The God Enthroned at the Center: Thor at Uppsala

The atlas records Thor's veneration status as historically attested with no continuous cult, and the same eleventh-century account of the Temple at Uppsala already used for Freyr and Frigg in an earlier band names Thor as the most prominent of the three idols standing inside it. Adam of Bremen describes three images enthroned together, Thor at the center, holding a scepter and flanked by Wodan (Odin) in armor and Fricco (Freyr), and states plainly that of the three Thor was reckoned the mightiest, invoked above the others in times of plague or famine, exactly the everyday crises a farming population would have prayed hardest against. The temple's own festival, held every nine years, is described as drawing worshippers from across the whole of Sweden. Modern scholarship treats Adam's account with caution, since he wrote at a Christian remove from the practices he describes and some specific details are disputed, but his placement of Thor at the physical and devotional center of Scandinavia's most famous pagan temple is consistent with the wider pattern historians read across the region's surviving place names, where compounds built on Thor's own name vastly outnumber those built on any other Norse god's, a popularity in everyday naming that Uppsala's own arrangement of its three idols reflects exactly.