Welcome to the Nordic mythology podcast, I'm Daniel Farund, owner of the Cumna Alberts.

Today I'm joined by Laauerina Albrez and we're going to talk about

sacral place names which I think is something we've not covered yet. So do you want to give a quick

little introduction to who you are, what you've studied and a little bit on what we're going to talk about?

Yes, hello, I am Larina Elphriss as you said and I'm an archaeologist and I have specialized in working with onomastics that is name studies in combination with archaeology and at the moment I'm based at the National Museum in Copenhagen in Denmark and I'm working with a project about the island of

Bon Harum but I've worked with other places in Denmark as well.

And today we're going to talk about what we call sacral place names.

And a sacral place name is what we call a place name that is in some way related to religion.

And of course today we will talk mostly about place names that are related to pre-Christian religion, but a

sacred place name could also be related to Christian religion or any other type of religion.

But we have quite a lot in Scandinavia of place names that reflect pre-Christian

religion in some way. And of course these are a very great source to our knowledge about the religion and how it was actually tied to the landscape and to real life people because the place names are a type of

source material that is detached from the written sources, they're out there just being tied to the landscape and a product of people talking about their landscape and naming places in the landscape.

So in that way, it's a different insight into the religion than we get from,

for example, old North texts. But it's also a very difficult source material,

and that's why maybe only few people work with it and few people are maybe aware that that it exists as a source material.

So my first thought goes straight away to how do we know or how we able to tell how old a place is as in how all the name is for a place because obviously I guess it's more

we can tell more or get more information if it was named

and Thor's Village in the Viking Age rather than maybe it was named that in the 1500s.

Yeah.

Yeah. Is it is it in which tell you? You struck right at the heart of the problem here.

Okay. Yes. And the sacral place names, so the place names that are related to religion is a part of general place name studies.

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