Heathen hofs

A heathen hof or Germanic pagan temple was a temple building of Germanic paganism; a few have also been built for use in modern Germanic neopaganism. The term hof is taken from Old Norse.

Etymologically, the Old Norse word hof is the same as the Dutch and German word hof, which originally meant a hall and later came to refer to a court (originally in the meaning of a royal or aristocratic court) and then also to a farm. In medieval Scandinavian sources, it occurs once as a hall, in the Eddic poem Hymiskviða, and beginning in the fourteenth century, in the "court" meaning. Otherwise, it occurs only as a word for a temple.Hof also occasionally occurs with the meaning "temple" in Old High German. In Scandinavia during the Viking Age, it appears to have displaced older terms for a sacred place, vé, hörgr, lundr, vangr, and vin, particularly in the West Norse linguistic area, namely Norway and Iceland. It is the dominant word for a temple in the Icelandic sagas, but is rare in skaldic poetry.

Many places in Scandinavia, but especially in West Norse regions, are named hof or hov, either alone or in combination. These include:

Some placenames, often names of farms, combine the word, such as:

There is also one in England: the village of Hoff in Cumbria, with an associated Hoff Lund, "temple grove."

The nature of Germanic places of worship has long been a subject of scholarly debate. Tacitus famously wrote in Germania:

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