year 1000, the Heathen and Christian factions in Iceland were each declaring the other side “out of law,” meaning that legal agreements and contracts by people on one side would not be considered binding on people on the other side. Quite apart from this threat to stability, Iceland’s dependence on trade with Norway gave Olaf leverage, as did the fact that Olaf was holding sons of leading Icelandic families as hostages. It was decided that all folk should live under one faith and one law, and Thorgeir the Lawspeaker—the person whose duty was to recite the laws at the Althing—would choose which it was to be.
Thorgeir covered himself with his cloak and lay still for a day and a night, a ritual which hints at some form of seeking visions or communication with the gods (Jón Hnefill Aðalsteinsson, Under the Cloak, pp. 103-123). When he came forth again, he decreed that Iceland would become Christian, but that certain Heathen practices, including the eating of horsemeat and the exposure of deformed infants, could be practiced in private.
Thorgeir’s decision (or inspiration) to pursue a relatively gentle conversion, with temporary accommodations for Heathen practice, protected Icelanders against possible reprisals from Olaf, while creating conditions that allowed the old myths and stories to be remembered and preserved.
Sorry, the Great Northern Crusades were not fought against Norse Pagans. They were fought by Scandinavian Christians against Baltic and Slavic Pagans.
Edred Thorsson once wrote that Germania was “the last to fall” (A Book of Troth, p. 12), the last pagan land to adopt Christianity. That’s not true. Even after the Scandinavian countries had adopted Christianity, their Finnic, Slavic and Baltic neighbors to the east remained pagan. Inspired by the Pope’s calls to spread the Christian faith (and by the desire to control rich resources and major trade routes, and by rivalry with the Eastern Orthodox Church), Scandinavian and German kings embarked on the so-called Northern Crusades against their pagan neighbors.
Some of the early “crusades” were scarcely different from Viking raids. Sweden allegedly crusaded against the Finns to the east as early as the 1150s; this seems to be more legend than fact, but by 1295 the entire Baltic coast of Finland was in Swedish hands (Christiansen, The Northern Crusades, pp. 113-122). German and Scandinavian forces moved against the pagan Balts and Slavs. In 1168, the army of King Valdemar I of Denmark destroyed the Slavic fortress and temple of Arkona on the island of Rügen, where he tore down an idol of the god Svantovit and forcibly baptized 1300 pagans (Knýtlinga saga 122; ÍF 35, pp. 304-306).
Beginning in 1229, the Teutonic Knights, an order of mostly German warrior-monks, began pushing into eastern Europe. By 1410, they had carved out their own theocratic state, the Ordensland, that stretched from present-day Poland all the way to Estonia (Christensen, pp. 82-92). Still, it was not until 1387 that the rulers of Lithuania formally adopted Christianity. Meanwhile, the Sámi people of northern Scandinavia maintained their traditional beliefs more or less undisturbed until serious conversion attempts got underway in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
But if they weren’t forced to convert, why did Pagans abandon their Gods?
So if it’s all a myth that this was a largely violent conversion and that our Pagan ancestors were all forced to convert at the sword or all died fighting the Christians to preserve their old ways… then why did Pagans convert? If it wasn’t forced, then why would they do it?
We will never know exactly why it happened, because no Norse Pagan actually gave an honest account of why they did it, but we can make a few guesses as to what is more likely or less likely to be the case given what we know about our religion and how it was historically practiced. And because we know the real history of how the Germanic people converted, we can also deduce a pattern or two.
But before we get into that, let’s just state that the theory: “People were happy to convert because the Gods were wicked” is also a myth.
Christian missionaries and chroniclers, eager to show that their people had joined the new European civilization, enthusiastically wrote that people abandoned the Gods because they witnessed some kind of miracle or show of supernatural force. But they were equally happy later to say that people abandoned their Gods because those Gods were cruel, capricious or somehow lacking in some moral aspect.
While the myths can show Gods as being petty or capricious, there are no other indications that in daily life people genuinely believed the Gods were that way. After all, why would you make offerings to a God that you believed could care less about your efforts? Some Pagans may have been so cynical, and we do have some reports of a kind of nonchalant atheism in the Viking Age, but other than that?
It also seems, following folklorists like Claude LeCoteaux, that Pagan belief in spirits continued well into after the conversion, despite protestations from the Clergy. What were simple spiritual practices ended up sublimated as “superstition.”
If we take scholars like LeCoteaux to a reasonable conclusion here, then not only did people worship the Gods but the worship of the Gods and the spirits in the world around us was a central and relevant part of their lives. So much so that when a new religion replaced the Gods, the spirit-worship practices simply continued as folk-belief or superstition.
