GODS AND GODDESSES

Caesar came into contact with Germanic tribes along the Rhine border of the Roman Empire. Whereas he was aware that the Celtic Gauls, whom he considered more culturally advanced than the Germanic tribes, believed in the existence of individual gods, he seems to have thought that this was not the case for the Germanic tribes.

Whereas Caesar elsewhere (On the Gallic War 6.17) names Mercury as their main god, the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus names several deities in his ethnographical work Germania for the many Germanic peoples he lists north and east of the Rhine. The problem with the descriptions found in this work and in his Annals is that he not only lacked firsthand knowledge of the areas he describes, but also pursued a hidden agenda aiming to portray the Germanic peoples as “noble savages” as opposed to the decadent Romans. As a result, his reports may therefore be overly idealistic even when based on eyewitness reports. Nevertheless, the names he gives the Germanic deities are of substantial benefit to our understanding of the Germanic pantheon and the roles played by the different gods within it. In chapter 9 of his Germania, Tacitus identifies three male deities and one female deity as the main gods of the Germanic peoples, namely Mercury, Hercules and Mars, and the goddess Isis. The fact that he does not give them their vernacular names means that their roles (and no doubt their similarity to their classical counterparts) are of more interest to him than the names given to them by the Germanic peoples.

Like Caesar before him, Tacitus considers Mercury, who is usually taken to mean Wodan, to be the main god of the Germanic peoples. This interpretatio romana of Tacitus is, in this case, supported by the interpretatio germanica by which the Latin weekday name dies Mercurii “day of Mercury” was translated into the Germanic dialects as “day of Wodan”, for instance, Anglo-Saxon Wodnesdaeg (and thus modern English “Wednesday”). However, further evidence of this substantiated with archaeological evidence is not found until several centuries later when the actual name of Wodan appears carved on the gilded silver fibula from Nordendorf in Bavaria (see below).

By the same method of identification, another god in the triad listed by Tacitus, Mars, appears to stand for the god Tyr/Tiwaz, whose name is also used for the Roman weekday name dies Martis, which is in turn translated as Anglo- Saxon tvwesdaeg (> Modern English “Tuesday”), Old Norse tysdagr. The last god of the triad, not quite as easily identified, is the god whom Tacitus refers to as Hercules. This god is most likely seen as a suitable equivalent for Donar/Thor since both gods show great valour and perform heroic deeds in their respective pantheons. However, in this case the interpretatio germanica of the weekday names did not follow the same pattern, and instead the god used to translate the day of the god Jupiter, dies lovi, is Donar/Thor, the weekday name thus becoming the “day of Donar/Thor”: Old English thunresdaeg “Thursday”, German Donnerstag.

It is not as easy to find a Germanic equivalent for the goddess whom Tacitus names as Isis. At least superficially, Isis certainly has little in common with the Roman goddess Venus, whose name, used in the weekday name dies Veneris, was translated using that of the Germanic goddess Frija/Frigg, thus resulting in Old Norse friddagr, Old English frlgedeag (>Modern English “Friday”). Isis may have more in common with the goddess Nehalennia, to both of whom appeal was made in cases concerning the fate of shipping.

In his Annals (4.73) Tacitus names some more goddesses, but no gods. One of them is a deity called Baduhenna, whose claim to fame comes from the supposed slaughter of nine hundred Roman soldiers in 28 CE near the holy grove dedicated to her in Frisia. As the etymology of her name may be explained as “battle­goddess”, this gruesome episode has a high degree of likelihood. Another female deity named by Tacitus (Annals 1.51) is Tanfana, whose temple somewhere east of the lower Rhine was destroyed by Roman troops in the autumn of the year 4 CE.

