Vilhelm Gr nbech was a preeminent professor of the history of religion at the University of Copenhagen in the early twentieth century. His vast breadth of knowledge of world cultures and religions had profound effect on Danish academic thought, and in The Culture of the Teutons, Gr nbech turns his keen analysis toward his own culture, that of Germanic Europe. Gr nbech draws upon a rich panoply of sources in the Norse sagas, legal rulings, and historical figures both living and mythological to deliver for us a compelling thesis of the tribes that harried Rome, of the Viking Age, of pagan rituals and later widespread adoption of Christianity as much more than the sum of bloodthirsty plundering, as less charitable historians have condemned them. Instead, we delve into a culture alien to that of Tacitus or the Greeks, misunderstood for hundreds if not thousands of years. In seeming contradiction, the pagan worldview is foreign compared to our own today, or to the culturally imperialistic
