14. Conclusions
This is not currently part of the peer-reviewed material of the project. Do not cite as a research publication.
A wide range of phenomena can be linked and exported according to various models, despite the extremely disparate body of sources for the pre-Christian religions of the North. Although other source types and problems arising from them are not documented here, it is likely that with minor modifications they can be incorporated into the structure.
This paper has proposed that the central concepts relating to religious phenomena can be abstracted from the texts and images that bear witness to them; and that the texts can be abstracted from the different material evidence for them. This results in an analytical structure for the pre-Christian religions in which the religious phenomena, the textual basis for them and the material evidence for them are all linked, and the interpretative processes are separated from the non-interpretative processes. This provides a firmer foundation for the study of pre-Christian religions than projects which do not integrate the material evidence and analysis.
The structure allows for the investigation of new questions that hitherto have been difficult or required duplicating data gathering, such as: How diverse was the worship of certain figures and other religious practices? What is the evidence base for accepted religious attributions and categories? What changes occur in worship over time (linking to datable resources such as archaeology, dated texts, etc.)? What are the geographical distributions of worship (linking to placeable resources such as place names, runic inscriptions, etc.)
There are difficulties in populating such a large and diverse resource, but the large amount of existing material currently available on the Web makes this process considerably easier than would have been possible even very recently. As the resource is developed there will no doubt be a need for further revisions of the structure and relationships, but this paper shows that some of the main analytical processes for the PCRN project can be represented in an electronic form.