There was also a belief in a variety of other supernatural entities which inhabited the landscape, including elves, nicors, and dragons. Casting further doubt over some of his festival etymologies is the fact that some of the place-name etymologies that Bede provides in his writings are demonstrably wrong. It has been suggested that Woden was also known as Grim – a name which appears in such English place-names as Grimspound in Dartmoor, Grimes Graves in Norfolk and Grimsby ("Grim's Village") in Lincolnshire– because in recorded Norse mythology, the god Óðinn is also known as Grímnir.

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The archaeologist David Wilson remarked that this "undoubtedly had special importance for the Anglo-Saxons, either magical or religious, or both. Shaw has however warned that many of these sites might not have been named by pagans but by later Christian Anglo-Saxons, reflecting spaces that were perceived to be heathen from a Christian perspective. Her name has been suggested as a component of the place-names Frethern in Gloucestershire, and Freefolk, Frobury, and Froyle in Hampshire. Christian sources regularly complained that the pagans of Anglo-Saxon England practised animal sacrifice. These hearg locations were all found on high ground, with Wilson suggesting that these represented a communal place of worship for a specific group, such as the tribe, at a specific time of year.Given the restricted nature of literacy in Anglo-Saxon England, it is likely that the author of the poem was a cleric or an associate of the clergy. We expect them to do the work done by Christian pastors visiting the sick and serving in prison ministries. In 1941, Stenton suggested that "between fifty and sixty sites of heathen worship" could be identified through the place-name evidence, [34] although in 1961 the place-name scholar Margaret Gelling cautioned that only forty-five of these appeared reliable.

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Theodore's Penitential and the Laws of Wihtred of Kent issued in 695 imposed penalties on those who provided offerings to "demons".Sometimes this happens in ecstatic possession, but other times it’s a non-stop connection, like a speaker phone you can’t hang up. It is not clear why such names are rarer or non-existent in certain parts of the country; it may be due to changes in nomenclature brought about by Scandinavian settlement in the Late Anglo-Saxon period or because of evangelising efforts by later Christian authorities. There was no set form of burial among the pagan Anglo-Saxons, with cremation being preferred among the Angles in the north and burial among the Saxons in the south, although both forms were found throughout England, sometimes in the same cemeteries. Archaeological investigation has displayed that structures or buildings were built inside a number of pagan cemeteries, and as David Wilson noted, "The evidence, then, from cemetery excavations is suggestive of small structures and features, some of which may perhaps be interpreted as shrines or sacred areas". The historian Clive Tolley has cautioned that any Anglo-Saxon world tree would likely not be directly comparable to that referenced in Norse textual sources.