History
It is a testimony to the sanctity of the location in the mindset of medieval Norse pagans that Gamla Uppsala was the last stronghold of pagan Germanic kingship. During the 1070s and 1080 there appears to have been a pagan renaissance with the magnificent Temple at Uppsala described in a contested account through an eye-witness by Adam of Bremen. Adam of Bremen relates of the Uppsala of the 1070s and describes it as a pagan cult centre with the enormous Temple at Uppsala containing wooden statues of Odin, Thor and Freyr.
Sometime in the 1080s the Christian king Ingi was exiled for refusing to perform the sacrifices. Instead Blot-Sweyn was elected, but he was killed by Ingi who could then reclaim his throne.
It is a testimony of Gamla Uppsala's great importance in Swedish tradition, that when Sweden received its Archbishopric in 1164, it was located in Gamla Uppsala. In practice, it had, however, lost its strategic importance due to the constant land elevation.
Read more about this topic: Gamla Uppsala
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“No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1874–1945)
“Books of natural history aim commonly to be hasty schedules, or inventories of God’s property, by some clerk. They do not in the least teach the divine view of nature, but the popular view, or rather the popular method of studying nature, and make haste to conduct the persevering pupil only into that dilemma where the professors always dwell.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
—J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)