The adoption of Christianity by the peoples of Scandinavia is a fascinating topic. If there was any place where a message of love and denial of self would seem to have little hope of success, it was among the peoples who had spawned the Vikings. Their conversion was a topic of interest to their contemporaries, and it continues to intrigue. Many fine works of scholarship have been produced on the subject, and Anders Winroth's The Conversion of Scandinavia can be added to them. The title of the book is too narrow for its broad context. In the development of his theme on religious conversion, the author writes a brief economic history of early Scandinavia with a particular interest in the contacts from Europe to Asia Minor. Winroth works deftly through a catalog of artifacts and written texts to place the relations between the Scandinavian peoples and their neighbors in a historical context during the religious changes that took place from the ninth to eleventh centuries.Winroth's thesis is simple: the conversion of the Scandinavian peoples was due to economic and political contact rather than the labors of missionaries. He sees pragmatism rather than persuasion as the key to understanding the process, which was manipulated by the Scandinavians themselves. In the end, the reason for the success of Christianity was its usefulness to the powerful elites. Trade relations and political development are emphasized in support of this view, especially the increasing range of commercial contacts from the ninth to eleventh centuries, together with the coalescing of political forces into the embryonic Scandinavian kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. This is an old argument—that Christianity was a club, and no one was too concerned about any spiritual message—and it has been one explanation of the conversion process in Scandinavia for more than a century. Winroth's argument is developed in two parts. The first (chapters 1 to 5) gives the historical background to the conversion process with a description of Scandinavian society and the social networks that provided its cohesion. How this actually achieved the process of conversion is discussed in the second section (chapters 6 to 12).Winroth has little time for contemporary medieval historical texts from outside Scandinavia, although he places a great deal of confidence in later Scandinavian accounts, especially from Iceland. He repeatedly states his belief that hagiographical works and narratives by men such as the eleventh-century historian Adam of Bremen, even when dealing with the events of their own day, are little more than fantasy. However, he is willing to accept with little or no reservations information such as Ari Þorgilsson's Book of the Icelanders (Íslendingabók) report, claimed to be based on the oral transmission of an eyewitness account, of the conversion via legislation in Iceland that occurred over a century earlier (assuming the text was composed circa 1125). There is another side to the story. Hagiography was not intended to be read as historical record but, rather, as devotional testimony; moreover bearing false witness was (and is) forbidden to Christians. Use of a stylized formula in a narrative does not immediately make its information false. The image of the champion of Christianity trampling the insignia of the devil in order to demonstrate the futility of idols (a comparison with missionary activity on the African continent would be instructive) is a standard motif in hagiography, probably because it happened frequently and writers recorded the fact using parallels with biblical references or earlier literary episodes. The chopping up of idols as a sign of Christian opposition to false images is creditable in the northern world. Representations of deities could be in many forms, but a ubiquitous one in the Scandinavian cultural world was the figure known as trémaðr, which was a wooden statue with a human form. Taking an axe to a tréguð (wooden idol) was a both effective and convenient way of showing its powerlessness.Among medieval authors, Adam of Bremen is dealt with harshly in this book. By modern standards there is much room for criticism, but it must be said in his defense that Adam was a professional historian who had been given the task of writing a history of the archbishops of Hamburg/Bremen and not a history of Scandinavia. While not always flattering about the Scandinavian peoples, his work was not secret, and there was ample opportunity for others to correct or augment it if necessary. The numerous annotations, some of which might have been the author's, show that the process of revision began almost as soon as the narrative was completed, while the manuscript tradition started less than a generation after his death. Furthermore, he had access to the records of the archbishops of Hamburg/Bremen, and one of his informants was the Danish king Sveinn II Úlfsson, the grandson of the late tenth-/early eleventh-century Danish king Sveinn I Haraldsson (also known as Sven Fork-Beard).The connection between trade and conversion is an easy one to prove superficially, because Christians could refuse to trade with non-Christians unless elaborate provisions were made. The passage on trade from the late ninth-century treaty between the English king Alfred and the Viking leader Guthorm required sureties as well as specific procedures when moving goods between the two groups. But where there is profit to be made—in whatever century—then barriers are overcome. One method was the practice of prime-signing, when an individual made known a desire to begin instruction in Christianity; this meant that someone could actively continue as a pagan while still satisfying the religious requirement necessary for trade with other Christians. Another accommodation can be seen in the treaty between the Vikings and the English king Æthelræd in the late tenth