There is a remarkable glimpse of how this worked in practice through a document known as Heliand, ‘The Saviour’. Written in Old Saxon during the first half of the ninth century, it is a paraphrase of the gospel for a Germanic audience, tweaked for their sensibilities and pitched almost as a Norse saga though with biblical heroes. Thus we read of Jesus’s birth in Galileeland, his later travels to Jerusalemburg, and how the Lord lives in a great hall in the sky (clearly Valhöll). The Lord’s Prayer is in ‘secret runes’, Peter is given command over the gates of Hel (with one L), and so on. Satan’s temptation of Christ takes place in a northern wilderness filled with vague forces, ‘powerful beings’ that seem to live among the trees, and one wonders what this implies of the traditional Northern beliefs that were known to the Christian clerics. By the same token, Jesus’s disciples are ‘warrior-companions’, framed in the language of a warlord’s retinue, and the Last Supper is the ‘final mead-hall feast’. Even God is called by Odinnic epithets such as ‘Victory-Chieftain’ and ‘All-Ruler’. This is the kind of message that was taken into Scandinavia by the first missionaries—a doctrine meshed with the ancestral stories of the North and following a model found in many other conversion histories.