Old Norse Rite Blótweitzla

Abstract

A serious problem in the study of the cultural characteristics of archaic Scandinavia is the verification of the sources. The main questions that arise: to which extent pagan ritual practices continued to exist after the beginning of mass Christianization, and what Christian ideas were extrapolated by later sources to the pre-Christian era. One of the major rituals mentioned in the sources – the feast of sacrificial blood, which was a crucial element of the structures of everyday life in pagan society, seems to be very important. A sufficiently detailed description of the ritual in the sources allows us to draw a number of conclusions about its role in the life of the ancient Scandinavians. The correspondence between the songs of the “Elder Edda” and the ancestral and royal sagas in the designation of objects of worship and their functions, as well as the preservation, even after the baptism of Iceland, of the traditional formula of the legal oath, which was originally given on the sacred ring of the godi, and after 1000 – on The Bibles, and the ancient formula of the agrarian cult (“for a harvest year and peace”) in a similar ritual of drinking beer in Norway at Christmas, according to Gulathing, with a high degree of probability confirms the historicity of ancient Icelandic information about a pre-Christian temple and a feast of sacrificial blood – blotweizl. In a broader context, it provides additional confirmation of the historicism of Icelandic sources and their extraordinary value for the process of reconstruction of the way of life in archaic Scandinavia.