The Early Medieval Era · c. 826-1104 · Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Iceland
Scandinavian Conversion Christianity
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About This Movement
Christianity came north in fits and starts over nearly three centuries. A Frankish monk named Anskar preached in Denmark and at Birka in Sweden in the 820s and 830s, with modest and short-lived results. Then came the kings — Harald Bluetooth, who set up a great carved stone at Jelling claiming that he had 'made the Danes Christian', and the two Olafs in Norway, whose methods included force and one of whom was killed in battle and venerated as a saint almost at once. Iceland took a different road: in the year 1000 the question was put to the Althing, the island's assembly, and the pagan law-speaker Þorgeir, after a night's deliberation, ruled that all Icelanders should be baptised, with some old practices tolerated privately for a time — a whole community changing religion by public decision rather than by conquest. The window closes in 1104, when the northern church received its own archbishopric at Lund and stopped being mission territory administered from Germany. The sagas that tell these stories most vividly were written down two centuries later.
Sources
- Rimbert, Vita Anskarii / Anskar: The Apostle of the North (trans. C. H. Robinson, 1921) (primary) — Near-contemporary missionary life (Anskar d. 865, by his successor) — the 826+ Danish/Swedish missions from inside; translation free online (archive.org, Fordham sourcebook).
- Adam of Bremen, History of the Archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen (trans. F. J. Tschan, Columbia, 1959; repr. 2002 with intro by T. Reuter) (primary) — A contemporaneous narrative (written c. 1070s, at the era's end), including the famous Book IV description of pagan Uppsala — a Hamburg-Bremen institutional viewpoint, so read with that bias in mind.
- Rune stones (Jelling stones; wider corpus) (primary) — Contemporary material evidence — e.g. Harald Bluetooth's Jelling claim to have 'made the Danes Christian' (c. 965). Corpus accessible via Rundata / Samnordisk runtextdatabas.
- Islendingabok and Kristni saga (trans. Sian Gronlie, Viking Society for Northern Research Text Series 18, 2006) (primary) — Ari's Book of the Icelanders (c. 1122-33) with the Althing conversion-by-vote account of 1000. One-century retrospect - much closer than the 13th-century sagas, but still needs careful, critical reading; free PDF from the Viking Society (vsnrweb-publications.org.uk).
- Anders Winroth, The Conversion of Scandinavia (Yale, 2012) (secondary) — Standard modern account; deliberately source-critical about mission narratives and saga retrospectives.
- Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 3, ch. 5: 'Germanic Christianities, 600-1100' (Lesley Abrams); cf. ch. 11: 'The northern frontier' (Ian N. Wood) (reference) — Both chapters are from the vol. 3 TOC; Abrams is the scholar of Scandinavian conversion - a direct fit.