Click here to read Part One of the interview with the author of American Heathens.

Jennifer Snook, ready for more questions

KS – You state that past scholarly work on American Heathenry “overlooked the more moderate voices of Heathens” and that the first years of your research “focused on Heathens with liberal to moderate political sympathies.” The book includes data from your survey of Heathen political beliefs that shows “Liberal or Moderate” Heathens outnumber “Conservative” ones nearly five to three. Seventy-seven percent of Heathens “Agree with Marriage Equality,” more than the fifty-seven percent of Americans as a whole. However, you also state that the values of Heathens are “remarkably socially conservative, in keeping with dominant cultural norms” and discuss “the small and difficult-to-locate left.” How would you reconcile these statements and summarize your data on political positions of American Heathens?

JS – I’m not sure if there’s anything to reconcile. Heathens are at once more socially liberal than many Americans in terms of their views on marriage equality, yet more conservative in regards to views on interracial marriage. These are merely two examples of conflicting political trends. This isn’t a surprise, given the participation in the pagan milieu and simultaneous focus on ancestry, ethnicity, and whiteness.

So at once, Heathens exist in a subcultural environment – around other pagans and in other alternative enclaves – in which liberal attitudes in regards to recreational drug use, (hetero) sexuality, female empowerment, etc., are common. These ideas are socially “liberal” in the sense that these Heathens support more personal freedoms and less oppression or regulation.

On the other hand, the hypermasculinity of American Heathenry, coming up from the days of the Viking Brotherhood and with significant influence from ex-military and ex-convicts, has an impact on the way that many Heathens express their personal politics. This plays directly into how Heathens discuss Wiccans, how people treat those in LGBT communities, how they perceive matters of race and racial exclusion, and influences prevailing sexist attitudes. So when I say that American Heathens are socially conservative, I speak in reference to my observations in which conservative attitudes toward women, transgendered people, “liberals” and academics were quite popular, and in which many Heathen norms and values echo mainline Protestantism.

For example, I observed a ton of discourse that any reasonable person would characterize as “conservative” ideological thought: a rejection of social welfare programs, the insistence that people’s use of social services is “lazy” and that people are working the system. Ironically, there is no shortage of Heathens who themselves are on social welfare of some kind, or who are part of what we might call “the working poor.” Granted, our assumptions about who is using welfare in this country is heavily racialized and stereotyped, so this plays into people’s attitudes.

Snook losing a game of "Capture the Wench" in 2011

Also, there was no shortage of sexism which seemed to run counter to the Heathen insistence on the equality or “badassness” of Heathen women. I myself experienced this on a number of occasions, from the game “Capture the Wench,” at [midwest Heathen gathering] Lightning Across The Plains – critiqued by a Heathen friend of mine as making mockery of the historical theft and inevitable rape of women by the Vikings and other tribes – to anti-feminist rhetoric, people giving me shit because I’m vegetarian, frequent paternalism, or even a “joke” at an event that I prepare a man’s meal, the assumption being that it was my rightful duty as a woman to do so. These ideas are intimately influenced by a person’s social class, education and regional location, as well.

So, like I lay out in the book, it’s complicated.

KS – Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke has written of “contemporary neo-völkisch groups and ideology in America and Europe” starting in the 1980s. Your portrayal of Stephen McNallen and Folkish Heathens seems to agree with his analysis:

Just as the original völkisch movement arose as a defensive ideology of German identity against modernity in the late nineteenth century, this neo-völkisch revival acts as a defensive ideology of white identity against multiculturalism, affirmative action and mass Third World immigration.

However, you differ with Goodrick-Clarke by stating that the pre-Third-Reich völkisch movement in Germany “championed the affirmation of white identity,” not German identity. What distinction would you make between the old völkisch emphasis on national German identity from modern Folkish ideas of transnational white identity?

JS – Well, white people – and Heathens – in the United States by and large aren’t focused on German identity. Although some ethnic whites focus on the ethnicity of their ancestors, a lot of Americans don’t have this data. They don’t know where they come from, and so they make assumptions based on their appearance, or vague information – they imagine that they are German, or English, or Scandinavian.

The Snook Family Crest, according to the interwebs

My dad, for example, thought for our entire lives that the surname “Snook” was a British derivative of “Seven Oaks,” like our mail-order family-crest infographic says. But when we trace our family tree, it goes back to Germany on the Snook side to Jacob Schnuch born in 1655. Then, when my dad had his DNA tested recently, it turns out we’re quite Irish. None of this changes my life or opportunities, and whether I embrace my “Irish” ancestry or not is completely voluntary.

When Heathens appeal to ethnicity, by and large they are appealing to whiteness. But whiteness itself is only a thing in contrast to the racialized “other.” It is a political construct meant to divide and conquer, used historically to make white wage-laborers work to support the white elite, rather than working in cooperation with freed black slaves also suffering under the same terrible working conditions. So whiteness has always been a privilege used for political purposes, and in this country, not much has changed. Yet, because we so infrequently identify whiteness as a category, it’s largely invisible.

Heathens are special in this respect, because so many focus on ancestry and a genuine desire to identify where they came from, their ethnic histories are salient. But my ethnic history may be different from another Heathen’s ethnic history, and yet, when we seek a common ancestral story, tradition or connection, we are appealing to a generalized whiteness. When we talk about Heathenry with the words “The Folk,” to which folk are we referring? And we know that Heathens of color frequently get crap from other Heathens who have no idea what their ethnic background is, but make assumptions based upon appearance.

I grew up with kids whose mothers were German but whose fathers were African-American soldiers. I have no doubt that these people would have a more difficult time settling into Heathenry and would constantly have to justify their “right” to belonging, simply because they don’t “look” white. So this is what I mean by an “affirmation of white identity,” which is intimately connected to the history of race and ethnicity in our country and culture in ways that I outline, perhaps too verbosely, in the book.

KS – You discuss “symbolic ethnicity by the offspring of immigrants” and “absence of actual ethnic identity among whites.” However, you also point out that many African-Americans “have white ancestry.” As a sociologist, how do you determine the relative “actuality” or “realness” of ethnic identity for a “German-American” daughter of postwar immigrants and an “African-American” whose ancestors have lived in America since the eighteenth century? Does academic parsing of identity politics override and overwrite individual and community self-definition?

"Whatever Happened to German America?" Click here to read an excellent New York Times post on "America's largest national ethnic group"

JS – No, of course not. People’s real-world lived experiences will always be more “real” than anything that we academics theorize. But, it’s our job to theorize, to observe patterns, to identify the historical, social, and economic significance of human events and behaviors. I don’t think that my words as a sociologist, in regards to symbolic ethnicity, in any way robs people of their agency to define their own ethnic identities.

What I would argue, however, if you’re asking the difference between the symbolic ethnicity of white people, and the “real” ethnicity of African-Americans, is that we’re talking about two different concepts. We don’t know the ethnicity of white people, unless they express it out loud. I can be Irish, I can be German, or I can just be a default taken-for-granted white American with nothing to prove. My ethnicity is invisible unless I’m wearing an ethnic costume, a “Kiss me, I’m Irish” shirt, or participating in folk dances, for example. We do assume, however, that we know the ethnicity of African-Americans because their racial category is visible and we often conflate race with ethnicity.

Race, however, is a political construct; it is a tool used to place people in a hierarchy in order to decide who has access to domains of power and privilege. Ethnicity is the bearer of culture, which determines custom, language, religion, and culture – food, music, clothing, etc. So my point in saying that many African-Americans “have white ancestry” is to say that our focus on ancestry in regards to who gets to be Heathen – when this focus appeals to whiteness – is often a focus on race, rather than ethnicity.

KS – Discussing European immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, you write that “ethnicity is something that white people adopt or neglect according to their whims,” describing “Americans who highlight their Irish American, Italian American, or German American (white) ethnicities during festivals and holidays.” Even in the last fifty years, there has been real discrimination in housing, hiring and government against some European immigrant groups and their descendants, many of whom were not considered “white” (such as Sicilians). There are still Americans today who draw sharp distinctions between Americans with Irish, Italian, German, Spanish and other Old World roots. In America’s major cities, there are communities where English is a second language after Polish or Russian. How does the idea of ethnic-by-choice relate to these continuing experiences of ethnicity by descendants of immigrants?

JS – Of course these communities exist, and ethnicity is a salient characteristic in the lives of the people within them. My research happened outside of these insular communities.

Disappearing into the landscape: Snook in Colorado

I am using the work of scholars since the 1970s who speak to the increasing disappearance of ethnicity as a category of identification among white Americans. See Alastair Bonnett’s 1998 piece “Who was white? The disappearance of non-European white identities and the formation of European racial whiteness” in Ethnic and Racial Studies. It may be salient to some people, but it’s certainly not as salient in the lives of white Americans as it was at the turn of the twentieth century.

So it’s not that ethnicity is not in play in some spaces, it’s that it’s much less a factor in the lives of white people than it used to be. In many cases, ethnic identification is optional for white people.

But perhaps more important is that ethnic identification by white people doesn’t necessarily, as a pattern of experience, exclude them from the privileges of whiteness the way that being non-white in our society does. Most white Americans do not live in these communities, and for the average white person in this country, ethnicity is not ascribed.

KS – You offer a critique of past scholars of American Heathenry, writing that “previous research has focused overwhelmingly on a fringe element within American Heathenry for whom whiteness is central to the question of who gets to be Heathen.” If we accept that the word Heathen “is inclusive of all varieties of Germanic paganism” (as you write in the book), then the term must encompass Odinism and overtly racist ideologies like Wotanism – as is suggested by your reference to the racist subjects of previous authors as “a fringe element within American Heathenry.” What hard data is available to sociologists that shows the percentage of the overall Heathen community that consists of those “for whom whiteness is central to the question of who gets to be Heathen”? In other words, how can we know scientifically that they are, in fact, a fringe element?

JS – In 2012, I put out a survey to Heathens over social media and email lists. I didn’t ask the question “Are you racist?” or “Are you a white supremacist?” – but I did ask people about their political identity. Of the 687 people who took the survey, only one of them identifies as a “white nationalist.” One white nationalist out of 687. That’s 0.1%.

What was more important to me than the survey data, however, was the field work. When we observe and interview the people with which we come in contact and listen to them, we can get a sense of the Heathen landscape. I did this for over a decade, all over the country. What I can speak to is the depth and breadth of my own data, across time and space, which clearly suggests, like the survey data, that most Heathens are not white supremacists and most are not overtly racist.

I should qualify what I mean by “overtly racist.” We have a conception in this country that racism requires people to not only declare the superiority of their race over those of the racialized “other,” but also to use derogatory terms and behave unpleasantly toward those who are non-white. This is what we sociologists call “traditional racism.” It’s the racism of our grandparents.

Bonilla-Silva's Racism without Racists

After the Civil Rights triumphs, however, the way that we discuss and experience race in this country has changed. Now, it is no longer acceptable to be openly racist – yet, racism persists. Sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva discusses this in his book Racism Without Racists. We’ve fundamentally learned a new way of talking about race that allows us to express racist sentiments – “soft” racism, if you will – or to disclaim or avoid accusations of racism by talking about how we’re “friends with black people” – which empirical data suggests is uncommon, anyway – or to use racism as a form of comedy, etc.

All of this by way of saying that the way that we do racism these days has changed. It’s more subtle and symbolic, it’s institutionalized and often unintentional. So when I say that most Heathens are not overtly racist, what I mean is that they are not traditionally racist. This doesn’t excuse them from their color-blind racism, any more than it would the average American – and Heathens are not special in this regard. They were socialized to understand and express ideas about race the same way as everyone else in the United States.

Although my survey was widely dispersed throughout the Heathen community and represents a diverse cross-section, my interviews and fieldwork didn't focus on Odinists, Wotanists or any group that was overtly racist. Mattias Gardell did enough of this in his book Gods of The Blood. But the Heathenry that he featured was not the Heathenry that I had known, nor was it the Heathenry I would come to know through my work. We cannot discount these groups – they exist. But they were not part of my sample, which was plenty large enough without them in it.

KS – Why do you think that academia and the media have focused nearly exclusively on the far-right, racist subset of Heathenry? Why do they largely continue to, as you write, “ignore the sizable contingent of outspoken antiracist Heathens”?

Embracing the Other: Snook with troll

JS – For reasons you may have guessed – White Supremacy is dramatic and interesting. These groups are more vocal and obnoxious and easy to locate, because part of their whole shtick is being heard. The people that I observed and interviewed were not political activists in this way; they are regular people living regular lives.

It would be much more challenging for a researcher who was not already a member of a group like Heathenry to locate and study its participants, although it has been done in the last few years by another colleague of mine who came to Heathenry as a non-member and then slowly went native. And then you’d have to have a compelling enough research question going in, unless you were convinced there was something of interest at play and were committed to allowing the data to speak for itself over time. I was committed.

To be concluded in Part Three.

Click links for Part One and Part Two of the interview with sociologist Jennifer Snook, author of American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement.

Jennifer Snook in Alaska

KS – In the book, you introduce Ásatrú Folk Assembly leader Stephen McNallen by saying he created an early Heathen organization while “[s]idestepping [Else] Christensen’s focus on racial ideology.” In 2003, Mattias Gardell also contrasted McNallen’s approach with the overt racism of Christensen’s Odinism, quoting Wyatt Kaldenberg’s portrayal of McNallen as non-racist: “He said folkish a little now and then, but when you said race, he’d turn pink.” Jeffrey Kaplan’s 1997 description of McNallen as occupying a “middle ground” between liberalism and white nationalism is echoed by Michael Strmiska’s 2005 portrayal of McNallen as “carefully screen[ing] potential members to keep out people with extreme political or racial views.”

However, you go on to describe the Ásatrú Folk Assembly’s “seemingly most important and all-consuming focus” on (in the organization’s words) “the preservation of the Peoples of the North,” the “cultural and biological” survival of “Northern European peoples.” This sounds quite close to the infamous “Fourteen Words” of white nationalist David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children.” You also cite McNallen’s essay on the “browning of America” and state that he uses the rhetorical tactics of white supremacists.

How would you reconcile these conflicting academic portrayals of McNallen as (1) non-racist, (2) neither non-racist nor racist, and (3) racist?

JS – I don’t know if there’s anything to reconcile. I would love to have interviewed McNallen. I’m sure he’s a very interesting and kind person, and I’ve heard as much from others. I’ve also read and gathered information from people that suggests that his attitudes toward race are complex and evolving.

I spoke to many people over the years that believe that he is becoming more extreme in his political and racial outlooks, and there is some evidence for this. His 2010 anti-immigration article “On The Down and Dirty Browning of America,” in which he freaks out about the racial take-over by brown people that he believes will rob white people of their political power and dominance, lead to their marginalization, and impending cultural extinction. In “Wotan vs. Tezcatlipoca” he frames it as a “spiritual war.” I’ve spoken to people close to him that have grown deeply concerned, and his reputation is certainly troubling – outlined by Circle Anzus in their break-down of McNallen’s work over the years.

Having said that, I don’t feel qualified to label him an outright racist. People are complex. Rather, he expresses some ideas that are racist in nature and has some interaction with known white supremacists, and his publications are very popular with white supremacists. So while I have no doubt about his sincerity regarding his passion for European heritage and culture, there’s much to critique about the way in which he expresses these thoughts and with whom he keeps company.

There is also, perhaps, something to be said about the creeping increase in political ideological messages coming off of the Ásatrú Folk Assembly blog and Facebook page, leading me (as an outside observer) to wonder whether his organization is religious or political, though as a sociologist I recognize that there is no such thing as religion without politics.

KS – In 2011, you joined McNallen’s Ásatrú Folk Assembly. Within months you were the subject of an investigation by the organization that included interviews of your friends, parsing of your writings, and asking you to explain your political beliefs. As a sociologist whose work is based on interviewing individual members of social groups, performing close readings of their written statements, and asking questions about their political views, how did this experience affect your own subsequent methodology?

Difficult crossing: Snook fording a river in Iceland

JS – It did put me in the position of being the subject of investigation, but it was fundamentally different than what sociologists do. We don’t dig, and needle, accuse and parse words – and I am only one person. I am hardly a good sample.

When sociologists do this work, we collect, we ask, and we observe a lot of people over time and space, and then we analyze. We don’t go in trying to confirm an answer we already had, which is what the AFA was doing when they questioned me. We refer to this method as “grounded theory,” which allows patterns to emerge from the data itself, from the ground up. I am always very reflective about the researcher-subject relationship, which is part of the feminist methodology I mentioned earlier.

In regards to how this affected my research, it was eye-opening. When I joined, I told them up-front on the application form about my work and how I was hoping to include the AFA as part of my sample. It came as great surprise to me when I was then accused of being an infiltrator with subversive intentions. I told them what I was doing! That would make me a terrible spy. The rigmarole I went through with the Q&A to justify myself was intense but ultimately productive, though it seems the positive recommendation of my inquisitor to the board was ignored.

In regards to my research, it was a huge loss for the membership of the AFA, as they were robbed of an active voice in my work. It would have been fun and helpful to visit AFA gatherings and chat with folks, and get to know Steve, but alas.

What it left me with was McNallen’s personal statements and Facebook updates, articles and blog posts – many of which may or may not have reflected the beliefs of the AFA membership. The comments that people left in response were likely skewed toward those who agreed, making it look like McNallen was speaking for them. I cannot know how many of them disagree with his ideas, nor can I know how many of them simply don’t care. It was the reason for my joining, but I was unfortunately unable to fill in that piece of the puzzle.

What I was able to do was find those AFA members who attended other events and chat with them there, and that made up somewhat for the loss. Yet, I can’t know to what extent it affected my data, because I simply don’t have the data.

KS – Aside from Stephen McNallen, the figure who arguably looms largest in your book is Mark Stinson. Lightning Across the Plains, Stinson’s annual Heathen gathering, is repeatedly referred to in your book as a model event. You write that it represents “the possibilities of a strong regional community” that values face-to-face camaraderie over internet bickering, and you describe Heathens coming to the event from a very large geographical area “to cement bonds of community, reinvigorate their Heathen identities, and join together in spiritual expression.”

You argue that national organizations like McNallen’s are “losing their importance as regional efforts in the Midwest render them redundant” and laud Lightning Across the Plains for the “success of the tribal model” over the “steady, grinding bureaucracy” of the national organizations. You refer to McNallen’s group as “a political organization with religious overtones” while presenting Stinson’s ideas on “productive real-world, practical concerns, such as growing the faith through cooperative local and regional relationships with other tribes,” asserting that his “arrival to American Heathenry in 2006 has reshaped its landscape in the Midwest.”

Since the publication of your book, both men have made news. Only three weeks before it was due to start, Stinson announced the cancellation of the 2015 Lightning Across the Plains. Nearly simultaneously, McNallen raised well over $50,000 in one month of an online campaign to fund a place of worship and community center for the Ásatrú Free Assembly.

Given Stinson’s emphasis on his gathering as a place where real-world relationships trump online arguments, it is striking that the cancellation announcement effectively blames “those who come to the event, enjoy the fruits of our labor, interact with us face to face, eat our food, drink our mead, enjoy all the benefits of our hospitality and then, after leaving, assassinate our characters both collectively and individually.”

