SOURCE: Karras, Ruth Mazo. “God and Man in Medieval Scandinavia: Writing—and Gendering—the Conversion.” In Varieties of Religious Conversion in the Middle Ages, edited by James Muldoon, pp. 100-14. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1997.

In the following essay, Karras examines how three thirteenth-century works—the Gesta Danorum, the Heimskringla of Snorri Sturluson, and Njal's Saga—differ in their accounts of the history of paganism and the advent of Christianity.

Stories of individual conversions are usually written by the subjects themselves. Such accounts tell us what they experienced and how they interpreted that experience—at least as much of it as they choose to reveal. Stories of the conversions of peoples, however, cannot be written by their subjects. Even if one member of the group in question writes the story, that one person is interpreting the experiences of others. More usually the writer is a contemporary outsider—the...