Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
Cultures

Saxons

Peoples

Citation Formats

General Reference

APA Style

BibTeX

The Saxons were a Germanic people of the North Sea coast, part of whom crossed to Britain and part of whom remained in what is now northern Germany. The continental Saxons resisted Frankish rule and Christianity until Charlemagne's wars late in the eighth century, while the Anglo-Saxons in Britain were converted from the end of the sixth. Their pre-Christian religion is known mostly from the names of gods left in place names, in the days of the week and in a handful of missionary texts.

Facts
Origins
Origin Region
The North Sea coast of what is now northern Germany, with a large part of the people crossing to Britain. 1
Language Family
Old Saxon on the continent and Old English in Britain, both West Germanic within Indo-European. 2
Traditions
Principal Religious Traditions
A Germanic religion attested chiefly through Frankish accounts of its suppression, including the felling of the Irminsul; Christianity, imposed on the continental Saxons through Charlemagne's wars late in the eighth century and adopted in Britain by persuasion a century and a half earlier. 3
Practice
Practice Status
Reconstructed in the modern era and openly practised 3
Learn More
The Irminsul, and a Religion Known From Its Ban

Continental Saxon religion is known almost entirely from the documents of its suppression. The Frankish annals record that Charlemagne destroyed the Irminsul in 772, a great wooden pillar the Saxons are said to have venerated, and the surviving lists of prohibited practices, drawn up for the use of missionaries, name what was to be stopped: offerings at springs, at trees and at stones, the burning of the dead, divination by lots, and the eating of sacrificial food.

The abjuration formula preserved for Saxon converts requires the renunciation of Thunaer, Woden and Saxnot by name, which is the clearest evidence for the pantheon and is also the only context in which the last of those names appears at all. David Wilson's study of the paganism of the related Anglo-Saxon settlers works from the same kind of material and shows how little can be built on it without importing Norse evidence, which belongs to a different branch and a later date.

The atlas therefore records the Saxon gods as attested by name, records the practices as attested by prohibition, and marks the rest as unrecoverable rather than filling the gap from Scandinavia. What a Saxon believed about any of it is not in the record, because nobody who held the religion wrote anything down.

Thirty Years of War, and a Crossing to Britain

The Saxons appear in Roman sources as raiders on the North Sea coast, and by the fifth century a part of them had crossed to Britain with Angles and Jutes, giving their name to Wessex, Essex, Sussex and Middlesex and contributing to what became the English. Those who remained held the country between the Elbe and the Rhine without kings, governed through an assembly of nobles, free men and dependants that met annually.

Charlemagne fought them for over thirty years, from 772 to 804, and the war was explicitly religious on the Frankish side. The capitulary issued for the conquered territory prescribed death for refusing baptism, for cremating the dead in the old manner and for eating meat in Lent, and the deportations and the mass execution reported at Verden in 782 belong to the same campaign. Widukind, the leader of the resistance, accepted baptism in 785.

The result was a Christian Saxony which within a century was producing its own religious literature. The Heliand, an Old Saxon poem of the ninth century, retells the gospel in the form and vocabulary of Germanic heroic verse, with Christ as a liege lord and the disciples as his retainers. In 919 a Saxon duke became king of the East Franks, and the dynasty that followed made Saxony the centre of the empire that had conquered it.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 25 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value a."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 26 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value ae."

This source names Saxons directly: "the runic alphabet used by the Anglo-Saxons and the Old Frisians, an expansion of the twenty four character Elder Futhark to as many as thirty three characters as English and Frisian speech gained..."

This source names Saxons directly: "David Wilson is an archaeologist, and this academic book, published by Routledge, surveys what is actually known about pre-Christian Anglo-Saxon religion from archaeological and limited textual..."

Source Anglo-Saxon PaganismDavid Wilson

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 18 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value b."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, J.R.R."

Source Beowulf: The Monsters and the CriticsJ. R. R. Tolkien

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 6 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value c/k."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Alessandro Barbero's academic biography of Charlemagne, translated from the Italian, giving one of the fullest modern treatments of the thirty two year Saxon campaign from 772 to 804, including the..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 24 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value d."

This source names Saxons directly: "Bede's De Temporum Ratione, The Reckoning of Time, completed in 725, is a work with no publication year in the modern sense since it survives as a manuscript composition rather than a printed..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Deutsche Mythologie is Jacob Grimm's own 1835 philological study, and it is the source of the reconstructed Continental goddess Ostara, whom Grimm inferred from the Old High German name for Easter..."

Source Deutsche MythologieJacob Grimm

This source names Saxons directly: "Donar's Oak, also called Jove's Oak or Thor's Oak, was a large sacred oak near Geismar in Hesse, central Germany, dedicated to the Germanic god Donar (Thor) and revered as a central cultic site by..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 29 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value ea."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 19 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value e."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "The Elder Futhark is the oldest runic alphabet, twenty four characters used across Germanic speaking Europe from about the second century to the eighth, and named for the sound values of its first..."