Given the description in your work of Heathens criticizing the bureaucracy, infighting and diffuse nature of the national organizations, it is interesting that McNallen’s organization – one of the oldest and arguably least democratic Heathen groups – has been able to so quickly raise such a large amount of donated cash and to purchase a dedicated property.

If you were still working on your book, how would you cover these two events?

Taking a breather after a long slog: Snook in Alaska

JS – Boy, am I glad that I’m not still working on my book! I spent a lot of time as I was writing thinking hard about what to include and what not to include, for fear of hurting people or violating their privacy. It was likewise difficult to clearly describe people when I thought that it might out them, unless they had already made themselves public.

In regards to the first, I would likely use McNallen’s fundraising as another example of how national organizations can be successful, and as evidence of the power of collective identity. How the money gets used, and how people participate in and experience the outcome is something I’m quite curious to see. I’m totally rooting for the AFA to make this contribution meaningful and useful to people.

The fact that he’s managed to fundraise online speaks as well to the power of social media – which I also discuss as influential in how Heathenry has changed over time. I don’t think that national orgs are useless, by the way, simply that they didn’t factor in to the daily practice and local culture of a majority of the people I came into contact with. In the cases where they were important, they provided networking and a feeling of like-mindedness with other members, particularly of The Troth, which is the only organization with which I spent any time.

In regards to the canceling of LATP, that’s complicated. First, there was a kerfluffle at LATP last year prompted by a group of men who hadn’t attended before. I noticed that at least one of them had an SS pin on his lapel. They broke a number of rules of etiquette that many people found offensive. The matter wasn’t dealt with in a way that some people thought it should be, and a few vowed not to return.

Second, LATP got so big, it became harder to vet the people that attended, and it began to attract people who weren’t part of the region, and extremists who some viewed as predatory. This created quite a bit of unrest. Recently, I spent some time with people who expressed the sentiment that LATP had gotten too big for its britches, far beyond the initial focus of regional alliances and community building. They’ve instead decided, like Mark expressed as well, to refocus on their own local and smaller regional events.

So, what happened at LATP would support Mark’s own assertion that big organizations become too unwieldy and are no longer functional – yet this time it was the fruit of his own labor that collapsed under its own weight, hoist by its own petard.

KS – You discuss reconstructionism as “a method for understanding historical Heathenry” that seeks “to piece together Heathenry in what they view as its most authentic form, unadulterated by modern influence and interpretation.” You quote Bil Linzie: “To be a good reconstructionist, one must be able to step away from one’s cultural background as well as spiritual background.” As a sociologist, how do you respond to the idea that a modern individual can avoid “modern influence and interpretation” and shed their “cultural background”?

Skeptical sociologist Snook

JS – As I lay bare in the chapter, I don’t think this is something that we can do. I think most scholars agree, and I think most people who practice reconstructionism understand their limitations.

We are socialized into particular realities that limit us in ways that are unimaginable. It’s not impossible for us to break free, for sure, but unless you’re off the grid in a commune the way that the Amish live, and socialize your kids outside of mainstream society, I think the influence of social structural arrangements and cultural, political and economic realities are simply too constraining.

Of course, I look forward to being proven wrong, because I think it could really be cool.

KS – You write that “American Heathenry has developed apart from its Icelandic and European cousins into a cultural system that is wholly and uniquely American, inseparable from its sociohistorical, economic, and political context.” However, the vast majority of your informants are provided with Icelandic names as pseudonyms (although spelled without Icelandic letters such as ð, þ, or ö). You introduce us to Americans with a dizzying array of assumed names from Icelandic literature, including Alfdis, Alvis, Aud, Brand, Egil, Einar, Gunnthra, Hallgerd, Herdis, Kveldulf, Leif, Mani, Signy, Sunna and Thrain. Notably, the Heathens you mention without pseudonyms tend to have Biblical names such as Elizabeth, John, Joshua, Mark, Michael and Stephen.

In addition to this swapping of Icelandic names for American Christian names, the study of Icelandic saga as source of ritual practice, the use of Icelandic mythology for theological conceptions, and the equation of figures from the settlement of Iceland with “ancestors” seems to point to a construction of (some) American Heathenry as Icelandic – or, to use the language of your work, a “performance of Icelandicity.” How does this appropriation of Icelandic cultural heritage by those with no actual family connection to Iceland fit with the Heathen emphasis on ancestry?

JS – I discuss in my book that there’s a heavy romanticism involved in how many Heathens imagine their European ancestry. The focus on ancient “Northern Europe” is an appeal to the “epic past,” in which life and culture are idealized, valorized, and somehow superior to the present.

Many American Heathens idealize Iceland because of the influence of Icelandic literature and history on our understandings of what Old Norse Heathens believed and practiced. There is a distinct pattern of American Heathens idealizing Iceland as a Heathen Mecca. Heathens do understand that they don’t have direct ancestry to Iceland. They know, however, that Icelanders themselves are descendants of the “Vikings” and other “Elder Heathens.” So in this way, Iceland is just a repository of Heathen lore, culture and religion that is available for consumption. It’s a fairy tale.

When American Heathens imagine the “Elder Heathen” ancestor, I think many times they are imagining a general Northern European-ness, lumping Germanic cultures together. There is of course some resistance to this, and many Heathens for whom Iceland is irrelevant outside of what texts are situated there. For them, it is German, Norman, Anglo-Saxon, or other Germanic tribal peoples that inspire them.

KS – American Heathens opens with your self-identification as someone who both practices and studies Heathenry. You write, “I not only research, write about, and teach about paganisms; I have been a practicing Pagan since my early teen years and a Heathen since age eighteen.”

Describing your work as a college student on an assignment for a course on American Paganism, you write, “I wanted to meet and interview a Heathen whose experience would lend insight into my assignment and perhaps even inform my new faith.” Your first forays into meeting other Heathens occurred in graduate school, when a “cheerful young man” you met on a Yahoo forum became your “first Heathen friend and research participant.” You also state that your “first experiences with Heathen ritual and community” were private gatherings in Heathen homes at which you “recorded field notes with feverish enthusiasm.” You write, “As I observed them and worshipped with them, I discovered my own way of being,” stating that “I have been a member, a friend, and a confidant, but my training as a sociologist was most salient, making me ever an outsider, critic, and distant observer.”

At the very end of the book, you discuss how the end of your research coincided with the end of your engagement with “the group itself,” relating that you no longer identify with the Heathen community – aside from a few personal relationships and a sense of connection to “collective memories created and recounted from the epic past.” Your active engagement with the Heathen community coincided with your academic study of it, yet you still state that you are a Heathen. In what ways does your religious belief and practice continue today?

Snook with Odin & Ravens, one of her felt creations

JS – It continues in a way that is internal. I practice my Heathenry through my spinning, felted land spirit sculptures, archery and gardening. I’m planning on landscaping a portion of my back yard as a Vé [enclosed holy area], as a way to get my daughters involved.

I am in regular contact with a bunch of amazing people who have helped with my work, but have also been inspirational in their friendship, generosity, kindness and ability to think critically about the world around them. I plan on continuing to attend smaller, more local gatherings to spend time with these great friends.

My separation from larger community and dialing down my use of social media isn’t just because I’m done and it’s no longer useful. It’s because, as fantastic as this journey has been, it’s also been a rather significant buzzkill.

The positive reaction to my work has been motivational, helpful, thoughtful and will produce helpful conversations and discussions for many people engaged in their own Heathen projects around the country, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to be part of that with some of these groups, Skyping in or doing talks at moots.

The negative reactions, however, in tone and lack of intellectual rigor, have reinforced my inward focus. My conclusions weren’t entirely flattering, and the work that it took for me to analyze and interpret the data, and then write things that I felt might make my friends look bad was extremely difficult. The work that it took for me to internalize these conclusions was sometimes heartbreaking.

Now, I’ll focus on what so many of my Heathen friends have suggested is important in their own lives – a focus on the innangard [inner circle], on loved ones, on personal spiritual growth, and less worry about the disabling negativity of eHeathenry.

KS – As we discussed earlier, your first steps towards religion sprang from your youthful interest in heavy metal, vampires, fantasy fiction, Dungeons & Dragons and the Society for Creative Anachronism. At the very end of the book, you write that “[t]o be Heathen is, to me, a connection to the epic past, to Tolkien’s Middle Earth [sic], which itself is a product of his love for Germanic mythology.” After your many years participating in and studying Wicca and Heathenry, why do you think your religious sense of self has landed in a place so similar to where it was when you started your exploration?

Dr. Snook eagerly awaits your comments.

JS – Interesting insight. This is where I feel safest, where I have always been. Being a huge nerd, but allowing that nerd energy to merge with the sacred.

It doesn’t involve the acceptance or permission of others. It’s simply and deeply part of who I am.

KS – Okay, that's it! Thank you for doing this interview.

JS – Thank you for the opportunity, Karl.

American Heathens is now available in The Norse Mythology Store.

For the second time this year, a mainstream news organization produced an ethically problematical piece on Ásatrú (“Æsir Faith,” a modern iteration of Old Norse religion). In February, Religion Dispatches posted an article on Icelandic Ásatrú that was rife with plagiarism and disrespect. Last Friday, Religion News Service released a deeply flawed report on American Ásatrú.

Religion News Service reporter Kimberly Winston tweeted on October 6 that she was visiting the building recently purchased by Stephen McNallen’s Asatru Folk Assembly, calling it “the first #Asatru ‘hof’ [Heathen temple] in the US.”

Since I had previously helped her cover Heathen soldiers pushing for recognition in the U.S. Army by bringing the story to her attention, providing background, introducing contacts, and verifying facts, I offered to help her with this new piece on Ásatrú.

What follows is the story of how a Religion News Service reporter resolutely insisted on giving a national platform to one controversial figure in American Heathenry while excluding any Heathen voice from outside of his non-profit organization and without quoting any source that challenged his statements and claims.

Ms. Winston has given me permission to quote from her emails for this article. Everyone quoted below in red is a Heathen whose contact information I provided to her; none of them were included in her post.

Note: Within a week of Religion News Service posting Winston's article, the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) website featuring McNallen’s essays on racial conflict was changed from public to members only.


In The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion, anthropologist Stephan Palmié makes a distinction between a discovery and a find, writing that “you can only discover what you already presume to be there. A find, in contrast, always needs to be subjected to laborious conceptual reworking, to turn it into a discovery.”

We can’t expect online journalists to act with academic rigor, but it seems fair to ask them to avoid discovering a story by first deciding what the reality is, accepting only data that fits a preconceived narrative, and rejecting any inconvenient truths that don’t match a predetermined conclusion. Honest journalism requires first finding as much information as possible, then writing a piece that connects the data.

Eric O. Scott (columnist at The Wild Hunt): The facts dictate the story; the story does not dictate the facts. This basic tenet of journalism applies especially to stories about minority religions, including Heathenry and other forms of modern Paganism, because reporters often lack grounding in the unique qualities and social dynamics of those religions. Reporters need to educate themselves about these subjects before publishing about them – and they need to confirm their findings with multiple sources, recognizing that any individual may hold views contradictory to the rest of the community.

In today's resource-stretched journalism environment, this kind of research may seem overly time-consuming and tedious, but it's necessary work. I understand that figuring out the complicated history of Heathenry and other Pagan religions is more complicated than writing another blog post about whatever the Pope said this week, but reporters owe it to their readers to present a full and nuanced account of minority religions.

Editors of mainstream media outlets continue to assign articles on Heathenry to writers with no prior knowledge of the tradition or contacts in the various communities. This usually leads to questionable stories with some variation on “religion of Thor” in the title.

Josh Heath (advocate for Heathens in the military): I've interacted with the media a lot over the last five to six years with the Open Halls Project. We've really tried to get some attention for what we've been doing with the goal of making people aware of what our mission is, but also to get some movement on the different actions we've undertaken.

Some of the media I've interacted with have been excellent at digging into a story, even asking for more time before publishing because they wanted to have all the information they could get. Those are the folks we want writing about Heathenry. They recognize that they are not experts, and that they need to truly hear the voices of a community before making a call on what they're going to write. They also understand that there is a real value to knowing when to use positive information, and when to dig deeper to see if there is more story to uncover.


After seeing her initial tweet, I notified Winston that the AFA building is not the “first standalone #Asatru ‘hof’” in the United States. She admitted that she had “not yet looked into other hofs” before publicly declaring the AFA to have the first in the nation, and she seemed to uncritically accept as true the AFA claim that the repurposed meeting hall is the first “temple, shrine, or other structure like this in almost a thousand years.”

She told me that the AFA “admitted there were other hofs, but characterized them to me as privately owned (like, in someone’s yard or on his/her property) or temporary.” Although I gave her the contact information for a Heathen group with its own permanent standalone hof – and at least one other Heathen contacted her to discuss this point – her article presents the AFA assertion as fact. Repeating the organization’s statement in her own voice, she writes that previous hofs have merely been “rooms in houses, backyard sheds, temporary structures or rented sites.”

Religion News Service administrators also promoted AFA claims as truth, publicly declaring that “Thor & followers of ancient Norse religion #Asatru build 1st US worship hall.” This goes even further than Winston in erasing existing Heathen spaces. To promote the AFA’s 4100-square-foot building as a “worship hall” while dismissing the 2800-square-feet Gladsheim Hof of Maryland as merely “a small house that serves as a hof” suggests that Winston and the Religion News Service are struggling to help McNallen create a news event where there is none.

Joe Marek (gothi [Heathen priest] of Gladsheim Kindred, which owns Gladsheim Hof): I was not contacted by her. Obviously she has not done any real research, and I have had others try to dismiss my building before. I was granted a conditional use of the property as a religious facility in 2005 by The Howard County, Maryland zoning board. It’s a matter of public record, and all of our rituals at the hof have been open to the public since the beginning. There is also another Hof – in Michigan, I believe – that is open to the public. But as I did get a permit from the county government, I do believe I had the first one in the US.

Winston insisted to me that “This is a story about news, not personalities.” The AFA building is neither the first American Heathen “worship hall,” the first standalone hof, the first free-standing hof, nor the first public hof. If the “news” is a fabrication, what is left but a promotional piece on a personality?


While writing her piece, Winston told me “I’ll be happy to reach out to anyone you suggest.” I supplied a list of Heathens, academics and journalists that included ten practicing Heathens, four leaders of Heathen organizations, and six academics (including four who have published major scholarly works on Heathens). I contacted people on the list, vouched for Winston’s trustworthiness, insisted that she would fairly represent their views, and reassured them that they would be quoted accurately. Mea máxima culpa.

Of the six academic contacts that I provided, the only one quoted in Winston’s piece is Jeffrey Kaplan, author of Radical Religion in America (1997). He minimizes McNallen’s contact with “racist subcultures” and the impact of his theory of metagenetics. Dr. Kaplan states that McNallen and other leaders of the AFA “really tried to redirect their anger to more positive directions,” but he does not specify what they are angry about or why the anger continues.

Dr. Michael Strmiska (editor of Modern Paganism in World Cultures): The treatment of a very important issue is sadly lacking. The connection of McNallen's form of Asatru with racist attitudes is a well-known controversy within the Asatru world, and for this reason many Norse Pagans who oppose racism disavow McNallen and his theory of “metagenetics” altogether. Though this is touched upon in the article, merely providing a link to a critical article without addressing the content of that criticism runs the risk of – no pun intended – "whitewashing" McNallen and the AFA.

Those who want to know more need to read serious scholars like Kaplan, whose words here do not reflect his generally much more critical scholarship, and Mattias Gardell, who did in-depth field work among American Norse Pagans/Asatruar and found a lot of racism there. Check out McNallen's attitude toward Mexican immigrants and the picture will become more clear.

Winston’s willingness to include defenses of McNallen was coupled with questionable treatment of Heathens who don’t belong to his non-profit organization.

Ryan Smith (co-founder of Heathens United Against Racism): I was contacted by Kimberly Winston by email. She failed to follow up with me after first getting in touch and rescheduled our phone interview so she could go to a basketball game. She later contacted me asking for more information, and after I provided it to her, she informed me she had already published the article. When I contacted her editor, she refused to retract the piece, claiming there were no factual errors justifying a retraction – in spite of multiple examples contrary to her assertion.

After receiving a formal complaint, what were the fact-checking methods used by the Religion News Service editor who confirmed the accuracy of Winston’s piece? Religion News Service promoted the false story of the AFA building being the “1st US worship hall.” Did they also “whitewash” McNallen’s statements on race?

Stephen McNallen promotional photo

When I raised the subject of McNallen’s positions on race with Winston, she told me, “I am well aware of who he is,” and “I raised the racial issue with them and got the standard ‘you can’t judge a religion by its worst adherents’ which is what I expected.” The following discussion examines what type of “adherent” McNallen is himself. No baseless accusations are made; evidence is examined and conclusions are drawn.

Winston’s article links to McNallen’s essay on metagenetics yet provides no response or criticism from other Heathens. It simply offers four words (“brought charges of racism”) hyperlinked to the Circle Ansuz series on “Stephen McNallen and Racialist Asatru.” Winston cites no information from the four-part series, but she does quote a one-paragraph summary of McNallen’s theory from a controversial Vice article followed by three paragraphs denying McNallen’s connections to racism. Relegating criticism of McNallen’s essay to four words while devoting four paragraphs to its explication and defense seems a bit unfair and unbalanced.

In her emails to me, Winston wrote that “the whole metagenetics thing” is “something perceived as racist.” Her article suggests that McNallen’s theories are merely portrayed as racist by his opponents and do not, in themselves, promote racism. However, reading the metagenetics essay itself quickly dispels any suggestion that something is being imposed on the piece by others, as opposed to being forwarded in the work by McNallen himself.

Despite Kaplan’s claim that “metagenetics is largely forgotten,” the new AFA website features both the original 1985 article and a 1999 “update” in which McNallen expands his theory to include crystals and “morphic resonance.” He claims that his updated theory “has incorporated new evidence” but declines to state what the evidence is, merely writing “I won’t go into it here.”

“Metagenetics” (1985) begins with a challenge to “some” who “have attempted to label us as ‘racist.’” Echoing L. Ron Hubbard’s claims for “Dianetics,” McNallen calls metagenetics “a science for the next century.” He discusses the “special place” of “clan,” “the curious connection between twins,” ESP research, “psychic resonance,” LSD promoter Timothy Leary’s theory of the “nuerogenetic [sic] circuit,” “reincarnation phenomena,” “rebirth into the clan line,” Carl Jung’s criticism of “Jewish psychology,” and the “inborn temperament” of “each race.” All of this leads to his conclusion that “Asatru is an expression of the soul of our race” and that “we” must focus on “coming from our racial ‘center.’”

This is undeniably a racialist theory.

ra • cial • ism
noun
: a theory that race determines human traits and capacities; also: racism
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

McNallen’s entire essay builds to the assertion that race determines “inborn attitudes” and “inborn religious predispositions.” This perfectly fits the definition of racialism. But is it racist?

rac • ism
noun
1 : a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race
2 : racial prejudice or discrimination
(Merriam-Webster Dictionary)

Tracing answers to two further questions will help determine whether McNallen’s work, in addition to espousing racialism, also promotes racism.

McNallen’s conclusion to “Metagenetics” states that his theory “does not mean that we are to behave negatively toward other peoples who have not harmed us.”

