Last night I listened to a very interesting lecture by the professor of religious history Olof Sundqvist at Stockholm University.
When I studied Old Norse religious history myself, I had Olof as a professor. His knowledge of the time in the shift between the pagan religion and Christianity is world-class and he has just come out with a book on the subject of how it actually happened when the Nordics left paganism behind and became a Christian country.
Many myths surround this story. But what do the sources actually say? It must be remembered that the transition to Christianity was a very slow process which, for Sweden, began around 830 when the missionary Ansgar visited the Viking city of Birka. And it can be said that the process was in port by the beginning of the 12th century although there could be some paganism left locally in some places.
So what was done on the part of those in power to get people to convert to a new religion? According to Sundqvist, it started with the elite, i.e. kings and the top layer of society, getting baptized and then exerting downward pressure. The fact that the kings wanted Christianity was about the fact that they wanted to build powerful alliances with royal houses out in Europe and to be able to marry sons and daughters into other royal houses, the same religion was required. It was also about the ecclesiastical organization that suited the royal power because it was based on a written language that functioned as an instrument of power. The church organization also gave the kings a monopoly on information and truth. Christianity made the Royal power even more powerful
So how did the kings spread Christianity downwards among the nobles and the people? It was a combination of carrot and stick. It was about missionary bishops moving in from other countries and starting to preach, but also about decisions on things, i.e. local parliaments where it was decided that the area should be Christianized. Gifts and bribes were used to convince people and build alliances
Furthermore, it was also about violence. What is sometimes called the mission of the sword, where religious places were burned down and those who refused to convert were killed or driven away. A result of this was also that former places of worship for Old Norse religion were built with wooden churches which then became stone churches. Today you can visit these places where the Old Norse name remains but where there is now a very old church. One such example is Lund, where there may have been an important sacrificial grove (lund means grove) during Old Norse times but where in the Middle Ages a Christian city was built on top.
All around Sweden you can still see the traces of the power of early Christianity. In principle, every single village in Sweden has a church in the middle, in the oldest cities there are far more churches than was justified by the size of the population, in Lund, for example, which was a very small city well into the 19th century, there were as many as 27 churches during the Middle Ages . Most of these were demolished during the Reformation in the 1500s, which was also a kind of religious change that was also carried out in very violent ways.