The Germanic peoples and the Norse sacrificed mainly animals, food, drink and the spoils of war – in sacred groves, at springs, in lakes and bogs, and later in halls during the communal blót feast. Human sacrifice is described by Roman and Christian writers, but archaeology can make it likely only in individual cases. We go through it find by find and source by source: Tacitus and the grove of the Semnones, Hjortspring, Nydam and Illerup Ådal, the bog bodies, Uppsala, Lejre and the sacrificial feast in the saga of Hákon the Good.
Picture a lakeshore in eastern Jutland, a few years after AD 205. Hundreds of swords, spears, shields, belts and bridles lie on the bank. Men are snapping blades, bending spearheads and hacking shield boards apart. Then everything goes into the water. Nobody is meant to carry these weapons ever again.
Something like this happened at Illerup Ådal, and scenes like it are the reason we know more about Germanic sacrifice than about almost any other part of that religion. The gods left no temple inscriptions, but the bogs kept what people gave them. We keep find, contemporary report, later tradition and modern interpretation strictly apart – on human sacrifice, that is the only honest way to talk.
The Old Norse word for both sacrifice and sacrificial feast is blót, with the verb blóta – "to sacrifice", but also "to worship". Despite the popular assumption, it is probably not related to the word "blood"; the link to Gothic blotan ("to worship") is considered much safer. The sacrificial blood had a name of its own: hlaut.
The logic behind it was simple and very human: a gift calls for a gift in return. The Hávamál, the wisdom poem of the Edda, has a stanza that sounds like a warning to over-eager worshippers. Loosely rendered (our own translation):
Better not to ask than to offer too much – a gift always looks for its return.Hávamál 145, own translation
So people did not give out of pure piety but as part of a relationship: victory, a good harvest, peace and health in exchange for meat, ale, weapons and jewellery. Think lordship and hospitality rather than marble altars and priestly castes. For the places where this happened, see our article on hörgr, hof and cult hall.
The oldest detailed written source is the Germania of the Roman historian Tacitus, written in AD 98. Tacitus never visited Germania himself. He drew on older works and reports, and his "Germans" double as a moral mirror for Rome.
In chapter 9 he says the Germans did not think it fitting to confine their gods within walls or to portray them in human likeness. Instead they consecrated woods and groves and gave the names of gods to that hidden presence which they perceived only in reverence. The same chapter contains the sentence that still shapes the debate: to the highest god, whom Tacitus equates with the Roman Mercury – most likely Wodan – it was lawful on certain days to offer human victims as well, while Hercules and Mars (probably Donar and Tiw) were appeased with animals. We untangle these equations in Wodan, Donar and Ziu.
Chapter 39 describes the famous grove of the Semnones. At a fixed time, delegations of all the related tribes gathered in an ancient wood made holy by omens, and after a man had been killed on behalf of the community they celebrated the grim beginnings of their rite. Nobody entered the grove unless bound, as a sign of his lowliness before the deity. The whole story is in our article on the grove of the Semnones.
Chapter 40 tells of Nerthus, whose wagon stood in a grove on an island. After her procession the wagon, the cloths and the goddess herself were washed in a secluded lake – and the slaves who performed the task were swallowed by that same lake at once.
Beyond the Germania, a few passages fit the bog finds remarkably well. In the Annals (13.57), Tacitus describes a war in AD 58 between the Hermunduri and the Chatti over a salt-rich border river. Both sides had vowed the enemy army in advance to Mars and Mercury, and after their victory the Hermunduri handed horses, men and everything they had defeated over to destruction. The booty was not shared out; it was given to the gods.
In Annals 1.61, Tacitus describes what Roman soldiers found six years after the defeat of Varus in the Teutoburg Forest: bones, broken weapons, skulls fixed to tree trunks and, in the nearby groves, "barbarian altars" where tribunes and senior centurions had been slaughtered. The late Roman historian Orosius tells something similar of the Cimbri after their victory at Arausio in 105 BC: gold and silver thrown into the river, armour hacked apart, horses drowned and prisoners hanged from trees. Orosius, however, wrote in the fifth century with an obvious Christian moral agenda.
For the objects, archaeology confirms these reports: war booty really was destroyed and sunk. For killed prisoners, the great weapon bogs mostly lack the evidence – they are full of weapons, not people.