Question 1: Does McNallen claim that any “other peoples” have harmed white people?

While insisting that McNallen’s connection to “racist subcultures” is in the past, Kaplan mentioned the continuing “anger” of the AFA leader.

Question 2: What is the object of McNallen’s anger?

These questions are answered in articles McNallen has issued since the release of Kaplan’s book in 1997.

McNallen’s “A Down and Dirty Look at the ‘Browning of America’” (2010), also known as “Not Just Another Immigration Piece,” is featured on the website of European Americans United, a group claiming that “European-Americans are facing a challenge to our institutions, our way of life, and even our genetic continuity.” This sense of being threatened and emphasis on biology also appear in the AFA Declaration of Purpose, which states that “the survival and welfare of the Northern European peoples as a cultural and biological group is a religious imperative for the AFA.”

McNallen is one of the subjects of Mattias Gardell's Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism

McNallen discussed the idea of white people as an endangered species with historian of religion Mattias Gardell in 2000. He spoke about his personal views on the favorite numbers of white nationalists: 88 (referring to “Heil Hitler,” as H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, or to the “88 Precepts” of white supremacist David Lane) and 14 (referring to Lane’s “14 Words,” “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for White Children”). McNallen told Gardell, “Some like the number 88. Some like 14, as in ‘14 words.’ I like it shorter… eight words: ‘The existence of my people is not negotiable.’”

Who does McNallen think is threatening the existence of white people?

In his essay on the “browning of America,” McNallen writes of “the slow-motion tidal wave” of non-white immigration into the United States. His focus is explicitly on race as he uses the terms “white folks” and “European Americans” interchangeably and laments loss of “our political and cultural clout” as “European Americans face minority status, then marginalization, and eventually extinction.”

According to McNallen, this racial Ragnarök has already happened: “The country we knew has been destroyed, and another one is being put in its place.” Illegal immigrants, nonprofit organizations, liberal foundations, government grant-giving agencies, local political entities, and the federal government have worked together to implement “conquest,” “invasion” and “takeover” of America by non-whites.

This answers both of the above questions at once:

Answer 1: McNallen does claim that “other peoples” (non-white immigrants) have harmed white people.

Answer 2: The objects of McNallen’s anger are non-white immigrants.

These answers are confirmed by McNallen’s “Wotan vs. Tezcatlipoca: The Spiritual War for California and the Southwest” (2000), an article featured on his organization’s website. It paints a picture of “barrio revolutionaries” who are “reviving Native Mexican religion” as part of a plan to take over California and the American Southwest and perpetrate the mass expulsion and killing of white people.

As in his metagenetics article, McNallen invokes Carl Jung and suggests that Catholic celebrations and rituals are “the way the archetype of Tonatzin manifests to the humble Mexican people” and that “Mexican-descended people” – although “solidly Christian, at least on the surface” – “manifest religious forces of which they’re not even consciously aware.”

McNallen asserts that Aztec gods are secretly inspiring Mexican Catholics to kill white people in America

Using the same conspiratorial rhetoric as the “browning of America” article, McNallen claims that a “widespread” and “powerful movement” seeking to implement a “program of ethnic cleansing” by “killing or deporting European-Americans” has infiltrated “today’s college campuses” and is “encouraged, somewhat covertly, by the Mexican government.” He compares “the Mexican nation” to the Third Reich, suggesting that “the bloodthirsty deities of the Aztecs, renowned for their warlike ways and human sacrifice on a mass scale” will drive Mexicans to “turmoil and war.”

In the worldview presented by McNallen, “this dangerous situation” will lead to “a subordinate role” for white people unless whites undergo a “cultural rebirth” and refuse to submit to “disempowerment and death” on the “cultural battlegrounds.” His concluding “challenge to Asatruar” is to “sink down roots in the soil, and insist on our right to be here.” In this context, the AFA’s purchase of a permanent home may be a belated response to that challenge – a response that seeks to send the message to “the Mexican nation” that the essay calls for: white people “are here to stay.”

I drew Winston’s attention to the metagenetics essay, the “browning of America” article, and the Gardell book with the discussion of white supremacist code-numbers. The Circle Ansuz series her article links to quotes and discusses the “Wotan” article. The extent to which Winston seems to have uncritically accepted McNallen’s representation of his views on race is reflected in her statement to me that “the context of the story” is that “the community out here is now big enough that they’ve bought their own building and are setting down roots.” Notably, she repeats the concluding rhetoric of the McNallen’s “Wotan” essay. By defending McNallen from “charges of racism,” her article supports McNallen’s message of racial conflict.

Dr. Jennifer Snook (author of American Heathens): McNallen's expressions of anti-immigrant fever and fear about white folks' loss of land, privilege, and political power, that he has vocalized publicly, have marked his organization as one for whom politics are a leading factor. I spoke to many Heathens across the country over the course of my research and asked a lot of them about the AFA (and other organizations). Most of them were not members of national organizations, and were alarmed, or at least suspicious, of McNallen's political motivations. It would be naive for us to think that this hof is open to anyone, regardless of racial classification, or that the AFA represents more than a fraction of American Heathenry, politically and spiritually.


In terms of the definition of racism cited above, McNallen’s essay on metagenetics indicates “a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities.” His more recent articles claim that “the Mexican nation” (“a much more fundamental entity than the Mexican state”) is determined to exterminate white Americans, thus reducing millions of individuals to a monolithic, faceless and terrifying racial Other. This clearly shows “racial prejudice or discrimination.”

McNallen’s articles thus match two-thirds of the definition; the only element not clearly shown so far is a belief that “racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.” Is there any evidence that McNallen promotes this idea, as well?

In 2011, John Powell of Media Matters for America posted “The Supremacy Cause: Inside the White Nationalist Movement.” It details his visit to “Towards a New Nationalism: Immigration and the Future of Western Nations,” that year’s annual conference of the National Policy Institute, “an independent think-tank and publishing firm dedicated to the heritage, identity, and future of European people in the United States and around the world.” This self-description of the organization lines up exactly with McNallen’s rhetoric throughout his career.

Powell calls the event as “a gathering of white supremacists” representative of “the white nationalist movement.” Describing the worldview of the attendees, he writes,

It's through this prism of tribal heritage and racial pride that the white nationalists seemed to view nearly every aspect of the rest of the world. The white race, which they know to be genetically superior to non-white lineages, is threatened by massive non-white immigration movements and widespread political liberalism promoting a universal egalitarian moral code that shuns conversations about race.

Everything in this statement accurately describes McNallen’s writings, except the sense of superiority. Does McNallen also believe this, the final piece of the racism definition?

Powell describes his interactions at the conference with a group of AFA members who were in attendance: “There were at least 7-10 AFA members at this event, maybe more, and with their jewelry [Thor’s hammer amulets] displayed, they could not have been unnoticed by the conference organizers.” The AFA members shared “their plans to recruit others to the white nationalist cause by use of racist humor” and “expressed frustration with a culture and government that they feel ignores and looks down upon the interests of the white race.” Believing that the reporter shared their views, “They were relieved that they had finally found a place where they didn’t have to ‘feel out’ the conversation before navigating it into the straits of white supremacy.”

National Policy Institute's latest conference event features Robert Taylor, another one of the subjects of Mattias Gardell's Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism

McNallen has accused Media Matters of defamation and claimed that the AFA members attended the conference as “private citizens,” not as representatives of his organization. His denial of responsibility is undercut by his simultaneous endorsement of the event as a gathering of “people of European descent to quietly discuss issues of concern to them as a group.” The issue of common interest he cites is “white extinction,” exactly the subject of his own essays discussed above.

McNallen’s denial that the conference attendees were sent by the AFA is dismissed by sociologist Jennifer Snook, who writes in American Heathens that Powell’s account was “corroborated by AFA members with close ties to McNallen.” Discussing McNallen’s claim that the AFA members were not at the conference on behalf of his organization, she writes, “Heathens with connections to McNallen and those in his inner circle have reported the opposite, citing the presence of the AFA attendees as a deliberate attempt at recruitment.”

When McNallen’s close associates declare the dishonesty of McNallen’s refusal to take responsibility for the recruitment effort at “a gathering of white supremacists,” they provide the final evidence that he is promoting a racist worldview. The clear congruence of his published rhetoric with the stated focus of the National Policy Institute is underscored by his public defense of a conference dedicated to discussing responses to a supposed “white extinction” threatened by non-white immigrants.

This removes any doubt that McNallen’s work fits every aspect of the definition of racism, including belief in “inherent superiority of a particular race.” It also shows that the repeated denials of racism with which he peppers his writings are merely part of a public relations campaign capable of luring a journalist of the Religion News Service into posting positive press promoting his projects.

Locking the hof doors: most of AFA website went private after Winston posted her article

In an email sent to Winston eight days before she posted her piece, I wrote:

Given that Mr. McNallen founded the Asatru Folk Assembly due to his disgust at "liberals, affirmative-action Asatrúers, black goðar, and New Agers" in American Heathenry, it's difficult to see his purchase of an agricultural advocacy group's meeting hall as relevant to anyone outside his own non-profit organization for "the northern European folk."

To view American Heathenry through a Catholic lens – to look for an "Asa-pope" who speaks for Heathens, to see the headquarters of one non-profit organization as a spiritual center for the greater community – is to fundamentally misunderstand and misrepresent a set of related religions that has no central authority and no central meeting place, but does have a complicated network of local groups and places of worship.

She replied by telling me that the AFA’s building “is a sign of the maturity of newly revived ancient religion on American soil” – apparently even if the vast majority of that religion’s practitioners deny that their faith has anything to do with McNallen’s racialized version of it.

Lonnie Scott (member of Ár nDraíocht Féin and the Troth): The Tree and Well at the center of Heathenism connects all of us. Our fates are intertwined regardless of politics or skin. Our myths recognize this in adventures of the gods seeking knowledge and heroes exploring beyond known borders. Our ancestors stretch back to the first humans all the way through the continuing expansion of mankind's migrations. I honor my ancestors for their challenges, skills, and the life they gave to me regardless of their culture, religion, or skin color. My values and deeds are color-blind. Heathenism may not be for everyone, but let that be their own personal decision free from twisted politics.

Winston’s article for Religion News Service cites my Worldwide Heathen Census 2013, stating that it “put the number [of American Heathens] at a little under 8,000.” Unfortunately, this confuses data and analysis. There were 7,878 responses from Heathens in the United States. In the census results post that she links to, the method suggested for interpreting the data would “put the number” of Heathens in America at 17,119. If we accept AFA claims regarding its own membership numbers, as Winston seems to do in the article, AFA members would make up only 4% of American Heathens.

Different standards for covering pagans and popes?

In 2014, Religion News Service ran a piece titled “Pope Francis raises eyebrows by saying pedophile priests include ‘bishops and cardinals.’” It quotes the pope saying, “Many of my advisers who are fighting it with me are giving me reliable data that estimates pedophilia inside the church at a level of 2 percent.”

If a building bought by a non-profit whose membership is only 4% of the American Heathen population represents the religion as a whole, does the child-rape perpetrated by 2% of priests, bishops and cardinals in the Catholic Church represent all of Catholicism? More to the point, since the AFA is only one organization led by one charismatic leader, to equate it with all of American Heathenry is like equating the rapist priests with all of Christianity.

Josh Heath (advocate for Heathens in the military): I've been a Heathen for twenty-plus years now. In that time I've seen organizations, kindreds, and people come and go. Heathenry has been moving away from large organizations. The large majority of Heathens in the US are not part of national or international organizations. They are focused on understanding and developing local manifestations of their regional Heathenism.

No one group or person represents all of Heathenry, and no single group building a hof means anything for Heathenry at large. If it did, all of the other hofs that predate the AFA's purchase of this grange building would have meant more than they do. Instead, they are local places of worship and that is what we should be striving for. The AFA's hof means nothing to me, nor does it mean anything to the large majority of US Heathens. It's an organizational holy site for members of that organization. It means as little to me as a new church going up in Alabama does.

Translator’s Note

Illustration of Óláfr Tryggvason by Peter Nicolai Arbo (1831-1892)

The anonymous Old English poem known as The Battle of Maldon was preserved in an eleventh-century manuscript that was destroyed in the 1731 Ashburnham House fire. Although a copy was made by David Casley in 1726, the beginning and end of the poem have been lost – hence the ellipsis a the start and the sudden cessation of the action at the finish.

The Battle of Maldon tells of a historical battle between Anglo-Saxons and Vikings that took place in August 991 on the River Blackwater (called Pante in the poem). In The Anglo-Saxons (1982), Campbell, John and Wormald call The Battle of Maldon an “unparalleled vernacular poem” and write that it “has been taken by almost all commentators as virtually contemporary with the battle.”

The Viking invaders begin the battle on the island (now called Northey) where they had landed their ships. Their main leader was Óláfr Tryggvason, famous (or infamous) for his declaration that “all Norway should be Christian, or die” and for his bloody forced conversions of the unwilling. The Maldon battle took place while Óláfr was still pagan, three years before his confirmation as a follower of Christ.

The Anglo-Saxon defenders are led by the ealdorman Byrhtnoth, follower of King Æthelræd. Campbell et al. refer to Æthelræd’s reign (979-1016) as one “of almost unremitting disaster that has impressed itself on the folk-memory of the English.” Æthelræd is today known as the Unready, but his nickname was actually Unræd (“ill-advised”), a play on the literal meaning of his name Æthelræd (“good advice”).

The battle begins at high tide, when the causeway from the island to the mainland is completely submerged by the river. As the tide flows out, the raised path is revealed and the Anglo-Saxons defend the narrow way until the Vikings politely ask to be let across.

Byrhtnoth’s fatal decision to let the Vikings wade over from their island camp to fight on the mainland – a decision made “because of his overconfidence” – may not have been as unwise as it seems at first blush. If he had not agreed to let the Vikings come to land and fight his assembled army, they would simply have sailed along the river in their ships and raided undefended spots.

Map of the site of The Battle of Maldon (click image to enlarge)

Readers familiar with Norse mythology, Icelandic sagas, Beowulf and related medieval sources will recognize many elements of The Battle of Maldon, such as having no tolerance for cowardice, standing by a boast made in the hall, vocally challenging the opposing side, demanding tribute or battle, standing in the shield-wall, seeing ravens fly over the battlefield, and winning glory in battle. There is a familiar emphasis on the special relationship of sister-son, the reciprocity between leader and followers, the duty to avenge a fallen lord, and the leader as giver of rings. Also present are tropes such as such as laughter amid slaughter, the “storm of spears,” and the image of Vikings as “slaughter-wolves.”

Following translators of Old English such as R.D. Fulk and J.R.R. Tolkien, I have rendered the poem as prose. The full text of The Battle of Maldon in Old English can be found in Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson’s A Guide to Old English, available as a paperback in The Norse Mythology Store under Books → Dictionaries & Language.

The Battle of Maldon
Translated from the Old English by Karl E. H. Seigfried

Statue of Byrhtnoth by John Doubleday

…was broken. [Byrhtnoth] then commanded each one of the warriors to let his horse go, to drive it far away, and to walk forth, to give thought to his hands and to good courage.

When the kinsman of Offa first realized that the nobleman would not tolerate cowardice, he let his beloved hawk fly from his hands towards the forest, and he strode towards the battle; through that one was able to recognize that the youth would not weaken at the battle, when he took up arms.

Besides him, Eadric wished to support his leader, his lord at the fight, then began to bear forth a spear to the battle. He had good thought as long as he was able to hold a shield and a broad sword with his hands; he stood by his boast when he had to fight before his lord.

Then Byrhtnoth began to array the warriors there, he rode and gave counsel, taught the warriors how they had to stand and hold the position, and bade that they hold their shields aright fastly with their hands, and fear not. When he had properly arrayed that army, he dismounted among the people where it was dearest to him, where he knew his household retainers were most loyal.

“The heathens shall fall at the battle”

Then the messenger of the Vikings stood on the shore, loudly cried out, spoke with words, he threateningly announced the message of the seafarers to the nobleman, where he stood on the shore.

“The bold seamen sent me to you, commanded that you be told that you may quickly send rings in exchange for protection; and it is better for you that you buy off this storm of spears with tribute, than we dispense such hard battle. We do not need to destroy ourselves, if you are wealthy enough for that; we will establish a truce with the gold.

“If you decide, you who is richest here, that you will ransom your people, give to the seamen in their own judgment wealth in exchange for friendship, and take peace from us, we are willing to go with the payment to ship, fare on the sea, and keep peace with you.”

Byrhtnoth spoke, he raised his shield aloft, he brandished a slender spear of ash, spoke with words, angry and resolute gave him back an answer:

“Do you hear, sailor, what this army says? They want to give to you as tribute spears, poisoned spear-point and ancient swords, that war-­equipment which will not be of use to you at the battle.

“Messenger of seamen, announce back again, say to your people a much more hateful message, that here stands a noble of unblemished reputation with his troop, who will defend this homeland, the country of Æthelræd, of my leader, people and ground. The heathens shall fall at the battle.

“It seems too shameful to me that you would go unopposed to ship with our payment, now you have come thus far hither into our homeland. You shall not get treasure so easily; spear and sword shall first reconcile us, fierce game of battle, before we give tribute.”

The slaughter-wolves waded

The island of Northey (left) & the site of the battle (right) Photo by Terry Joyce

He then commanded shields be carried, warriors to go, so that they all stood on the riverbank. Because of the water, the troop was not able to go to the other; there came the flowing flood after ebb-­tide, the water-­streams joined. It seemed too long to them, until they would bear spears together.

They stood there alongside the river Pante in array, the East-­Saxon vanguard and the spear-­army. Nor was any of them able to harm the other, unless someone took a fall through the flight of an arrow. The tide went out; the seamen stood ready, Vikings many, eager for battle.

The protector of the warriors then commanded the war-­hard warrior to hold the bridge, he was called Wulfstan, brave with his kin, that was the son of Ceola, who shot the first man with his spear who stepped there most boldly on the bridge. There stood with Wulfstan warriors unafraid, Ælfere and Maccus, two bold men, who would not take flight at the ford, but they steadfastly defended against the enemies, as long as they were allowed to wield weapons.

When they perceived and readily saw that they found bitter bridge-­wardens there, the hateful strangers began to use guile, asked that they might have passage to land, to fare over the ford, to lead the foot-troop. Then the nobleman began because of his overconfidence to allow too much land to hateful people.

Then the son or Byrhtelm began to call out over the cold water (warriors listened):

“Now a way is opened to you, walk quickly to us, men to battle; God alone knows who may control the place of slaughter.”

The slaughter­-wolves waded (not mourning because of water), the Viking troop, west over the Pante, carried shields over gleaming water, ship-men bore shields to land. Byrhtnoth with his warriors stood there ready against the hostile ones; he commanded them to form the battle-­wall with shields, and to hold that formation fast against the enemies.

Then the fight was near, glory from battle. The time was come that there doomed men had to fall. There was shouting raised, ravens circled, an eagle eager for carrion; there was a cry on the earth.

The warriors give thought to war

The Battle of Maldon by Rory W. Stapleton

They then released from hand file-hard spears, grimly ground spears to fly; bows were busy, shield received spear-­point. Bitter was the battle-­rush, warriors fell on either hand, young men lay dead. Wulfmær was wounded, chose a bed of death, kinsman of Byrhtnoth; he was with swords, his sister-son, cruelly cut down.

