A Scandinavian visitor once turned up at the court of the German emperor and started a brawl. It was a dirty one, all fists and wrecked furniture. When the guards dragged him in to explain himself, he was offended. He had been baptised three times, he said. The first two times they gave him decent presents. This time he got a wretched little shirt.
Vasily Novikov tells the story with a grin. He is an archaeologist, a Candidate of Historical Sciences, and he heads a detachment of the Joint Gnezdovo Archaeological Expedition. The joke also shows how conversion worked in the North: step by step, with a gift at each step, and nobody in a hurry to throw the old world away.
That matters for anyone who has ever pictured a Viking funeral. The burning ship from the films comes from the old stories, and those stories survived because Christians kept them. The way they were kept is a neat piece of social engineering.
Take the problem from the converts' side. Odin is a typical supreme god of the pagan kind, and the new faith offered a gentle preacher who was executed like a criminal. Novikov's answer is that the Scandinavians took a road that Rus never took. They didn't declare Odin and his company false. They declared them human. "These supreme comrades" were great heroes of the past, to be honoured, with legends written down about them. They just weren't gods. As Novikov puts it, God is one, "and he's not Odin."
They said these supreme comrades are not gods. They are great heroes of the past. They should be honoured, legends should be written about them, and so on. They are not gods.
Они сказали, что эти все товарищи верховные, это не боги, это великие герои прошлого. Их нужно чтить, о них нужно записывать легенды и все остальное, они не боги.
— Vasily Novikov, NauchDok, 32:53
Then there was Baldr, a much-loved god, which made him useful. He dies, shot down by a trick, and goes to the underworld, Hel. Hel agrees to let him go if everything in the world weeps for him. Loki, sly as ever, hides in a cave disguised as an old woman and refuses. So Baldr is released only in part: he walks the earth in spring and goes back below in winter. A Christian listener hears the question of resurrection in that.
His funeral adds more. The gods lay him in a boat with gifts and set it on fire. Odin leans down and whispers something in his ear. In one saga a king with a magic sword, one that even the gods feared, plays riddles with a disguised old man. The last riddle is what Odin said to his son on the pyre. The king shouts out that it was Odin, the cursed one, and swings the sword at him. Odin flies off. The king is dead in two days, which is what you get for fighting a god. The usual guess is that the whisper was a promise to rise again.
Here Novikov slows down, because he doesn't trust the sources. We know the mythology badly, he says. It was written down in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries, it is full of contradictions, and it doesn't give a complete picture. Scholars of Scandinavian studies at the University of Münster said much the same in 2025: apart from short runic inscriptions, no texts survive from the pagan period, so our Norse myths rest on reports by Christian scholars written well over a century later. We can't tell how much of the Christian shape of Baldr was already there and how much was added by the people holding the pen.
The objects look the same way. Thor's hammer, Novikov notes, is almost a little cross. In Russia, archaeologists dig a chamber grave with a warrior, his horse, spear and sword, everything for the afterlife, and on his chest lies a cross. Or they dig a mound that looks like a grave but is nearly empty, holding one small knife, with a candle standing in a niche as a sign of the cross. The priests who ran this had been pagans themselves not long before. They knew which strings to pull.
The old life didn't stop on a given day. Adam of Bremen writes of a giant pagan festival held every year or two, where horses and men were hanged and blood flowed. A Christian whose faith forbade it could pay a sum and stay home. "Don't want to, don't have to." Later the laws begin banning horse meat, a record that comes from around the 12th century, Novikov thinks. Eating horse was a pagan rite, and nobody forbids what nobody does. A study in Science Advances in 2024 found horses being shipped across the Baltic from Scandinavia to the eastern shore in the Late Viking Age. Its author, Katherine French, reads this as contact between pagans and their newly Christian neighbours keeping horse sacrifice going into the medieval period.
Nothing was erased, so there was nothing for people to defend. Novikov calls it a long, careful, very delicate transition, and then goes to the carvings.
Wooden carving and manuscripts from the 13th century on are full of Scandinavian ornament, and inside that ornament are the old gods. Sigurd, who tears open a dragon, is one of them. You can walk into a church covered in Scandinavian-style carving and find Sigurd on the wall, still killing the dragon. The dragon is a serpent, and the serpent is the devil. The hero who once belonged to Odin's world now works for the other side, and from the outside he looks the same as ever.
