How The Vikings Turned Christian?

Gone Medieval

History Hit

History

4.6 • 2.2K Ratings

🗓️ 7 November 2023

⏱️ 35 minutes

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Summary

Denmark's King Harald Bluetooth was among the first Scandinavian rulers to officially embrace Christianity in the early 10th century. Norway followed later that century while Sweden's conversion occurred gradually in the following century.

But contrary to the common narrative of Europe's military and religious conquest and colonisation of the region, what if rather than acting as passive recipients, Scandinavians converted to Christianity because it was in individual chieftains' political, economic, and cultural interests to do so?

In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Eleanor Janega finds out more from Dr. Anders Winroth, author of The Conversion of Scandinavia: Vikings, Merchants and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe.

This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and
0:05.0	welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit.
0:06.0	I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanega and today's episode
0:09.0	I will be speaking with Professor Anders Vinroth,
0:12.0	a historian specializing in religious, intellectual, and
0:14.9	legal medieval history in general and of the Viking Age in particular.
0:19.3	Today we're going to be talking about the absolutely huge topic of the process of Christianization of Scandinavia,
0:24.6	the politics of changing religion, and what it means to Christianize.
0:29.5	Anders, thank you so much for being here.
0:32.3	Thank you very much for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. As I say, this is a
0:36.6	ridiculously large topic. But I think it would help if we're saying that there's this
0:40.2	process of Christianization. We probably also need to establish what
0:44.0	the people of Scandinavia were Christianized from first. So what does religious
0:51.6	belief look like prior to conversion to Christianity?
0:55.8	That's a very difficult question of course.
0:58.4	But in a way I think it's wrong to talk about belief.
1:01.8	Belief is something that comes with Christianity.
1:04.6	Pre-Christian is about what you do.
1:06.5	It's about practice.
1:08.2	And what you do is that you get together
1:11.0	and you celebrate your religion by doing sacrifices of various kinds and then having big parties in celebration of that.
1:20.0	I think one way that is quite interesting to look at religion sometimes is the concept of
	...

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