Saxons

Continental Saxon religion is known almost entirely from the documents of its suppression. The Frankish annals record that Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul in 772, a great wooden pillar the Saxons are said to have venerated, and the surviving lists of prohibited practices, drawn up for the use of missionaries, name what was to be stopped: offerings at springs, at trees and at stones, the burning of the dead, divination by lots, and the eating of sacrificial food.

The abjuration formula preserved for Saxon converts requires the renunciation of Thunaer, Woden and Saxnot by name, which is the clearest evidence for the pantheon and is also the only context in which the last of those names appears at all. David Wilson's study of the paganism of the related Anglo-Saxon settlers works from the same kind of material and shows how little can be built on it without importing Norse evidence, which belongs to a different branch and a later date.

The atlas therefore records the Saxon gods as attested by name, records the practices as attested by prohibition, and marks the rest as unrecoverable rather than filling the gap from Scandinavia. What a Saxon believed about any of it is not in the record, because nobody who held the religion wrote anything down.

The Saxons appear in Roman sources as raiders on the North Sea coast, and by the fifth century a part of them had crossed to Britain with Angles and Jutes, giving their name to Wessex, Essex, Sussex and Middlesex and contributing to what became the English. Those who remained held the country between the Elbe and the Rhine without kings, governed through an assembly of nobles, free men and dependants that met annually.

Charlemagne fought them for over thirty years, from 772 to 804, and the war was explicitly religious on the Frankish side. The capitulary issued for the conquered territory prescribed death for refusing baptism, for cremating the dead in the old manner and for eating meat in Lent, and the deportations and the mass execution reported at Verden in 782 belong to the same campaign. Widukind, the leader of the resistance, accepted baptism in 785.

The result was a Christian Saxony which within a century was producing its own religious literature. The Heliand, an Old Saxon poem of the ninth century, retells the gospel in the form and vocabulary of Germanic heroic verse, with Christ as a liege lord and the disciples as his retainers. In 919 a Saxon duke became king of the East Franks, and the dynasty that followed made Saxony the centre of the empire that had conquered it.