Christianization - The End of Paganism

How did the Germanic tribes and Vikings abandon their ancestral gods and become part of Christian Europe?

The answer is far more complex than conquest, missionary preaching, or the baptism of a few famous kings.

The Christianization of the Germanic World presents a sweeping history of the transition from Germanic and Norse paganism to Christianity between the third and twelfth centuries. Moving from the borders of the Roman Empire to Anglo-Saxon England, Carolingian Saxony, the North Sea world, and Viking Age Scandinavia, Einar Thoresen shows that conversion was not a single event. It was a centuries-long transformation of religion, government, law, trade, literacy, and everyday life.

Christianity succeeded not only because people accepted a new faith, but because it created a new public order. Baptism opened diplomatic and commercial networks. Clerics supplied rulers with writing, legal knowledge, and administration. Monasteries became centers of education, welfare, and economic activity. Church festivals organized markets and assemblies, while sanctuary and regulated penance offered alternatives to blood feud and private vengeance.

Inside this wide-ranging account, readers will discover:

• How Wulfila's Gothic Bible and Arian Christianity shaped the earliest Germanic conversions
• Why royal marriages, elite baptisms, and political alliances transformed the Anglo-Saxon and Frankish kingdoms
• How monasteries, roads, rivers, ports, and markets carried Christianity across Northern Europe
• Why Charlemagne's violent conversion of the Saxons was an important exception to the more common pattern of gradual adaptation
• How Scandinavian settlers entered Christian society in the Danelaw and Normandy
• How Harald Bluetooth, Sweyn Forkbeard, and Cnut the Great connected Danish kingship with Christianity
• Why Norway's conversion depended on royal power, Christian law, parish building, and the cult of Saint Olaf
• How Iceland's Althing resolved religious conflict through a legal compromise around the year 1000
• Why Christianization developed more slowly in Sweden, from Birka and Götaland to Uppsala and the Lake Mälaren region
• How crosses, Thor's hammers, runestones, coins, burial customs, and sacred places reveal generations of religious coexistence

The book also explores what happened to Germanic and Norse Mythology after pagan worship declined. The old stories were not simply destroyed. Runes carried Christian prayers, skaldic poets continued to employ pagan imagery, and Christian scribes preserved the myths that later appeared in the Poetic Edda and Prose Edda. Paganism often disappeared through adaptation, replacement, and eventual disuse rather than through a single act of suppression.

Written for readers of Viking history, medieval European history, religious history, Anglo-Saxon studies, Norse culture, and Germanic paganism, The Christianization of the Germanic World offers a comparative explanation of one of Europe's most consequential transformations.

Discover how pagan communities became Christian kingdoms - and how law, trade, memory, and political power helped build medieval Europe.