The Conversion of Scandinavia (review)

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...