century (the law code cum treaty known as II Æthelræd), where there are references to storage areas on neutral territory as well as the procedure for bringing a ship's company to court to answer any charges of theft or violence; but there is no mention of anyone being Christian or not. Religious orientation simply was not mentioned, although nationality was. This increased during the eleventh century as trade became more lucrative than pillage. Changes in diet, such as the increasing number of fast days for Christians, meant that a new profitable source of merchandise was fish, which would continue to be a staple of the Scandinavian economy to modern times.The context of the international aspect to religious change is important, because developments outside Scandinavia had an impact on the progress of change within it. For example, the organization of the churches in Scandinavia during the twelfth century that made them independent of the archbishop of Hamburg-Bremen can be properly understood only with reference to the Investiture Controversy and the tensions between pope and Holy Roman emperor. Similarly there could be echoes of earlier historical events, and the selection of Nicholas Breakspear (the future Pope Adrian IV) as cardinal-legate to Scandinavia on the eve of his elevation to the papacy reflected the ties between the English churches and the Scandinavian ones that were partly a result of the Danish conquest of England in the early eleventh century.One suggestion that modern scholars find (for some reason) very uncomfortable is that Scandinavians converted to Christianity because they believed it to be the truth. Swedes who were in contact with the Muslim peoples around the Black and Caspian seas did not convert to Islam, even though it was the religion of lands that offered just as much economic opportunity as the Christian ones. Moreover, acceptance of Christianity came at a price. The elites were forced to give up remunerative control of the local sacred grove or temple (hof). Though the influential clergy of the church often were their relatives, the local nobles could not help themselves to the contents of the collection plate, so to say, especially in the aftermath of the Gregorian Reform Movement. The humble were in a different, but no less financially unrewarding, position because church tithes (a flat tax of 10 percent) were onerous and collected rigorously. Even the organizational benefits for a prince were not exclusive to Christianity, and it is worth recalling that the largest western empire up to that time had been the non-Christian Roman Empire. The contention that gift exchange encouraged conversion to Christianity is true so far as it goes, but it was not a monopoly. In the aftermath of the Cluniac Reform Movement, donations used to endow churches or other religious houses brought no more return than goodwill and prayers (in theory), but ritual exchange was important long before Christianity came on the scene. As the frequently cited episode of Beowulf in Hrothgar's hall shows, the rewarding of service with an object of value was a well-established custom. On the contrary, an argument can be made that by the time Christianity became the official religion in Scandinavia gift exchange with the church was not as lucrative as it once was. In the post-Cluniac atmosphere of the eleventh century the reward for gifts to the churches became increasingly spiritual.Of course the “elephant in the room” is paganism, or to put the matter more precisely, religious practices in Scandinavia prior to the conversion to Christianity; more attention to it might have been useful. Even before the start of the “Viking Age” there were efforts by Christian princes to deal with “heathenism,” however defined. Charlemagne, in his Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae of 787, ordered enslavement for sorcerers and fortune-tellers but death for those who worshipped “Wotan” (i.e., Óðinn). A similar effort through legislation on the part of the Anglo-Saxon kings was made in the tenth century, and it was clearly aimed at Scandinavian settlers in Britain. The problem persisted into the eleventh century, when the Northumbrian Priests' Law gave a detailed exposition of non-Christian worship as practiced in the region of Britain where there had been an intense concentration of immigration from Scandinavia. There is little doubt that sacrifices of animals and humans were gruesome and endured for a long time even in nominally Christian lands. The Irish tract War of the Irish Against the Vikings (Cocad Gáedel re Gallaib) mentions an area called “Thor's Wood” across the river Liffey from the Viking fortress of Dublin, in roughly the location of modern O'Connell Street.The clergy's approach to the problem was not uniform. An early version of the “noble savage” was applied to non-Christian Scandinavians by the eleventh century. The French (from Vermandois) historian Dudo of St. Quentin used the image of the sailor on the sea as a symbol for the soul in the cosmos, while the Anglo-Saxon archbishop and jurist Wulfstan of York, in his Sermon of the Wolf to the English (Sermo Lupi ad Anglos), compared the piety of the pagan Viking with the impiety of the slovenly Christian. Although he was making a point—the bad Christian was more contemptible than the pious pagan—the idea must have been gaining some credibility. Even the Icelandic sagas, written in a land that (by that time) was wholly Christian and by men who believed themselves to be devout, are quite evenhanded in their assessments of non-Christian religious practices.Anders Winroth's The Conversion of Scandinavia provides much material to ponder as well as a great deal of information. His meticulous gathering of materials opens new avenues for consideration, while this thoughtful survey of the material will provide guidance for anyone interested in the topic and period.