page_title: Anglo-Saxon paganism
section_title: Legend and poetry
hierarchical_section_title: Anglo-Saxon paganism / Mythology / Legend and poetry
caption_attribution_description: English: An illustration of Beowulf fighting the dragon that appears at the end of the epic poem.
context_page_description: Anglo-Saxon paganism, sometimes termed Anglo-Saxon heathenism, Anglo-Saxon pre-Christian religion, or Anglo-Saxon traditional religion, refers to the religious beliefs and practices followed by the Anglo-Saxons between the 5th and 8th centuries AD, during the initial period of Early Medieval England. A variant of Germanic paganism found across much of north-western Europe, it encompassed a heterogeneous variety of beliefs and cultic practices, with much regional variation.
  Developing from the earlier Iron Age religion of continental northern Europe, it was introduced to Britain following the Anglo-Saxon migration in the mid 5th century, and remained the dominant belief system in England until the Christianisation of its kingdoms between the 7th and 8th centuries, with some aspects gradually blending into folklore. The pejorative terms paganism and heathenism were first applied to this religion by Christian Anglo-Saxons, and it does not appear that these pagans had a name for their religion themselves; there has therefore been debate among contemporary scholars as to the appropriateness of continuing to describe these belief systems using this Christian terminology.
context_section_description: In pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon England, legends and other stories were transmitted orally instead of being written down; it is for this reason that very few survive today.
  In both Beowulf and Deor's Lament there are references to the mythological smith Weyland, and this figure also makes an appearance on the Franks Casket. There are moreover two place-names recorded in tenth century charters that include Weyland's name. This entity's mythological stories are better fleshed out in Norse stories.
  The only surviving Anglo-Saxon epic poem is the story of Beowulf, known only from a surviving manuscript that was written down by the Christian monk Sepa sometime between the eighth and eleventh centuries AD. The story it tells is set not in England but in Scandinavia, and revolves around a Geatish warrior named Beowulf who travels to Denmark to defeat a monster known as Grendel, who is terrorising the kingdom of Hrothgar, and later, Grendel's Mother as well. Following this, he later becomes the king of Geatland before finally dying in battle with a dragon. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was commonly believed that Beowulf was not an Anglo-Saxon pagan tale, but a Scandinavian Christian one; it was not until the influential critical essay Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics by J. R. R. Tolkien, delivered in 1936, that Beowulf was established as a quintessentially English poem that, while Christian, looked back on a living memory of paganism. The poem refers to pagan practices such as cremation burials, but also contains repeated mentions of the Christian God and references to tales from Biblical mythology, such as that of Cain and Abel. Given the restricted nature of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England, it is likely that the author of the poem was a cleric or an associate of the clergy.
  Nonetheless, some academics still hold reservations about accepting it as containing information pertaining to Anglo-Saxon paganism, with Patrick Wormald noting that "vast reserves of intellectual energy have been devoted to threshing this poem for grains of authentic pagan belief, but it must be admitted that the harvest has been meagre. The poet may have known that his heroes were pagans, but he did not know much about paganism." Similarly, Christine Fell declared that when it came to paganism, the poet who authored Beowulf had "little more than a vague awareness of what was done 'in those days'." Conversely, North argued that the poet knew more about paganism that he revealed in the poem, suggesting that this could be seen in some of the language and references.
caption: A 1908 depiction of Beowulf fighting the dragon, by J. R. Skelton.
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