There the Vikings were given requital. I heard that Eadweard slew one fiercely with his sword, withheld not the stroke, so that the doomed warrior fell at his feet; for that his lord said thanks to the bower-­servant, when he had the opportunity.

So the resolute warriors stood firm at the battle, eagerly gave thought who there with spear-­points might first win life from doomed man, a warrior with weapons; the slaughtered fell on the earth. They stood steadfast; Byrhtnoth commanded them, bade that each of the warriors give thought to war who wished to win glory from the Danes by fighting.

Then advanced one hard in battle, raised weapon up, shield as defence, and strode against that warrior. So went the resolute nobleman to that yeoman, each intent on harm to the other. Then the sea-­warrior sent the southern spear, so that the lord of the warriors was wounded; he shoved then with the shield, so that the shaft burst apart, and so that the spear quivered, that it sprang back.

The warrior was enraged; he stabbed with a spear the proud Viking, who gave him the wound. The army-warrior was wise; he let his spear go through the neck of the warrior, hand guided so that it reached the life of the sudden attacker. Then he quickly shot another, so that the mail-­coat burst apart; he was wounded in the breast through the ring-­mail, the poisoned spear-­point stood in him at his heart. The nobleman was the happier one, laughed then, bold man, said thanks to the Creator for the day’s work that the Lord gave him.

Then a certain one of the Vikings let spear go from hand, to fly from hand, so that it too deeply went through the noble thane of Æthelræd. By his side stood a warrior not fully grown, a boy in the battle, who completely bravely pulled from the warrior the bloody spear, son of Wulfstan, Wulfmær the young, let go the exceedingly hard one to go back again; the spear-­point penetrated in, so that he lay on the earth who previously severely wounded his lord.

Their lord lay dead

Anglo-Saxon sword grip & pommel (late 8th century)

Then an armed warrior walked to the nobleman; he wished to fetch the rings of the warrior, armor and ring-­mail and ornamented sword. Then Byrhtnoth drew sword from sheath, broad and with shining blade, and struck on the coat of mail. A certain one of the ship-men hindered him too quickly, so that he wounded the arm of the nobleman. Golden-­hilted sword fell then to earth; he was not able to hold hard sword, to wield weapon.

Then the hoary battle-warrior still spoke words, encouraged young warriors, bade to go forth as good companions; he was not able then to longer stand up fast on feet. He looked to heaven:

“Thank you, Ruler of peoples, for all of the joys that I experienced in the world. Now I have, merciful Creator, most need that you grant goodness to my spirit, that my soul be allowed to travel to you into your dominion, lord of angels, to go with peace. I am requesting to you that hellish enemies are not allowed to lay it low.”

Then heathen warriors hewed him and both the warriors who stood by him, Ælfnoth and Wulmaer both lay dead, who alongside their lord gave up life.

They retreated then from battle, those who did not wish to be there. There the son of Odda was first in flight, Godric from battle, and abandoned the good one that often gave him many a horse; he leaped upon the horse that his lord owned, on the harness which was not right, and his brothers both ran with him, Godwine and Godwig, cared not for battle, but turned from the battle and sought the wood, fled into that stronghold and saved their lives, and more men than was proper, if they all remembered the favors he had done them to their benefit. So Offa had said to him earlier in the day before in the meeting-place, when he had a meeting, that many spoke bravely there that afterwards at need would not endure.

Then the leader of the army was fallen, nobleman of Æthelræd; all the hearth-­companions saw that their lord lay dead. Then there went forth proud thanes, undaunted men hastened eagerly; they all wished then for one of two things, to forsake life or to avenge the dear one.

They did not care about life

Anglo-Saxon drinking horn made from aurochs (late 6th century)

So the son of Ælfric encouraged them forward, warrior young in winters, spoke words, Ælfwine then said, he valiantly spoke,

“I remember the times when we often spoke at mead, when we raised boasts on bench, heroes in hall, about hard battle; now one can find out who is brave. I wish to make my noble lineage known to all, that I was of a great family among the Mercians; my grandfather was called Ealhelm, wise nobleman, prosperous.

“Thanes in that people shall not reproach me that I wish to fare from this fyrd, to seek my homeland, now that my lord lies cut down in battle. To me is that greatest of harms; he was both my kinsman and my lord.”

Then he went forth, remembered feud, so that he wounded one with spear, seaman in that army, so that he on the ground lay killed with his weapon. He then began to urge comrades, friends and companions, that they should go forth.

Offa spoke, shook ashen spear:

“Hey you, Ælfwine, you have exhorted all thanes at need, now that our lord lies dead, nobleman on the earth. It is needful for us all that each of us should encourage the other warrior to battle, as long as he is able to have and to hold weapon, hard blade, spear and good sword.

“Godric, cowardly son of Odda, has betrayed us all. Many a man thought that, when he rode on horse, on that proud horse, that it was our lord; therefore here on the field the army was divided, shield-wall broken. May his beginning come to naught, because here he caused so many a man to flee!”

Leofsunu spoke and raised his shield, shield as protection; he answered the warrior:

“I vow that I will not flee a footstep from here, but wish to go further, to avenge my beloved lord in battle. Steadfast heroes need not reproach me around Sturmer with words, now that my lord has fallen, that I would travel lordless home, would turn from battle, but a weapon must take me, spear and iron sword.”

He advanced very angrily, fought steadfastly, he scorned flight.

Dunnere then said, shook spear, humble yeoman, called out over all, bade that each of the warriors would avenge Byrhtnoth:

“He who intends to avenge the lord in the army can not draw back, nor care about life.”

Then they went forth, they did not care about life; retainers then began to fight fiercely, fierce spear-bearers, and asked God that they might avenge their beloved lord and work death on their enemies.

A special song of terror

Anglo-Saxon shield ornament (late 6th century)

The hostage eagerly began to help them; he was of a tough family in Northumbria, son of Ecglaf, his name was Æschferth. He did not flinch at the fighting, but he often shot forth an arrow; sometimes he shot into a shield, sometimes tore apart a warrior, always after a short while he gave some wound, as long as he could wield weapons.

Edward the Tall still stood in the vanguard, ready and eager, spoke boasting words that he would not fly the space of a foot of land, retreat in the rear, when his better lay dead. He broke the shield-­wall and fought against the warriors, until he splendidly avenged his treasure-giver on the seamen, before he lay dead in the slaughter.

So did Ætheric, noble companion, ready and eager to advance, fought earnestly. The brother of Sibyrht and very many others cleaved keel-shaped shields, keenly defended themselves; rim of shield burst, and the byrnie sang a special song of terror.

Then at battle Offa struck that sailor, so that he fell on the earth, and there the kinsman of Gadd sought ground. Soon Offa was cut down at battle; nevertheless he had carried out what he had promised his lord, as he before vowed with his ring-giver that they should both ride into the stronghold, hale to home, or fall in the army, in the place of slaughter perish from wounds; he lay loyally beside his lord.

Then was crashing of shields. Seamen advanced enraged by battle; spear often passed through life-house of a doomed man. Then Wistan went forth, son of Thurston, fought against these warriors; he was the slayer of three of them in the throng, before the descendant of Wigelin would lie on the field of slaughter.

There was a hard encounter; warriors stood fast in strife, warriors perished, weary with wounds. The slaughtered fell on the earth. Oswold and Eadwold all the while, both the brothers, encouraged warriors, bade their beloved kinsmen with words that they ought to endure there at need, unweakly use weapons.

“Mind must be the harder”

Bryhtwold spoke, he raised his shield aloft (he was an old retainer), shook spear; he very boldly advised warriors;

“Mind must be the harder, heart the keener, courage the larger, the smaller our strength grows. Here lies our leader entirely cut down, the good one in the dust. He can mourn forever, he who now intends to turn from this fighting. I am old in life; I will not away, but I myself by the side of my lord, by so beloved a man, intend to lie.”

So the son of Æthelgar encouraged them all, Godric to battle. Often he let spear go, slaughter-spear to fly into the Vikings, so he went foremost in that army, hewed and injured, until he perished in battle. That was not that Godric who fled from the battle.

This modern English translation is © 2015 by Karl E. H. Seigfried

Cover to a book by Karl Paetow

CONTEST

The theme for The Norse Mythology Blog's sixth art contest is a bit different. Be sure to carefully read the entire Contest Theme section so that you understand the assignment.

During the winter solstice on December 21, those of us in the northern hemisphere will experience the shortest day and longest night of the year. This may seem early in the season, but it’s really the middle. From this point on, days will get longer as we slowly move back towards summer.

Throughout Northern Europe, there are local traditions that celebrate midwinter. Some of these practices preserve very old rituals. Your original piece of visual art should capture the midwinter spirit.

I strongly suggest doing some reading and research on myth and folklore before you begin your artwork. What characters and concepts can you discover? Can you think of a way to relate them to the contest theme?

If you need some ideas about mythology, browse The Norse Mythology Blog Archive. You can also check out the winners of the Midwinter 2014 Art Contest in the three categories: kid, teen and adult. Most importantly – be creative!

CONTEST THEME

Illustration of the Grimms' fairy tale

Your artwork entry must somehow relate to the character and legends of Frau Holle. When I was a child, my father told me of the German folk tradition of Frau Holle; when she made her bed in the sky, she would shake out her comforter, and the downy feathers would fall to the earth as snow. I think of her whenever Chicago is coated by a beautiful new snowfall.

This complex figure of folklore has many aspects, and most of them relate to winter and midwinter. Your job is to find something about Frau Holle that speaks to you and inspires you to create your own original work of art. Here's some information to set your imagination going.

In the first volume of Children's and Household Tales (1812) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (also known as Grimms' Fairy Tales), Frau Holle appears in tale number twenty-four. A beautiful and diligent maiden falls into a well and finds herself in a lovely meadow. Eventually, she meets an old woman named Frau Holle.

At last she came to a small cottage where an old woman was looking out of a window. She had such big teeth that the maiden was scared and wanted to run away. But the old woman cried after her, "Don't be afraid, my dear child! Stay with me, and if you do all the housework properly, everything will turn out well for you. You must only make my bed nicely and give it a good shaking so the feathers fly. Then it will snow on earth, for I am Frau Holle." [After loyally serving Frau Holle for a time, the maiden eventually asks to go home.] Frau Holle answered, "Since you've served me so faithfully, I myself shall bring you up there again." She took the maiden by the hand and led her to a large gate. When it was opened and the maiden was standing beneath the gateway, an enormous shower of gold came pouring down, and all the gold stuck to her so that she became completely covered with it. "I want you to have this because you've been so diligent," said Frau Holle. Thereupon, the gate closed, and the maiden found herself up on earth. Then she went to her mother, and since she was covered with so much gold, her mother gave her a warm welcome. [adapted from translation by Jack Zipes]

There's more to Frau Holle than just feathers! The following descriptions of her are adapted from the first volume of Jacob Grimm's Teutonic Mythology (1835). Notice that Frau she appears in many different guises – some charming, some beautiful, some frightening. Which aspect will you pick to portray in your artwork?

Powerful goddess of the sky In popular legends and nursery-tales, Frau Holle appears a superior being, who manifests a kind and helpful disposition towards humans, and is never cross except when she notices disorder in household affairs. Frau Holle is represented as a being of the sky, begirding the earth; when it snows, she is making her bed, and the feathers of it fly. She stores up snow, as Thor does rain; so that Frau Holle comes before us as a goddess of no mean rank. Beautiful lady of the lake She loves to haunt the lake and fountain; at the hour of noon she may be seen, a fair glowing lady, bathing in the flood and disappearing; a trait in which she resembles the goddess Nerthus. Mortals, to reach her dwelling, pass through the well. Wagon-driver in the midwinter dark She drives about in a wagon. She had a linchpin put in it by a peasant whom she met; when he picked up the chips, they were gold. Her annual progress is made to fall between Christmas and Twelfth-day, when the supernatural has sway, and wild beasts like the wolf are not mentioned by their names, brings fertility to the land. Head of the Wild Hunt Frau Holle, like Odin, can also ride on the winds, clothed in terror and she, like the god, belongs to the Wild Hunt. From this arose the fancy, that witches ride in Frau Holle's company. Into the same Furious Host, according to wide-spread popular belief, were adopted the souls of unbaptized children; not having been christian'd, they remained heathen, and fell to heathen gods, to Odin or to Frau Holle. Leader of spooky sprites The next step is, that Frau Holle, instead of her divine shape, assumes the appearance of an ugly old woman, long-nosed, big-toothed, with bristling and thick-matted hair. "He's had a jaunt with Frau Holle, they say of a man whose hair sticks up in tangled disorder, so children are frightened with her or her equally hideous train: "Hush, there's Holle-bruin, Holle-bogie coming." Holle-peter and other house-sprites are among the muffled servitors who go about in Frau Holle's procession at the time of the winter solstice. Wife at the spinning wheel Frau Holle is set before us as a spinning-wife; the cultivation of flax is assigned to her. Industrious maids she presents with spindles, and spins their reels full for them over night; a slothful spinner's distaff she sets on fire, or soils it. The girl whose spindle dropt into her fountain, she rewarded bountifully. [adapted from translation by James Steven Stallybrass]

Frau Holle statue by Viktor Donhauser

You can do any of these things:

1. Illustrate a scene from the fairy tale of Frau Holle
2. Illustrate one of the aspects of Frau Holle from Teutonic Mythology
3. Illustrate the feeling of Frau Holle
4. Create something inspired by Frau Holle
5. Draw something connecting Frau Holle to other characters or concepts from Norse myth and Germanic folklore

You must do this one thing:

Include an explanation with your entry explaining how your work relates to the poem.

Beware!

In this contest, Marvel Comics characters are NOT considered part of Norse mythology or folklore. Art with imagery from comic books or movies will NOT be accepted. Do some reading and research on myth and folklore, then base your imagery on what you learn!

JUDGES

I am extremely proud to announce the judges for the art contest. I greatly respect both of these incredibly talented people, and I'm very happy that they agreed to participate this year. The three of us will judge the entries together.

Simon Coleby

Simon Coleby

I've loved Simon Coleby's art since I first discovered it in the early 1990s in the pages of the great UK weekly comic 2000 AD, where his brilliantly unique work was showcased in tales of Judge Dredd, Rogue Trooper, Venus Bluegenes, Malone, and Sinister Dexter. In the first decade of this century, Simon blasted into the pages of the Judge Dredd Megazine, with massive thrill-power on the title character and hilarious silliness in stories of Bato Loco.

His work for DC includes Lobo (with Batman's Alan Grant) and The Legion (with Thor's Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning). For Marvel, he's worked on The Punisher, Death's Head, and The Eternal. He's currently working on Dreaming Eagles (with Preacher's Garth Ennis) for Aftershock Comics.

Simon's art is always designed with integrity and finished with intensity. I'm very happy that he's a judge this midwinter, and I look forward to his insights on the entries.

Dr. Kendra Willson

Dr. Kendra Willson

Kendra Willson is currently a researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Turku in Finland, with a project focusing on possible Finnish and Sámi elements in runic inscriptions.

She has previously held positions at the University of Helsinki, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), and the University of Manitoba. She holds a PhD in Scandinavian languages and literatures from the University of California at Berkeley. She has written on Old Icelandic and Modern Icelandic personal names, discourse structures and genre in Old Icelandic sagas, metrical aspects of poetic translation, and word order change in Icelandic and Finnish.

I am very interested to follow the results Kendra's fascinating new research into Finno-Ugric elements in runic inscriptions. She writes:

I will review the corpus of runic inscriptions from Scandinavia to reassess the possibility that especially undeciphered inscriptions might contain names or other elements from Finnish or Sámi. Unintelligible inscriptions have often been interpreted as magical or illiterate but rarely as reflecting non-Germanic languages. This may in part reflect outdated views of the cultural makeup of the region in earlier times and the nature of language contacts.

Scandinavian runic inscriptions contain personal names from West Germanic, Celtic, Latin and (one) Slavic. While runestones mention several place names from Finland and Estonia, no Finnic personal names have been established in runic inscriptions. The few proposed Finnish and Sámi interpretations in the runological literature have shown anachronisms due to limited understandings of the histories of those languages.

The results of this research could have far-reaching repercussions for interpretation of supposedly magical runic inscriptions. You can read more about Kendra's project by clicking here.

AGE CATEGORIES

Frau Holle by Wilhelm Stumpf

There will be three winners in each of the following categories:

Kids: Age 12 & under
Teens: Age 13-19
Adults: Age 20 & up

RULES

1. Art must be done with crayon, marker, paint, pen, pencil or digital materials.
2. Original art only; no photos or collage.
3. Art must be kid-friendly; no nudity or violence.
4. No copyrighted characters. Let’s leave the Marvel Comics to the professionals!
5. One entry per person, please.

HOW TO ENTER

Send an email to mythcontest@live.com that includes the following:

1. Your full name (kids can give first name and last initial)
2. Your age (as of December 18, 2015)
3. Your location (city, state/province, country)
4. A short description of your artwork that explains how it relates to lore of Frau Holle
5. Your artwork (as an attachment)

Seriously, don’t forget to include your art as an attachment!

ENTRY DEADLINE

11:59 p.m. (Chicago time) on December 18, 2015

ANNOUNCEMENT OF WINNERS

Winners will be featured on all Norse Mythology Online sites

Steve, Kendra and I will be judging the entries based on creativity and relation to Norse mythology. Do some reading, do some thinking and make something original!

The three winners in each age group will be featured on The Norse Mythology Blog, The Norse Mythology Facebook Page, The Norse Mythology Google+ Page, The Norse Mythology Pinterest Page and The Norse Mythology Twitter Page. Your art and your description of it will be posted on all the many sites of Norse Mythology Online and will remain permanently in the The Norse Mythology Blog Archive.

December 21: Kid winners announced
December 22: Teen winners announced
December 23: Adult winners announced

Good luck to everyone!

Charlemagne by Albrecht Dürer

Charlemagne, king of the Franks and emperor of the Romans, fought a war of conquest and conversion against the pagan Saxons from 772 until 804. The thirty-two-year conflict ran through seventy percent of his reign; he was twenty-four when it began and fifty-six when it ended. This article will examine Charlemagne’s long-term efforts over this extended period to replace the pagan beliefs and social structures of the Saxons with Christian beliefs and Frankish rule.

After brief surveys of primary sources used, early Carolingian-Saxon conflicts, material goals of the Frankish invasions, and Charlemagne’s religious motivation, this article provides a narrative of the Saxon war that focuses on religio-cultural elements. Emphasis is placed on five key events: the destruction of the Irminsul, the conflict with Widukind, the mass execution at Verden, the issue of the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniæ, and the forced relocation of the Saxon people.

The central argument proposed is that, over the long course of the war, Charlemagne increasingly sought a complete erasure of Saxon pagan identity.

PRIMARY SOURCES

The Royal Frankish Annals are arguably the prime primary source for the history of the Saxon war. They offer an official history covering the years 741 to 829, with events after around 790 written down contemporaneously. Additional material was added by a reviser between 814 and 817. Although plainly written in annual entries with no real reflection or meaningful commentary, the RFA provide a detailed account of the major events of the Saxon war from a Frankish perspective. It is unknown whether Charlemagne personally commissioned the annals, yet the encouragement of such a project fits with his promotion of historiography in general.

