ABSTRACT
Half a century ago, Gabriel Turville-Petre presented a full if rather monolithic picture of Scandinavian beliefs and traditions of the pre-Christian era entitled Myth and Religion of the North. It is a paradox that place-names are probably our most important contemporary evidence for cults and beliefs in the pre-Christian Viking Age. The paradox lies in the fact that the surviving evidence, namely the written forms of the names, is almost never older than the thirteenth century in Scandinavia, very rarely older than that in the diaspora, and often later in both cases. The Earldom of Orkney was a centre for Norse cultural activity in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. This chapter assesses the most useful evidence for understanding what people actually did and believed in the Viking Age. Within the last decade, a ritual building that has been described by some as a pre-Christian temple has been unearthed in the archaeological excavations at Uppakra in Skane, southern Sweden.
