Gamla Uppsala

• 1. Introduction

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  Gamla Uppsala sits on the Fyris Wolds, a cultivated plain in Sweden, and for more than a thousand years it held together the sacred, the royal, and the legal in a way no other place in Scandinavia could claim. The oldest Scandinavian sources, among them Ynglingatal and the Westrogothic law, refer to the ruler of the Swedes not as a king of Sweden but as the "King at Uppsala," a title that compressed an entire political identity into a single place name. What made this village so central? Why did kings, priests, and eventually archbishops all plant their authority here? And what lies beneath its ancient mounds? Those questions pull through the full story of Gamla Uppsala, from the sacrificial groves described by an 11th-century chronicler to the excavation ordered by a future Swedish king, to the burial gifts of a warrior whose sword was Frankish and whose game pieces were Roman ivory.

• 2. The Sacred Centre

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  The Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus wrote that Odin himself had chosen Gamla Uppsala as his preferred dwelling place, residing there "with somewhat especial constancy" because of its pleasantness. The Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson offered a different arrangement: in his account, it was the god Freyr who took up residence at Gamla Uppsala, while Odin settled in nearby Fornsigtuna. Snorri recorded a direct speech attributed to tradition, in which Freyr is said to have built a great temple at Uppsala, made it his chief seat, and given it all his taxes, his land, and goods, establishing what became known as the Upsal domains.

  Saxo added a darker detail. He wrote that Freyr exchanged the old custom of prayer by sacrifice for something more terrible: the beginning of human sacrifice at the site. Adam of Bremen, writing in the 11th century, described the temple he knew from a witness account as built entirely of gold, housing wooden statues of three gods, and surrounded by a sacred grove. In that grove, Adam noted, bodies of sacrificed creatures hung from every tree; a Christian informant told him he had counted seventy-two bodies hanging there together. A spring near the grove was used for a different kind of offering: a human being was immersed alive, and as long as the body was not found, the community held that their request would be fulfilled.

  A general festival for all the provinces of Sweden was held at Uppsala every nine years, and attendance was required of everyone, kings and subjects alike. Over nine days, one human being was sacrificed each day alongside other animals, reaching a total of seventy-two victims. A golden chain encircled the temple and caught the eye of those approaching from across the plain. An enormous tree stood near the temple, with widespread branches that remained green through winter and summer alike, and no one could identify its species. The Swedish Asatru Society restarted the tradition of holding religious ceremonies called blots at Gamla Uppsala in the year 2000.

• 3. Kings, Laws, and Assembly

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  Every late February or early March, the Thing of all Swedes gathered at Gamla Uppsala. A thing was a general assembly, and this one drew people from across the Swedish lands for legal business, royal proclamation, and communal ritual. The Law of Uppland records that it was at this assembly that the king announced whether the fleet levy would be summoned for warfare in the coming summer. At that moment, all the crews, rowers, commanders, and ships were assigned. The assembly bound military obligation to a specific moment in a specific place, and that place was Gamla Uppsala.

  The assembly was held alongside two other observances: a great fair called Disting and a Norse religious celebration called Disablot. Commerce, law, and worship occupied the same days and the same ground. During the Middle Ages, Gamla Uppsala was the largest village in Uppland, and the eastern part of that region probably formed the original core of the Uppsala od, the complex of properties belonging to the Swedish Crown. The western part of the Uppsala od was the royal estate itself, known as kungsgarden.

  The political primacy of the location began to erode when the land itself changed. Post-glacial rebound, the slow but continuous rising of land that follows the retreat of ancient ice sheets, gradually cut Gamla Uppsala off from navigable waters. Without direct water access, the strategic argument for keeping power centered there weakened, and the seat of the archbishopric eventually moved south to Ostra Aros in 1273. That town was then renamed Uppsala at papal request, which is why the original settlement required the modifier "Gamla," meaning old.

• 4. The Royal Mounds

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  Three large barrows rise from the landscape at Gamla Uppsala, known collectively as Kungshogarna, or the Royal Mounds. In the 19th and 20th centuries, they were associated by name with three kings of the semi-legendary House of Ynglings, called Aun's Mound, Adils's Mound, and Egil's Mound. Today their names are purely geographical: the Eastern Mound, the Middle Mound, and the Western Mound. They are dated to the 5th and 6th centuries. According to folklore, the three gods Thor, Odin, and Freyr rest within them.