There is a lot more detail given by Tacitus (Germania 40) for another goddess, whom he calls Nerthus, and who is said to be venerated on an island in the ocean, which must be assumed to be one of the Danish islands, although the seven Germanic tribes he names as worshipping Nerthus were settled mainly east of the Elbe river. In his text about her, Tacitus describes an interesting ritual practised by the Germanic peoples. Tacitus narrates how the procession of this goddess on a cart drawn by cows and led by the priest, who is the only one allowed to touch the cart, is marked by a festive peace when weapons are put away. On returning to her grove, the cart, clothes and the goddess herself are washed in a secluded lake and the assisting slaves are then drowned in the same lake to preserve the secret surrounding her grove. This cult of Nerthus is remarkable in several ways: first, if the form Nerthus (rather than Herthus, which is also found in the early printed editions of Tacitus’s Germania) is correct, the name of this female deity corresponds etymologically to that of the Old Norse male god, Njordr.

In addition to these female deities named by Tacitus, there is a relatively long list of goddesses whose names occur rarely but point to some form of veneration at least by their presence on the numerous Roman votive altars in the Germanic provinces under Roman rule: Alateivia, Beda, Fimmilena, Friagabis, Gamaleda, Haeva, Hariasa, Harimella, Hellivesa, Ricagambeda, Sandraudiga, Sibulca, Sulevia, Vercana and Vihansa. However, these goddesses are of only minor importance compared with the Germanic cult of a triad of goddesses known to us from the Latin texts as matronae who were venerated between the second and fifth centuries CE. Although neither the belief in these goddesses nor its ritual realization is exclusively Germanic (since it can be found in Gaul as well as in Italy), about 1100 Roman votive stones bear over a hundred different, yet quite clearly Germanic, names of these maternal deities. The cult of these so-called matrons was then carried into even more remote areas of the empire by Germanic legionaries serving in the Roman army, especially to Hadrian’s Wall in northern England, where legions from Frisia were stationed.

The centre of the cult seems to have been in an area of mixed Germanic- Roman-Celtic population around Cologne and Bonn on the west bank of the Rhine, where at least four major shrines to these deities have so far been located. The most widely documented matronae are the Austriahenae (“the eastern ones”?) and the Vacallinehae (probably from a place-name) with more than 130 stones dedicated to each of them, as well as the Aufaniae (“generous ancestral mothers”) in Bonn with approximately 90, and the Suleviae (etymology unclear) with around 40 known votive altars respectively.

The matronae on the stones are shown almost exclusively in groups of three, and their very distinct style of dress marks two of them as married women while the middle one is an unmarried girl with loose hair. The functions of the matronae, which range from general protection of the family to fertility, childbirth and health, may indicate a relationship to the disir documented much later for Scandinavia, but possibly identical with the idisi, protective or helping females in the First Merseburg Charm of the eighth century (see below). Apart from denoting their function as giving and caring, as in the names of Alagabiae (“the all-giving ones”) and Friagabiae (“the freely giving ones”), surprisingly many of the names can be etymologically linked to the names of rivers. This indicates parallels with the Celtic cult of river goddesses, but also points to the the holding of sacrifices by the pre-Christian population.

The form which the communal sacrifices took may partly be reconstructed from their physical remnants, which were in many cases carefully preserved. In Yeavering near York, for example, the cult building was used to store the skulls of ritually slaughtered cattle, and in many of the Danish bog finds, the skulls of cattle or horses were deposited with the skin and the extremities still attached: in doing so, the share of the gods in the sacrificial animals was displayed. In other cases, bones which had been carefully wrapped and deposited in the bog have been found. From finds such as these, we may assume that the edible parts of these large animals, but also of sheep, must have served as the communal meal, in which the blood and meat of the sacrificial animal would be communally consumed.

Large halls, which seemed to serve either only religious or both religious and secular purposes, were built since the Migration period in Scandinavia. They testify to the fact that the size of the gathering was an important aspect of the sacrifice. The sacrificial deposits in Rislev (Zealand), in Kragehul (Fyn) and in Soest and Donnstetten in Germany show the form of the ritual killing of the sacrificial animal, through an axe blow into the front of its skull.

