Yes, well, although I positively love Wikip., this is one of those articles that I
don't love. Here are the reasons:
A. there is nothing that says that that "final battle" had anything to do with heathens vs Christians in the first place, and
B. Sweden was not even Sweden then, and so there was no such thing as a Swedish king to claim ownership of Uppsala. If there had been, he'd not have lived in a "house" for sure, he'd have lived in a longhouse (that's not me being snotty, I'm just pointing out that there are a few things that tell me that wholever wrote the article hadn't done their homework.. There are important distinctions between all the different kinds of buildings out there, and in this context, you really need to be specific), and
the characteristic Norse tradition would have been for him to keep the longhouse of his predecessor rather than to build new ones for each king as the article implies. It is more likely that there is a longhouse with a number of storage houses, outhouses, barns, and lodging for visitors or warriors and their families than several buildings belonging to several kings. There weren't enough generations of kings between heathendom and when people started to write for there to be that many houses without us knowing who they belonged to. In any case, there were no kings, there were drotts, but that's about it.
C. The area was the last to be converted and so the likelyhood of Ingold's battle being the last between two lords where one was Christian and the other one wasn't is utter bullshit, to be frank.
D. There are all sorts of post holes all over Sweden, going back as far as the mesolithic. That doesn't mean they were post holes from a temple. According to Adam, this building was supposed to be huge. Not even Domkyrkancan be defined as "huge".
E. Like I said, the first churches built on the site were wooden constructions. Unlike Jesus, who apparently doesn't leave remains, churches leave post holes, which are indistinguishable from heathen temple post holes, or indian sweat lodges for that matter. In other words, you'd need some archaeological findings besides from the building itself to prove there was a temple there.
F. In all the ON litt, and the other "classical" litt, only groves and hargs and ve etc are mentioned, but actual temples, no, with one notable exception. So a temple would be an anomality, and as such, a temple is then more difficult to prove.
And as for 2000-3000 mounds...common now, how the hell do you just loose 1000 graves? There is a variance of 1000 dead people there, dude. If you do your homework, it's not very difficult to find out how many
graves there actually are, never mind mounds. Sloppy homework again. Whoever wrote the article gets detention from me just for that alone.
I think there
was some sort of structure, but the thing is that Adam never went there to see it. It could very well be that we're talking about a beautiful longhouse belonging to a rich lord in that area - someone with enough political clout to be able to host a thing and many warriors etc., and to build a very fancy building with all the riches that were typically associated with the longhouse and then some. The longhouse has a very long history that is extremely closely tied to the religious cult. The whole layout of the building is ruled by religious imagery and the building was also intimately tied to politics. As soon as people were converted, the longhouse structure disappeared. After 5000 or so years of the same construction, it just disappears within a few decades after the conversion of each individual area. A building that was that colsely tied to religious cult could quite easily have been perceived by someone like Adam as a "temple". And there certainly were some drotts in the area that had enough clout to build exquisite longhouses in huge size, and the whole purpose of such a building would have been to show political and religious (since the drott, as leader of the household and the warband, was in charge of religious ceremony) status. That, again, is just my own interpretation of things, though. There are just as many archaeologists that think there was a temple as there are those who think there wasn't. I take the middle path.
Krigly, I'll leave the answer to your question for Pagan, since Varg really wasn't active until after I left. But, having said that, churches have been burned for revenge in modern time, and for being planted on top of heathen sacred space also. Wheter it was Varg that did it, I don't know, but I bet Pagan does.
