The name says it all: Gudme means „home of the gods". On the Danish island of Funen lay one of the richest cult and power centres of the Iron Age – a place of gold, with a vast hall and the gods in the very soil.
Gudme (Old Norse Guðheim, „home of the gods") was a so-called central place from the 3rd to the 6th century AD – long before the Viking Age. The place-names around it already sound sacred: nearby lie a „gods’ hill" and an „elf hill". A whole sacred landscape.
Gudme is famous for spectacular gold finds – among them the Broholm hoard, one of the largest gold treasures of the Nordic Iron Age. At its heart stood a vast hall some 48 metres long, surrounded by workshops. Here resided an elite that combined wealth, craft and cult in one hand.
A few kilometres away, on the coast, lay the trading harbour of Lundeborg. The division of labour is telling: Gudme inland was the place of power and cult, Lundeborg by the sea the place of trade and import. Together they formed a power centre such as the North knew centuries before Hedeby and the Viking towns.
Gudme shows: the Germanic cult needed no temple like a church. Religion, rule, craft and trade concentrated at a „central place" – a model that later sites such as Tissø carried on.
Tissø · Gamla Uppsala · Hedeby · The Norse pantheon.
P. O. Nielsen, K. Randsborg, H. Thrane (eds.), The Archaeology of Gudme and Lundeborg (1994). National Museum of Denmark (Gudme, Broholm). Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology.