The hlautbolli is a bowl for hlaut, the blood of a sacrificed animal, and the hlautteinn is the twig or aspergillum used to flick that blood over the walls of the building and over the people present. Both appear in Icelandic prose of the thirteenth century, in Snorri Sturluson's account of King Hakon the Good in Heimskringla and in the temple description in Eyrbyggja saga, where a bowl stands on the platform beside the ring. The picture the texts give is coherent and detailed: the meat is boiled and eaten, cups are passed and dedicated to named gods and to the dead, and the blood is applied to the fabric of the place and the bodies of the participants.
Facts
Disputed
Origin AccountWhether the account preserves pre-Christian practice or is a literary construction modelled on the Christian liturgy is disputed 1 Hlautbolli, the sacrificial bowl used to catch blood in accounts of Norse pagan ritual, is described chiefly in medieval Icelandic sources written down after Iceland's conversion to Christianity, raising the question of how much reflects genuine inherited pre-Christian practice. John Lindow's Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001) records one camp holding that specific vocabulary preserved in skaldic verse, an older and more conservatively transmitted poetic form than the prose sagas, anchors a core of genuinely inherited pagan tradition within the later prose descriptions. The opposing camp holds the unusually orderly, systematic detail of the described ritual is itself evidence of a Christian author's literary imagination constructing a plausible pagan rite rather than transmitting a remembered one. The method is philological and literary-historical, weighing the skaldic vocabulary's transmission history against the narrative structure of the prose accounts embedding it. Because the same texts supply evidence for both readings, the origin account remains genuinely disputed. Use
Who May Handle ItClergy or ordained officiants only 1 ConsecrationConsecrated in a rite before use 1 Ritual ContextIn the account the meat is boiled and eaten, cups are dedicated to Odin for victory, to Njord and Freyr for peace and good seasons, and to the dead 1Tradition: Norse religion Scholarship and Forensics
Scholarly NoteNo excavated vessel has been identified as a hlautbolli, and there is no independent contemporary description of the practice 2 Attributions
TraditionNorse religion as described in thirteenth century Icelandic prose 1 Identity
Also Known AsHlautteinn; the blood bowl and twig 1 Category of Sacred ObjectA bowl for sacrificial blood, used with a twig to flick the blood over the building and the participants 1Tradition: Norse religion Sources
Textual NoteThe descriptions are in Snorri Sturluson's saga of Hakon the Good in Heimskringla and in the temple passage of Eyrbyggja saga, both thirteenth century and both by Christian authors 1 Learn More
What the Sagas Describe
Snorri Sturluson, writing in the thirteenth century, gives a full account of a sacrifice in his saga of King Hakon the Good. Animals are killed, and the blood, called hlaut, is caught in bowls. Twigs made for the purpose are dipped in the bowls and used to flick the blood over the platform, over the walls inside and outside the building, and over the people present. The meat is boiled in cauldrons over fires in the middle of the floor, cups are carried round the fire, and the presiding chieftain blesses them and dedicates them, first to Odin for the king's victory, then to Njord and Freyr for good seasons and peace, and then to the dead. Eyrbyggja saga describes a temple containing a platform on which lie a ring and a bowl for the blood, with a twig beside it.
The picture is vivid, orderly and complete. It has furnished nearly every popular account of Norse sacrifice written since. And every element of it comes from a Christian writing in Iceland more than two hundred years after Iceland accepted Christianity, in a literary culture thoroughly familiar with the Mass, with the sprinkling of a congregation with holy water and with the blessing of a cup. That is not a reason to dismiss it. It is a reason to label it accurately, which is what this entry is for.
Two Centuries and a Conversion in Between
The disagreement among historians is real and it has camps. One position holds that the saga writers were working from inherited tradition, that skaldic poetry composed before the conversion preserves enough of the vocabulary of sacrifice to anchor the prose accounts, and that a core of the description reflects something that was done. The opposing position holds that the accounts are literary constructions, built by educated Christians who needed a pagan rite for a narrative and modelled it on the liturgy they knew, and that the level of orderly detail is itself the giveaway, because real ritual practice is rarely so tidy.
Archaeology has not been able to arbitrate. No excavated vessel has been identified as a hlautbolli, and no twig could survive. Blood residue analysis on vessels from a securely identified cult context would be the sort of evidence that could move the question, and the obstacle is finding such a context rather than the analysis. Meanwhile the practical consequence for a reference work is a labelling discipline: a hammer pendant is an object somebody dug up, and a hlautbolli is a description in a manuscript. Both belong in the atlas. Presenting them at the same level of confidence would be a straightforward misrepresentation of what is known about the religion of pre-Christian Scandinavia, which is a great deal less than the confident summaries suggest.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Attested In
Snorri Sturluson describes the hlautbolli standing on the temple platform beside the oath ring in his account of King Hakon the Good in Heimskringla.
Belongs to Tradition
The bowl belongs to the account of pre-Christian sacrifice given in thirteenth century Icelandic prose.
Implement Of
Blot, Rituals This edge names simple ritual function rather than a contested claim in its own right. Hlautbolli's own origin-account fact already carries the dispute over whether the Icelandic prose descriptions preserve genuine pre-Christian practice or reflect a literary construction modelled on Christian liturgy, in full.
Related To
The twigs and the bowl form one matched ritual set in both saga sources.
Sources
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