  The Ynglinga saga described the burial customs that shaped these mounds. The fire of a royal funeral pyre could reach temperatures of 1,500 degrees Celsius. After burning, the remains were covered with cobblestones, then a layer of gravel and sand, and finally a thin layer of turf. The saga gave a reason for the grandeur: the higher the smoke rose in the air, the higher the dead would be raised, and the richer he would be, the more property consumed with him.

  In the 1830s, some scholars argued the mounds were natural formations rather than human constructions. The future Swedish king Karl XV found this intolerable for monuments of national identity and ordered an excavation. The task fell to Bror Emil Hildebrand, the director-general of the National Archives. In 1846, Hildebrand opened the Eastern Mound, which stood nine metres tall, by digging a tunnel twenty-five metres into its interior.

  The finds inside were complex and surprising. Hildebrand's team found a clay pot filled with burnt bones, surrounded by charred grave offerings. Fragments of decorated bronze panels depicted a dancing warrior holding a spear; these panels had probably adorned a helmet of the Vendel Age type, with the only foreign parallels being the Sutton Hoo and Staffordshire helmets. Gold fragments may have belonged to a scramasax or a belt. The dead had been given glass beakers, a tafl game, a comb, and a hone. The remains pointed not to a single male warrior king but to a woman, or possibly a young man and a woman together. Hildebrand reburied most of the remains, meaning a fresh excavation will be needed before the question of identity can be settled.

• 5. What the Western Mound Held

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  In 1874, Hildebrand returned to Gamla Uppsala and opened the Western Mound by cutting an enormous shaft down into the centre of the cairn. Beneath the cobblestones, the charred remnants of a funeral fire were still identifiable. The person buried here was different from the occupant of the Eastern Mound. The remains were those of a man, accompanied by animals that were probably intended as food for the journey ahead.

  The objects buried with this man spoke of reach. His sword was Frankish, adorned with gold and garnets. A board game found with him used Roman pawns carved from ivory. He wore a suit made of Frankish cloth woven with golden threads and a belt with a sumptuous buckle. Four cameos from the Middle East, probably once part of a casket, were among the finds. These objects together show that the people of Uppland in the 6th century were not isolated. They maintained contacts stretching from the Frankish kingdoms to Rome to the Middle East.

  The warrior's weapons and clothing marked him as someone of extraordinary power. No single item in the burial was locally ordinary, and the combination of imported luxuries from such distant origins suggests a man who moved goods and relationships across the known world, or whose reputation commanded them as tribute. The Eastern Mound may still hold its secrets, but the Western Mound offered something definitive: a picture of Gamla Uppsala not as a remote northern backwater but as a node in a wide network of prestige and exchange.

• 6. Church, Cathedral, and Continuity

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  Gamla Uppsala became Sweden's first archbishopric in 1164, a decision that placed Christian institutional authority at the same location where Norse religion had been practiced for centuries. The stone church that stands there today was probably begun in the 11th century and finished in the 12th. It may have been preceded by a wooden church, and before that, archaeologists believe it likely sat on the same ground as the large Temple at Uppsala. The pattern of building churches on pre-Christian sacred sites was common, and Gamla Uppsala fits that pattern almost too neatly.

  A fire in 1240 destroyed much of the original cathedral. The nave and transepts were removed in the aftermath, leaving only the choir and the central tower. The sacristy and porch were added later, giving the church its current outer form. In the 15th century, vaults were installed alongside chalk paintings. Three medieval wooden crucifixes survive from the 12th, 13th, and 15th centuries.

  Archbishop Valerius was buried here. King Eric IX of Sweden was buried here before his remains were moved to Uppsala Cathedral. The astronomer, physicist, and mathematician Anders Celsius, born in 1701 and died in 1744, was buried at Gamla Uppsala Church alongside his grandfather Magnus Celsius, who had lived from 1621 to 1679.

  Excavations beneath the present church have found the remains of one or more large wooden buildings, and the debate over whether those structures were the Temple of Uppsala or an early Christian wooden church has not been resolved. On a plateau of clay adjacent to the church, known as the Kunsgardspla tan, archaeologists have found the remains of a large hall, pointing to a royal presence that preceded both the temple traditions and the cathedral that followed them. Pope John Paul II visited in 1989 and held an open-air mass at the Royal Mounds, an event that carried particular weight given that those same mounds had once anchored the Norse religion this site replaced.