Dear Ingegerd
Your postings and a recent reading of Meg Cormack's 'Saints in Iceland' have
spurred me to think anew about the 'religion' thread in the Viking tutorials I
shall soon be conducting. When you write
> there wasn't a specific building for pagan rituals, as these would normally
> have been carried out in the chieftain's hall. So, there is not necessarily
> a cult building continuity as such, but there is certainly often a farm or
> family continuity, in that central 1st millennium A.D. farms, which can be
> assumed to have acted as ritual centres for a community or region, also were
> the ones to acquire medieval churches.
> As for the remoteness of today's surviving stave churches, I cannot actually
> agree (and my English husband and I have visited all but one of them on our
> travels in Norway). They may seem remote today, but nearly all of them are
> on important farms, which through their names, written sources etc. can be
> pinpointed as probable ritual centres in pre-Christian times.
what are the diagnostic features of such 'important farms' which act as
'centres for communities or regions' (e.g. place-names)? It would be interesting
to see whether it is possible to look for comparable places in Britain.
Best wishes
Graham
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Dr Graham Jones
Leverhulme Special Research Fellow
University of Leicester
Department of English Local History
Marc Fitch House
5 Salisbury Road
Leicester LE1 7QR
United Kingdom
+44 (0)116-252-2765 (direct)
+44 (0)116-252-2762 (department)
+44 (0)116-252-5769
e-Mail: [log in to unmask]
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