THE BELIEVER

The female head of the family often doubled up as its spiritual guide

With many gods and goddesses in the pantheon, and a host of other supernatural beings stalking the Earth, the matter of who you believed in, and how and where you contacted them, varied across the Viking world. Cult practices could take place outdoors or in religious buildings. But it seems it was common to worship one’s favoured deity in the home.

Evidence suggests such rites were the province of the female head of the household. In the early 11th century, the Icelandic poet Sigvatr came across women on a remote Swedish farm performing a sacrifice to the elves – although, as a Christian, he was not allowed to witness the ceremony.

The term gyðja for a female cult practitioner may refer to such women, whose social status required that they perform religious rites. There are parallels with the betterdocumented masculine role of the goði – someone who seems to have had both secular and supernatural power in the Viking age.

We also have evidence of more specialised, travelling cult practitioners, both male and female, although what they actually did is still obscure.

There were a number of Norse goddesses – such as Freyja, the goddess of love, sex and beauty, and Hel, the partly decomposed ruler of the netherworld – which we know about mainly through later Icelandic sources, although we can be sure about the Viking age origins of at least some of these figures.

From the evidence we can also deduce that Scandinavian women were drawn to Christianity, with devotion to the Virgin Mary confirmed in 11th- century Viking runic inscriptions from Sweden and Norway. An enormous rune stone from Dynna, Norway – on which a mother commemorates her dead daughter – depicts a nativity scene.