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.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to “realize” myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have “succeeded” this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is “realizable.” Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.”
—Eugène Ionesco (b. 1912)
“Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)