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I'm Hello and welcome to the history of Vikings.

Today I'm joined by Dr. Luke John Murphy, who is a postdoctoral

researcher at the University of Lester. He wrote his dissertation in the history of religion

on how the different forms of Nordic pagan practice may have related to each other at Arhus University

in Denmark and has since worked as a lecture at the University of Iceland

and a researcher at Stockholm University in Sweden. Very interestingly, he's presently working

on a book about animal sacrifice. Dr. Murphy, thank you so much for joining me today.

An absolute pleasure, Noah. Thank you very much for the invitation.

It's my pleasure. So you've done some fascinating research on the study of Nordic paganism.

So this is kind of a broad question, but I'll just start it off by asking you, you know, what is Nordic paganism?

I guess the term we use on this show is Norse mythology. I like to break it down for people,

but is there sort of a difference between Nordic paganism or Nordic mythology, Nordic religion?

How does one define Nordic paganism? Oh, you're absolutely right. That's a very broad question

to which there's no kind of single correct answer. It already depends on what you want those terms to mean and how you use them.

But the way I use them and the way a lot of scholars understand them

is that a mythology is only one part of a religion.

The mythology is kind of the stories that a religion has to explain the way the world is,

how the world got to be the way it is right now. So

Christian mythology would be the Bible. And then more specifically, a Catholic mythology would

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