Heathen hof

[2] In Scandinavia during the Viking Age, it appears to have displaced older terms for a sacred place, vé, hörgr, lundr, vangr, and vin, particularly in the West Norse linguistic area, namely Norway and Iceland.

Tacitus famously wrote in Germania:The Germans do not think it in keeping with the divine majesty to confine gods within walls or to portray them in the likeness of any human countenance.

[12] Most older scholars considered that a hof would be a dedicated temple: an independent sacred place, built specifically for ritual proceedings, comparable to a Christian church.

[citation needed] In the first chapter, in in heiðnu lǫg, of book four of Landnámabók (Hauksbók) it is stated that Iceland was divided into four courtdistricts all containing three hofs each.

[17]Jan de Vries considered the 100 by 60 foot dimensions and the eternal flame exaggerated; the human sacrifices in a pool by the door, not so much.

In this temple, entirely decked out in gold, the people worship the statues of three gods in such wise that the mightiest of them, Thor, occupies a throne in the middle of the chamber; Wotan and Frikko [presumably Freyr] have places on either side.

The significance of these gods is as follows: Thor, they say, presides over the air, which governs the thunder and lightning, the winds and rains, fair weather and crops.

[21] Another scholion describes natural features near the hof:Near this temple stands a very large tree with wide-spreading branches, always green winter and summer.

[23] Adam's presumed source, Sweyn Estridsen, was in service as a young man (from 1026 to 1038) with King Anund Jakob of Sweden, and therefore had the opportunity to personally see the hof at Uppsala.

In his Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), Bede describes the conversion of King Edwin of Northumbria.

His high-priest, Coifi, convinced that Christianity is a better way, volunteers to personally lead the destruction of the temple and its idols, which Bede says was located at Goodmanham, just east of York:So he .

In addition, large numbers of offered items were found in the area, among others a huge gold ring, amulets with mythological motifs, and animal bones.

[26] Other finds in the area, for example weapons and jewelry, show that the site was associated with the highest strata of society, possibly with the royal family.

The entire complex, which also included workshops and a marketplace, may have functioned as a temporary residence for the king when he made periodic visits to that part of the kingdom.

Since 1991, the Icelandic Archeological Institute (Fornleifastofnun Íslands - FSI) has re-investigated it; since 2002, in an international investigation under the Landscape of Settlements program.

[32][33] However, in addition to clarifying the relationship between the annexes and the main hall, the re-excavation revealed even more bone fragments, and analysis shows that at least 23 cattle had been sacrificial offerings.

The horns had not been removed and in age the animals ranged from just full-grown to middle-aged, both of these being unique in Icelandic farming at the time; also the majority appear to have been bulls, which is very surprising in a dairy economy.

[37] Olsen also regarded as highly significant that only 9 meters from the south door of the building was an oval pit containing ash, charcoal, fragments of animal bone, and sooty stones.

The walls on the long sides were made of slightly convex, rough-cut oak posts or "staves," which were sunk into a trench in the earth more than one meter deep.

[45] At Lunda farm in Södermanland,[46] excavation revealed a small building parallel to the north side of a longhouse, with three phallic figurines inside, one solid gold, the other two cast in bronze and gilded.

In the layer immediately underlying the church, dated to approximately 900 C.E.,[51] he found post-holes that he interpreted as the remains of the great hof described by Adam of Bremen.

However, as Olsen demonstrated, the remains are too sparse to support this interpretation, which is in any case based on Carl Schuchhardt's reconstruction of the Wendish temple at Arkona, a later and non-Germanic site.

[54][55] At Hov in Vingrom near Lake Mjøsa in southern Norway, excavations of a 15-meter longhouse have revealed gullgubber and "strike-a-lights," suggesting cultic use.

[56] The as yet unpublished site is identified as a 6th-7th century building that was part of a farm and apparently was never used as a residence, and so far has yielded 29 gullgubber, a half-dozen strike-a-lights, a scramasax dated to approximately 550 C.E., pearls, knives, and a ring-nail.

The building was remarkable in that it in its centre, a quadratic-shaped structure had four holes for round pillars which is interpreted as holding up a central spire, similar to Uppåkra.

[59] Another building, round and smaller in size, marked again by holes for its posts was also found during these excavations about 100 m northeast of the first, slightly more distant from current shore.

This was a royal residence of the Anglo-Saxon kings of Northumbria, but Hope-Taylor emphasized that as implied by its Celtic name, its history began far back in the post-Romano-British past; the "Great Enclosure" on the eastern edge of the site, in his opinion, had most likely been created in the 4th or 5th century C.E., possibly earlier, and only one of the burials on the site could reasonably be claimed to be Anglo-Saxon rather than indigenous Celtic, and that mainly on grounds of the individual's unusual height.

[68] In addition, outside the northwest corner of the building there was a pit 4 feet in depth in which a post had been placed; nothing was found here except unusually clayey soil compared to the rest of the site, and crushed animal teeth, probably from sheep or goats; numerous thin, pointed stakes had been driven into the ground around this feature.

Finally, of the graves in the western cemetery area of the site, the northernmost 16 were grouped around the temple building; but no burials lay to the east of the enclosure, suggesting that was where the gate was.

[71] The unusual medieval stave churches of Norway and Sweden were constructed using a later version of the upright stave technique seen at Yeavering and Uppåkra, often have runic graffiti and very old-fashioned decorative carving, and the oldest, at Urnes, has preserved in one wall two ancient door panels featuring the motif of the gripping beast that were evidently felt to be too pagan to continue to be prominently displayed.