Duke Henry the Lion, King Waldemar, and Bishop Absalon answer the Pope's call for the Northern Crusade to Christianize Baltic Slavs. Being successful in achieving their goal, and having subdued the Slavs, they witness the strange and unusual temples, statues, customs, and divination rituals of the Wendish Slavs, artefacts and practices that are scarcely, if at all, documented in other sources, and appear or deduced from archeological finds. Among the literary sources on the pre-Christian religion and mythology of the Slavs, the Western, German-Danish, and Latin texts, while predominantly highly fragmented and biased, distinguish themselves when compared to the Arab and Old Rus' sources by their relative scrupulousness and less obvious agendas. Even in the backdrop of the other Western sources, accounts of Saxo Grammaticus are especially characterized by the detailed and rigorous descriptions and the minimal use of ideologically motivated narrative instruments. The following translation, with all its imperfections, is intended to make Saxo Grammaticus' texts more accessible for a wider circle of readers, both specialists and not; present frequently overlooked fragments; and correct some of the errors, traditionally creeping from one of the Saxo's account overview to another.
Stanislaw Sielicki is a history, political philosophy and comparative mythology enthusiast. He was writing short forms on the Internet long before the terms "blogger", "social networking" and "Web forums" were invented. If you are familiar with such names and abbreviations as Usenet, Fido or BBS, you have got the idea. His motto is "If you are 100 percent, positively sure that a particular historical event developed in a certain way, it is the time to carefully and rigorously check your sources!"
