Here’s an oddity, and pretty much up my alley. Tip: Grim’s Hall.

I think I’ve mentioned before how I’ve gradually been won over, at least tentatively, to the view that the original Viking raids against England, particularly the one against Lindisfarne (793 AD), may have been intended as a preemptive attack, in order to send a message to the Emperor Charlemagne. This would have been because Charlemagne, at the Battle of Verden (782) forcibly baptized the defeated Saxons, and (probably) massacred them, an action that Denmark (understandably) considered provocative.

Under the rule of the Franks, the Saxons were formally Christianized. In order to teach them the gospel, Frankish missionaries did something both interesting and questionable. They “translated” the Gospel story into Germanic epic form, in a work known as the Heliand. (I actually have a friend who’s been raving about this poem for years, but I’ve never read it myself.)

We’ve wrung our hands recently over a New Testament translation that caters to Muslim sensibilities. But those changes pale compared to the alterations the Franks made, in order to put Christ’s story into a form that would be intelligible to Germanic warriors.

Having been thoroughly ‘Saxonised’, Christ becomes a warrior, the towns of ancient Israel become ‘hill forts’ and the three wise men become warriors and thanes. John the Baptist is called a ‘soothsayer’ and the Lord’s Payer [sic] apparently contains ‘secret runes’. When Christ leaves the wedding at Cana, the Heliand says that

‘Christ, the most powerful of kings decided to go to Capharnaum, the great hill fort, with his followers. His forces of good men, his happy warrior company assembled in front of him’

Read all about it here.