Qualla: Irminsul

Irminsul: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Linear77, CC BY 3.0. A stone column was dug out of the ground at Obermarsberg during the reign of Louis the Pious, carted to Hildesheim Cathedral, and set up inside as a candelabrum. Records from Hildesheim between the ninth and thirteenth centuries treat it as a trophy: this was the thing the Saxons had bowed to, now holding candles for the God who replaced it. Nobody today can say whether it was the Irminsul or a piece of Roman spolia that suited the story. That is roughly the state of the evidence for the most famous object in Saxon paganism — everything about it is secondhand, and most of it was written by the people who destroyed it.

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Image: Linear77 | CC BY 3.0

Irminsul: 772

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Heinrich Leutemann (1824-1904)., Public domain. The oldest account is a single entry in the Royal Frankish Annals. In 772, at the opening of what became more than thirty years of Saxon Wars, Charlemagne's army took the Saxon stronghold at Eresburg — modern Obermarsberg, on a plateau above the Diemel — and destroyed the Irminsu...

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Image: Heinrich Leutemann (1824-1904). | Public domain

Irminsul: A Great Pillar Under the Open Sky

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit HOWI - Horsch, Willy, CC BY-SA 3.0. What it was comes almost entirely from Rudolf of Fulda, writing around 865 in De miraculis sancti Alexandri, nearly a century after the fact. He describes a great wooden pillar, erected and worshipped in the open air, and glosses the name as the universal, all-sustaining column. ...

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Image: HOWI - Horsch, Willy | CC BY-SA 3.0

Irminsul: The Chair That Became a Symbol

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gunnar Ries, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1929 a German lay archaeologist named Wilhelm Teudt looked at the medieval relief carved into the Externsteine rocks near Detmold — a Descent from the Cross — and identified a bent shape at Nicodemus's feet as an Irminsul, drooping in defeat. He published a straightened-up ver...

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Image: Gunnar Ries | CC BY-SA 3.0

Irminsul: Irmenseul, 1996

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Varus111, CC BY-SA 3.0. This particular point on the map is not Eresburg. It is a village in the hills south of Hildesheim, in Lower Saxony, whose name — Irmenseul — has carried the word for centuries with no evidence that the pillar ever stood here. Place-names travel. So do claims. In 1996 the villag...

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Image: Varus111 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Irminsul: Reading the Gap

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Rolf Speckner at German Wikipedia. (Original text: Marianne Klement Speckner. Steenkamp 17, 22607 Hamburg. 0408992083), Public domain. There is a lesson in the Irminsul that has nothing to do with paganism. Almost everything known about pre-Christian Saxony survives only in the accounts of the people who ended it, filtered through a further century or two of copying, and then interpreted by later generations wit...

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Image: The original uploader was Rolf Speckner at German Wikipedia. (Original text: Marianne Klement Speckner. Steenkamp 17, 22607 Hamburg. 0408992083) | Public domain