Any records of Norse priests practicing both Christianity and Germanic Paganism?

by Olafio1066

I know that this is a reaaaal stretch but here me out before just calling me dumb. Norse by the late 800 and 900s had been in contact with Christianity for awhile but many just added Jesus to the List of Gods right? So was there ever ordained priests of the Church also sometimes doing sacrifices to Thor or Odin. You gotta admit it's a cool thing to think about.

Steelcan909

In short there are no such records, if only because we have no records about Norse priests as a whole, indeed we cannot actually say with any certainly that the Norse pagan traditions had a dedicated priesthood at all. The dedicated professional clergy of the Medieval Church was not an institution that existed without significant state support and cultural buy in, developments that only arrived with Church administration and conversion.

This is a complicated question for a number of reasons, and I will get into some of them, but I think it is worth taking some time at the beginning to go over a few important aspects to touch on.

There is a certain assumption in popular culture that pagan religions lacked agency. By this I mean the idea that pagan traditions, pantheons, beliefs, practices, etc... were more or less unchanging before the arrival of Christianity, and only through direct contact with sustained Christian activity, be it through force of arms, missionaries, or other forces, were the pagan population brought into Christendom. Nor was this transition, from pagan to Christian, instantaneous or even firmly binary. There were many people who were influenced by both pagan traditions and Christianity, but that does not mean that were not capable of self identifying as either pagan or Christian, nor does it preclude them from shifting allegiance over time! But, that doesn't mean that such examples of syncretism were widespread or long lived either.

However before progressing it is worth defining our terms. What does it mean to be pagan? What does it mean to be Christian?

Paganism is hard to firmly describe, as many of the simplest explanations are not satisfactory, nor is the word divorce from cultural significance/stereotyping/context. Why for example do we refer to Norse heathens as pagans but not other religious groups such as Muslims or Hindus for example? While these questions are interesting, they are not pertinent to the immediate query so we will side step them. For our purposes here, paganism will refer to the indigenous religious traditions of Europe and the broader Mediterranean world that gave way to monotheistic/Abrahamic faiths. Pagan faiths could be polytheistic, monotheistic, urban, rural, orally transmitted, codified, esoteric, practical, and pretty much anything else. We tend to gravitate towards the charismatic pagan faiths, those that have survived in epic stories, surviving structures, and so on. Traditions such as Egyptian paganism ("Kemeticism"), the Germanic pantheon ("Heathenry"), Slavic, Baltic, Gallic, Celtic, Iberian, Canaanite, Phoenician, and so many others are what we think of, and we think of them in largely similar ways (mostly out of a tradition stemming from Graeco-Roman paganism) with set gods/goddesses, often with various domains for the deities, that were worshiped or invoked in exchange for sacrifices or other offerings.

Christianity by contrast seems simple, "Do you believe that Jesus Christ was sent by God and died for humanity's sins?", that is sufficiently broad to encapsulate most Christian traditions, with anything much beyond that being the realm of innumerable divisions within Christendom as a whole. But even within this broad definition there are issues, and any number of Christian traditions have believed different things, accepted different local variations, and so on. What it meant to be Christian in 6th century Egypt was quite different from 12th century England. The differences between "folk" Christianity and the institutional Church could likewise quickly add up. For our purposes though, Christianity is allegiance to an institutional Church, usually centered in large Mediterranean Urban areas. This allegiance could be more theoretical than actual as we will see, but there is a claim of continuity through Apostolic Succession (at least in the case of Orthodoxy and Catholicism) that stretches right back to the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

These two systems have often been set up in stark contrast with each other, and its hardly surprising. Christianity is a pretty exclusive religion, with no room for other Gods (mostly), and Christian approaches to pagans ranged from genocidal to mildly exclusionary to political allegiance. Paganism after all was largely extirpated from most places that adopted Christianity and long term co-existence between pagan and Christian communities was...rare. The adoption of Christianity was usually followed within a century or so with its total religious domination of the area.

Now, tracing the influence of Roman society and culture over the rest of Europe through the Middle Ages is a tall order, and there is no easy way to summarize it. Suffice it to say that Roman society utterly transformed western Europe. Rome influenced everything from architecture, coinage,to writing systems, to jewelry, to religion, and just about everything else you can think of. We can trace this in innumerable ways, whether its the Christian influence on Norse saga stories such as the death and resurrection of Baldr, the adoption of silver "Mjolnir" amulets among the Norse before conversion to Christianity, or other less obvious influences such as the appropriation of antiquated pagan burial practices to try and create a conspicuously non-Christian identity in Denmark.

However, a true measure of the influence that Christianity exerted on medieval paganism is sadly impossible, because we don't have the sources to fully examine the changes within pagan areas over time. We have NO written sources on paganism from indigenous practitioners. Whether they are Irish druids, Norse heathens, or Slavic pagans. ALL of our sources come from post conversion sources, usually Chrisitan officials such as monks and priests. We cannot reconstruct the pagan religions before influence from Christianity because often the only non-archaeological information we have comes after Christiantization. So while we can guess that Christian influence was likely profound, we cannot reconstruct what it looked like, of only because we can barely reconstruct what these traditions looked like at all.

Anders Winroth says in his The Conversion of Scandinavia that the religious situation was complex and nuanced. His central argument is that Scandinavian rulers converted, or refused to, out of concern for their own self interest, namely in regards to ruling ideology and practical concerns. Christianity brought many benefits to the rulers who converted, chiefly among these benefits were the prestige of the religion and the unifying force it could exert. Winroth doesn't believe that the actual beliefs of the new religion were important to the rulers who converted, and instead it was the prestige associated with the religion of the Empire(s) and the rituals associated with the new religion, namely baptism, that were the really important aspects of Christianity to Scandinavian rulers. These rulers were likewise incentivized to ensure that the conversion was genuine and thus to stamp out the worship of the pagan deities as it provided a practical obstacle to their power.

The reasons to convert were practical and ideological, not oriented around the religious beliefs of the Norse rulers. In particular Winroth points to the community created by rites such as baptism and the Eucharist as reasons to convert.

Scandinavia at this point was primed to need a unifying ideology. Harald Bluetooth, before his conversion to Christianity, had toyed with establishing a deliberately archaic form of conspicuous paganism in contrast to Christianity, but later abandoned his project and embraced Christianity. Winroth points to a similar development in the Kievan Rus as well. These rulers needed a unifying ideology in order to solidify their political control over the lands that they ruled and Christianity fit the bill. Conversion came along with ties to the broader Christian economic world, opening up opportunities for greater economic integration with Europe and Byzantium. Winroth specifically points to the luxury good of wine, rare in Scandinavia, that would have increased the prestige of Christian rulers in the eyes of their subjects and retainers.

Rulers who refused to convert would then be at a disadvantage compared to rulers who did convert. Winroth points to the tensions between Earl Hakon and King Olaf to epitomize this tension. Olaf, who converted, won glory abroad, had a prestigious new religion and ideology, and consequently was able to maintain a more prestigious court and supply his followers with more gifts of luxury items, wheras Earl Hakon, who did not convert, was left in the dust. Once Christianity was ingrained among the ruling elite it worked its way down into the populace at large. This worked well for the Scandinavian kings who were able to exercise control over the functions of the Church and reaped the benefits of a close relationship to the Church such as more able administrative structures, literacy, prestige, unifying ideology, and so on.