Mære is a village in the municipality of

Steinkjer Steinkjer is a municipality in Trøndelag county, Norway. It is part of the Innherad region. The administrative centre of the municipality is the town of Steinkjer which is located on the inner part of the Trondheimsfjord. The town is also th ...

Trøndelag Trøndelag (; sma, Trööndelage) is a county in the central part of Norway. It was created in 1687, then named Trondhjem County ( no, Trondhjems Amt); in 1804 the county was split into Nord-Trøndelag and Sør-Trøndelag by the King of Denma ...

county,

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic country in Northern Europe, the mainland territory of which comprises the western and northernmost portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the ...

. It is located along European route E6 and the

Nordlandsbanen The Nordland Line ( no, Nordlandsbanen, ) is a railway line between Trondheim and Bodø, Norway. It is the longest in Norway and lacks electrification. The route runs through the counties of Trøndelag (formerly Sør-Trøndelag and Nord-Trøndel ...

railway line, about south of the town of Steinkjer. The village of Sparbu lies about south of Mære. Mære Church is located in this village as well. Mære kirke

The village has a population (2018) of 460 and a

population density Population density (in agriculture: Stock (disambiguation), standing stock or plant density) is a measurement of population per unit land area. It is mostly applied to humans, but sometimes to other living organisms too. It is a key geographical ...

of .

History

In the early

Viking Age The Viking Age () was the period during the Middle Ages when Norsemen known as Vikings undertook large-scale raiding, colonizing, conquest, and trading throughout Europe and reached North America. It followed the Migration Period and the Germ ...

, according to the

Sagas is a series of science fantasy role-playing video games by Square Enix. The series originated on the Game Boy in 1989 as the creation of Akitoshi Kawazu at Square. It has since continued across multiple platforms, from the Super NES to th ...

, Mære was one of the most important religious ceremonial places, with sacrifices to the

Norse gods Norse is a demonym for Norsemen, a medieval North Germanic ethnolinguistic group ancestral to modern Scandinavians, defined as speakers of Old Norse from about the 9th to the 13th centuries. Norse may also refer to: Culture and religion * Nors ...

. Under the medieval church at Mære, traces of preceding

heathen hof A heathen hof or Germanic pagan temple was a temple building of Germanic religion; a few have also been built for use in modern heathenry. The term ''hof'' is taken from Old Norse. Background Etymologically, the Old Norse word ''hof'' is the s ...

were found in archeological investigations during the 1960s, the only case in Norway so far of a pre-Christian building being found to have existed on the site of a church.

References

Villages in Trøndelag Steinkjer {{Trøndelag-geo-stub