The annals were a source for Einhard, who wrote his Life of Charles the Emperor around 828. He was educated at the Fulda monastery founded by Saint Boniface, the martyred missionary who was of such symbolic importance to both the Christian Charlemagne and the pagan Saxons. Einhard became a member of Charlemagne’s court while in his early twenties. He served Charlemagne from the beginning of the 790s until the emperor’s death in 814, then remained in the court of Charlemagne’s son and successor Louis until the end of the 820s.

Like the RFA, Einhard’s Life provides a courtly and contemporary perspective on the age of the Saxon war. Einhard states that his work combines his own eyewitness testimony “along with the common reports of other writers.” Although Einhard is often inattentive to detail, muddles basic facts, mixes up individuals with similar names, and imports information from classical authors, he at least seems to have not simply fabricated material. His courtly audience included many survivors of Charlemagne’s day who would have recognized outright fantasy.

Notker Balbulus in an 11th-century manuscript

Notker Balbulus, author of The Deeds of Emperor Charles the Great, was born in 840 and given to the monastery of Saint Gall as a child oblate. He was neither a member of the royal court nor an eyewitness to the events he describes. However, the section of the Deeds dealing with Charlemagne’s military conquests is based on the oral testimony of one Adalbert, who served in the Saxon war with Gerold, brother of Charlemagne’s wife Hildegard.

The anonymous Corvey monk known as the Saxon Poet is yet farther removed from the events of the Saxon War. His Life of Charles the Great was written between 888 and 891. Although the poem is largely based on Einhard and the annals, the poet does add some additional details.

More than eighty years after the end of the conflict, the Saxon Poet is thankful to Charlemagne for conquering and converting his forefathers. However, some sense of Saxon self shows up when the poet departs from his Frankish sources; he places more emphasis on distinguishing between the various tribal subsets of Saxons, portrays some of Charlemagne’s incursions into Saxony as pre-emptive strikes that were not motivated by actual Saxon attacks, and elaborates on the effects Charlemagne’s post-795 scorched earth policy had on the Saxon people.

EARLY CONFLICTS & MATERIAL GOALS

The Saxons appear in the third entry of the Royal Frankish Annals. Charlemagne’s uncle Carloman invaded Saxony and forced the submission of the Saxon leader Theodoric in 743 and (with the aid of Charlemagne’s father Pepin) in 744. Pepin himself led forces into Saxony in 747, 753 and 758.

Pepin by Louis-Félix Amiel

The annals provide no explanation for the invasions and list no initial incendiary action by the Saxons, although material motivation is implied by the statement that, after the 758 Frankish incursion, the Saxons “promised Pepin to obey all his orders and to present as gifts at his assembly up to three hundred horses every year.” Throughout this period, a non-pacified Saxony provided a steady source of income in the form of raided plunder and large annual tribute payments. While reports of these early conflicts mention some religious elements (missionary work and baptism by the Franks, church burnings by the Saxons), their role is minute compared to what was to come under Charlemagne.

Charlemagne’s unrelenting offensives against neighboring peoples have been explained as “a means to provide the king with sufficient funds to reward his vassals and to compensate for the meager resources and inadequate revenues of his kingdom.” In 774, two years after his first invasion of Saxon territory, one of Charlemagne’s four attacking detachments is said to have “returned home with much booty.” Later campaigns continued to siphon Saxon wealth into Frankish hands.

The Saxon Poet makes Charlemagne seem something of a pirate in a passage reminiscent of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle’s description of the Viking raid on Lindisfarne: “he sent a threefold army into [the Saxons’] regions, and sorely afflicted the people by much slaughter and plundering. After devastating many places he withdrew as victor, laden with spoils.” Altogether, the Saxon lands he worked so hard to conquer were eighteen times larger than the Wessex that Alfred defended from the Vikings; through his conquests, Charlemagne nearly doubled the size of the lands inherited from his father.

CHARLEMAGNE'S RELIGIOUS MOTIVATION

However, treasure and land were not the sole motivation for the conquering king who wore a sword with a “cross-shaped hilt at the ready for attacking pagans.” The Saxon Poet calls him “a teacher of faith” who came to the Saxons “to save them against their will.”

Charlemagne by D.J. Pound

A text on the life of Saint Liborius written between 887 and 909 states that Charlemagne “preached to the Saxons with an iron tongue,” perhaps echoing Notker’s striking image of the conquering “iron Charles” riding down his enemies: “helmeted in iron, armed with iron gloves, his iron chest and broad shoulders safe in an iron breastplate… ‘Oh, the iron; alas the iron’: the bewildered wail of the citizens sounded forth.”

In 775, the original RFA entry simply describes another Saxon raid by Charlemagne with no motivation given. The revised RFA, however, states that he “decided to attack the treacherous and treaty-breaking tribe of the Saxons and to persist in this war until they were either defeated and forced to accept the Christian religion or entirely exterminated.” This determination is something quite different from territorial expansionism and gathering of wealth.

The religious nature of the Saxon war goes beyond the “with God’s help” trope repeated to the point of banality in the RFA. Charlemagne saw himself as a new Constantine, emulating the first Christian emperor by naming a Frankish stronghold Karlsburg after himself, as the earlier emperor had done with Constantinople. To his consternation, the eponymous stronghold was destroyed by the pagan Saxons rebelling under the leadership of Widukind.

In Einhard’s Life, the Saxons are the only non-Christian people whose religious beliefs are discussed. The biographer introduces them by stating that the Saxons, “like almost all the peoples who live in Germany, were ferocious by nature, devoted to the cult of demons, hostile to our religion, and did not consider it shameful to transgress divine or human laws.” Einhard’s assertion that the Saxons were demon-worshipers parallels the eight-century Old Saxon baptismal vow used by those who converted to Christianity: “I renounce all the words and works of the devil, Thunaer, Woden and Saxnot, and all those demons who are their companions.”

Along with this demonization of Saxon religion, Einhard sets out the trope of Saxon dual disobedience of sacred and secular law, an idea that pervades contemporary portrayal of the Saxon war. Unlike the RFA, Einhard gives Charlemagne a clear motive for his first offensive against the Saxons by asserting that the Saxons provoked the war: “Murder, robbery, and arson never ceased on either side [of the Frank-Saxon border]. The Franks were so irritated by these incidents that they decided the time had come to stop responding to individual incidents and to open a full-scale war against the Saxons.”

Despite Einhard’s description of a reasonable defensive action taken by the Franks, the first action against the Saxons was of an overtly religious nature.

THE WAR BEGINS: DESTRUCTION OF THE IRMINSUL

In 772, Charlemagne’s destruction of a major sacred space of the Saxons was the opening sortie of the Saxon war. The RFA report his actions:

Capturing the castle of Eresburg, he proceeded as far as the Irminsul, destroyed this idol and carried away the gold and silver which he found. A great drought occurred so that there was no water in the place where the Irminsul stood. The glorious king wished to remain there two or three days in order to destroy the temple completely, but they had no water. Suddenly at noon, through the grace of God, while the army rested and nobody knew what was happening, so much water poured forth in a stream that the whole army had enough.

The destruction of the Saxon sanctuary was enough of an event for news of it to fairly quickly travel as far as England. In 783, the Anglo-Saxon abbot Eanwulf sent Charlemagne a letter congratulating him for his victory over the pagans and his demolition of the religious site.

"Charlemagne Destroys the Irminsul" by Hermann Wislicenus

The name Irminsûl means “gigantic pillar” in Old Saxon. Rudolf of Fulda described the Irminsul as “universis columna, quasi sustinens omnia” (“pillar of the universe which, as it were, supports all things”), but he was writing in 860, eighty-eight years after the event. He was also prone to cribbing descriptions of Saxon religion from the first-century Roman writer Tacitus.

The Saxon Poet writes that the Irminsul “was fashioned in the form of a huge column and contained a corresponding wealth of adornment,” but his account was written nearly 120 years after the destruction of the site. Such later sources must be treated with caution; sources contemporary with the Saxon war do not clarify whether the Irminsul was a carved column or a natural tree.

As in the entries on Carloman and Pepin’s incursions into Saxony, no initial Saxon strike is mentioned; Charlemagne simply initiates the decades-long war by invading Saxon territory to destroy and plunder a religious sanctuary. The wealth benefit incurred by stealing the site’s votive treasures seems secondary. The reason given for Charlemagne’s extended stay at the site is to completely demolish what must have been a substantial pagan temple, not to search for more treasure.

The destruction of the Irminsul and the plundering of the temple treasure represent a radical break with past Carolingian policy. The wealth of the site was likely well known, and the shrine’s location near Eresburg would have been easily accessible by Charlemagne’s predecessors during their raids on Saxon lands. However, neither Carloman nor Pepin had sent troops to plunder it. The fact that Charlemagne destroyed the religious site left intact by earlier Frankish leaders marks the beginning a new strategy of engagement with the Saxons.

A sense of holy war hovers over the scene, as the annalist describes the miracle of water God sent to Charlemagne’s army. Given the continuing religious elements of Charlemagne’s campaigns against the Saxons, it is striking that the first mention of Saxon religion in the Royal Frankish Annals is a description of Charlemagne destroying their idol in “a symbolic statement of his intentions.”

THE SAXONS STRIKE BACK

While Charlemagne was in Rome in 773, the Saxons entered Frankish territory with a large army. After they burned houses outside the castle of Büraburg,

they came upon a church at Fritzlar which Boniface of saintly memory, the most recent martyr, had consecrated and which he had said prophetically would never be burnt by fire. The Saxons began to attack this church with great determination, trying one way or another to burn it. While this was going on, there appeared to some Christians in the castle and also to some heathens in the army two young men on white horses who protected the church from fire. Because of them the pagans could not set the church on fire or damage it, either inside or outside. Terror-stricken by the intervention of divine might they turned to flight, although nobody pursued them.

This passage in the RFA mirrors that describing Charlemagne’s destruction of the Irminsul. In the first event, Charlemagne succeeded in destroying a pagan holy place because God sent a miracle of water as help for the Christian Franks. In the second event, the Saxons failed to destroy a Christian holy place because God sent a miracle of fire-retardant horsemen as obstacle to the pagan Saxons. Symbolically, the waters of baptism are opposed to hellfire. The Christians are sent life-giving water when the sun is at its highest; the pagans bring destructive fire that loses its power in the face of God’s grace.

Adding to the literary and homiletic sense of these paired entries is the invocation of Boniface, the martyr (originally an Anglo-Saxon monk named Winfrid) associated with Charlemagne’s father in the RFA. In 750, “Pepin was elected king according to the custom of the Franks, anointed by the hand of Archbishop Boniface of saintly memory.” The saint is intimately tied to the Carolingians by his blessing of their first king, and this dynastic connection continues through the fulfillment of his prophecy during the reign of Pepin’s son. Charlemagne himself was dedicated enough to Boniface to task the Frisian cleric Liudger with constructing a church and large-scale memorial to martyred saint.

Boniface cuts down Thor's Oak St. Boniface Roman Catholic Church, Crediton, England

If the failed attack on the church consecrated by Boniface is to be taken as historical fact and not merely as a pious lesson on the Carolingian’s saintly connections and Christianity’s inevitable victory over paganism, the Saxon choice of target is noteworthy. In his missionary days, Boniface had (with the aid of “a divine blast from above”) felled “a certain oak of extraordinary size, which is called, by an old name of the pagans, the Oak of Jupiter” in front of “a great multitude of pagans, who in their souls were most earnestly cursing the enemy of their gods,” then used its wood to build an oratory dedicated to Saint Peter.

“Jupiter” is usually taken to be an interpretatio romana of Thunaer, the Saxon equivalent of the Norse Thor who appears in the baptismal vow mentioned above. So, after the destruction of the Irminsul, the Saxons attempted to avenge the destruction of a pagan site centered on what may have been a “great pagan tree shrine” by destroying a Christian site dedicated by a man who had famously destroyed a sacred pagan tree in an earlier generation.

The Saxon Poet stresses that the church consecrated by Boniface was indeed the primary target of the Saxon incursion. The pagans continued to come after the saint; the saint’s relics eventually had to be evacuated by the monks of Fulda when the Saxons sought to destroy the monastery and kill its clerics, perhaps in an effort specifically designed to stop missionary efforts at conversion and destruction of sacred pagan sites. The RFA entry on the initial Saxon attack in 773 makes no mention of plundering, which supports the idea that it was a retaliatory act against a religiously significant object.

RELIGIOUS WARFARE

If this reading is correct, it suggests that the Saxons saw Charlemagne’s attack as an act of religious warfare in the context of a long-term campaign against their traditional religion. “Conscious and consistent policies of resistance” may have been driven by a pagan worldview that formed its own narrative of Christian actions across multiple generations.

Attacks on churches, including the Episcopal seat at Büraburg, continued through 774. The Saxon assault on church property put Charlemagne on the defensive as the royal protector of Christianity. His desire for revenge piled upon revenge continued to escalate over the following years in a self-perpetuating cycle reminiscent of the decade-spanning feuds of the Icelandic sagas.

Sturm by Johann Philipp Preuß (from a photo by Lothar Wiese)

After the mass baptism following the Saxon defeat in 777, Abbot Sturm and the four hundred monks of the Fulda monastery founded by Boniface were tasked with the religious education of the new converts. The monks made baptism their primary goal and destroyed as many heathen religious sites as they could. Sturm’s biographer Eigil writes that Charlemagne specifically entrusted the abbot with destruction of Saxon temples, razing of sacred groves and raising of new churches.

Many of these churches were in turn destroyed by pagan Saxons, belying the triumphalism of the poem De conversione Saxonum, composed at Charlemagne’s court in 777 to celebrate Saxon conversion and the seeming end of the conflict. The reaction of the Saxons to the ongoing anti-pagan activities of the Franks and their allied churchmen led to the rise to prominence of the major Saxon leader of the decades-long conflict.

Widukind will appear in Part Two.

Click here for Part One of the article.

Widukind (Wittekind) by Hans Mündelein

Widukind is presented by the Royal Frankish Annals as Charlemagne’s greatest opponent in the war. Previous Saxon leaders had been named in the annals, but only in defeat. Widukind is the one pagan Saxon given extensive treatment in the text. He is mentioned in multiple entries over the eight-year period from 777 through 785, a period spanning one-quarter of the duration of the Saxon war.

The RFA’s first mention of Widukind is linked to its first mention of Norsemen. The initial appearance of Widukind in the RFA declares that he was “in revolt along with a few others” and was the only Saxon not to attend the general assembly Charlemagne held at Paderborn in 777. The original entry states that Widukind had “fled with his companions into Nordmannia,” and the revised entry glosses this by saying that he “had fled to Sigifrid, king of the Danes.”

Widukind escaped the mass Saxon execution in 782 by again fleeing into “Nordmannia,” after he was once more the lone Saxon absent from Charlemagne’s assembly, this time “at the source of the River Lippe.” As in the 777 entry, Widukind is linked to the Danes; “Norse emissaries of King Sigifrid, Halptani with his companions, also appeared at this assembly.”

The Saxon-Danish connection continued. In 798, Saxons rebels killed Charlemagne’s envoy as he returned from a visit to Sigifrid, leading to Charlemagne becoming “savagely aroused.” It has been suggested that Charlemagne’s negotiations with the Danes specifically concerned their continued harboring of Saxon fugitives, and that the forced relocation of Saxons from Nordalbingia to closer to the Rhineland area was to prevent them from escaping into Denmark or being encouraged to further rebellion by the Danes. As late as 823, there seems to have been a dispute between Franks and Danes over the Norsemen harboring Saxon fugitives.

In The Deeds of Emperor Charles the Great by Notker Balbulus, the only non-Christian religious beliefs mentioned are those of the Saxons and the Norsemen. Of the latter, Notker tells the well-known story of the Norse elder who had “been washed here twenty times” (i.e., been baptized) in order to repeatedly receive the fine linen garments given to converts. Like the Saxons, the Norsemen are portrayed as mocking the sacrament of baptism by repeated apostasy.

Widukind (Wittekind) fountain by Heinrich Wefing

The reports of Widukind being harbored by the Danes hint at a cross-cultural pagan consciousness in direct opposition to the would-be universality of the Church. Despite their differences of language and location, the Saxons and the Danes belonged to overlapping traditional socio-religious systems that were less hierarchical than that of the Christian Franks.

This pagan network may have also extended to a Saxon-Frisian relationship. The two peoples had an adversarial history with Boniface in common; the future saint had been martyred in 754 during his attempts to convert the Frisians to Christianity. In 784, the RFA report that “[t]he Saxons rebelled again as usual and some Frisians along with them.” Of course, the absence of written records by pagans makes it impossible to prove the existence of any wider sense of pagan unity in the face of Christian conversion efforts.

In the RFA entry for 778, Widukind is portrayed as a leader in what seem to be religious terms: the Saxons “followed their detestable custom and again revolted, spurred on by Widukind and his companions.” The “detestable custom” may simply mean revolt itself, but it likely refers to the idea expressed in the 777 entry: “Many Saxons were baptized and according to their custom pledged to the king their whole freedom and property if they should change their minds again in that detestable manner of theirs and not keep the Christian faith and their fealty to the Lord King Charles, his sons, and the Franks.”

The “detestable custom” seems to refer to both religious apostasy and political disobedience. These concepts are regularly connected in the Carolingian sources, such as the revised RFA entry on the 778 rebellion, which states that the Saxons “destroyed in like fashion both the sacred and the profane.” The regular tendency of the Saxons to de-convert is denounced throughout the RFA, and Einhard laments that “they were quick to go right back to their old ways” after promising that “they would abandon the cult of demons and willingly submit to the Christian religion.”

Charlemagne baptizes the Saxons – art by Émile Antoine Bayard

Charlemagne had exclusively focused on taking oaths and hostages as a means of ending open conflict since his first Saxon campaign in 772, in which he had taken twelve hostages after a parley with the Saxons at the River Weser. In 776, his demands after victory in battle were expanded; at the head of the River Lippe, the Saxons “surrendered their land to the Franks, put up security, promised to become Christians, and submitted to the rule of the Lord King Charles and the Franks.” Later, “[t]he Saxons came there with wives and children, a countless number, and were baptized and gave as many hostages as the Lord King demanded.”

This is the first of several mentions of Saxon conversion and mass baptism in the RFA. The large-scale baptisms reflect the fact that the tribal structure of the Saxons precluded the top-down method of conversion used in England and Scandinavia; in the absence of courtly structures, missionaries were not able to use “the convenient and relatively comfortable procedure of converting the king and working downwards or outwards from there.”

The Frankish policy of oaths and hostages changed in 782. After Charlemagne returned to Francia, “the Saxons, persuaded by Widukind, promptly rebelled as usual.” The Saxons surrounded the Franks in the Süntel Mountains and slew them “almost to a man.” Charlemagne’s losses were considerable; “two of the envoys, Adalgis and Gailo, four counts, and up to twenty other distinguished nobles had been killed, not counting those who had followed them, preferring to perish at their side rather than survive them.”

