When did people stop believing in the old gods like Greek and Norse? Did the Vikings just wake up one morning and think ”this is bullshit”?
In: Culture
A few thing to note that a lot of people generally miss out on:
1. The Roman Religion was already on the outs when Christianity was picking up steam. The Romans were already flirting with ideas like monotheism with concepts like Sol Invictus and the official religons days were numbered. In actuality a lot of what falls under that traditional umbrella is separate competing religions like Simonism which was at best mildly syncretized but has it’s own philosophy and cosmology. Something was going to give eventually.
2. The Norse religion only appears in it’s earliest Germanic form hundreds of years into the common era and *after* Rome was already christian. Some of the older viking runestones talk about historical kings and leaders but some of those were already christian despite having been dead for centuries by the time of that carving.
3. To be particular Theoderic The Great was a Gothic king and Patrician who was very much an Arian Christian. However like a lot of historic figures he got twisted around into a mythic form. Christians in Germany interpreted him as Dietrich Von Bern, a kind of Arthurian hero who both fights historical battles but also slays dragons and fights dwarves. He runs into other historical figures that similarly got twisted around to be nearly unrecognizable. However, at more or less the same time this is going on the Norse were carving his name as Tyrker the bold and telling a mostly exclusive but similarly outlandish set of stories about him. Some of the other historic figures become Valkyries or immortals.
4. As you can probably tell at this point folklore and mythology kind of blend into each other and become context sensitive. People didn’t just stop believing in Dwarves and Giants and didn’t stop telling stories. They also didn’t really stop with sorcery. You can see some surviving incantations where Odin and Balder just got replaced with God and Jesus. Norse style sorcery continued for centuries past this point. One of the things people forget is that there’s a lot of folk catholicism that uses spirits and monsters and weird figures that at best just kind of become saints of that the church just kind of allows to happen because it keeps the wheels spinning smoothly.
5. A lot of these folk ideals can still germinate past that point and spread to other, almost entirely different folk ideals elsewhere. Brigid the celtic god became St. Brigid to Catholics. But then at some point she also became Maman Brigitte, a voodoo death goddess.
So there isn’t really a linear A-B. It’s more accurate to think of it like genetics where there can be a lot of branches and cross pollination between them and some genes become dominant but others don’t really go away.
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