In 1921–22 a boat was excavated from Hjortspring bog on the Danish island of Als; it is now in the National Museum in Copenhagen. It is about 19 metres long, built of lime wood, sewn rather than nailed, with room for at least 20 paddlers. It belongs to the pre-Roman Iron Age and is usually dated to around 350 BC, although the radiocarbon dates spread across the fourth and third centuries BC.
In and around the boat lay the equipment of a small army: by the usual count 131 wooden shields, 138 iron spearheads, 31 points of bone or antler, 11 single-edged iron swords – two of them deliberately bent – and the remains of several mail shirts. Beneath the boat were a dismembered horse, a lamb, a calf and two dogs.
The standard reading: a seaborne raiding force was defeated, and the victors sacrificed ship and gear. It matches Tacitus' Hermunduri story surprisingly well, nearly 450 years earlier. Where the attackers came from is still an open question.
We owe much of our knowledge of this kind of find to the Danish archaeologist Conrad Engelhardt. Between 1858 and 1863 he dug at Thorsberg bog near Süderbrarup in Angeln and at Nydam bog in Sundeved. Today the Thorsberg finds and the great Nydam boat are at Gottorf Castle in Schleswig.
Thorsberg is famous for something that almost never survives: clothing. A complete pair of trousers with attached foot pieces, a tunic, cloaks – plus weapons, Roman decorative discs and fragments of helmets with face masks. The deposits span several centuries of the Roman Iron Age, with the main emphasis in the second and third centuries AD.
Nydam held several boats. The best known is made of oak, a little over 23 metres long, and dated by dendrochronology – tree-ring analysis – to around AD 310–320. Remains of further boats, including one of pine, had been chopped up and sacrificed as well.
The objects were often systematically wrecked: swords bent, shield bosses pierced, spears broken. Whether this was meant to "kill" the weapons, to put the booty permanently beyond human use, or both, we cannot say. What is clear is that nothing here was lost or hidden. It was given. For an overview of these sites, see The Sacrificed Army in the Bog.
The largest find of its kind came to light in 1950 during drainage work in the valley of the Illerup Å near Skanderborg. In two campaigns, 1950–1956 and 1975–1985, archaeologists recovered around 15,000 objects – and by the excavators' estimate that is less than half the deposit. Most of it still lies in the ground.
The main sacrifice can be dated unusually precisely: tree rings in shield boards and the latest Roman coins point to shortly after AD 205. The equipment is enough for an army of more than a thousand men, with visible ranks: hundreds of ordinary warriors with iron shield bosses, a smaller group with bronze fittings, a few leaders with silver and gold. Around 200 swords, most of them made in Roman workshops. Horses were sacrificed too.
Where the defeated army came from is disputed. Combs of reindeer and elk antler point to the Scandinavian north, and Norway or western Sweden are often suggested. More in our article on Illerup Ådal.
This is where caution matters most. Hundreds of human bodies and skeletons are known from the bogs of north-western Europe, ranging from the Stone Age to modern times. Only some date to the Iron Age, and only some of those show signs of violence.
Tollund Man was found on 6 May 1950 in Bjældskovdal near Silkeborg. New radiocarbon dating places his death between 405 and 380 BC. Around his neck was still the plaited leather rope with which he was most likely hanged. His face looks so peaceful that the finders first thought he was the victim of a recent crime. His last meal was a porridge of barley, flax and wild plants, with some fish according to recent analyses.
Grauballe Man was found in 1952 in central Jutland and is now in Moesgaard Museum near Aarhus. His throat had been cut from ear to ear before he was laid naked in the bog. The museum dates his death to the early Iron Age and considers sacrifice the most likely explanation – while explicitly mentioning other possibilities.
The "Windeby Girl", found in 1952 in the Domsland bog near Eckernförde and dated to roughly 40 BC – AD 120, is the classic cautionary tale. For decades she was presented as an adulteress drowned with a blindfold and half-shaven head, straight out of Tacitus, who in Germania 19 describes how unfaithful wives were punished. Later work by the anthropologist Heather Gill-Robinson produced a very different picture: probably a boy of about 14, the "blindfold" more likely a hairband that had slipped, the "shaving" a result of decay and excavation, no clear signs of violence, but evidence of illness, above all a severe jaw infection. The most famous "victim" turned into a person whose death remains unexplained.