Charlemagne’s reaction was fast and furious; he “rushed to the place with all the Franks that he could gather on short notice” and stopped “where the Aller flows into the Weser.” The Saxons submitted to his authority “and surrendered the evildoers who were chiefly responsible for this revolt to be put to death – four thousand five hundred of them. This sentence was carried out. Widukind was not among them since he had fled into Nordmannia.”

1916 postcard of Verden an der Aller

The Saxon Poet writes that the prisoners were killed by beheading and that “[t]he place is now called Verden.” The revised RFA entry adds that “[a]ll denounced Widukind as the instigator of this wicked rebellion.” There is no mention of oaths, hostages, or the possibility of baptism – only a mass execution of surrendered prisoners in a symbolic revenge for the Franks who fell in the Süntel Mountains.

The Verden executions seem to mark a turning point in Charlemagne’s attitudes (and perhaps those of the Frankish nobility). They were followed by a concerted effort to wipe out the Saxons; the option of surrender was no longer mentioned. The enormity of the killings may have been driven by Charlemagne’s attempt to emulate the kings of the Old Testament and their mass executions of Amalekites and Moabites, to visit the wrath of God upon his enemies and wipe them from the earth.

In 783 and 784, Charlemagne’s forces fought several battles against the rebels in which they killed “[a]n immense number of Saxons”; the only survivors were those who fled. There is no further mention of taking oaths or hostages for the next eleven years.

The fact that, in 785, Charlemagne wintered in Saxony for the first time is further evidence of his renewed determination to bring an end to the repeated rebellions. After a massive military push, he demanded that Widukind and his son-in-law Abbi be brought to him. At this point, the two rebels understandably “were reluctant to place themselves in the king’s trust,” and “asked for assurances that they would remain unharmed.”

Widukind surrenders to Charlemagne – painting by Ary Scheffer

For the first time in the RFA, Charlemagne delivered Frankish hostages to the Saxons, an act that underscores Widukind’s great importance as a Saxon leader. Widukind and Abbi accepted the hostages, met Charlemagne at Attigny and “were baptized with their companions.” Emphasizing the symbolic importance of the event, Charlemagne served as Widukind’s godfather for his baptism on Christmas Day.

On both sides of the Saxon conflict, the political and the religious were often blurred; Widukind himself may have been both a military leader of armed rebellion and a sacral prophetic figure. If he was, a baptized religious leader would have been much more useful to Charlemagne as a propaganda tool than a dead one.

Indeed, after Widukind’s baptism, all of Saxony “was then subjugated.” The Saxon leader is never mentioned again in the Royal Frankish Annals.

Charlemagne issues the “terror capitulary” in Part Three.

Click here for Part One and here for Part Two of the article.

Charlemagne by N.C. Wyeth (1924)

The Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniæ was issued by Charlemagne at Paderborn around 785, most likely in the same violent spirit of wrath that seems to have consumed the Frankish king from the Verden executions three years earlier through the removal of Widukind from the conflict.

The “terror capitulary” was issued in 785 as “a harsh law of occupation” and a provision “by which an infuriated general attempts to break the resistance of an entire people through terror.” There is no specific evidence for the duration or extent to which the capitulary was actually disseminated and put into practice, and it survives in only one manuscript.

OUTLAWING PAGANISM

The Capitulatio contains thirty-four laws, many of which proscribe putative pagan practices. Since the only contemporary sources for pagan Saxon religion of the period are those generated by the Franks, we cannot assume that the practices described by the capitulary accurately reflect the realities of the Saxon religion. Exaggeration of pagan ritual may be part of a propaganda effort to dehumanize the Saxon enemy as a monstrous Other.

The Capitulatio states that it is punishable by death to burn and eat a witch “after the manner of pagans.” Although this appears a bit outlandish, the Old Norse poem Hyndluljóð makes references to this very act, albeit in a mythological context. The capitulary also makes cremation (as opposed to Christian burial) a capital crime for those who carry it out, and pagan mound burials are forbidden outright. Refusing baptism and “wish[ing] to remain a pagan” brings a death sentence, as does human sacrifice to “the devil” and “the demons” (i.e., the pagan gods).

Engaging in pagan marriage rituals brings a monetary fine, as does making “a vow at springs or trees or groves” or “partak[ing] of a repast in honor of the demons.” The latter phrase seems to refer to “one of the most important forms of sacrifice among the Germanic peoples, in which the slaughtered animal was eaten by the sacrificing community.”

The laws stipulating fines include a provision that anyone who cannot immediately pay “shall be given into the service of the church” until the fine is paid. The capitulary also states that “[d]iviners and soothsayers shall be given to the churches and priests,” but it does not make clear exactly what will be done with these religious figures.

ENFORCING CHRISTIANITY

In addition to these prohibitions of pagan practice, the Capitulatio enforces adherence to Christian ways. Eating meat during Lent is punishable by death. The newly converted “parishioners” are required to give property, servants and tithes to the church. Refusing to baptize a newborn child within its first year brings the Capitulatio’s largest fine, twice what is levied for sacrificing to pagan gods.

The church is given primacy in many other ways, as well. The first law states that all new churches in Saxony “should not have less, but greater and more illustrious honor, than the fanes of the idols had had”; a century later, the Saxon Poet was able to celebrate that churches “now shine where the ancients used to worship pagan temples.” The Capitulatio declares these new churches inviolable places of sanctuary and states that the confession of any of the stipulated capital crimes to a priest and willing acceptance of penance frees the criminal “by the testimony of the priest from death.”

Charlemagne by Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier

On the other hand, crimes against the church and churchmen are singled out for strict punishment. Theft of church property; church burnings; killing of bishops, priests or deacons; and “form[ing] a conspiracy with the pagans against the Christians” are all capital crimes.

THE SAXON ASSEMBLY

As a final blow to traditional Saxon cultural practices, the last item in the Capitulatio outlaws the Saxon assembly; the Saxons now may gather en masse only by royal decree. The assembly’s judicial function is given to counts and priests.

A parallel institution to the well-documented Icelandic Alþing, the annual assembly of the Saxons at Marklo on the Weser River brought together around 3,700 representatives – “the heads of the hundred political districts (Gaue) with thirty-six elected representatives from each district, twelve each for the three estates of the nobles, freeman, and tenant farmers.” Given the large area of the Saxon lands and the various regional and tribal subdivisions, this massive assembly was the “only unifying instance” in Saxon cultural life. In the absence of a single monarch on the Frankish model, the assembly of “the sophisticatedly organized albeit pagan people” was a key component of cultural cohesion.

The annual assembly may have also included large-scale religious rituals; the Life of Saint Lebuin mentions that pagan Saxons prayed to their gods at the meeting. Written between 840 and 865, most likely by a Saxon author, the hagiography portrays the mid-eighth-century Anglo-Saxon missionary addressing the Saxon assembly and telling them that they must convert:

“But if you are unwilling to accept God’s commands, a king has been prepared nearby who will invade your lands, spoil and lay them waste and sap away your strength in war; he will lead you into exile, deprive you of your inheritance, slay you with the sword, and hand over your possession to whom he has a mind: and afterwards you will be slaves both to him and his successors.”

The speech is attributed to Lebuin in a passage “heavy with hindsight”; a catalog of the later acts of Charlemagne is retroactively placed in a supposed previous prophecy delivered at the massive gathering.

The Saxons were not a single people but a confederation of several smaller groups, and the annual assembly was a major element in determining a pan-Saxon identity uniting the various subgroups. To outlaw the assembly was to destroy one of the core cultural elements of Saxon society.

THE POPE CELEBRATES

With Widukind neutralized and the capitulary issued as the law of Saxony, the pagan threat was seemingly over. In 786, Pope Hadrian sent Charlemagne a letter congratulating him on what was thought to be the final submission of Saxony. The pontiff celebrated that the king had, with the help of God and saints, “bent the necks of the Saxons to his power and authority, and led their entire nation to the holy fount of Baptism.” The pope ordered that special litanies celebrating Charlemagne’s triumph be celebrated “wherever Christians lived.”

Charlemagne and Alcuin by Jean-Victor Schnetz (1830)

However, Charlemagne faced criticism from his own bishops and abbots, who began to believe that, in order to convert pagan populations, “it was not sufficient to force them into a river at swordpoint.” The Anglo-Saxon cleric Alcuin, originally from Northumbria but now a close advisor to Charlemagne, decried the imposition of tithes and fines on the newly converted Saxons, writing that “tithes are a good thing, but it is better to give them up than to destroy belief.”

Charlemagne drew back from the extreme sanctions of the Capitulatio– not for ethical reasons, but because they proved impossible to enforce; “[h]is despotism is restrained by his scanty resources rather than by the ethics of his political ideology.” His attempt to use “the church more as a tool of government than an ally” was unworkable; the priests assigned to the supposedly pacified Saxon lands complained bitterly about being forced to give precedence to material concerns over spiritual work.

In 797, a second capitulary was issued that was far milder than the original. Monetary fines replaced capital punishment. This time, Saxons were included in the decisions regarding capitulary contents, and it seems that the Franks were willing to include elements of older Saxon law.

Charlemagne also called for a codification of Saxon legal customs in a written Law of the Saxons as part of his project of transcribing the laws of all the Franks’ subject peoples after his own coronation as emperor in 800. Although the most draconian measures of the Capitulatio were rescinded, Charlemagne continued to require Saxons to turn to Frankish Christian clergy for religious instruction that condemned pagan practices such as sorcery, divination, and praying at trees, stones or springs.

THE NEXT GENERATION

After Widukind’s capitulation, no further Saxon rebellion occurred until 793, when there was a “general revolt of the Saxons.” The fact that nearly a decade passed between Widukind’s submission and a large-scale uprising suggests that the Saxons patiently waited for a new generation of men to reach fighting age after the mass killing at Verden, an event that may have served as a long-term motivating factor in a reputation-conscious society.

After being surrounded by Frankish forces in 794, “they promised, with no such thing in mind, to become Christians and be loyal to the lord king.” In 795, Charlemagne “heard that the Saxons had, as usual, broken their promise to accept Christianity and keep faith with the king.” To the usual description of Frankish reprisals, the revised Royal Frankish Annals entry adds that this rebellion “further persuaded the king to beat down the Saxons promptly and made him hate the treacherous people even more.”

Charlemagne “laid waste” to Saxony in 795 and, after rebellions in 797 and 798, did the same to “the whole of Saxony between the Elbe and the Weser.” The revised entry for 798 mentions that “the king was savagely aroused” by the latest events, implying that the scorched earth policy was a result of Charlemagne’s increasing fury regarding the repeated rebellions of the Saxons, a quarter-century after the conflict began.

Charlemagne receives oath of fidelity and homage from baron Colored engraving based on 14th-century manuscript miniature

There is a suggestion that, as in 782, Charlemagne executed prisoners; “Four thousand of [the Saxons] were slain on the battlefield; the rest fled, escaped, and entered into peace negotiations; but many of them also perished.” The final clause is unclear, perhaps meaning that the frustrated Frankish king again executed those who had been taken prisoner. No Frank-Saxon conflict is mentioned until 802, when Charlemagne continued the new policy of destruction and “dispatched an army of [loyal] Saxons to lay waste the lands of the [rebellious] Saxons on the far side of the Elbe.”

FORCED RELOCATION

In 804, Charlemagne’s Saxon strategy took a final turn. That summer, “he led an army into Saxony and deported all Saxons living beyond the Elbe and in Wihmuodi with wives and children into Francia and gave the districts beyond the Elbe to the Obodrites.” Einhard adds detail to this brief statement, stating that Charlemagne had finally had enough of the endless Saxon rebellions:

with all of those who were used to resisting him either struck down or else returned to his power, he transported ten thousand of the men who lived along the Elbe, along with their wives and little children, and dispersed them in little groups in various places in Gaul and Germany.

So the war that was drawn out for so many years was seen to be brought to a conclusion, on terms proposed by the king and accepted by the Saxons. They had to abandon the cult of demons and let go of their ancestral rites, receive the sacraments of the Christian faith and religion, and unite themselves to the Franks so that they might become one people with them.

Here is the ultimate extension of Charlemagne’s program of religio-cultural erasure that began with the three days spent razing the Irminsul site thirty-two years earlier.

Some Saxon warriors were resettled near the monastery at Corbie, where Charlemagne’s cousin Adalhard oversaw their instruction in Christian teachings. Their land was now controlled by Frankish counts ruling over transplanted Franks or given away to the Obodrites, a Slavic tribe then living beyond the River Elbe. The Annals of Lorsch state that Charlemagne “divided [the Saxons’] lands among his fideles.”

CULTURAL ERASURE

The relocation consciously demolished major factors that united Saxon culture: connection to ancestral lands, extended kinship relationships, inter-tribal alliances, and traditional religious practices. Aside from the personal suffering of the individual Saxons, the social structure of Saxony was fundamentally severed. The Saxon nations were forcefully broken up and integrated into Frankish society in groups too small to maintain discrete identities tied to past practices and relationships.

The program worked. There was no further Saxon rebellion against Charlemagne, who lived another decade. Saxon authors of the ninth century express Christian ideals, not pagan ones.

By the time of Charlemagne, ten generations had passed since the top-down conversion of the Franks under Clovis in the early sixth century. For the Saxons, conversion did not follow this institution-to-individual process, but was instead the imposition of a foreign worldview violently (and often fatally) forced on their entire society over the course of a struggle that lasted nearly one-third of a century.

The Saxon war had finally resulted in “a thoroughly efficient replacement and reform of previous communal institutions: a cultural revolution” imposed from the outside. The Saxons were required “to suspend themselves not only within time but also within culture – or more prosaically, within the basic evaluative patterning of their existence,” a process accomplished by “a making-over of their most fundamental cultural artifact – reality.”

DOOMED TO REPEAT IT

Caliph Harun al-Rashid receives Charlemagne's delegates Painting by Julius Köckert (1864)

It is difficult to resist seeing the Saxon wars through the lens of subsequent events, or at least to observe parallels with more recent history. The determined destruction of the Irminsul conjures images of ISIS soldiers bulldozing Nimrud. The willful intolerance of the Capitulatio is reminiscent of the most extreme Muslim law codes; according to one scholar, it may have actually been inspired by Charlemagne’s interactions with Muslim rulers and those who lived under them.

The erasure of a people and their culture through legal proclamations, military means, extensive slaughter of prisoners, and mass movement of civilians makes it tempting to refer to Charlemagne’s actions as “the final solution to the Saxon question,” and to brand those Saxons who handed over the rebels at Verden as quislings and collaborators. The forced relocation of entire communities recalls the darkest actions taken by European immigrants against Native American and Aboriginal Australian populations.

Einhard writes that “the Saxon war received a conclusion that was well suited to its long duration.” He makes no mention of the Verden massacre or the Capitulatio, and he blithely asserts that “not the slightest hint of unjust cruelty was alleged against [Charlemagne] by anyone.” The narrative provided above provides a clear response to Einhard’s assertions.


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Mayr-Harting, Henry. “Charlemagne, the Saxons, and the Imperial Coronation of 800.” In Religion and Society in the Medieval West, 600-1200, 1113-1133. Surrey: Ashgate, 2010.

McKitterick, Rosamond. Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Riché, Pierre. The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe. Translated by Michael Idomir Allen. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993.

The Saxon Poet’s Life of Charles the Great. Translated by Mary E. McKinney. New York: Pageant Press, 1956.

Simek, Rudolf. Dictionary of Northern Mythology. Translated by Angela Hall. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993.

Story, Joanna. “Charlemagne and the Anglo-Saxons.” In Charlemagne: Empire and Society, 195-210. Edited by Joanna Story. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.

Titlestad, Torgrim. Viking Norway. Translated by Stephen R. Parsons. Stavanger: Saga Bok, 2008.

Turville-Petre, E. O. G. Myth and Religion of the North: The Religion of Ancient Scandinavia. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1964.

Willibald. The Life of Saint Boniface. Translated by George W. Robinson. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916.

The kids' division of this year's Midwinter Art Contest features some very creative work by talented young artists. It was quite difficult for the judges to rank them!

I'd like to thank my fellow judges Simon Coleby (comics artist for 2000 AD, Judge Dredd Megazine, Lobo, Punisher and much more) and Dr. Kendra Willson (researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Turku in Finland) for all the time they spent considering the entries and for their thoughtful comments on all the works. This contest would not be possible without their kind donations of time and labor.

Congratulations to our winners! The assignment was to create a piece that somehow related to the character and legends of Frau Holle. If you're unfamiliar with this figure of folklore, click here to read more about her in the original announcement of the contest.

These four young artists created wonderfully imaginative works of art inspired by Frau Holle. I hope that they will all continue exploring mythology and folklore as they develop their artistic skills!

FIRST PLACE
Katie U.
Age 11
Fort Myers, Florida, USA

Katie writes, "My drawing is based off of the legend of Frau Holle, who is the goddess of the sky. My drawing depicts Frau Holle creating snow that falls down to a small village. As the folklore states, every day when Frau Holle makes her bed she stores the snow until winter."

This is such a beautiful and mature piece of art. Great work!

Simon says, "This is a very accomplished image. I particularly like the serenity of the facial expression, and the gesture of the hand, with the details around the wrist. The colors work well; a simple contrast between the purples and blues, and the flesh tones which, in turn, are picked-up by the gold enhancements in the snow. The whole painting works well as a cohesive image. Very well done, Katie!"

Kendra comments, "I like the combination of bright blue shades, the shading in Frau Holle's face and her secretive expression. The texture in her hair and feathery eyelashes is very nice. The composition with the close-up figure to the right, the village viewed from a distance at the bottom and the more abstract or decorative pattern of the sky also works well."

First Place: Katie U.

SECOND PLACE
Rowan Chiment-Scimeca
Age 8
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA

Rowan's mom writes, "This is what the hard-working girl saw after she fell down the well. She looked up the well and saw the snow falling from the clouds, and she imagined the clouds were actually pillows and the snow was feathers so she wouldn't feel cold and scared in the well. The red is the pillow she imagines."

I love the creativity of this piece. The perspective is such a unique idea.

Simon comments, "This is an intriguing picture. I very much like how it invites the viewer to ask questions and investigate the legend of Frau Holle. I also like the perspective drawing used in the piece. It's very well rendered, and it gives a sense of depth and distance from the trees at the top of the well. Excellent, Rowan!"

Kendra writes, "I like the composition of this drawing, with the heavy gray bricks of the well around the window of sky. I also like the unusual perspective with the trees and sky."

Second Place: Rowan Chiment-Scimeca

THIRD PLACE
Paul Jules Butler
Age 7
Schweich, Rheinland-Pfalz, Germany

Paul writes, "Frau Holle is always young, because snow doesn't have time to get old. I hope she comes to see us this year!"

This is such a technically accomplished piece. Fantastic!

Simon says, "This painting has an appropriate sense of coldness, winter frost and snow. The hair is very well rendered, and the image is nicely framed and enhanced by the details in the branches. An appealing, delicate choice of color palette, and a pleasing image. Good work, Paul!"

Kendra writes, "I like the texture and different shades in Frau Holle's hair and the way that it blends with the pussy-willow-like snow and branches in the background. The darker lines in her hair also echo the branches. Nice shading in the face, as well, and I like the way she looks at the viewer."