Source Runes: An IntroductionRalph W. V. Elliott

This source names Saxons directly: "Elves in Anglo-Saxon England: Matters of Belief, Health, Gender and Identity, Alaric Hall's 2007 study from Boydell Press, is a linguistic and textual reassessment of Anglo-Saxon elf belief, arguing..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 13 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value eo."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 15 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value x/z."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 23 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value oe."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 1 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value f."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 12 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value j/y."

This source names Saxons directly: "The second of Mendeleev's predictions to be confirmed."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 7 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value g."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 9 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value h."

This source names Saxons directly: "This entry on the Saxon State and University Library Dresden draws on the institution's own history of its collections, tracing its origin to the electoral library founded in 1556 and its 1996..."

Source History of the SLUBSaxon State and University Library Dresdenthe holders' own account

This source names Saxons directly: "Named for the indigo line in its spectrum, by which Ferdinand Reich and Hieronymous Theodor Richter found it in 1863 in Saxon zinc ore."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 22 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value ng."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 28 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value io."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 11 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value i."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 21 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value l."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Bede's Life of Saint Cuthbert is a primary hagiographic text, an eighth century account of the Northumbrian monk-bishop's life and posthumous miracles, written by one of the most careful historians..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 20 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value m."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Modranicht (Old English, Night of the Mothers) is the one pagan Anglo-Saxon observance the monk Bede names directly in De Temporum Ratione, recording that the pagan English reckoned the start of..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Terje Spurkland is a specialist in runology and Scandinavian historical linguistics, and this book, translated into English by Betsy van der Hoek and published by Boydell Press, is an academic..."

Source Norwegian Runes and Runic InscriptionsTerje Spurkland; Betsy van der Hoek (trans.)

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 10 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value n."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 4 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value o."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 14 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value p."

This source names Saxons directly: "Popular Religion in Late Saxon England: Elf Charms in Context, Karen Louise Jolly's 1996 study from the University of North Carolina Press, argues the Anglo-Saxon elf charms are best read as a..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 5 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value r."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 16 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value s."

This source names Saxons directly: "Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie's edition of The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, published by Columbia University Press in 1942 as volume six of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records series, is the standard critical..."

Source The Anglo-Saxon Minor PoemsElliott Van Kirk Dobbie (editor)

This source names Saxons directly: "Wayne Harbert is a linguist, and this academic book, published by Cambridge University Press, is a technical survey of the Germanic language family's grammar, phonology and historical development..."

Source The Germanic LanguagesWayne Harbert

This source names Saxons directly: "Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine, prior of a Roman monastery, to the Kingdom of Kent, a deliberate choice since King Aethelberht held influence over neighbouring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms and was..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Michelle P."

This source names Saxons directly: "On 26 April 1847, twelve pastors representing fourteen congregations from Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, New York and Ohio met in Chicago and signed a constitution founding the German..."

This source names Saxons directly: "The Tree: The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft is Raymond Buckland's 1974 book, published by Samuel Weiser, setting out Seax-Wica, the tradition of modern Witchcraft he founded in the United States..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Raymond Buckland's The Tree, The Complete Book of Saxon Witchcraft, published by Samuel Weiser in 1974, is the primary text itself, Buckland's own founding document for Seax-Wica, a tradition of..."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 3 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value th."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 17 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value t."

This source names Saxons directly: "Three interlaced arcs forming a closed triple loop."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 2 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value u."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Three interlocking triangles, carved on Gotland picture stones such as Stora Hammars and Tangelgarda, on a bedpost from the Oseberg ship burial, and on an Anglo-Saxon gold ring from the Nene valley..."

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

This source names Saxons directly: "A community-maintained tertiary reference on Anglo-Saxon paganism, directly examined."

Source Wikipedia, "Anglo-Saxon Paganism"Wikipedia contributors

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 8 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value w."

This source names Saxons directly: "Rune 27 of the Anglo-Saxon Futhorc, the expanded English and Frisian rune row preserved in the Old English rune poem; sound value y."

Source An Introduction to English RunesR. I. Page

This source names Saxons directly: "Beginning in 1722, refugees from the Hidden Seed communities in Moravia arrived on Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf's Saxon estate and founded the settlement of Herrnhut; the community formalized its..."

Source Moravian Church (Wikipedia)Wikipedia contributors

Contained In

Originated In

Germany, Countries

Related To

Anglo-Saxons, Cultures

The Saxons of the continent are the parent population of one of the settling groups.

Sources
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference)
Encyclopaedia Britannica editors, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 2024View the Source
2. The Germanic Languages
Wayne Harbert, Cambridge University Press, 2007View the Source
3. Anglo-Saxon Paganism
David Wilson, Routledge, 1992View the Source
The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems
Elliott Van Kirk Dobbie (editor), Columbia University Press, New York, 1942
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.

View At A Past Year

The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.