Uppsalir (Uppsala)

Uppsala is the ancient sacred heart of heathen Sweden — the great temple-seat that, in Snorri's telling, the god Frey himself founded, beginning the line of Yngling kings from whom the whole Norwegian royal house descends. It is the centre of the old religion at its most awesome and most terrible: the place of the great sacrifices, where in the Ynglinga Saga the Swedes, through years of famine, offered first oxen, then men, then at last their own King Domald, reddening the altars with a king's blood for the sake of good seasons. Uppsala is where the corpus reaches back into its deepest, darkest pagan layer — sacral kingship, the king answerable with his life for the harvest, the god-descended dynasty dying its strange ritual deaths. The headwater temple from which the rivers of legend and royal blood both flow.