Page:The Heimskringla; or, Chronicle of the Kings of Norway Vol 1.djvu/99

 planted from Norway by the first aristocratical settlers, and where Christianity had no royal supporters, the Thing of the people declared Christianity the lawful religion of the land. The institutions of Odinism, as well as its doctrines, were evidently become extinct as religion. The incompatible elements of civil power, wealth, and sacerdotal function, had lost all religious influence. The mixture is at this day as ineffective in its power over the human mind as it was in the 11th century, and in the Christian religion as it was in Odinism.

The only practices connected with religion mentioned in the sagas, at which a priesthood may have officiated, are sacrifices, at the three great festivals, of cattle, which were killed and feasted upon. The door-post, floor, and people are stated to have been sprinkled with the blood of the sacrifice by a brush; but even this may be a fiction of the saga-maker, taken from the similar sprinkling of holy water by a brush in the Romish church. The best established of the religious practices of the Odin worshippers was the partaking of horse-flesh at those festivals, as commemorative of their ancestors. This practice was transplanted even to Iceland by the pagan settlers, and it held its ground there long after Christianity was adopted. As food, the horse never could have been reared in Iceland; and a religious or popular superstition only must have kept up such a custom there. The eating of horse-flesh at those festivals appears to have been held as decisive a test of paganism, as baptism of Christianity; and was punished by death in the 11th century by Saint Olaf. Public business, however, in the Things, and the ordinary business and pleasures of great country fairs, appear to have occupied the people at those festivals much more than any religious observances. Public worship under any form, or private or household devotion in the Odin religion,