In favour of the sacrifice theory: many Iron Age bog bodies were killed with conspicuous effort (rope, cut throat, sometimes more than one method), laid down at places where pots, animals and objects were also offered, and not cremated like ordinary dead. Against it: the cases are scattered over centuries, no uniform rite can be recognised, and interpretation long started from Tacitus rather than from the evidence. More sites where offerings and bogs meet are described in Sacrificial Bogs and Bog Finds.
Animals were the backbone of Germanic sacrifice, and their bones record cut marks, age and butchery.
At the sacrificial bog between Oberdorla and Niederdorla in Thuringia, today's "Opfermoor Vogtei", offerings were made over many centuries: pottery and wooden figures, but also cattle, horses, sheep, goats and dogs, often represented only by skulls and foot bones. Researchers frequently read this head-and-hooves pattern as follows: the meat was eaten together, while head and hide went to the deity. More in our article on the sacrificial bog of Oberdorla.
In Iceland, at Hofstaðir near Lake Mývatn, a Viking Age hall 38 metres long was excavated. Skulls of at least 23 cattle were found there. In 2007 the archaeologists Gavin Lucas and Thomas McGovern showed that the animals had been ritually beheaded – a bloody, public killing, probably at recurring feasts – and that the heads were then put on display. It fits the sacrificial feasts of the sagas strikingly well.
Beneath the church on Frösön in Jämtland, in 1984, excavators found the stump of a birch surrounded by animal bones, mainly brown bear and pig, radiocarbon-dated to the late Viking Age. A sacred tree evidently stood here before the church was built over it.
The horse holds a special place. Tacitus reports in Germania 10 that white horses were kept in sacred groves and consulted as oracles. Later Christian missionaries treated eating horse meat almost as the badge of paganism. More in Sacred Horses and Secret Cults.
Around 1075 Adam, a canon of Bremen cathedral, wrote his history of the archbishops of Hamburg. In the fourth book he describes the temple at Uppsala: adorned entirely with gold, housing images of three gods – Thor in the middle, flanked by Wodan and Fricco, who is probably Freyr. Next to the temple stood a huge evergreen tree, and there was a spring.
Every nine years, he says, all the provinces of Sweden held a common festival. Nine of every kind of male creature were sacrificed, and their bodies were hung in the grove beside the temple. Dogs and horses hung there alongside men; a Christian had told him he had seen 72 such bodies hanging side by side. A marginal note (scholion) adds that the feast lasted nine days, that on each day one man was sacrificed together with other animals, and that it took place around the spring equinox. Another scholion says a living man was plunged into the spring; if he did not come up again, the people's wish would be granted.
Sounds clear-cut. It is not. Adam never went to Uppsala. He relied on informants, among them the Danish king Sven Estridsen, and he wanted to present his archdiocese's mission in the North as urgent. The number nine runs through his account so conspicuously that some scholars suspect literary stylisation; others point out that nine is a sacred number in Norse sources as well.
Archaeology at Gamla Uppsala reveals a central place with royal mounds and halls, but so far no temple that clearly matches Adam's description and no sacrificial grove with human bones. That does not make Adam a liar; it means we cannot check his details. We introduce the site in Gamla Uppsala – Temple and Royal Mounds and the chronicler in Adam of Bremen. For the god images he describes, see our article on Germanic idols.
Even earlier, around 1012–1018, Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg wrote his chronicle. In the first book he recounts King Henry I's campaign against the Danes in 934 and inserts a note about Lejre on Zealand, the "head" of the Danish realm. There, every nine years in January, after the feast of Epiphany, everyone gathered and offered to their gods 99 people and as many horses, together with dogs and cockerels – the cockerels in place of hawks.
Thietmar was not there; he passes on what he had heard, nearly a century after the events, and once again the number nine appears, this time as 99. Excavations at Lejre have uncovered great halls of a royal seat, but no traces of mass sacrifice on anything like that scale.