Third Place: Paul Jules Butler

RUNNER-UP
Torin Chiment-Scimeca
Age 6
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA

Torin's mom says, "Torin was very sad that the [Icelandic] Yule Lads were not an option this year, as they are his favorite part is the season aside from presents and cookies. So he bent the rules a little here. This is a picture of [Yule Lad] Askasleikir [Bowl-Licker] helping Mother Holle with her pillows. He can hide better when the pillows are big, and she asked for help, so he helped. Mother Holle needs help because her hands and feet are turning into snow clouds and Askasleikir's pillow is making snow, too."

Bringing in other elements from Norse and Germanic mythology and folklore not only isn't against the rules – it's encouraged! I'm very happy to see a young artist thinking creatively.

Simon writes, "This picture is really terrific! It made me smile as soon as I saw it. I love the Yule Lad's big hands, and I especially like Rowan's decision to include him in the drawing, alongside Frau Holle; that demonstrates enthusiasm for the subject. The drawing has great energy, and it's full of life and fun. I like it very much! Very well done, Torin!"

Kendra says, "It's fun to combine the Icelandic Yule lads with Frau Holle. The similarities in their postures reflects the universality of myths. I like the smiles and the transformation of Holle's limbs into clouds."

Runner-Up: Torin Chiment-Scimeca

Teen winners will be announced tomorrow!

The teen division of this year's Midwinter Art Contest features some very creative work by talented young artists. It was quite difficult for the judges to rank them!

A big "thank you" goes out to my fellow judges Simon Coleby (comics artist for 2000 AD, Judge Dredd Megazine, Lobo, Punisher and much more) and Dr. Kendra Willson (researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Turku in Finland) for all the time they spent considering the entries and for their thoughtful comments on all the works. There were a lot of entries in this division, and it took quite a while for each of us to rank them.

Congratulations to all four winners! The assignment was to create a piece that somehow related to the character and legends of Frau Holle. If you're unfamiliar with this figure of folklore, click here to read more about her in the original announcement of the contest.

These talented artists each created wonderfully imaginative works of art inspired by Frau Holle. I look forward to seeing more work from each of them in the future!

FIRST PLACE
Heather Mathis
Age 16
Woodstock, Georgia, USA

Heather writes, "Frau Holle is depicted in many different ways, most of which have something to do with the cold time of year and snow. I wanted to express this, as well as the duality of how she's usually shown as either a beautiful young woman or more of a haggard old one."

I love everything about this piece – the design, the technique, the colors, the spirit. Wonderful!

Simon says, "This is a wonderful image, and amazingly accomplished for such a young artist! I love the subtleties of the coloring in Frau Holle's cloak, and also the inclusion of foliage amidst the swirls of tone. I also like the contrast between the slightly warmer tones on one side of the picture and the cold hues on the other. The gesture of the hands is also very well done. This could easily be offered as a card or poster for sale. It's an excellent piece of work."

Kendra comments, "I like the rich textures and subtle colors, the skirt and the hands filled with snow. The face has a mischievous, pixie-like quality."

First Place: Heather Mathis

SECOND PLACE
Marquellius Nunn
Age 19
Elyria, Ohio, USA

Marquellius says, "Frau Holle is bringing the midwinter snow over the lands, while her raven searches for the lost souls of children in need of caring."

This has very striking design and comes across as quite powerful.

Simon comments, "The bold contrast of colors in this makes it a strong piece of work. I like the enigmatic expression of Frau Holle's face, and also the way the gray hair sweeps over her shoulder. That's a nice compositional touch, and it works very well."

Kendra writes, "I like the different shades of blue and purple in the mountains and sky and the way the figure's sleeve becomes part of the line of the mountains. The figure is intriguing with her wise and secretive expression."

Second Place: Marquellius Nunn

THIRD PLACE (TIE)
Stefano J.
Age 15
Florida, USA

Stefano writes, "When she made her bed in the sky, she would shake out her comforter, and the downy feathers would fall to the earth as snow."

I really like the energy and wildness of this piece. Stefano has created a very special image of this folklore figure.

Simon says, "Being an artist who uses traditional media, I always like to see this kind of straightforward approach to an image. It's a nicely composed and rendered drawing. I like the way the details lead the eye around the outside of the picture, while Frau Holle is framed in the center of the piece. A very good drawing, indeed."

Kendra writes, "I like the different textures of the feathers and leaves and the energy in the figure's hand and face."

Third Place (Tie): Stefano J.

THIRD PLACE (TIE)
Kaytie Corbett
Age 16
Oberlin, Ohio, USA

Kaytie writes, "I chose to illustrate the legend where Frau Holle is said to 'haunt the lakes.' I put the color scheme in the blues mostly to incorporate the mix of snow and such due to show cold – also to show the midwinter night and darkness. I incorporated Thor in the top; his symbol is on his sleeve. This is because I like the mood of that piece in this, it is a rather dark feeling legend. It's said that Thor was the protector of the kinds of forces that roamed free on the earth during the frightening time between the rebirth of the sun and the resurrection on January 12th. So seeing as Frau Holle haunts the lakes, he is there in the sky being the protector, rather right along with her. "

I really like the way that Kaytie thought about the myths and folklore and found a creative way to combine them. Great work!

Simon says, "This is a quiet and intriguing image. I like the simplicity of the composition, and the small details which enhance the piece. The gesture of the figure is very nicely done. The emphasis on the hands of both Frau Holle and Thor pulls the picture together well and makes the image work as a whole."

Kendra comments, "I really like the deep blues with the strong jagged white horizontal line, the dark hand barely contrasting, the brown tree fading into black. The figure appears to be bathing in sky. I like the idea of bringing together Frau Holle and Thor."

Third Place (Tie): Kaytie Corbett

Adult winners will be announced tomorrow!

The adult division of this year's Midwinter Art Contest was very, very competitive. There were many fantastic entries from talented artists in Brazil, England, Finland, Germany, Poland and the USA. It's wonderful to see myths and folklore moving people in so many different places around the world!

I would again like to thank my fellow judges Simon Coleby (comics artist for 2000 AD, Judge Dredd Megazine, Lobo, Punisher and much more) and Dr. Kendra Willson (researcher at the Turku Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Turku in Finland) for all the time they spent considering the entries and for their thoughtful comments on all the works. The adult division was particularly difficult to judge, and I really appreciate the work Simon and Kendra put into this.

Congratulations to the winners! The assignment was to create a piece that somehow related to the character and legends of Frau Holle. If you're unfamiliar with this figure of folklore, click here to read more about her in the original announcement of the contest.

These wonderful artists each created works that show unique visions of the source material. This year's winners really show a very high level of creativity and skill. Each one of them could have won first place; placements reflect the combined scores of all three judges.

FIRST PLACE
Maria Bogdanova
Age 32
Oulu, Finland

Maria writes:

Up in night northern skies, she sits on her throne of icy diamonds – the Lady of the Winter, the goddess of heaven. Her silver crown is adorned with silver stars, lighting up the night, and the silver spinning wheel spins new shiny threads of maidens' destinies. Gentle white feathers surround her as they softly fall, swirling to the earth, transforming into snow, for she is it's keeper.

The idea of Frau Holle / Lady Winter I got from several sources, the first one was where she was mentioned as the Lady of Heavens. So I painted her sitting on her shining ice throne above the clouds. The silver spinning wheel is coming from the reference of her being a spinning-wife, so I imagined a silver spinning wheel spinning on it's own a thread of the destiny as the Lady is watching the process. And of course, I couldn't resist to frame the picture with feathers as it is mentioned in several stories I used to read, too. The colors used in the throne are what I have seen in northern lights around here.

Maria has created an absolutely gorgeous work of art. I truly love the thought she put into this work and the wonderful way she combined research and personal experience. Congratulations on a beautiful piece!

Simon says, "This is a superbly conceived and executed painting. The composition is very strong, and it's a striking and captivating image. I especially like the way the prism of color in the ice of the throne is picked up in the painting of Frau Holle, herself. That almost suggests a transparency in the figure, which adds a subtle, intriguingly ethereal note. The feathers framing the piece are a perfect touch, and they are very well rendered, indeed."

Kendra comments, "Nice decorative design. I like the frame of feathers and the rich textures that both contrast and blend. The red and yellow highlights in a primarily blue composition are striking. The figure looks strong and determined. The complex iconography reminds me of medieval paintings of saints. This would make a stellar postage stamp!"

First Place: Maria Bogdanova

SECOND PLACE
Ida M. Kozłowski
Age 36
Poznań, Poland

Ida writes:

Level 1: Frau Holle is a teacher. She guards what is good and punishes the bad. Her eyes see everything, even what you hide. She is an old woman and very experienced. She evaluates everything right.

Level 2: A woman who is like a ghost, Frau Holle is everywhere – even when you do not see that she sees you. You must be on guard!

Level 3: Frau Holle always reminds me of Adelaide. Adelaide is my great-grandmother. She was born in East Prussia (Ostpreußen), a land that no longer exists. She watched everything that was "sehr gut," as she would say. She was very demanding. She taught me the laying of bed linen and chided me very much for that reason.

Adelaide died long ago. She passed away, as did the land from which she came. Now it reminds me of how our life is fleeting, like those goose feathers in the wind.

I love everything about this work. As the son of someone whose German village has likewise vanished from the earth, I truly feel the power of what Ida writes. I also love the idea of portraying figures of myth and folklore with a contemporary appearance, which makes them come alive to modern audiences in a very different way than presenting them in traditional clothing. Wonderful!

Simon comments, "I think this painting is quite excellent. It's fascinating to take a mythic archetype, and transpose it into a contemporary context. In this case, it has made for a very captivating piece of art. I love the enigmatic expression of the lady's face. She looks strong, and perhaps a little stern, but she doubtless has stories to tell. The interaction with the feather adds a touch of magic, which invites the viewer to ask questions. A simple, strong idea, superbly executed. This is a very successful piece of art."

Kendra writes, "Striking realistic portrait. A challenging gaze and a strong woman with a lot of secrets. Dynamic hand (younger than her face) touching the feathers."

Second Place: Ida M. Kozłowski

THIRD PLACE
Jorge Alves de Lima Júnior
Age 47
Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil

Jorge writes:

Frau Holle like a powerful goddess of the sky: I was delighted with the transformation of a deity to a character of fables. I chose the first aspect as goddess. I tried to avoid the old illustrations and also the characters of Marvel.

Gods have no form; they assume forms that sometimes we can recognize. That's what I tried to do.

Jorge has such deep insights into the nature of mythology and folklore. I love his approach to portraying deities. He has created a truly visionary work.

Simon says, "This is a very strong, energetic painting. Rendering the figure to resemble the Aurora Borealis is a powerful idea. This has the feeling of something cataclysmic, and quite awe-inspiring."

Kendra writes, "I like the variety of textures and contrasting colors, the square edges in the sky. The unusual colors – almost a design like a Nordic (or South American) knitted sweater – are striking in the figure that is at once bird, woman, aurora, a force of nature and part of the sky."

Third Place: Jorge Alves de Lima Júnior

FIRST RUNNER-UP
Hannah M. Vale
Age 24
Pittsville, Wisconsin, USA

Hannah writes, "I chose to interpret Frau Holle as the Woman on the Lake. I did some research on her and found some cool information about how she related to spinning, and I decided to give her the staff that she was depicted with in many of the medieval art portraits of her. "

This is one of my favorite pieces of all the contests that have been run on this site. I love that Hannah has taken a completely different approach to Frau Holle and avoided the standard image of pillows and snow. This is a uniquely beautiful and inspiring work.

Simon says, "I like the combination of clean, defined lines and blended colors in this piece. The addition of the flowers in the hair adds a point of interest which sets the painting off, very well indeed."

Kendra comments, "I like the blue and green background that blends with the figure's hair. Interesting to blend Holle and Woman of the Lake – almost a Triton or sea-king figure as well."

First Runner-Up: Hannah M. Vale

SECOND RUNNER-UP
Susanne Beneš
Age 44
Berlin, Germany

Susanne writes, "An invocation of an old Goddess: In times of climate change we strongly need the aid of an old goddess of snow and wisdom. With my contribution I am invoking Holle as an intermediary between worlds, so she can guide our journeys. I am asking her to give us clear thoughts – unique like ice crystals – so we can understand what is right. And to let us dive deep into wisdom, so we might act wiser than before. The sigils are four variations of the word truth, developed from the old futhark of runes."

Susanne's work is powerful and mystical. She has managed to capture elements from the folklore that go far beyond feathers and pillows. Absolutely fantastic!

Simon says, "This is a somewhat brooding picture, which has both a sense of menace and of wisdom. I like the way the face emerges from the almost abstract textures, making it a rather otherworldy image."

Kendra comments, "I like the subtle textures in black and white. The face is haunting – wise and a bit demonic, a mischievous mouth and a determined brow."

Second Runner-Up: Susanne Beneš

Thank you to all the kids, teens and adults who entered this winter. We really enjoyed everyone's work. See you when the next contest rolls around!

I was contacted in July by Phil Pegum, Senior Producer for BBC Religion and Ethics. He was working on a project for Radio 3, “the BBC’s art, classical music and new ideas station.” Slated for broadcast at midwinter was “a festival of programmes celebrating the life and culture of the countries of the north.” The Religion and Ethics department had been asked to produce a series of “talks for the festival around the areas of belief, religion, mythology and history.” Mr. Pegum, in turn, asked me to write and record a radio essay on the continuing popularity of Norse mythology, its broader cultural significance, and the resurgence of Heathen religion in recent decades.

What follows is the full script that I wrote and recorded for the series Religion in the North, broadcast as part of The Essay, a regular program which features “leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week – insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.” I feel greatly honored to have been included as one of the authors chosen for this prestigious series, and I am very thankful to Mr. Pegum for the time he spent and the wisdom he shared with me, both during the writing phase and during the recording of the audio for broadcast.

My radio essay was broadcast by the BBC on December 23. You can listen to the complete recording via the audio player at the bottom of this post.

MIDWINTER CELEBRATION

The Dark Gods by Max Ernst (1957)

Hail to the gods!
Hail to the goddesses!
Hail to the bounteous earth!
Speech and wit
Give to us famous ones
And healing hands, while we live!

A white-bearded Icelandic gentleman, a Heathen priest, bundled up against Reykjavík’s midwinter cold, recites these verses of medieval pagan poetry before an attentive gathering. They stand closely together beneath a clear night sky, holding candles, gathered in a circle around a roaring fire. So begins the Yule celebration of Icelanders who practice a modern iteration of Norse religion, a contemporary practice that considers the poems and legends of Norse mythology to be core texts for ritual and reflection.

TURNING TO THE NORTH

Willy Pogany's illustration of the Norse god Odin from Padraic Colum's Children of Odin (1920)

Far from Iceland, my parents were philosophers in Chicago. When I was a child, they made sure I read Greek, Jewish and Christian mythology, telling me I could believe whatever I wanted as an adult, but that I needed to know these three traditions, so I could understand the art, literature and music of the western world.

My father, from a German farming village in eastern Europe, told me stories of Siegfried the dragon-slayer and introduced me to Grimms’ Fairy Tales and fabulous folklore from the Rhine River region. The one thing I didn’t learn about was Norse mythology. As a kid, Norse myths seemed like the exclusive property of far-away Scandinavia.

After my dad died, I read Children of Odin, a retelling of Norse myths by Irish poet Padraic Colum. The god Odin, wandering the world in a quest for wisdom – a quest confirming his existential concerns about the future – reminded me of my father’s decades of work in philosophy after escaping from anti-German extermination camps run by Marshall Tito’s Communist Partisans. The god Thor, world-traveler, lover of children and ale, quick to anger and quick to forgiveness, reminded me of my Opa, my grandfather who went from family farm to Soviet prisoner-of-war camp to new life in America, yet never lost his passion for living. Sigurð, wooing the Valkyrie in a ring of fire, was the Norse version of Siegfried, the dragon-slayer my father had told me tales about when I was a child.

It suddenly seemed as if I had always known the Norse gods and heroes. I began to read the mythic material written down in medieval Iceland and Denmark, to study the poems preserved in what we now call the Poetic Edda, to learn about the literature, religion and history of the ancient northern world. Along the way, I found that many other people have been bitten by the same bug that bit me.

ROMANTICISM, RECOVERY AND REWRITING

18th-century Icelandic manuscript of Snorri's Edda

There have been repeated revivals of international interest in Norse mythology as people around the world continue to find connections to the gods, goddesses, heroes, and heroines. The Eddas– the thirteenth-century Icelandic sources for the majority of surviving myths – were first published in modern translation three-hundred-and-fifty years ago in Denmark. Further translations and studies followed in England, France, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Russia, and elsewhere.

Nineteenth-century Romantics plunged into Norse mythology. William Morris worked with Eiríkur Magnússon to translate selections from the Eddas and sagas – Iceland’s great prose precursors to the novel – then wrote original poetry and prose inspired by them. Jacob Grimm’s massive treatise on what he called “German mythology” arguably launched the repeated appropriations of medieval Icelandic literature for nationalist projects throughout the century. The greatest flowering of this Romantic fascination (or its lowest ebb, depending on your perspective) is Wagner’s seventeen-hour Ring of the Nibelung, which – despite Germanization of character and place names – is almost completely based on Icelandic sources.

In the twentieth century, the Romantic melding of myth and nation yielded a strange and bitter crop in the Third Reich’s propagandist imagery. This perversion continues to seduce the radical right of racist revivalists, despite Hitler’s repeated repudiation of those who, in his words, “keep harping on that far-off and forgotten nomenclature which belongs to the ancient Germanic times.” Tolkien, whose works include many elements taken directly from Norse mythology, famously railed against Hitler for “ruining, perverting, misapplying, and making for ever accursed, that noble northern spirit, a supreme contribution to Europe.”

The myths recovered and were recovered. Tolkien’s friend W. H. Auden and Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges published translations of the Eddas. More recently, Norse gods have appeared in fiction by English writers including Joanne Harris. She told me, “What I’m trying to do in my way is to demonstrate how stories evolve and how heroes… cast long shadows in their wake. These shadows become part of the oral and written tradition and, as centuries pass, are embellished, rewritten and re-interpreted by successive generations.”

Hollywood has done its fair share of rewriting. Based on a superhero first appearing in comic books in 1962, Marvel’s Thor films are far removed from Norse myth. Core elements of the 1960s character were lifted from Superman and Shazam, who provided inspiration for Thor’s red cape, his ability to transform from human nebbish to powerful superhero in a flash of lightning, and the love triangle between his two identities and the co-worker to whom he longs to reveal his secret identity.

Marvel’s movie versions of the Norse gods are rewritten to fit a Judeo-Christian worldview. Instead of the wondering, wandering wizard of the myths, Odin is an angry Old Testament patriarch. Although Thor plays his mythical role as protector of the human world, the first film follows the comics in recasting him as a Viking Jesus from outer space. He is sent by his father to live as a mortal among men, win a small group of faithful followers who must be convinced of his godliness, and prove his worthiness by sacrificing himself to save us all. This is New Testament, not Norse mythology.

