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I'm joined by Anders Winroth, Professor of Medieval History, and

Birget Baldwin Professor of History at Yale

University. He is the author of a wonderful book called The Conversion of Scandinavia,

Viking Merchants and Missionaries in the Remaking of Northern Europe. And of course, our topic of

discussion today is indeed the conversion of Scandinavia, something which I myself don't know nearly enough about.

So I'm very excited to get into our discussion today.

Professor Winra, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you, Noah.

I'm very pleased to be back.

Yes, it's certainly very nice to have you back.

But my first question for you today is simply this. How did

the conversion of Scandinavia happen? How is it that a people who have embraced a pagan religion

for hundreds and hundreds of years come to abandon their faith and convert to Christianity?

Yeah, that's a very good question. and it's also a very big question.

It's the kind of question that one can't really answer in one breath, as it were.

I'd like to explain it in this way that one can look at the conversion of Scandinavia from two different points of view. On the one hand, one can look at it

from Christian Europe, Europe, most of the sort of Mediterranean and southern North Sea Europe was

already Christian by the beginning of the Viking Age in around 800. And from their perspective,

the story of the conversion of Scandinavia is a story of a kind

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