Scandinavia, the Nordic lands of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Iceland, together with the far north, is best known for Norse Paganism, the religion of the Vikings, but the region actually held two distinct religious worlds. The Norse religion is unusually well preserved among European paganisms, thanks to the medieval Icelandic manuscripts, the Poetic Edda and Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, written down after Christianization but recording a rich mythology: the Aesir and Vanir gods (Odin, Thor, Freyr, Freyja), the world-tree Yggdrasil and the Nine Worlds, the doom of Ragnarok, and the warrior afterlife of Valhalla. This tradition, and its modern reconstruction as Asatru/Heathenry, is what most associate with the region.
But the far north is also home to the Sami, an indigenous people whose language is Uralic, not Norse, and whose own religion, a shamanic tradition centred on the noaidi (shaman), the sacred drum, and the veneration of nature-spirits and sacred sites (sieidi), is entirely distinct from that of their Norse-speaking neighbours and was suppressed by later Christian missions. Scandinavia thus carries a double indigenous heritage: the celebrated mythology of the Norse, and the separate, often overlooked, shamanic religion of the Sami, on the same northern ground.