Francis Young

“In Tatyana Devyatkina’s view, the Mordvins originally worshipped predominantly female deities; patriarchal gods were a late development in their mythology, perhaps stimulated by contact with Christianity. Indeed, the Mordvin language is without grammatical genders and the gender of some deities is ambiguous. Gods are beings of supernatural knowledge and they are able to transform themselves into human beings, animals, or therianthropic beings, and they sometimes seek liaisons with human women. Deities depend upon one another in a chain of being, such as Tumopaz the god of oak trees, who depends on Viryava the god of forests, who depends in turn on the supreme deity Shkay.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples

“In early modern Iceland, for example, galdur was a form of magic almost entirely of pre-Christian origin, based on the power of runes; similarly, the shamanistic idea that a magician could send out his hugr (‘mind’) persisted in early modern Iceland.93 Yet few would dispute that early modern Iceland was a Christian society – indeed, its Christianisation was by that time over five centuries old.”
― Francis Young, Silence of the Gods: The Untold History of Europe's Last Pagan Peoples