Suchergebnisse

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.

Two fundamentally different phases of social development in archaic Scandinavia can be identified. Judging by the fact that the long house of frame construction of the patrilocal extended family, who had been keeping an oðal for generations, emerged in the early Scandinavian Bronze Age around 1800 BC and existed for three millennia, including the so-called "Viking Age", it is possible to assume that the traditional Scandinavian society of bonds had existed all this time until 1179–1180 in Denmark. The odel system had developed; this land was inherited by males and passed down from generation to generation. Often three generations of relatives — the head of the oðal with his wife and his adult sons with their wives and children as well as numerous household members and house slaves — lived under the same roof in a long house with central rectangular hearths along the axis. The king had the right to call out militia of bonds, which under the leadership of its leaders — strong and wealthy bonds — was quite capable of resisting the king's not large squad and often dictated terms to it. The kings were chosen at þings — assemblies of armed men of districts where legal issues were settled. The formation of early medieval states in Denmark took place in the last quarter of the 12th century. The king Valdemar and Bishop Absalon after a period of the so-called "civil wars" supported by professional heavy cavalry defeated the militia and disarmed bonds, who were now assigned only agriculture work, taxes to the crown and the church and service to the new feudal lords.