Ullr is a god of archery, skiing, single combat and the hunt, who dwells in Ydalir, the yew-dales, yew being the wood of the finest bows, and glides over the winter country on ski or snowshoe. He is oddly prominent and oddly obscure at once: the surviving myths tell almost nothing about him, yet he is invoked in the poem Grimnismal, sworn by in oaths, and, most tellingly, his name is embedded in a great many old place-names in Norway and Sweden (Ullr-shrine, Ullr-field and the like). This density of toponyms points to a god who was once widely and actively worshipped, probably far more important in the pre-Viking period than the literary sources, fixed in the thirteenth century by Christian writers, let him appear.
Ullr is thus a clear case of a deity whose cult can be traced better in the landscape than in the myths. The clearest single piece of evidence for an early cult of Ullr is not literary but epigraphic: the Thorsberg chape, a bronze scabbard-mount recovered from a votive bog deposit at Thorsberg in Schleswig-Holstein and dated to around 200 CE, carries an Elder Futhark runic inscription read by most scholars as owlþuþewaz, "servant of Ullr," among the very oldest runic inscriptions known and, if the reading holds, the earliest surviving reference to any Norse god by name, centuries before the Eddic poems that otherwise carry his memory were written down.