This mostly applies to the surviving written stories that are either recordings of pre-Christian stories (such as those found in the Poetic Edda), or post-Christian stories that were heavily influenced by pre-Christian beliefs (such as Beowulf).
The thing to keep in mind is the specific work's target audience.
I seriously doubt the bulk of surviving accounts of our Lore were written for what we'd call "posterity". Rather, they were written down because the author either liked them, or their audience liked them. All of them, without any exception that I'm aware of, were written by Christians, for Christian audiences. Not recently converted Christians, either, as by that point, their cultures had been Christian for at least the same amount of time that the US has existed. If the identity of Americans as Americans (separate from the English but still with a little love, perhaps a bit cultural nostalgic in nature, for English Lore such as the stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood) is anything to go by, your average person during the times these writings were made would probably be offended at the suggestion that they were pagan. Try calling your average American an Englishman.
Consider, also, folks like Tolkien, who longed for England to have a mythology of its own, and so set out to create one for himself only loosely based on what little survived (and actually succeeded fairly well, all things considered). However, his stories still contain heavy Christian themes because he was so devoutly Catholic.
Another thing to keep in mind, and this is really what inspired this thread in the first place, is that stories like Beowulf were composed for Kings. I seriously doubt your average Anglo-Saxon farmer would have been interested by the long lineage passages, or how great Kings are and that it's really not their fault, really, when things go wrong in the land!
The reason I'm saying all this is mostly to help newcomers to European Paganism remember that we know virtually nothing with certainty about what people believed before Christianity, since pre-Christian Northern Europeans didn't write stuff down much, and when they did, it had nothing to do with Lore. What little we do know has a lot of bias attached that has to be sifted through, but it can be difficult to separate the pre-Christian from the post-Christian influences, or the differing interests between classes or Tribes/Kingdoms. What I know with 90% certainty, however, is that there was far, far more diversity in terms of what was believed and practiced, even regarding the same Gods and stories, than romanticized portrayals of these people suggest.
A good microcosm of this divide is the issue of Valhalla. Nowadays, we say that those who die in battle go to either Valhalla or Folkvangr, while everyone else goes to Helheim. But from what I've seen, such a distinction is only in the Prose Edda; other sources suggest there may not have been any differences between these realms, and that they were all just kennings for the same place.
The thing to keep in mind is the specific work's target audience.
I seriously doubt the bulk of surviving accounts of our Lore were written for what we'd call "posterity". Rather, they were written down because the author either liked them, or their audience liked them. All of them, without any exception that I'm aware of, were written by Christians, for Christian audiences. Not recently converted Christians, either, as by that point, their cultures had been Christian for at least the same amount of time that the US has existed. If the identity of Americans as Americans (separate from the English but still with a little love, perhaps a bit cultural nostalgic in nature, for English Lore such as the stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood) is anything to go by, your average person during the times these writings were made would probably be offended at the suggestion that they were pagan. Try calling your average American an Englishman.
Consider, also, folks like Tolkien, who longed for England to have a mythology of its own, and so set out to create one for himself only loosely based on what little survived (and actually succeeded fairly well, all things considered). However, his stories still contain heavy Christian themes because he was so devoutly Catholic.
Another thing to keep in mind, and this is really what inspired this thread in the first place, is that stories like Beowulf were composed for Kings. I seriously doubt your average Anglo-Saxon farmer would have been interested by the long lineage passages, or how great Kings are and that it's really not their fault, really, when things go wrong in the land!
The reason I'm saying all this is mostly to help newcomers to European Paganism remember that we know virtually nothing with certainty about what people believed before Christianity, since pre-Christian Northern Europeans didn't write stuff down much, and when they did, it had nothing to do with Lore. What little we do know has a lot of bias attached that has to be sifted through, but it can be difficult to separate the pre-Christian from the post-Christian influences, or the differing interests between classes or Tribes/Kingdoms. What I know with 90% certainty, however, is that there was far, far more diversity in terms of what was believed and practiced, even regarding the same Gods and stories, than romanticized portrayals of these people suggest.
A good microcosm of this divide is the issue of Valhalla. Nowadays, we say that those who die in battle go to either Valhalla or Folkvangr, while everyone else goes to Helheim. But from what I've seen, such a distinction is only in the Prose Edda; other sources suggest there may not have been any differences between these realms, and that they were all just kennings for the same place.
