Building upon several decades of the author’s consideration of and publications on this book’s topic and related matters, Olof Sundqvist’s The Demise of Norse Religion: Dismantling and Defending the Old Order in Viking Age Scandinavia offers a comprehensive account and discussion of sources for the processes of conversion from pagan or heathen Norse religion to Christianity that occurred in stops and starts in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Iceland from roughly the ninth through twelfth centuries. Combining data used in and scholarly insights from the fields of literary studies, archaeology, and the history of religions, Sundqvist aims to add to existing treatments of the topic by focusing more than others have done on what disappeared or was replaced, i.e., the Old Norse religious system with its concepts, practices, officiants, etc., “with particular focus on the role of Viking kings and indigenous agency in the winding up of the native religion” (13). Sundqvist characterizes his as an “actor-oriented approach” that improves upon three existing competing, if overlapping, explanations, which he labels the theories of decay, clash, and adaptation (47–59). His sources include texts in Old Norse and Latin (e.g., sagas, saints’ lives, regional national and church histories, law codes, and Snorri Sturluson’s Edda), skaldic poetry, grave finds, runestones, and onomastic data. A few maps and figures (color photographs of landscapes, runestones, churches, and so on) are included.

After a brief “Preface” that is really more of an “Acknowledgements,” the book is divided into four parts of two, five, four, and one chapters (totaling twelve), respectively. Part I, “Prolegomena,” describes the focus of, sets out the agenda for, and broadly reviews earlier scholarship relevant to the study. Part II, titled “The role of rulers as agents in the winding up of the native religion,” reviews mostly literary data, which will be familiar to most readers, for how kings and other Norse rulers focused largely on eliminating and replacing ritual practices and modifying their own roles as cult leaders as means of transitioning from paganism to Christianity. Part III, titled “Pagans fight back,” looks again at mostly literary evidence for how pagans resisted religious change in specific parts of Sweden and Norway, and then in Iceland. Part IV, “Epilegomena,” i.e., chapter 12, summarizes the book’s findings.

The chief service that Sundqvist’s book provides is presenting to an English readership a thorough account of the evidence for processes of religious change in Norse societies, and addressing, summarizing, and responding to a vast body of research published over a long period of time in a number of languages. Ultimately, however, the rewards for digesting its over 400 pages are fewer than might have been hoped for. One disappointment is that the book covers mostly well-trod ground, both in terms of the sources that are explored and what is made of them. For example, chapter four concludes its over 100-page survey of “rulers’ strategies for doing away with former religious practice and beliefs” (75) with the fairly obvious and somewhat tautological observation that rulers “ultimately aimed at dismantling the indigenous religion [… in order] to build a new social community and identity with Christian signs” (182–183). Here, the action being accounted for and its proposed motivation are essentially identical. The book also sometimes concedes that its approaches and insights are not as novel as it claims at other times. For instance, while Sundqvist writes that in order to avoid a false choice between “two competing theories in the research about the religious change in Scandinavia […,] one [that] emphasizes that it took place under peaceful condition with a slow and gradual process, and the other [that] accentuates conflicts and violent encounters with an abrupt ending,” he will offer “a contextual approach” in which “all types of sources are investigated and compared,” he admits in a note that “[s]uch a contextual and interdisciplinary approach has been more common the last three or four decades” (222, last quotation in footnote 4).

A third weakness of the text is its many and often significant grammatical problems. Rampant problems with syntax, non-standard English expression, typos, use of wrong pronouns, wrong word choices, mistaken (or at least nonstandard) word usage, noun–verb agreement, and so on, pose a major distraction for readers, as they occur on virtually every page. To provide just a few examples: “demise” is used repeatedly as a verb or an adjective, as in “the Old Norse religion demised” (10) or “elements of the demising religion” (26); “extinct” is used as a verb (“extinct that staff that controlled […]” (26); “royalties” is used for “kings” or “monarchs” (e.g., 6), “clericals” for “clerics” or “clergy” (e.g., 16), and “locals” for “locales” or “localities” (e.g., 17); in the space of just a few pages, “pursue” is used where “persuade” is meant (235), “estimated” for “esteemed” (237), and “restored to” for “resorted to” (239); and simple typos, e.g., “speach” (103), “coersive” (119), or a misspelling of a scholar’s name (“Robins” for “Robbins” [147, footnote 280]), abound. There is also some lack of care or clarity in presenting quotations of others’ work, ranging from typos in quotations (e.g., the example from 239 cited above) to paraphrases (which sometimes are presented in ways that suggest they are straight quotations) that introduce grammatical infelicities not present in the cited material. For example, Sundqvist’s text replaces Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes’s “The king came during the night inland to Mærin. Then a house there was straightway surrounded” (Snorri Sturluson, Heimskringla Volume II: Óláfr Haraldsson (The Saint), trans. Alison Finlay and Anthony Faulkes [Viking Society, 2014, corrected 2016], 118) with—in a block quotation and with a note reading stating “Trans. Finlay & Faulkes 2014”—“The king came during the night to Mære. Then a house there was straightly surrounded” (317). Greater care in its preparation, then, would have greatly benefitted this volume and its usableness.