When did Germanic Tribes start believing in Norse gods and really how did it come around?

by Eggoknight

I've started watching Barbarians on Netflix and I noticed they believed in Wotan (Odin) and I saw they had a different name for Thor. When did they first start believing in Norse mythology and how did it come around?

BRIStoneman

It's not the case that various German tribes adopted Norse Paganism but rather that the two of them evolved out of a common shared "Proto-Germanic Paganism", in the same way that Scandinavian and German languages share a root proto-German tongue.

It's worth noting that we have very, very few sources on any Germanic pre-Christian religion, even the Scandinavian Paganism so beloved of pop-history. Mostly, the names of gods are known to us through inscriptions on archaeological artefacts and sites, and occasionally place-names, long before they were recorded in writing, and so a certain amount of regional variation is only to be expected.

y_sengaku

They [deities either of the Anglo-Saxons or of the Continental Saxons] were not necessarily conflated with those of the Norse mythology easily, as generally assumed. While the thread structure is a bit complicated, /u/Platypuskeeper and my comments in Why is Norse mythology so well-known compared to other contemporaneous Germanic religions? includes some basic information.

The points are as following:

  1. Extant evidences of the deities either in the Anglo-Saxons or in the Continental Saxons are so fragmentary (as I mentioned in the linked thread, only a few in sum for the latter!) that we cannot track the 'chronological development' of their religion closely. We only know the memory of name of deities were still not totally forgotten in the 8th and 9th century after the conversion to Christianity in Germany.
  2. Even pre-Christian Norse religion was very fluid without any 'canon'. Actual beliefs and practices were probably much more diverse than the extant written texts in medieval Icelandic manuscripts narrates. We cannot presuppose the uniform pan-Germanic mythology or religion throughout the Early Middle Ages.

Reference:

  • Brown, Peter. The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph & Diversity, A. D. 200-1000, Tenth Anniversary Edition. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013, Chaps. 18, 20.
  • Wood, Ian. ‘Pagan Religion and Superstition East of the Rhine’. In: After Empire: Towards an Ethnology of Europe's Barbarians, ed. Giorgio Ausenda, pp. 253-79. Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995.