Formal belief in Ran vanished with the conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity, yet the habit of naming her when someone drowned proved remarkably durable in everyday speech and folk custom. Nineteenth century folklorists collecting material in Iceland, the Faroe Islands and coastal Norway recorded fishing communities still using phrases equivalent to gone to Ran for a lost sailor centuries after any formal cult had disappeared, alongside a cluster of related superstitions, among them the old belief, noted by several collectors, that a fisherman who saw certain omens before setting out was fated to drown, and that carrying a coin to give Ran, echoing the old idea of gold as a fitting gift for her favour, might improve the odds of a safe voyage or an easy death if the worst happened. These practices belong to what folklorists call the long afterlife of pre-Christian belief in ordinary superstition, ideas and phrases that outlive the theology that first produced them by many centuries, persisting as customary caution among people whose livelihood still depended, exactly as it had for the Viking Age Norse, on a sea that could kill them without warning.
The persistence says less about survival of actual Norse religion than about how deeply the image of a hungry, personified sea had lodged in the language of people who worked it daily; a folk saying does not require its speaker to believe in Ran as a goddess to find her name the natural word for what the sea had done. By the time these sayings were written down, they were treated by their own users as inherited figures of speech and folk caution rather than active worship, the linguistic residue of a religion that had otherwise been gone for the better part of a thousand years.