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While much work has been done on goddesses of the ancient world and the male gods of pre-Christian Scandinavia, the northern goddesses have been largely neglected. Roles of the Northern Goddess presents a highly readable study of the worship of these goddesses by men and women. With its use of evidence from early literature, popular tradition, legend and archaeology, this book investigates the role of the early hunting goddess and the local goddesses who were involved in all aspects of the household and the farm. What emerges is that the goddess was both benevolent and destructive, a powerful figure closely concerned with birth and death and with destiny of individuals.

Fragments of ancient belief mingle with folklore and Christian dogma until the original tenets are lost in the myths and psychologies of the intervening years. Hilda Ellis Davidson illustrates how pagan beliefs have been represented and misinterpreted by the Christian tradition, and throws light on the nature of pre-Christian beliefs and how they have been preserved. The Lost Beliefs of Northern Europe stresses both the possibilities and the difficulties of investigating the lost religious beliefs of Northern Europe.

Theo Brown (1914-1993) made great contributions as an amateur folklorist specializing in the West Country. Her book 'Tales of a Dartmoor Village' was published in 1961 and 'The Fate of the Dead: A Study in Folk Eschatology in the West Country After the Reformation' was published in 1979. She edited the West Country Folklore Series and was a member of the Council of the Folklore Society and of the Guild of Pastoral Psychology.

How should we approach a religion of the past when it has left no creed for us to study, no sacred books or descriptions of rituals, no life of its founder and, indeed, little trace of the religious leaders and thinking minds who contributed to its development? Sometimes it is only possible to put together a few fragments of recorded beliefs and practices, to study carved stones or to find traces of mythology in legends and folk traditions and the tentative interpretation of names of nearly forgotten deities. This is roughly the position with the beliefs of some of the peoples of northern Europe, such as the FinnoUgrians (including the Saami or Lapps and the Estonians), the Balts (including the Lithuanians and the Letts) and the Slavs. Traces of their mythology survive in folklore and folk art, and archaic features of surviving Baltic languages make the names of super-natural beings of much interest to scholars. In Finland the material collected by Lönnrot in the early nineteenth century, found in the lays making up the Kalevala, indicates a fine heritage of mythological tradition, but after so long a space of time there is little definite evidence from which to reconstruct ritual and belief (Honko 1987). In the case of the Celtic and Germanic peoples, however, the position is different, in studying their religion we are faced with many problems and there are vast gaps in our knowledge, but we have evidence from early art and archaeology in many different regions, and in addition an extensive early literature from medieval Ireland and Iceland. Although this was recorded by Christian chroniclers and story-tellers, in most cases in monasteries, it has, nevertheless, preserved a1 good deal of information about pre-Christian traditions and myths. Antiquarian enthusiasm for the past and the lively spirit of many of the old tales have ensured their continued existence in manuscripts and popular oral tradition long after Christianity was firmly established. It should therefore be possible to build up at least a partial picture of the old religion of north-western Europe, provided we realize the possibilities and limitations of the sources available.

No religious system can exist in a vacuum. It grows and develops subject to outside influences, which are apparent in the religious art of the period and in the surviving myths and legends. Beliefs and practices change according to the changing needs of those familiar with them, while they are subject also to certain general laws. Those interested in the history of religions are constantly trying to determine the patterns of myth which survive from the various religions of the past. However, fashions of interpretation change according to the current mode of thought, and the emphasis varies in each generation. In the early centuries of Christianity, when the cults of the pagan gods still flourished in certain areas and had not been forgotten, the usual reaction was to regard such gods as devils, part of the forces of evil battling against the kingdom of Christ. This was, however, by no means the only attitude open to the medieval scholar with an interest in antiquity.

