Interesting, but somewhat disorganized. Unfortunately the lost beliefs of Northern Europe still remain lost. ( )

The great Scandinavian ship-burials must have been planned with deliberate use of religious symbolism, and one contemporary account by an Arab writer of the early tenth century certainly confirms this. In Ibn Fadlan’s detailed account of a cremation funeral on the Volga by Swedish merchant-adventurers in 921, we find reference to complex funeral rites, including songs, ritual actions and animal and human sacrifice. Of especial interest is his description of the ceremony where the girl who was to be offered up as a sacrifice as the bride of the dead chief was made to look through a frame into what appears to represent the Otherworld; she described it as green and fair, claiming to see her husband and her dead kinsfolk awaiting her.

This book attempts to answer the question of how we should "approach a religion of the past when it has left no creed for us to study, no sacred books or descriptions of rituals, no life of its founder and, indeed, little trace of the religious leaders and thinking minds who contributed to its development?" The author's answer is to put together a jigsaw puzzle from archaeological finds, extant myths and legends, sagas and poetry, the sparse historical descriptions of religious practices left by Tacitus, Ibn Fadlan and others, and tales of Christian saints destroying temples and toppling idols.

One of the archaeological finds mentioned is the Viking Age memorial stones of Gotland, which include this picture of Odin's eight-legged horse Sleipnir: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ardre_Odin_Sleipnir.jpg

An interesting book that makes it clear how incomplete our picture of the pagan religions of Northern European and their entanglement with Dark Ages Christianity actually is. ( )

To be honest, the book didn't hold my attention. I read about 50 pages and it seemed it was much more about what we don't know than about what could have been.

Good book, pretty pictures. ( )

Another classic by H. E. Davidson; a shame she feels the need to distance herself from recons, though. ( )