The Last Heathens

THE LAST HEATHENS From Proto-Indo-Europeans to the Viking Age and Charlemagne’s War on the Old GodsTwelve thousand years ago, three peoples who had never met-hunter-gatherers of the northern forests, farmers migrating out of Anatolia, and horse-riding pastoralists from the steppes beyond the Black Sea-began the long, slow collision that would become Northern Europe. The Last Heathens traces that story from its deepest roots in ancient DNA through the rise of the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker peoples, the bronze-forging warrior elites of Scandinavia, the tribal confederacies that stunned Rome at Teutoburg Forest, and the sacred groves, sun chariots, and rune-carved horns of a religious world that endured for millennia.But this is also a book about resistance. It follows the pagan north into its final centuries: the Saxon leader Widukind, who fought Charlemagne’s armies for a generation rather than abandon the old gods, and the thousands executed at Verden under a law that made worshipping them a capital crime. It follows the Cathars of southern France, crushed at Montségur, and the strange afterlife their story acquired in the hands of Otto Rahn-an amateur Grail-hunter whose sincere, flawed scholarship was later seized upon by the SS for purposes he never intended and, by most accounts, wanted no part of.Drawing on the archaeogenetic revolution of the past decade-the work of David Reich, Kristian Kristiansen, and the labs that have sequenced thousands of ancient skeletons-The Last Heathens replaces the racial mythology that has dogged this subject since the nineteenth century with what the evidence actually shows: real communities of real people, mixing, migrating, worshipping, and, in the end, fighting to keep their gods.This is a history of the north as it happened-not as it was later imagined.