Today we took a side trip from Uppsala to the town of Gamla Uppsala, or Old Uppsala. This was the pre-Christian religious center of Sweden.  Saxo Grammaticus wrote that Odin, chief of the Norse gods, lived in this place. The first Christian cathedral in Sweden was here in 1140, but when it burned a hundred years later, they built the new cathedral a few miles away in what is now Uppsala.

In Gamla Uppsala you can see (and walk on) the burial mounds which according to tradition belong to the Norse gods Thor, Odin and Freyr. Archaeologists have determined that they are the burial places of members of an ancient royal dynasty.