The Viking Age And Christianity In Norway

The Viking Age began as a result of certain actions by Charlemagne, the king of France, in year 772, when he chopped down Irminsûl, the holy column or tree of the Saxons. He had assassinated approximately 5.000 Saxon noblemen, in cowardly ambushes, and crushed the ability of the Saxons to resist his armies any longer. This was the moment the northern brethren of the Saxons, the Scandinavians, finally ceased all hostilities against each other on a national level and instead started to wage war on Christianity. This was a war that started the age we know as the Viking Age. In 772 the kings of Norway were actually allied to Charlemagne in a war against the Danes, but they broke this pact when he cut down Irminsûl and assassinated the Saxon lords, and instead they too went to war against Charlemagne.

Initially the Scandinavians attacked all the cloisters and burned all the churches in Scandinavia, in their own home countries, and this is the reason why Europe suddenly saw a stream of settlers from Scandinavia in the Viking Age. Historians have long wondered why so many Scandinavians all of a sudden emigrated, and have for some reason failed to see the obvious reason why. The simple fact is that the civil war in Scandinavia forced many of them to flee and look for other places to live.

When the Christians in Scandinavia had been killed or were forced to flee the Pagans attacked the monasteries that had sent the missionaries to Scandinavia in the first place. In Norway's case that was first and foremost the monastery on Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, in England. This attack is the first recorded Viking attack in history and took place the 6th of June in 793. The vast majority of the Viking attacks were naturally attacks on France, though, as we already know from the official history, because Charlemagne was seen as the main enemy, but also other parts of the Holy Roman Empire fell victim to such attacks as well as other Christian countries in Europe.

Those who argue that the Vikings were first and foremost traders seem to forget that the Scandinavians had been traders before the Viking Age too, and even in the Bronze Age, about 4.000 years ago and 3.000 years before the Viking Age, we sailed along the coast as far as to what today is Scotland and traded with the tribes that became later known to the Romans as the Picts ("The Painted Ones"). Trade across the North Sea itself began possibly as early as in the IVth or Vth century, when the earliest versions of the long boats used by the Vikings were developed. In other words, the Scandinavian trade with the rest of Europe existed before, during and after the Viking Age, so it has really nothing to do with any of this. What makes the Viking Age special is the Pagan attacks on Christian targets, first in Scandinavia and then in the rest of Europe, attacks that began after Charlemagne had made his intentions clear to everybody. When the proud Saxons finally fell to his might, Scandinavia was under threat. Until then the few Christian missionaries in Scandinavia and their converts had been tolerated. The Christian missionaries had arrived in Scandinavia hundreds of years earlier, probably as early as in the Vth or VIth century, but until the Viking Age began we had been foolish enough to tolerate them.

The Viking Age is often looked upon with pride by most Scandinavians, but it was a desperate time of strife, cultural decline and civil war. It was a two hundred year long war against the Christian realms of western, central and southern Europe. People fled to Iceland, Ireland, Scotland or other parts of Europe (and even America) to get away from the trouble, or they were forced to leave for different reasons, and they didn't colonize these parts of the world because they wanted to, because our forefathers were such great adventures and explorers, like many like to think. Scandinavians are not and have never been any more adventurous or curious than other Europeans. We didn't even bother to colonize America, even though we knew where it was as early as the Xth or XIth century. And I may add that the only reason the Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch (and later other Europeans too) began to explore the world in the XVth century was petty greed, nothing else. They had no noble motives for doing so, that's for sure. When the Americas and other parts of the world were finally colonized by Europeans they were populated with religious deviants who fled from religious persecution, men who wouldn't inherit their family properties in Europe because they had older brothers, and so forth. They were rarely, if ever, "adventurous explorers" who left Europe because they sought adventure, like people in the USA like to believe. There is a reason why there is so much "white trash", greed, ignorance and crime, and so many religious fanatics - and 8 million Jews - in the USA in the first place.