More information can be gleaned from the remnants of the trophy deposits of southern Scandinavia as the bogs here contain an incredible wealth of material: typically, armies of sixty fully armed soldiers and two hundred less well armed auxiliaries along with ten horsed knights were stripped of all their equipment after they had been defeated by the local defenders. This complete booty of swords, shields, daggers, lances, spears, bows and arrows as well as saddles, bridles, tools and other personal belongings were not taken over and shared by the victors, but were deliberately and completely destroyed: swords were bent, the tips of spears and daggers were folded, shield-bosses were hammered flat and in some cases (as at Ejsbol in Jutland) the whole loot was burnt on a pyre. In several cases, as in Hjortspring and Nydam, the boats of the victims were destroyed and sunk in the same sacrificial bog into which the weapons were tossed; in Ejsbol the boat was burnt together with the weapons.

The large Nydam boat, now housed in Schleswig, is the only one surviving out of three found originally in this bog. It is the biggest, and must resemble the boats which the Angles, from exactly this region, used at that time to emigrate to Britain. The fact that no weapon booty sacrifices have been found to date in the British Isles may indicate that the conquering Angles quickly abandoned the local religious customs of their newly abandoned original homelands - or that Britain did not suffer from foreign incursions to the same degree as Jutland.

In several cases of weapon deposits, the objects were then collected and sorted before being bundled up and sunk in the moor, possibly with the help of the many stones that have been found in the context of these offerings. On the other hand we have no idea about the function of the hundreds of sharpened sticks and stakes that were also found; perhaps they were used to mark off the area of the deposition, like the spears that were stuck round the Thorsberg weapon sacrifices. In some cases it is clear, simply by their position in the ground when found, that the objects were flung from a lakeside, whereas in other instances the weapons were carefully bundled up and must have been sunk either from a boat or from the ice of a frozen lake. Finds of this type come from several well-excavated sites in Denmark, Germany and Sweden: in Hjortspring, Ejsbol, Illerup Adal and Nydam in southern Jutland, Thorsberg just below the German border, Illemose on Fyn in Denmark, Karingsjon and Hassle Bosarp in southern Sweden, and Skedemosse on Gland.

Occasionally, small details show us how little we actually know about these ritual depositions: in Illerup Adal, runes were carved into several of the destroyed items after they had been burnt but before they were deposited in the lake. Similarly, we also lack all other information about the nature of this sacrificial victory-feast, in which the destruction of weaponry, the pyre, the carving of runes, the sorting of items, and the final and irretrievable sinking of the goods are some, but surely not all the elements of the ritual. One major piece of information is so completely missing as to make the whole ritual even more enigmatic. With the exception of one single case, in none of these weapon booty deposits have any human bones even been found, nor are there any graveyards in the proximity which could be understood as being appropriately related to the weaponry found. Thus we do not know what happened to the warriors of the defeated army, whether they were killed and their bodies burnt somewhere else, or hanged in some other place, or even sacrificed in a completely different way. But perhaps they were not killed at all but rather released for ransom, sent home again, kept as slaves or sold?

However, the deliberate and complete destruction of valuable equipment with the obvious aim that nobody in this world would ever use these weapons again can only mean that they were being given over to the powers or god(s) to whom they may have been promised before the battle in the case of the hoped-for victory. Several of these sites (Ejsbol, Illerup Adal) did indeed have a wooden effigy, as discussed above, both to mark the place and to show the recipient of the sacrifice. The relatively rare occurrence of this type of sacrifice, which may have occurred only once in one given place, or with centuries in between, obviously made it unnecessary for there to be a regular infrastructure on these sites: no causeways (as in Skedemosse), jetties (as in Thorsberg) or fences (as in Thorsberg and Oberdorla) have been found at sites such as these.

