The Temple at Gamla Uppsala — Adam of Bremen’s Account

Also called: Temple at Uppsala, Uppsala temple

Around 1075 the German cleric Adam of Bremen wrote that there was a pagan temple adorned with gold at Uppsala in Sweden, housing statues of Thor, Odin and Freyr. It is the most famous account of Norse pagan worship, but Adam never visited Uppsala and wrote from hearsay.

Adam, a scholar of Bremen Cathedral, wrote a Latin history of the archbishops of Hamburg-Bremen around 1075, and in its fourth book described the lands and peoples of the North. He says that at Uppsala, near Sigtuna, stood a famous temple “entirely adorned with gold”, where Thor, the mightiest, sat in the middle, flanked by an armed Wodan (Odin) and Fricco (Freyr) with a huge phallus. Sacrifices were made to Thor in famine and plague, to Odin in war and to Freyr at weddings, and a golden chain visible from afar ran round the temple’s roof.

Gamla (Old) Uppsala keeps three great burial mounds of about the 6th century and was an important seat of the Swedish kings. In 1926 the archaeologist Sune Lindqvist found postholes beneath the church, inspiring many reconstructions of the temple, but later research has questioned them, showing the holes belong to several periods. Remains of what seems to be a large feasting hall have also been found nearby.

Adam never went to Uppsala, and he was a Christian cleric who saw paganism as something to be overcome. The size of the temple and the golden chain may be exaggerated, and some scholars doubt whether his “temple” was pagan at all. Still, most agree that Uppsala was a major cult site of pagan Sweden. Uppsala became the seat of the Swedish archbishop in 1164.