Chapter 1

Christianity was not popular. It came from abroad, it aimed at supplanting the time-honoured indigenous gods whom the country revered and loved. These gods and their worship were part and parcel of the people's traditions, customs and constitution. Their names had their roots in the people's language, and were hallowed by antiquity; kings and princes traced their lineage back to individual gods; forests, mountains, lakes had received a living consecration from their presence. All this the people was not to renounce; and what is elsewhere commended as truth and loyalty was denounced and persecuted by the heralds of the new faith as a sin and a crime. The source and seat of all sacred lore was shifted away to far-off regions for ever, and only a fainter borrowed glory could henceforth be shed on places in one's native land.

The new faith came in escorted by a foreign language, which the missionaries imparted to their disciples and thus exalted into a sacred language, which excluded the slighted mother-tongue from almost all share in public worship. This does not apply to the Greek-speaking countries, which could follow the original text of the christian revelation, but it does to the far wider area over which the Latin church-language was spread, even among Romance populations, whose ordinary dialect was rapidly emancipating itself from the rules of ancient Latin. Still more violent was the contrast in the remaining kingdoms.

The converters of the heathen, sternly devout, abstemious, mortifying the flesh, occasionally peddling, headstrong, and in slavish subjection to distant Rome, could not fall in many ways to offend the national feeling. Not only the rude bloody sacrifices, but the sensuous pleasure-loving side of heathenism was to them an abomination (see Suppl.). And what their words or their wonder-working gifts could not effect, was often to be executed against obdurate pagans by placing fire and sword in the hands of christian proselytes.

The triumph of Christianity was that of a mild, simple, spiritual doctrine over sensuous, cruel, barbarizing Paganism. In exchange for peace of spirit and the promise of heaven, a man gave his earthly joys and the memory of his ancestors. Many followed the inner prompting of their spirit, others the example of the crowd, and not a few the pressure of irresistible force.

Although expiring heathenism is studiously thrown into the shade by the narrators, there breaks out at times a touching lament over the loss of the ancient gods, or an excusable protest against innovations imposed from without (8) (see Suppl.).

The missionaries did not disdain to work upon the senses of the heathen by anything that could impart a higher dignity to the Christian cultus as compared with the pagan: by white robes for subjects of baptism, by curtains, peals of bells (see Suppl.), the lighting of tapers and the burning of incense. (9) It was also a wise or politic measure to preserve many heathen sites and temples by simply turning them, whensuitable, into Christian ones, and assigning to them another and equally sacred meaning. The heathen gods even, though represented as feeble in comparison with the true God, were not always pictured as powerless in themselves; they were perverted into hostile malignant powers, into demons, sorcerers and giants, who had to be put down, but were nevertheless credited with a certain mischievous activity and influence. Here and there a heathen tradition or a superstitious custom lived on by merely changing the names, and applying to Christ, Mary and the saints what had formerly been related and believed of idols (see Suppl.). On the other hand, the piety of christian priests suppressed and destroyed a multitude of heathen monuments, poems and beliefs, whose annihilation history can hardly cease to lament, though the sentiment which deprived us of them is not to be blamed. The practice of a pure Christianity, the extinction of all trace of heathenism was of infinitely more concern than the advantage that might some day accrue to history from their longer preservation. Boniface and Willibrord, in felling the sacred oak, in polluting the sacred spring, and the image-breaking Calvinists long after them, thought only of the idolatry that was practised by such means (see Suppl.). As those pioneers 'purged their floor' a first time, it is not to be denied that the Reformation eradicated aftergrowths of heathenism, and loosing the burden of the Romish ban, rendered our faith at once freer, more inward and more domestic. God is near us everywhere, and consecrates for us every country, from which the fixing of our gaze beyond the Alps would alienate us.

Probably some sects and parties, non-conformity here and there among the heathen themselves, nay, in individual minds a precocious elevation of sentiment and morals, came half-way to meet the introduction of Christianity, as afterwards its purification (see Suppl.). It is remarkable that Old Norse legend occasionally mentions certain men who, turning away in utter disgust and doubt from the heathen faith, placed their reliance on their own strength and virtue. Thus in the Sôlar lioð 17 we read of Vêbogi and Râdey 'â sik þau trûðu,' in themselves they trusted

[*NF* - They in themselves confided,
and though themselves alone to be
above all people;
but their lot
Almighty God was pleased
otherwise to appoint.
- Solarlióð Str. 17: Thorpe Translation];

9. Greg. Tur. 2, 31. Fornm. sög. 1, 260. 2, 200.  (back)