Such a widely practised custom of the Germanic tribes in the Iron Age did not go unnoticed in the Roman world, and two descriptions of similar votive dedications of army equipment have survived from continental Europe. The older of the two provides written support for the archaeological evidence. However, this is a far from contemporary description by Paulus Orosius in his Historia adversus paganos (History Against the Pagans, fifth century) of the battle of Arausio on the Rhone (which took place on 6 October 105 CE), in which the Cimbri and the Teutones destroyed the loot they had taken from the Romans because of an extraordinary oath they had taken: “The clothes were rent and trodden into the mud, the gold and silver was thrown into the river, the armours were cut up, the decoration of the horses destroyed, the horses themselves drowned in the pools of the river, and the men were hung by ropes in trees, so that the victors retained none of the immense booty” (5.16). Orosius mentions a battle in 405 in which a similar vow was apparently made in preparation for battle. In this violent oath, the Goths had vowed to sacrifice all captured Romans (7.37) - and seemingly did so.

It is a matter of discussion just how frequently sacrifices were held. It is clear that the sacrifice of weapon booty only occurred at necessarily irregular intervals, but the frequency of normal public sacrifices is also a matter of discussion, even if they may be assumed to have been held on a yearly basis. This should, however, not be presupposed, as the Nerthus cult described by Tacitus in his Germania does not seem to have been an annual event. A far greater period of time between sacrifices is described in much later sources in the eleventh century by the German chroniclers Thietmar of Merseburg and Adam of Bremen, who refer to the Scandinavian superregional sacrificial feasts which took place in Lejre (Denmark) and Uppsala (Sweden) at intervals of nine years. Such a lapse of time between sacrifices seems to be corroborated by the bog finds themselves, the evidence of which suggests that sacrifices were relatively few and far between even if the sacrificial place was in use over a period of several centuries.

Apart from the unfortunate survivors of battle, it seems that human sacrifices were a rare occurrence among Germanic tribes: on the Swedish island of Gland, in the sacrificial bog in Skedemosse which was in use over a period of five centuries, only thirty-nine human skeletons have been found in addition to weapons, goods, and thousands of fragments of animal bones. Traces of anthropophagy, on at least some of them, in this rich stock-raising community clearly show that these were victims of the ultimate: the rare human sacrifices.

The numerous bog corpses of northern Europe have earlier led to the supposition that these bodies, preserved with skin and hair by the acids contained in the bog water, must have either been the victims of human sacrifice or else, as Tacitus (Germania 12) writes, the victims of the death penalty for particularly shameful crimes, such as cowardice or sodomy. However, not only are bog corpses by no means limited to the pre-Christian Germanic period and can be dated from the Neolithic period to the twentieth century, but also there is no clear indication that there was any truth in the story told by Tacitus, seeing that no traces have been found of the mats or woven coverings supposedly used to hide and keep the victims under water. Of course, there is no way to rule out either the possibility that the bogs were used for carrying out the death penalty or for human sacrifice (or a combination of both), but it would seem that many of the bog corpses were simply the victims of accidents, murder and wars, whereas others were simply buried away from human habitation for a variety of reasons which are no longer known or retraceable today. Only for a very small number of bodies found, namely for those carrying multiple potentially fatal injuries and in some cases conspicuous marks, such as shaving, castration or binding, might we possibly infer that these were indeed cases of human sacrifice.

While in the Romanized area of the Germanic world Christianity was already wide-spread by the fifth century, in Scandinavia and other Germanic areas the nature of sacrificial rituals seems to have changed rather abruptly around the middle of the first millennium. On both the continent and in southern Scandinavia, bogs and lakes seem to lose their central role in at least public sacrifices, and other forms of cults appear to be taking over. The nature of these cults is less clear to us, as they have left fewer physical traces, but they seem to be considerably more centralized within a few key locations where a secular potentate may have also wielded religious power.

One such place is Gudme-Lundeborg, where an intricate cult topography around Gudme (from a reconstructed form *Gud-hjem, “Home of the God[s]”) is documented by place-names, excavations of a large representative hall at the centre of the settlement, and numerous finds of precious objects, particularly bracteates and so-called guldgubber as well as other important luxury goods. While guldgubber, small gold-foil pictures of richly adorned human figures, belong to the second phase of the “Golden Age” of Denmark during the Migration Age and Merovingian periods and never had any relevance outside Scandinavia, bracteates are far more widespread.