Worship and the Thin Record

What Anglo-Saxon pagans actually did in worship must be pieced together from archaeology, place-names, and scattered later notices. There is little sign of monumental temples; worship seems often to have taken place at open-air sites, sacred groves, springs, and hilltops, and the sources speak of sacrifice (Old English blot) of animals, especially at seasonal feasts. Place-names preserve the memory of cult: sites such as Wodnesbeorg (Woden's barrow), Thunderfield and Thundersley (Thunor), or the several Harrow and Weoh names (from words for a heathen shrine) map where gods were once honoured.

Material evidence, richly furnished cremation and inhumation burials, amulets, and objects such as the carved whalebone Franks Casket with its mix of pagan and Christian scenes, fills in something of the imaginative world. Yet the record is genuinely thin: no myths were written down in England, and reconstructions rest on inference from a handful of survivals rather than on any connected account.