A lake named after a god. A lord’s hall the size of a church. Weapons sunk in the water, and a gold ring heavier than any other: Tissø on Zealand was one of the last great pagan cult sites before the North turned Christian.
Tissø means „Týr’s lake" (Týs sø) – the name carries the war-god Týr within it. On the shore of this Zealand lake stood, from the 6th to the 11th century, the seat of a magnate, joined to a sanctuary.
Over the centuries several vast halls succeeded one another. Beside the dwelling hall lay a specially fenced cult precinct with a small separate building – by the archaeologists’ reading, a manorial sanctuary (hov). Rule and cult here belonged inseparably together.
In the lake lay weapon sacrifices; in the ground amulets, Thor’s hammers and tools – and a spectacular gold neck-ring of about two kilograms, one of the heaviest in the North. The lake took the gifts; the water was a threshold to the gods.
Tissø confirms what the re-reading of Uppsala also suggests: the Norse cult was tied to the aristocracy, not to a separate temple-and-priest institution. The lord was also the cult leader. Around the year 1000 the site was abandoned – Christianity had come.
Týr · Gudme · Gamla Uppsala · Hedeby.
Lars Jørgensen, Gudme-Lundeborg and Tissø. Two magnates’ complexes; National Museum of Denmark (Tissø). Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology; Neil Price, The Viking Way.