The aim of this thesis is to consider a selection of recently excavated Viking Age farms and cult sites, Norse texts, and textual motifs related to pre-Christian cult buildings in the Viking Age, and to undertake a re-evaluation of some Norse texts as sources to pre-Christian religion on a comparative basis which combines philological source criticism with recent advances in archaeology. My hypothesis is that the archaeological advances of recent decades lend support to descriptions in the written sources which scholars from the 1960’s onwards have generally assumed to be unreliable.