ABSTRACT
A fundamental problem that scholars encounter when investigating Old Norse religion is the lack of distinction between time periods and places in the primary sources, which are essentially pieces of living folklore, passed on from generation to generation and modified to fit public officials’ policies in the early medieval period. Aspects of religious practices in Scandinavia drawn from oral traditions and recorded by medieval Icelanders (at the time when Christianity had been introduced in the ‘North,’ and in most parts also accepted) tend to run together under the all-encompassing category of ‘paganism,’ which is often understood as a static and isolated religious system. It is sometimes overlooked that the written sources derive from a society at a point when it was a cultural melting pot where Scandinavians, Celts, Sámi and other groups met and interacted. Scholars have predominantly focused on mythology, which is sometimes seen as a ‘religion’ in its own right, overlooking the fact that it is pieced together from a number of social realities of different origins. Any attempt to reconstruct the religion of early Scandinavian societies is therefore difficult and requires a flexible and interdisciplinary approach. This chapter discusses some of the key characteristics and difficulties of working with Old Norse religion and provides an outline of the main types of literature available for its study.
