Two Centuries and a Conversion in Between

The disagreement among historians is real and it has camps. One position holds that the saga writers were working from inherited tradition, that skaldic poetry composed before the conversion preserves enough of the vocabulary of sacrifice to anchor the prose accounts, and that a core of the description reflects something that was done. The opposing position holds that the accounts are literary constructions, built by educated Christians who needed a pagan rite for a narrative and modelled it on the liturgy they knew, and that the level of orderly detail is itself the giveaway, because real ritual practice is rarely so tidy.

Archaeology has not been able to arbitrate. No excavated vessel has been identified as a hlautbolli, and no twig could survive. Blood residue analysis on vessels from a securely identified cult context would be the sort of evidence that could move the question, and the obstacle is finding such a context rather than the analysis. Meanwhile the practical consequence for a reference work is a labelling discipline: a hammer pendant is an object somebody dug up, and a hlautbolli is a description in a manuscript. Both belong in the atlas. Presenting them at the same level of confidence would be a straightforward misrepresentation of what is known about the religion of pre-Christian Scandinavia, which is a great deal less than the confident summaries suggest.