Old Norse religion in the context of "Norse mythology"

Religion in Iceland has been predominantly Christianity since its adoption as the state religion by the Althing under the influence of Olaf Tryggvason, the king of Norway, in 999/1000 CE. Until then, in the 9th and 10th centuries, the prevailing religion among the early Icelanders — who were mostly Norwegian settlers fleeing Harald Fairhair's monarchical centralisation in 872–930, with some Swedes and Norse British settlers — was the northern Germanic religion, which persisted for centuries even after the official Christianisation of the state.

Baltic Finnic paganism, or Baltic Finnic polytheism was the indigenous religion of the various Baltic Finnic peoples, specifically the Finns, Estonians, Võros, Setos, Karelians, Veps, Izhorians, Votes and Livonians, prior to Christianisation. It was a polytheistic religion, worshipping a number of different deities. The chief deity was the god of thunder and the sky, Ukko; other important deities included Jumala, Ahti, and Tapio. Jumala was a sky god; today, the word "Jumala" refers to a monotheistic God. Ahti was a god of the sea, waters and fish. Tapio was the god of the forest and hunting.

Baltic Finnic paganism included necrolatry (worship of the dead) and shamanism (tietäjä(t), literally "one who knows"), and the religion was not always uniform across the areas it was practiced, as customs and beliefs varied during different periods of time and regions. Baltic Finnic paganism shares some features with its neighbouring Baltic, Norse and Germanic pagan beliefs.

The Walhalla (German pronunciation: [valˈhala] ) is a hall of fame monument in Bavaria that honours laudable and distinguished people in German history – "politicians, sovereigns, scientists and artists of the German tongue"; While all new inductees since 1890 have been Germans or German-speakers, several earlier honorees came from outside modern Germany, which had not yet been established when the monument was built. Their inclusion reflects a 19th-century, still evolving, more loosely defined concept of "Germanness", one that would today be seen as conflating the term "German" with the much broader notion of having spoken a Germanic language or being of partial or supposed German ancestry.

The Walhalla memorial is named for the Valhǫll of Norse Paganism. It was conceived in 1807 by Crown Prince Ludwig I of Bavaria in order to support the gathering momentum for the unification of the many German states into the German Empire. Following his accession to the throne of Bavaria, construction took place between 1830 and 1842 under the supervision of the architect Leo von Klenze. The memorial displays some 65 plaques and 130 busts covering 2,000 years of history, beginning with Arminius, victor at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in the year 9 AD.

Norse cosmology is the account of the universe and its laws by the ancient North Germanic peoples. The topic encompasses concepts from Norse mythology and Old Norse religion such as notations of time and space, cosmogony, personifications, anthropogeny, and eschatology. Like other aspects of Norse mythology, these concepts are primarily recorded from earlier oral sources in the Poetic Edda, a collection of poems compiled in the 13th century, and the Prose Edda, attributed to the Icelander Snorri Sturluson in the 13th century. Together these sources depict an image of Nine Worlds around a cosmic tree, Yggdrasil.

In Old Norse, seiðr (sometimes anglicized as seidhr, seidh, seidr, seithr, seith, or seid) was a type of magic practiced in Norse society during the Late Scandinavian Iron Age. The practice of seiðr is believed to be a form of magic which is related to both the telling and the shaping of the future. Connected to the Old Norse religion, its origins are largely unknown, and its practice gradually declined after the Christianization of Scandinavia. Accounts of seiðr later made it into sagas and other literary sources, while further evidence of it has been unearthed by archaeologists. Various scholars have debated the nature of seiðr, some of them have argued that it was shamanic in context, involving visionary journeys by its practitioners.

Seiðr practitioners were of both sexes, with sorceresses being variously known as vǫlur, seiðkonur and vísendakona. There were also accounts of male practitioners, who were known as seiðmenn (or seiðmaðr in the singular). In many cases these magical practitioners would have had assistants to aid them in their rituals.