This Christianization process in Scandinavia began in the Vth or VIth century, but as we know they had little success until the IXth century in Denmark, the XIth century in Norway and the XIIth century in Sweden, when the respective populations were officially converted to Christianity, by force and deceit I may add. However, Norway (and the parts of Sweden that until the XVIth or XVIIth century was a part of Norway [Jämtland, Härjedalen, Bohuslän, Idre and Särne]¹) wasn't converted to what we normally think of when we say Christianity (id est the Catholic or Greek/Russian Orthodox church), until the XVth century, when Norway became a part of Catholic Denmark. Before that the Norwegians were so-called Celtic-Christians, and had a Gnostic faith similar to that of the Templars. When the Norwegian kings from 1030 to 1450 canonized people and gave people bishop titles on their own the pope was naturally furious, as this was seen as his task, but why should the Norwegian kings care? They weren't Catholics and didn't answer to the pope anyhow. Norwegian priests were further expected to get married and have children, something that was unheard of in the Catholic world. We even had a female saint; a princess from the British Isles as far as I remember, called saint Sunniva ("Sun Gift", from Anglo-Saxon and Norse "sunn-gifa").

The Celtic church and its Gnostic faith was soon defeated and replaced by Catholicism on the British Isles, but only after they had successfully converted Norway, and for several hundred years Norway was the only so-called Celtic-Christian country in the world! But then most of the Gnostic clergy was killed by the so-called pestilence we know as the Black Death in 1349 and the following years, as they were involved in the treatment of the sick, and because of that were more exposed to the mysterious Black Death than others, and were replaced by Danish Catholic priests when the two countries united in 1450.

This pretty unknown so-called Celtic Christianity explains why you only find stave churches in Norway and parts of Sweden, and only stave churches built before 1349. The Catholics didn't build stave churches. These stave churches were Gnostic churches, built to honour the dragon, the serpent in the garden of Eden, that in the Gnostic Christianity was seen as a symbol of Jesus/Lucifer rebelling against the tyrant we know as Jehovah (or Allah or Yahweh or "God"), the demiurge. The true "God" in their point of view was Abraxas. For that reason the architecture of these churches was so different from Catholic churches; the roofs of the stave churches were covered with something that looked like the skin of a dragon, the crosses were Celtic crosses instead of Catholic crosses, and the stave churches were decorated with serpent-heads! They were temples of the dragon!

The British missionaries in the Viking Age didn't talk about Jesus Christ, but called him "Kvitekrist" ("White Christ"), because they linked him to the "White" disc (the Sun) on the firmament, that they amazingly claimed had the number 666 (like many occultists still claim). To them 666 was the number of the Sun and Jesus! It was this Sun that woke up the serpents (the dragon) in the spring, and when Norway was Christianized the ancient Sun worship merged with the Gnostic faith, and remained the official religion in Norway for more than four hundred years!

I can mention, that when the Templars were persecuted as "devil worshippers" in Europe - amongst other things because they painted 666 on the forehead of skulls and placed them on the altars - beginning in 1189 as far as I remember, mainly in France and England, many Templars fled to Norway, where they found a safe haven and continued to practice their Gnostic faith. The Norwegian kings didn't care what the Catholic pope or any other Catholics said, as they were Gnostics, so the Templars faced no persecution in Norway, and because of that some of the youngest Templar graves in the world can be found in Norway, recognized by the placement of the legs of the dead person in the grave (the legs of the dead are crossed to make up a crucifix). Like the Gnostic priests the knights in the order of the Templars were probably wiped out as a result of the Black Death, as they too were involved in medical care².

Now, one might wonder why the Catholic Europe didn't force Norway to convert to Catholicism, like they did on the British Isles (including Ireland), but they actually tried to. The Catholic and well-known Adam of Bremen called a Norwegian king, saint Olav, "crow-bone" and claimed he practiced sorcery, which of course he did, as the occult Gnosticism in Norway had merged with ancient Pagan practices. Also, everybody in Norway knows about the conflict between the so-called Birkebeinerne and Bragglerne, which was actually an armed conflict between supporters of the Catholic pope and supporters of the Gnostic king. For some reason unknown to me the Gnostics prevailed, and the thing that finally crushed them was, like I have already said, the Black Death and the incorporation of Norway into Catholic Denmark.