The Feudal model of society, where society was held together by the the web of oaths binding one Lord to the service of another Lord pre-dated Christianity and was visible in the Odinic Warband. The oath-bound Odinic Warband became the ideal vehicle for the conversion, because if one Lord converted, his entire retinue would need to convert as well. We see this in the case of the Franks and the English.
If a member of the retinue refused to convert, this would set him in violation of his oath of fealty to his Lord, and would make him outside of the law and thus any claims he had justified through the force of the warband would be forfeit and could be taken by anyone the Lord deemed more worthy. Unless you had some kind of political backing and ambition of your own, it was very rare for anyone to refuse baptism when it was demanded.
As a sign of their conversion to this new faith, they’d spend some of their cash (usually sponsored by the King himself) to build things like Churches or Cathedrals as a way of currying favor with their Lord–and showing off their wealth and power. They also would allow missionaries to recruit and train clergy to serve these communities.
Building this infrastructure created a lot of jobs, jobs that only Christians would be allowed to do. Craftsmen in communities would have to convert in order to build the churches and cathedrals.
As Christianity advanced and began to take over the daily institutions of life, Paganism became less relevant to people.
Think about it, if the only way to get a Lord to recognize your marriage (and thus your property claim) was to have it be a Christian marriage, you’d get a Christian marriage. If the only way to have your children legally recognized (and thus get your property rights secured) was to give them the rite of Christian Baptism, you’d get them Baptized. If Church holidays were the only way you’d get a chance to go to the manor-house to improve your position with your Lord, you’d celebrate the Church holidays. If the only way to get commissioned for a job was to convert, then you’d convert.
This process of institutional replacement took decades if not centuries, and was a mostly peaceful process of attaching institutional incentives to one religion and removing them from another one. There simply were no incentives for anyone to remain Pagan and every incentive for people to convert to Christianity.
Then why do we believe the myth of a violent conversion? What does it do for us?
A myth is a story that does something. It justifies a behavior. It explains the way things are so we can know what to do next. So what are we trying to do with this myth? What are we trying to justify?
- The myth of a violent conversion plays into anti-semitic and white victimhood narratives where Christianity was a Jewish weapon used against white people to gain submission to Jewish hegemony. The red flag for this particular interpretation is when someone refers to Christianity as a “foreign religion” or as Christian Kings being part of a “invading horde.” It falls apart when you ask the question “OK, then who was invading?” Because in reality, the Kings and Lords who converted were English, Frankish or Norse themselves, as was everyone in their retinue. So who is the foreigner? You see where this is going. Best to nip this one in the bud.
- The myth of a violent conversion subverts responsibility or complicity in the legacies of Colonialism and Imperialism by implying that white people, too, were a victim of Colonialism, which they in general were not. This functions the same way as the “Irish were slaves too” argument. Some well-meaning Pagans say it as a means to support solidarity with Indigenous Rights, but in fact it is meant to do the opposite. It is meant to side-step the issue and take the individual out of the position of having to think about the legacies from which they personally benefit that were extracted from the violent dispossession of others.
- The myth serves as a comfort to those who have been through religious trauma. For some Pagans, the choice to become Pagan is a choice that is at odds with the religion of our families–for most of us this is Christianity. This leads to feelings of disconnection from our families, and in a religion that emphasizes ancestor worship this can be especially hard for many Pagans to deal with. This leads to Pagans developing a hypothetical Pagan ancestor who approves of the conversion from Christianity. The more violent and terrifying the conversion was, the more it sometimes reflects the experienced realities of their own trauma.
This article cites heavily from work in Our Troth Volume 1, 3rd Edition. The information has been abridged and condensed for ease of reading but if you’re looking for more resources on the History of the Christian Conversion and how our faith grew and developed over time, then you should take a look at the book!
We do not need to be forgiven by the Gods, and if we did, it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t forgive us.
What this myth can also do is instill a sense of guilt in us: a guilt we inherit from the actions of our ancestors. They converted. They abandoned the Gods. For centuries, generations of our family worshiped different Gods and not the Norse Gods. You might think that they’d be sore about that, but very few modern Heathens have reported any kind of feeling of anger or jealousy from the Gods. Why might that be?
We might take a verse out of the Havamal, where a way to a friend’s house remains even if the path has overgrown. Let’s say that you had a way to a friend’s house, but you hadn’t visited each other in awhile. That path became overgrown with weeds and brambles. But one day, you decide to clear that path and you find your friend waiting there wondering where you’ve been this whole time.
That’s how many Heathens today see the Gods and the “path” of Heathenry. The way was overgrown, and we have cleared it. And for many of us, we found our faithful friends there at the end of it–as if the last 1000 years has been a blink of an eye and there was no shame, no guilt and nothing to forgive.