Alongside the more common practice of using animals, Germanic tribes also conducted human sacrifice to appease their gods. This took many forms and varied considerably throughout the tribes, but Roman accounts and archaeological evidence suggest drowning, decapitation, and burning were the most common forms. This included pitting a warrior against a captured enemy as a crude means of deriving a battle’s outcome, to the drowning of the slaves that washed the chariot of Nerthus in her sacred lake. In a similar fashion to animals, sacrificial victims were hung from trees within the sacred groves.
