And mind you, not only gods some traditions as well.

Here you have a treatise on The Development of Hagiography and the Cult of Saints in Western Christendom to the Year 1000

http://www.the-orb.net/encyclop/religion/hagiography/survey1.htm


And now, talking stilla bout saints and hagiography...
The Old English Martyrology is a collection of brief accounts of the lives of saints, arranged chronologically according to the temporale (calendar of non-moveable feastdays, beginning on 25 December), and also including entries for some feasts other than saints' days (e.g. the Epiphany, the Seven Days of the Creation, Christ's Descent into Hell, and the Ascension). The notices range in length from names only, or a couple of short sentences, to about 400 words. Although the Old English Martyrology survives only in a number of fragmentary witnesses (there is no complete manuscript), the vast majority of the collection has come down to us. The extant text consists of 238 entries, with one significant gap, covering the feastdays for February, and several smaller losses. The earliest manuscript fragments date from the ninth century and are written in the Mercian dialect.

The earliest martyrologies were bare lists of dates and places of martyrdom of the saints. The first narrative or 'historical' martyrology was compiled by Bede in the early eighth century, but there is no direct connection between this, or indeed other known Latin martyrologies, and the Old English work. It is thought that rather than using an existing Latin martyrology as source, the Old English writer drew upon a wide range of saints' lives and other writings to produce an original collection, independent of other compilations. The Old English work contains accounts of the apostles and other great saints of the universal church, a large number of early martyrs and also of non-martyrs, and entries for occasions other than saints' days. More than fifty of the saints represented are women, and a number of the notices are for Anglo-Saxon saints (for most, but not all, of which the writer turned to Bede's Ecclesiastical History). Many of the Anglo-Saxon saints have Mercian connections. The compiler was evidently a person of considerable learning, ranging widely among English, Irish and continental exemplars, and showing considerable skill and inventiveness in abstracting and recasting this material in Old English. It is not clear what the specific purpose was behind the compilation but the Martyrology provides carefully structured edifying reading in the vernacular, perhaps for private use, and appears to be the work of a spiritual guide to an audience unable itself to access Latin literature directly (which would seem to cover most people in ninth-century England - clerical as well as lay, if we can believe King Alfred).

The Old English Martyrology is among the earliest prose writing to survive from Anglo-Saxon England. It and another ninth-century work, the Life of St Chad, have been viewed as presenting evidence for a flourishing tradition of Old English writing in ninth-century Mercia, independent from and antecedent to King Alfred's programme of translation in Wessex. Another work often mentioned in this context is the translation of Bede's Ecclesiastical History, which was also written in Mercian. Of course, it is well known that Alfred was assisted by Mercian scholars in his project, and one of these may have produced the Martyrology, just as the Old English Bede may have been produced under Alfred's sponsorship. Whatever its relationship to the works of King Alfred and his circle, the Martyrology is an important text in the history of early English prose and is particularly significant to students of Anglo-Saxon hagiography.

The standard scholarly edition of the Old English Martyrology is Günter Kotzor, ed., Das Altenglische Martyrologium, 2 vols (Munich: Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981), but this lacks a translation, and non-specialists should continue to make use of George Herzfeld, ed. and trans., An Old English Martyrology, Early English Text Society, Original Series, 116 (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, and Trübner, 1900).

-http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=11997