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Germanic Religion
GERMANIC RELIGION: AN OVERVIEW From the linguistic point of view, the Germanic people constitute an archaic branch of the Indo-European family. The earliest Germanic culture that archaeologists identify as such is the so-called Jastorf culture, a cultural province of northern Europe in the Early Iron Age (c. 600 bce) covering present-day Holstein, Jutland, northeast Saxony, and western ...
Germanic Religion: History of Study
GERMANIC RELIGION: HISTORY OF STUDY. This article concentrates on the most recent phase of the history of scholarship on Germanic religion. A 1956 study by Jan de Vries provides a detailed review of work up to the middle of the twentieth century, and 1985 reviews by Joseph Harris and John Lindow cover developments up to the early 1980s.
Germanic Peoples
Teutons. Little can be gleaned from the writings of classical authors on the subject, but manuscripts of the Middle Ages by such writers as Snorri Sturluson and Saemund Sigf ú sson (The Eddas) and Saxo Grammaticus, and such epics or pseudohistories as The Nibelungenlied, shed some light on Teutonic magic practice and beliefs.. From these writers one can arrive at several basic conclusions: (1 ...
Afterlife: Germanic Concepts
AFTERLIFE: GERMANIC CONCEPTS The Old Norse accounts that supply most of the detailed information about pre-Christian Germanic religion picture several different kinds of afterlife. These can be simplified into two contrasting general concepts of life after death. In one view, the dead traveled to one of several halls depending upon how they died.
Theologia Germanica
THEOLOGIA GERMANICA The title given to an anonymous treatise written by a priest of the Teutonic Order at Sachsenhausen toward the end of the 14th century. The first printed edition was made under the direction of Martin Luther, who was influenced by it in the early phases of his career and who found its opposition to good works and its doctrine on individual religion favorable to his own ...