When I wrote The Year of the Warrior, I took a historical gamble. I included among the buildings at Sola farm, where the hero lived, a heathen temple.
That may not sound too audacious, but in fact I was flying in the face of all the research I’d done on Viking life. In book after book, I’d read that historians believed there were no temples in the Norse religion; that religious ceremonies were performed either in the open air or in the chieftain’s home.
But Adam of Bremen, in his history of the bishops of Hamburg, insists that there was a temple at Uppsala, Sweden. And having a small shrine just seemed right to me, so I put one in the story.
And now this, from the Archaeology News Network:
Located at the site of Ranheim, about 10 kilometers north of the Norwegian city of Trondheim, the astonishing discovery was unearthed while excavating foundations for new houses and includes a “gudehovet” or “god temple.” Occupied from the 6th or 5th century BCE until the 10th century AD/CE, the site shows signs of usage for animal sacrifice, a common practice among different peoples in antiquity. Over 1,000 years ago, the site was dismantled and covered by a thick layer of peat, evidently to protect it from marauding Christian invaders. These native Norse religionists apparently then fled to other places, such as Iceland, where they could re-erect their altars and re-establish the old religion.
I love being right. It doesn’t happen very often.
One thing that puzzles me is that the article suggests that similar temples have been discovered outside of Norway. Why has no one told me about this?
