Nearly an hour’s drive north of Stockholm, Sweden’s capital, sits the important ecclesiastical and academic city of Uppsala. It’s the seat of the archbishop of Sweden and of the nation’s oldest university, established in 1477.
Anders Celsius (d. 1744), the astronomer, physicist and mathematician who gave us the centigrade (or Celsius) temperature scale, was born in Uppsala, taught at its illustrious university, died at home and is buried in Uppsala’s “Old Church.” Another native son and graduate of the city’s university is the former United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld, a diplomat and religious thinker who died in a mysterious 1961 African airplane crash while on a peacekeeping mission. His body rests in Uppsala’s “Old Churchyard.”
Uppsala Cathedral itself is the last resting place of many important Swedes, including the powerful king Gustav Vasa (d. 1560), who presided over the Swedish Reformation; the great biologist Carl Linnaeus (d. 1778), whose “binomial” system of classifying organisms is used by scientists around the world (e.g., Homo sapiens for human, “Canis familiaris” for dog, “Sequoiadendron giganteum” for giant redwood, etc.); and the fascinating scientist and mystic Emanuel Swedenborg (d. 1772). The cathedral possesses relics of St. Bridget (or Birgitta) of Sweden, one of Europe’s six patron saints, and of Eric IX Jedvardsson, Sweden’s own patron saint, who was martyred in 1160 on the very site where the cathedral stands.
Today’s Uppsala Cathedral, however, is a latecomer to the city’s religious life. It was built essentially between the late 13th century and the early 15th, but a portion of its predecessor survives and is still in use as a parish church about 3 miles to the north. And, as any visitor to the older church can readily see, important things were going on at that place — today called “Gamla Uppsala” or “Old Uppsala” — even before construction of the original cathedral.
From perhaps as early as the third century A.D., and certainly from the fourth century onward, Gamla Uppsala was a vital Scandinavian religious and political center. It was the residence of early Swedish kings, for example, and the Thing of All Swedes, the country’s governing assembly, met there well into medieval times.
Moreover, Gamla Uppsala was the site of an enormously important pagan temple, known even before the Viking age throughout Scandinavia and beyond. It was a wooden structure that’s said to have contained magnificent statues of the Norse gods, to whom human sacrifices were sometimes offered. In fact, some writers claim that the chief god, Odin or Wotan — or, perhaps, the god Freyr — actually once lived in Uppsala. Three large artificial hills or barrows in Gamla Uppsala, known in Swedish as the “Royal Mounds,” were thought by some to be the burial sites of Odin, Freyr and Thor.
The Old English poem “Beowulf,” composed as early as the seventh or eighth century, explicitly mentions Gamla Uppsala and describes events and people from two centuries before its composition. One of them is a wealthy and covetous king called Eadgils (d. circa 575), whose burial place has probably been identified in one of the “Royal Mounds.” There, a man’s body was found buried on a bear skin, adorned with rich cloth (including golden thread), armed with a Frankish sword, accompanied by two dogs and by ivory pieces from a board game, surrounded by four Middle Eastern cameos that likely once decorated his coffin — and that illustrate the far-flung trade networks of early Scandinavia.
When Christianity began to prevail in Sweden, Uppsala was among the last strongholds of the ancient pagan Viking faith. Finally, though, it surrendered. When Sweden was granted an archbishopric in 1164, Uppsala became its seat. The small parish church of Gamla Uppsala is thought to stand upon the very spot where the great Norse temple stood before it. And, directly adjacent to it, ruins have been located of what was likely a large royal hall, much like Heorot, the hall in which Beowulf feasted before going to fight the monster Grendel — and like Meduseld, the great hall of Rohan in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
When fire seriously damaged the original cathedral at Gamla Uppsala in 1204, locals sought permission to move it to a better location at “Östra Aros” or “Eastern Aros,” the place where St. Eric had been martyred. Pope Alexander IV granted their request, on condition that the name “Uppsala” be transferred with it. The small parish church that remains sits in a meadow, serene after a dramatic history.
Daniel Peterson founded BYU's Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, chairs The Interpreter Foundation and blogs on Patheos. William Hamblin is the author of several books on premodern history. They speak only for themselves.