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
I Norway at least they killed everyone who would not converte.
My history teacher explained it like this once “both sides pray to their religion before a battle, if you win your god was clearly stronger so at the next battle your enemies pray to your god too”
Both were converted to Christianity.
Greece converted when it was a part of the Roman Empire at the same time that the whole of Rome was converting. This took centuries.
The Vikings Converted due to Christian Missionaries sent by the Catholic Church specifically to convert them (and others in Northern Europe). This also took several hundred years.
I think I can answer this.
I have done some research into the normans, and it turns out that they originated as vikings who invaded northern France.
So they carved out the territory they needed and became an enclave. They freely adopted the the french language, customs and way of living, but still maintained their ferocious army.
The French king ended up giving them their own lands, in exchange for giving the Italians a pasting in the south.
So after a while they became as french as the french, and set about improving the french system of administration.
So the answer is that they readily adopted overseas cultures and “gods”.
I would argue that the Greek and Roman pantheons were never believed in, in the same way that Christianity is believed in. Christianity is a faith based on specific historical claims about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and it has produced a series of creeds and confessions that lay out precisely what Christianity believes to be true. Greek, Roman, Norse, and other myths belong to a different category entirely. They have no creeds, no confessions, and no catechisms. Their adherents would have been puzzled by the suggestion of such a thing. Their “faith” such as it was, existed in a different frame from their philosophy, which co-existed fairly happily but remained separate. (You might see something similar today in the practice of Shinto, for instance.) Christianity was the first faith to put the two together and give us theology.
I’m not sure if this is an original thought to him, but G.K. Chesterton elaborates on this at length in one of his great works, *The Everlasting Man.* (You can easily find it as a free PDF, and can just jump to the part where he starts discussing “comparative religion.”)
Incidentally, this is part of the reason that the line used by folks like Dawkins in debating Christians is mistaken: “You’re also an atheist when it comes to Zeus and Thor and Baal, I’m just an atheist for one more god than you.” It’s a category error. There was never anything like Jewish monotheism, until Christianity which consummated it (Jews would disagree). And there hasn’t been anything comparable since that hasn’t somehow descended from Christianity.
Long story short? Christianity spread like a very violent plague.
Here’s why, in bullet points:
* Christianity appeared.
* Local rulers noticed that the main point of Christianity is “life sucks, but grin & turn the other cheek and then you get eternal rewards (TM) after death.”
* Local rulers thought, “hey, this means God is telling them not to rebel against me when I raise taxes, sweet!”
* Rulers then found God and converted to Christianity.
* Any vikings who weren’t so sure about the new, merciful God got burned at the stake or murdered.
* The Vikings who remained alive decided that it was safer to follow Jesus than not to.
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.
If you’ve ever listened to Viking metal you would know there’s lots of people who still believe it
European perspective.
1. The spread of Catholicism / Christianity, starting with Roman Emperor Constantine. Christians were pretty aggressive at spreading the faith, at least once they got to the point where they had material political and military power,
2. Arguably, the ‘old gods’ where a god would be dedicated to a specific purpose, desire or topic (god of fertility, hunting, farming, lost causes,…) was replaced with the Roman Catholic canonization of saints.
When was the last person celebrating the fertility feast of Eostre ?
Last April.
When did the people last celebrate the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain the end of summer and the harvest and the beginning of the dark, cold winter, a time of year that was often associated with human death. Last October 31st, and we will again this October 31st.
there’s your answer.
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