Still, human sacrifice in Denmark is not pure invention. The National Museum of Denmark points to finds from western Zealand: at Trelleborg, before the ring fortress was built there in 980/81, five wells about three metres deep held human and animal skeletons, jewellery and tools; four of the five humans were children aged between four and seven. Skeletons from wells at the magnate's estate at Tissø are discussed along similar lines. The contrast with Thietmar is telling: the ground shows isolated, rare killings that are hard to interpret – not 99 people every nine years.
The only eyewitness account comes from a Muslim envoy. In 921–922, Ahmad ibn Fadlan travelled on behalf of the caliph of Baghdad to the Volga Bulghars and there met traders he calls the Rus – in the view of most scholars today, people of Scandinavian origin.
He describes how a trader, on arrival, carries bread, meat, onions, milk and an intoxicating drink to a tall wooden post with a human-like face, surrounded by smaller figures. He prostrates himself and asks for good business. If trade goes well, he slaughters sheep or cattle, gives away some of the meat and hangs the heads on the posts. Sacrifice as a trade agreement, with no priest involved.
At the funeral of a chieftain, Ibn Fadlan then describes the killing of an enslaved girl who had "agreed to go with him", along with a dog cut in two, two horses, two cows, a cockerel and a hen. He depended on interpreters, but he had no interest in blackening paganism for a missionary text. His account rewards careful reading: Ibn Fadlan among the Rus on the Volga.
The most vivid picture of a Norse sacrificial feast comes from the thirteenth century: from the saga of Hákon the Good in Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla (chapter 14 in the standard Icelandic edition, chapter 16 in Laing's 1844 translation). Snorri says it was the custom at a sacrifice for all the farmers to come to the temple site, bringing the provisions they would need during the feast. Livestock of all kinds, horses included, was slaughtered. The blood was called hlaut, the bowls for it hlautbollar, and with hlautteinar – twigs shaped like sprinklers – altars, walls and people were spattered. The meat was boiled in cauldrons over fires in the middle of the hall.
Then came the toasts: first Odin's cup for victory and power for the king, then the cups of Njord and Freyr til árs ok friðar – "for a good year and peace". Many then drank the bragafull, the chieftain's cup, and finally a toast to departed kinsmen, the minni. Meet the gods invoked here in Freyr and the Vanir.
King Hákon was a Christian, but he could not afford to lose the powerful farmers of Trøndelag. At the feast at Lade he makes the sign of the cross over his cup; his jarl Sigurd saves the moment by explaining that the king is making the sign of Thor's hammer. Later, at Mære, Hákon has to eat a few bites of horse liver and drain the cups – a Christian king forced to share the heathen meal.
That is how we work on our engraving motifs, too: better plain and secure than spectacular and invented.
Contemporary outside views: Tacitus (1st century) and Ibn Fadlan (10th century) describe sacrifices at first or second hand, each from his own perspective. Christian chroniclers: Thietmar and Adam (11th century) give the most dramatic numbers – from hearsay. Later tradition: Snorri and the sagas (13th century) give the most vivid picture, but from a great distance. Modern interpretation: that the bog bodies were offerings to Nerthus, that weapons were "killed", that Uppsala was a supra-regional centre of human sacrifice – all hypotheses, some well founded, none proven.
Did the Germanic peoples practise human sacrifice? Roman and Christian writers say so, and individual finds such as bog bodies with signs of violence or the children's skeletons in wells near Trelleborg make it likely that it happened. A regular mass sacrifice of the kind Adam of Bremen or Thietmar describe has not been demonstrated archaeologically.
What is a blót? Blót is the Old Norse word for sacrifice and sacrificial feast. According to the saga of Hákon the Good, animals were slaughtered, their blood sprinkled on altars and participants, the meat eaten together and cups drunk to gods and ancestors.
Were bog bodies like Tollund Man sacrificed? Possibly, but not certainly. Tollund Man was hanged and Grauballe Man had his throat cut before being placed in the bog – that could be sacrifice or execution. The Windeby case shows how quickly such interpretations can collapse.
Why were weapons thrown into bogs? The usual interpretation is that victors offered the equipment of defeated armies to the gods, often after deliberately destroying it. Tacitus describes such a custom among the Hermunduri in AD 58.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
Germanic Religion · The grove of the Semnones · The bog army-offerings · Nerthus – the earth goddess · The Nahanarvali.
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