The pagan Norse had no word for religion; they called it old custom
Before Christianity reached Scandinavia, its people practised their faith without scripture, creeds or even a term for religion. Only after conversion did they label it forn sið, old custom. What mattered was doing: sacrifices led by chiefs and kings, rites at groves and lakes, and gifts buried with the dead.
Old Norse religion took shape in the Proto-Norse period, as the North Germanic peoples split from their neighbours, and Christianity had displaced it by the 12th century. Of all the Germanic religions it is the best documented, yet the archaeologist Anders Andrén calls the label merely conventional. Colleagues describe it as a patchwork that varied by region, era and social class, and Karen Bek-Pedersen suggests treating it as several belief systems rather than one.
Because it lived in oral tradition, it was woven into farming, fighting and everyday social life. Kings and chieftains led public sacrifices. Worship first happened outdoors, in groves or by lakes; from the third century CE some purpose-built cult houses appear, though never in large numbers. Specialists practised seiðr, a sorcery some scholars call shamanistic, and the dead were either buried or cremated, usually with grave goods. The word heiðinn, heathen, first shows up in the poem Hákonarmál, a sign that Christianity had made people aware of their older faith as something separate.
Evidence is patchy, and Hilda Ellis Davidson warned against building grand theories on isolated scraps. Almost all written accounts were produced by Christians after conversion, mostly in Iceland. Outsiders add fragments: Tacitus around 100 CE, Adam of Bremen describing a temple at Uppsala in the 1060s and 1070s, and Ibn Fadlan, a 10th-century Arab traveller who described a ship burial among Volga traders. Snorri even recast the Æsir as Trojans, tracing their name to Asia.
Archaeology and place names fill gaps the texts leave. Names ending in -vé, -hörgr or -hof mark sacred sites, and Magnus Olsen used Norwegian examples to argue that worship moved from fields and groves toward temple buildings. In some districts gods like Ullr and Hǫrn appear in place names more often than Odin, and Thor was a popular element in personal names, especially in Iceland. The Norse also exchanged ideas, marriages and trade with Sámi, Finnish, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Slavic neighbours.
Source: Old Norse religion