I may add that Norway might have been too poor and primitive for the pope to even bother to continue the fight at that time. Norway lies in the periphery of Europe, it was a very poor area with hardly any infrastructure, industry or wealth - and with hardly any power in Europe at all. "Norway" is the name of the only "way" to get around in Norway at the time: by boat or ship along the coast, the "north-way". It was not easy to get around inland. Besides, it was scarcely populated, so why bother? With a bit of humour I can say that the only reason it took the Germans a whole month to make Norway surrender in 1940, was the fact that it took them a whole month to walk through the boggy mountains and forests and finally reach their objectives - while it took them a couple of hours to drive across civilized Denmark in motorized vehicles and make them surrender. It is not like we offered them any armed resistance worth mentioning, as our "heroic" (Danish) king and left-wing labour government was too busy running away to London to even order a general mobilization of the Norwegian army.

When Norway became a part of Denmark in 1450 we too became officially Catholics, but the Danes had to send Danish priests to Norway, because there were no Norwegian Catholics. According to the records of history these Danish priests, and other Danish officials, did not have an easy job. They described the Norwegians as "wild" people, and especially the people living in the mountains were "hostile", "unchristian" and "dangerous". One of our inland counties still carries the name "Hedmark", that translates as "The Land of the Pagans". The Danish sheriffs and priests were regularly beaten to death by the Norwegian peasants, and some men even competed against each other, trying to be the one who had killed the most Danish priests and sheriffs. One story from Telemark ("The Land of Thule", another mostly inland county in Norway) tells us that a young man refused to stop until he had killed "at least as many priests as my father killed". This was in the XVIth century! They have also found archeological evidence that some places people made (animal) sacrifices in ancient holy lakes continuously from the Stone or Bronze age and all the way to the XVIIth century!

The explanations of this is of course the fact that Norway was actually never Christianized, as we understand the term. In 1030 they had officially been converted to a faith that was a mix of Pagan beliefs, including Sun worship and a Gnostic form of Christianity. When they met the Danish Catholic priests in the XVth century, who tried to convert them to Catholicism, many of them reacted with violence.

What saved the situation, to some extent, was the Reformation in the early XVIth century. It was more acceptable for the difficult and narrow-minded Norwegians to convert to Protestantism, rather than to the religion of their "oppressors", the Danes. As we know Denmark-Norway became Protestant, and finally most of the "wild" people were slowly Christianized, as we understand the term.

The interesting thing about this, is that the Norwegian people and parts of the Swedish people have never been Catholic! Norway is the only country in Europe that has been neither Greek/Russian-Orthodox nor Catholic. Also, old Pagan religious practices were common as late as the XVIIth and possibly the XVIIIth century. That is quite amazing, and it helps people understand the mentality of the modern Norwegian, and why only 3% of the Norwegian population goes to church (and most of these few church-goers are very old people too, who already have one foot in the grave).

The next time You wonder why there are so many Black Metal bands in Norway, of all countries, and the next time You wonder why it all began in Norway, think about what I have told You in this article... (Dissection is from Bohuslän in Sweden, by the way, so they could easily be called Norwegian too).

If You ever ask any Norwegian about this he or she will probably know nothing about it though, because this is occult history, kept hidden from us for hundreds of years! Official history claims we were Catholics and our Norwegian kings were just a bit cross and individualistic, and that's why they opposed the popes. They just love to make up lies about the past, and do whatever they can to make history place them in a good light. They have no respect for the truth whatsoever, just like the other rulers in our modern world. So enjoy this rare insight into the past. If it had not been for "Nazi-pigs" like me You would have never even heard about these things. Think about that for a minute or two.

Thank You for the attention, and for drinking with me from the Well of Mímir ("Memory").

¹ In 1994, when Sweden unfortunately became a part of the EU while Norway wisely voted against an EU membership (), a lot of Swedes living in these areas wanted them to be returned to Norway.

² We do have some "Templars" in Norway even today, though, who claim their order has existed continuously since the Age of the Crusaders. I actually met one of them in prison, or rather I met a "fallen" Templar. He was thrown out of the order when they found out he was a criminal. He enthusiastically told me about their rituals and beliefs (so much for "vows of secrecy"), and I think they can best be described as some sort of Freemasons.

Varg "The Wild" Vikernes
November and December 2004

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