It would be a mistake to neglect the goddesses in this survey, since there is good reason to believe that their cults were important in everyday life, and were by no means confined to women and children. They were of considerable importance also among the Celtic peoples-even though we have little evidence as to how they were worshipped-for traces of powerful female divinities may be found in many Irish tales. One reason for our limited knowledge is no doubt because most of our records were written by men, and usually by monks, who would be unlikely to know much of the lore and practices of mothers, wives and unmarried girls who turned to the female deities to help them to achieve a good marriage or to give them healthy children; nor were they likely to give such matters their approval. Christian writers tended to condemn fertility rites, such as were usually associated with the female deities. Moreover, confusion is caused by the practice of giving many different names to one goddess, so that it is often assumed that these are separate divinities. It seems also that the goddesses were often worshipped in small local cults rather than in established public rituals like those of Thor or Odin. Sometimes they were represented as a group, receiving worship in Scandinavia as the Dísir, while the norns, valkyries and various female spirits of the Vanir are often introduced as groups of beings in the tales. In Ireland there is often a trio of goddesses under one name, as in the case of the Irish Brigid. Again, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between goddesses and giantesses; a goddess might be conceived as huge or even monstrous in stature, while a giantess from the underworld might become the bride of a god.

To deal adequately with the archaeological finds that have some bearing on the pre-Christian religion would require a book in itself, and perhaps several volumes. Here only a small number of examples has been selected, of widely differing types, to give some idea of the way in which archaeological discoveries may contribute to our knowledge of the religious past, especially when they can be linked with evidence from literary sources. They show also how difficult it is to draw reliable conclusions about beliefs from material remains or early works of religious art alone, with no additional help from written records. The material has been taken from the early Celtic period and from Anglo-SaxonEngland at the close of the pre-Christian period, as well as from Scandinavia; the scattered examples illustrate the types of problem that may be presented by archaeological evidence.

Evidence that needs to be kept separate from the recorded myths concerning the gods is that which has to do with the religious practices of the pre-Christian northern world, concerning the worship of the gods and cult rituals in which the rulers, individual worshippers or the people in general took part. Various written sources tell us something of such religious practices in the Viking Age, with occasional glimpses further back in time, and such evidence must be joined with that obtained from archaeology, artefacts and iconography to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of the past. Since much of the literary evidence was recorded in Christian monasteries, we face the usual difficulties of possible misunderstandings and prejudice; we have to remember also that those genuinely interested in the religion of the old gods could have been influenced by what they had read of heathen deities in the Old Testament or in writers like Virgil. For instance, there is little archaeological evidence for elaborate temples in preChristian Scandinavia, and some literary descriptions may have, therefore, to be discounted as unlikely to be based on genuine tradition. What are we to make of Adam of Bremen’s description of the temple at Uppsala, written in the eleventh century? (O.Olsen 1966:116 ff.). His account of the figures of the gods there is of great interest, but a note added to the text (scholium 139) tells us:A golden chain goes round the temple. It hangs over the gable of the building and sends its glitter far off to those who approach it, because the shrine stands on level ground with mountains all about it like an amphitheatre.

We rely mainly on carved stones to put alongside the written sources, together with metal work of the pre-Christian period. Some prove to be in surprisingly close agreement with the later literary accounts, although the carving may be older by some centuries than the written sources. The picture of the bound Loki on the Gosforth Cross, for example (p. 50), or representations of Thor fishing for the World Serpent (p. 52), indicate that some motifs have altered little over a considerable period of time. However, more perplexing pictures like the plates on the Gundestrup Cauldron (p. 25) or tiny scenes on the gold bracteates (p. 41) show us how little of the symbolic language of the past we really understand, and remind us that the chances of survival may lead us to overvalue the trivial and neglect the symbols of greater importance for those who worshipped the old gods and goddesses. It is worthreviewing the scattered material at this point, to see if there is any hope of building up a coherent scheme of the relations of men and women with the supernatural world in a pre-Christian society. Here it is necessary to distinguish between evidence for religious rites and customs on the one hand, and the content of the myths on the other. In this chapter it is intended to survey what appear to be the outstanding characteristics of the religious life of the Scandinavians before the conversion, putting this against the vaguer background of our picture of the Celtic and Germanic past.