The Blot

A stone hut typical of the kind found on the Viking farm over a thousand years ago. The sod roof provided excellent insulation during the long, harsh Norwegian winter.

The central religious rite for the Vikings was the sacrificial offering, in which both beasts and humans would be slaughtered.  Solemn feasts were held every nine years; at the heart of these ceremonies were multiple blood sacrifices, which the Vikings called blot.  Adam of Bremen describes this ceremony in great detail: 

Nine heads are offered from every kind of living creature of the male sex, and the custom is to appease the gods with their blood.  But the decapitated bodies are hung in a grove near the “temple.”  The grove was so sacred for the pagans that they held each of the trees as divine because of the victims’ death. 

Dogs were hung with horses and men, and a Christian told me that he had seen as many as seventy - two corpses hanging in rows. The victim was killed with sword or axe. Blood was collected in a sacred vessel.  This was either sprinkled or re-examined by augurs.  Death by hanging was also not uncommon.  These ritual deaths were then followed by feasts, which began with solemn libations offered to the gods.

In one instance, a mock sacrifice backfired.  A Viking leader, King Vikar, was to stand on a tree stump with a calf’s intestines looped around his neck and fastened to the tree above.  Starkad, hero and follower of Odin, was to thrust a long rod at the king, uttering.  “Now I give thee to Odin!”  However, notes Gautrek’s Saga, the ritual became real:

He let the fir bough go.  The rod became a spear, and pierced the king through.  The stump fell from under his feet, and the calf’s intestines became a strong rope, while the branches shot up, and lifted the king among the boughs, and there he died.

                                                                                                                         - S.H.