TRIPARTITE APPEAL

Odin and his two brothers vanquish the giant Ymir in Katherine Pyle's Tales from Norse Mythology (1930)

Whatever form it takes, there is an eternal return of interest in the myths. A thousand years after the conversion of the Nordic countries, Norse mythology still somehow speaks to people around the world. I think that this appeal works at three levels – dramatic, emotional, and spiritual.

At the first level – that of drama – these are grand adventure tales. The gods create the world from the corpse of a primeval giant and set the moon, sun and stars on their courses to begin a golden age. The dwarves are created from earth, the first humans are made from trees, and a mysterious unkillable sorceress brings strange magic.

Ages pass, a dragon sucks juices from the dead by a stream full of murderers, and a giantess gives birth to the wolf that will eat the moon. A monstrous dog breaks free, signaling an age of axes, swords and shields, wind and wolves. The gods, elves, giants and dwarves prepare for war, and a figure of fire comes from the south. The sun and stars are destroyed as the world perishes in fire and flood.

Finally, a new world rises up from the waters, new gods appear, and a new golden age begins. All is joy in the halls of the gods, until the corpse-sucking dragon is seen flying over the hills under the moon.

These mysterious goings-on are enough to fill a series of fantasy novels, yet they are merely elements of the first prophetic poem of the Poetic Edda. From this snapshot of the barest beginning of the mythology, it should be clear that this is exciting stuff.

At the second level – that of emotion – the myths appeal as an expression of exuberant excitement at the experience of existence. There is a cast of colorful characters including Njörðr, the god who rules over wind and sea, and Freyr and Freyja, his beautiful children. Freyr rules the world of elves and presides over prosperity and peace, rain and sunshine. Freyja rides in a chariot pulled by cats and loves love songs and love affairs. The bright god Heimdall is, enigmatically, the son of nine mothers. His horse’s mane and his own teeth are of gold, and he lives by the Rainbow Bridge in the Castle of Heaven – from where he can hear the sound of grass growing in the fields and wool growing on sheep.

Thor most embodies the joy of life lived. Unlike Odin, he doesn’t meditate on coming darkness. Instead, he wrings every moment of life for its full flavor. Admittedly, he spends much of his time smiting giants with his heavy hammer, but he does so with his heart laughing in his breast. Otherwise, his main interests are drinking prodigious amounts, taking kids on adventures, going on long walks with friends, and feasting on the magically regenerating goats that pull his sky-chariot. This is a fellow who likes to enjoy himself.

At the third, spiritual level, the myths present a powerful worldview. Although everything Odin learns about the future tells him he and the world will die, he never stops searching for knowledge and never ceases to rage against the dying of the light. The gods die, yet the ending of the prophecy is a life-affirming one. We will not live forever, but our children will survive us, and their children will survive them. The branches of the World Tree will continue to grow as new leaves appear each springtime.

ÁSATRÚ AND HEATHENRY

Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson in 1960

The spiritual message of the myths survives, despite bloody centuries of Christian conversion. In 1972, Icelandic farmer-poet Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson led the foundation of the Ásatrúarfélagið, a fellowship for those who follow the religion of Ásatrú– an Icelandic term meaning “faith in the Norse gods.” For those raised to believe that Christianity is the natural religion of the western world, and that the structure of Christian belief is the yardstick by which to measure other faith traditions, it may come as a surprise to realize that the older religions of northern Europe were closer to Hinduism. Today, Ásatrú attracts those who feel a connection to the Old Way, and – like other religions – it provides a rich experience of ritual, celebration, and community.

In 1973, the Icelandic government officially recognized the Ásatrú religion. Forty years later, it is the largest non-Christian religion in Iceland, and the faith has spread throughout the world. Although practitioners respect the Icelanders for beginning the religion’s rebirth, the Icelandic organization is a local group and now just one aspect of a global practice. There are many branches of the tradition, yet most participants agree that Heathenry (with a capital H) is the most general term to cover all of today’s variant forms.

In 2013, I conducted the first Worldwide Heathen Census and received over sixteen thousand responses from ninety-eight countries. Iceland has the highest Heathen density – the greatest number of Heathens as a percentage of the country’s population. The United States has the highest number of Heathens; my interpretation of the data suggests that there are approximately twenty thousand American practitioners. That may not seem like a large number in a country this size, but it is impressive for a religion that is not even half a century old, has no central authority, does not engage in missionary work, and has been almost completely ignored by academia and media.

MYTHOLOGY AND RELIGION

Iðunn and Bragi by Nils Jakob Olssen Blommér (1846)

Mythology is only one part of a lived and living religion. What matters most to me is how myths can inspire us to live our lives in new ways. As a professional musician, I understand intellectually that improvisation and composition involve chemical interactions between stored memories of past experiences that interact across areas of the brain to produce new combinations. However, my experience of performing and writing music is more spiritually understandable when I consider that, over a thousand years ago, northern poets felt that their flashes of inspiration came from Odin, the god who brings creative frenzy.

Like most artists, I feel my best work is done when I’m not fully in control of the creative process, when the melodies appearing in my head seem to come from somewhere else. It deepens the reality of the creative moment to realize that I share this feeling with poets of long ago, and that we also share a vocabulary and system of symbols that enable the experience to be emotionally understood at a deeper level.

Jimmy Cheatham, one of my musical mentors, often talked about “opening yourself up to the Creative Spirit.” At the time, I was young and dumb and thought he was an inscrutable mystic. Decades later, I understand what he meant about turning from our everyday lives of volunteered slavery and listening to what Odin has to tell us. At least, that’s how I choose to understand it. Norse mythology offers a poetic way of perceiving our experiences from a perspective outside our day-to-day existence. It overlays the mythical over the mundane, which is especially welcome during the long winter darkness.

WAITING FOR THE SUN

A Bonfire in the Moonlight by Hermann Herzog (1832-1932)

At the Icelandic Yule celebration, a priestess with joyously twinkling eyes explains how the god Freyr falls in love with the beautiful maiden Gerðr. In this telling of the tale, Freyr’s desire for the girl with the shining arms is parallel to the longing of Icelanders to see the sun during the long nights of northern winter. When Gerðr finally agrees to give her love to the young god, she tells him he must wait for nine nights. His lament ends the medieval poem that preserves the myth:

Long is a night –
long are two –
how can I suffer through three?
Often a month to me
seemed shorter
than half of this nuptial night.

After the sharing of the story, the Yule-feast begins. Like Freyr, we all wait through the long, dark nights for the coming of the sun. The communion of companionship in celebration of our lives together makes the wait a joyous one, and the Norse myths – like the myths of any faith – give us a shared tradition that shapes the cycle of the year. That is a wonderful gift from the past that continues into the future.

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For more information on Ásatrú, check out the articles in The Norse Mythology Blog Archive by clicking here.

At the request of the United States Department of Defense, the members of the Open Halls Project Working Group have written a Heathen Resource Guide for Chaplains. As part of The Norse Mythology Blog's continuing series on Heathens in the Military, this article includes background on the important event and provides the full text of the document, which has now been accepted by the Department of Defense.

THE STORY SO FAR

In 2013, I interviewed Josh and Cat Heath, co-founders of the Open Halls Project, an organization “set up to connect military heathens with civilian and military heathens throughout the world.” Part of our discussion was on the struggle to haveÁsatrú and Heathenry added as options on the U.S. Army's religious preference list.

Followers of the Old Way in the military have had a couple of important victories since then. Thor's hammer was added to the official list of “available emblems of belief for placement on government headstones and markers” by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Ásatrú and Heathenism were added to the religious preference list of the U.S. Air Force.

Heathens in the Army have not fared so well. On January 5, 2015, Chaplain (Colonel) Bryan Walker, Personnel Director at the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains, wrote to a Heathen serviceman that the addition of Ásatrú and Heathenry to that branch's religious preference list had been approved. It had not. After the announcement of the addition, Chaplain Walker backtracked and stated that he had "mis-communicated." As of March of last year, the status of Heathen soldiers remained in limbo.

In May, those of us in the Open Halls Project Working Group issued a public call to action. We asked soldiers and civilians to contact the Armed Forces Chaplains Board, Army Human Resources Command, Army Public Affairs Officer, and Chief of Army Chaplains. We asked that concerned people express their frustration with the fact that six years of requests from Heathen soldiers had passed without recognition of their lawful religious rights by the Army. Many, many people wrote. They all received form letters in reply.

YEAR SEVEN: A STEP FORWARD

We are happy to announce that the Department of Defense has requested, reviewed and accepted our Heathen Resource Guide for Chaplains. Josh Heath explains the events that led to the members of the Open Halls Project Working Group writing the document:

Over the last year, we worked to get details about our request to get Heathen and Ásatrú added to the religious preference list. The head of the Department of Defense working group focused on developing a new system for those preferences asked us to produce a document explaining the basics of Heathenry.

We produced a document for him modeled on the Army Chaplain’s Handbook excerpt for Wicca. This basic framework assisted us in developing information that was generally applicable to the largest amount of Heathens possible. When we submitted this document to the chaplain who had requested it, he suggested a few changes which we inserted into the document. This document acts as a basic information sheet for any chaplain that might find himself or herself working with a Heathen service member.

A working group was selected to develop the document and they put their noses to the grindstone. This work is a product of the Open Halls Project and we would appreciate it being attributed to the organization, but it may be shared freely to all who might find it useful.

Josh also gives an update on the seemingly endless struggle to have Ásatrú and Heathenry added to the Army's religious preference list:

The Open Halls Project, through a member, has been in touch with the head of the Department of Defense working group that requested this document. This chaplain requested we do some adjustments on the document to include information on books that would be useful and on casualty care.

During this conversation, the chaplain indicated there was working group interest in adding Ásatrú over Heathen. Since more of us prefer the term Heathen, it was indicated that both terms would still be preferred to be added. Overall, the working group is still moving on this issue and cannot provide a clear timeline for completion of our request, but they are highly responsive to the member who is assisting the Open Halls Project.

We have been told that the Heathen Resource Guide will be disseminated to chaplains for their education and to help them assist Heathen soldiers. The central concern of the Department of Defense was to build a foundation for helping Heathen soldiers in times of crisis. Department of Defense interactions with our representative have been very positive throughout this entire process.

HOW YOU CAN USE THE RESOURCE GUIDE

The full Heathen Resource Guide is posted below. Given that we were limited to two pages of text, the sections are quiet succinct. The members of the working group intend this to be an introductory guide, not a definitive theology. We understand that not every Heathen will agree to every line in the text. That is completely understandable. Our goal was to create a basic document that will be useful to military chaplains as they interact with Heathens.

It may also be of some use as a simple introduction to the religion for the general public. Heathens may wish to use it as they explain their religion to friends or family who are unfamiliar with the tradition. Academics and journalists writing articles about the religion might peruse the guide to get a sense of some of the core elements of the faith. Students can use it as a first source for their study of the subject.

If any of the terms used below are unclear, see also the Ásatrú definitions from the Religion Stylebook of the Religion Newswriters Association by clicking here.

HEATHEN RESOURCE GUIDE FOR CHAPLAINS DEVELOPED BY THE OPEN HALLS PROJECT

ADDRESS
No central address. Heathens worship in autonomous groups called kindreds or hearths. Some Heathens are affiliated with regional, national, or international organizations.

OTHER NAMES BY WHICH KNOWN
Heathen is the most common blanket term for this faith, but other terms used by some groups include: Ásatrú, Forn Sidr/Fyrnsidu, Theodism.

SUGGESTED READING LIST
These books are not central holy texts but do represent works that influence and explain basic Heathen concepts and are accepted as useful by a large majority of Heathens.

● The Poetic Edda (Anonymous, available in various translations)
● We Are Our Deeds: The Elder Heathenry, Its Ethic and Thew (Eric Wódening)
● Culture of the Teutons (Vilhelm Grønbech, translated by W. Worster)
● The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (Hilda Roderick Ellis)
● Sacred Gifts: Reciprocity and the Gods (Kirk S. Thomas)

LEADERSHIP
No central leadership. Organizational bodies hold internal elections for a number of positions parallel to those in churches and fraternal organizations including religious leaders, secretaries, mentors, and various officiates.

MEMBERSHIP
Accurate membership cannot be estimated because Heathenry does not require formal membership in an organization. Results of a 2013 survey suggest there are nearly 20,000 people in the United States who identify as Heathen and that a large percentage of those people have served, or are currently serving in the US military.

HISTORICAL ORIGIN
Heathenry is a reconstruction of the religious customs of pre-Christian Europe with a particular focus on the Germanic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon cultures. It shares many similarities with traditional religious practices from around the world (e.g. ancestor veneration, community focus, polytheistic worldview.)

The modern revival can be traced back to the early 1970s and has significantly evolved due to archaeological discoveries and re-examined historical contexts that have improved modern understanding of fundamental traditions. Some revivals occurred prior to this; however, most modern groups do not trace any connection to earlier movements or groups.

BASIC BELIEFS

Thor by Max Koch (1900)

Heathenry is a polytheistic faith with a variety of holy powers. Gods such as Odin, Thor and Freyr are worshiped alongside goddesses including Frigg, Sif and Freyja. The deities are known by a variety of names from various Northern European cultures; Thor is also called Thunor (Anglo-Saxon) and Donar (German).

Heathens also venerate a variety of beings known as vættir or wights. These local land-spirits inhabit the natural world and are treated with honor and respect. A wight may represent a specific natural feature (such as a river or waterfall) or a larger geographical area. House wights are believed to watch over one’s home.

Heathens place great importance on the relationship with one’s ancestors. Individual and communal rituals regularly include spoken tribute to deceased forebears ranging from immediate family to ancient ancestors. Following Old Norse sources, some Heathens think of distant ancestors as as Álfar (Elves) that continue to interact with the living.

Heathenry is a world-accepting religion; emphasis is placed on right action in this life rather than focus on an otherworldly afterlife. Heathens commonly assert that “we are our deeds,” meaning that the sum of one’s actions is of primary importance. They place great emphasis on personal responsibility and place significant value on how they are remembered by their family and community.

PRACTICES AND BEHAVIORAL STANDARDS
Heathenry derives ethics and morals through allegory from historical texts but does not have a codified moral system or standard of conduct in the same way that Christianity and Islam do. Some Heathens use a codified list of values as a basic code of conduct similar in some ways to the Army Values – the Nine Noble Virtues: courage, truth, honor, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, self-reliance, industriousness, and perseverance. These virtues were codified by Heathens early in the modern movement and have fallen out of favor in many groups.

Norns at the Well of Urð by Charles E. Brock (1930)

Reciprocity is one of the central ethical standards of Heathen thought. The process of regular and consistent gifts and favors builds a solid relationship that must be maintained. In practice, as a Heathen soldier interacts with his fellow soldiers, they will become bound in a web of responsibility and respect. Heathens may be slow to make new friends when moving into new units because being careful around new people is considered a virtue. However, once they have begun to do so they will often be intensely loyal and expect the same in return.

Heathens believe that doing what is best for their family and community is a high moral calling. This includes a dedication to service, both nationally and locally. Heathenry is a fundamentally family-oriented belief system, and Heathens keep close ties to their extended family and ancestors as a matter of religious belief. Heathenry is also an orthopraxic religion, depending on right action over right belief. Men and women are judged by their deeds and their word. Heathens believe their deeds affect their luck, or spiritual wealth. This luck can be transferred from generation to generation, so Heathens believe what they do will not only affect themselves, but their children, and their children for many generations.

In general, Heathens celebrate five major holidays:

● Yule begins around December 20 and lasts for 12 nights. It is the most important of all the festivals to many Heathens and is a celebration of deep winter breaking and the start of the new year.
● Summer Finding is celebrated in late spring, and the date may vary depending on local climate.
● Midsummer is celebrated on or near June 21.
● Winternights is generally celebrated near the end of October but may be moved to more in line with local climate.
● Day of Remembrance is celebrated frequently in line with local remembrances such as Veteran’s Day.

There may also be regionally and locally celebrated festivals such as the Charming of the Plow, Eostre, Loafmas, and Winter Finding, though this is not an exclusive list.

ORGANIZATIONAL STRUCTURES
Heathen groups have various organizational structures. Some organizations have distinct top-down leadership, and others are more loose democratic associations of families and extended tribal groups. The kindred is a common model based on creation of oaths and agreements to treat members as family. Many kindreds form loose alliances with one another to create regional meetings and events. There are some Heathens that do not have a large community near them; these individuals are often in contact with others at least through social media.

ROLE OF MINISTERS
The leadership of an Ásatrú/Heathen group is responsible for the group’s ritual schedule, events that are attended or hosted, facilitating religious knowledge amongst its membership and its surrounding community, and mediating issues as required. There are numerous titles for these leadership positions, but some of the most common are: gođi [GO-thee] (priest), gyđja [GEE-thee-uh] (priestess), and chieftain. Often the gođi/gyđja/chieftain conducts the spiritual and administrative tasks.

WORSHIP

Drinking horns are regularly used in Heathen worship

Heathen worship is based on the concept of reciprocal relationships. For Heathens, all relationships – be they with other humans, gods, ancestors, or wights – are reciprocal in nature. The majority of Heathen worship involves gifting, or making offerings. Typical offerings include drink, bread, items the worshiper has made or grown, or incense. Heathens offer these items to the Holy Powers in exchange for favor for themselves or others. Many Heathens refer to this type of gifting worship as blót.

Another form of Heathen worship is sumbel, a ritual that strengthens both the bonds within the human community and the bonds of that community with the Holy Powers. During sumbel, a horn of drink, usually mead, is typically passed around the assembled worshipers three times. Each round is dedicated to toasting and praising a group of beings; for example, the first round for the gods, the second for the ancestors, and the third for the land spirits or community. Depending on group or occasion, there may be more than three rounds in sumbel. These further rounds may be dedicated to making oaths and boasting.

There is no universal Heathen liturgy, although groups and organizations may elect to create their own standard formats. In spite of this, these ritual forms are still almost always recognizable enough that Heathens from different groups and communities can worship together with ease.

DIETARY LAWS OR RESTRICTIONS
None.

FUNERAL AND BURIAL REQUIREMENTS

Thor's hammer from Veterans Affairs list of belief emblems for headstones

Individual preferences are honored. If death occurs in combat zone, refer to service member's will for further instructions. The Thor's hammer symbol, which is held as sacred by the majority of Heathens, is included among the Veterans Affairs headstone emblems.

MEDICAL TREATMENT
No medical restrictions. Casualty care should be developed on an individual basis. Each Heathen has a different level of appreciation and understanding of Heathenry in their own lives. Prepare probing questions for any service member receiving care to help develop an individualized plan to assist them during their recovery.

OTHER
Many involved in Ásatrú/Heathenry are incredibly supportive of all forms of public service, relating to the need to care for the community’s welfare such as the military, police, firefighting, and EMT professions; by a wide margin, military service is often seen as one of the most honorable professions. Many pride themselves on depth of knowledge regarding religious aspects, history, and traditional crafting skills to a point where Ásatrú/Heathenry is referred to the “religion with homework.”

A young J.R.R. Tolkien

Last semester, I taught a new course on "The Silmarillion: J.R.R. Tolkien's Mythology." Students read and discussed the collection of epic tales that make up the mythological background for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Classes moved through the history of Middle-earth, from the creation of the world to the War of the Ring, as we explored the complex web of legends that Tolkien drew upon, including those of Norse, Celtic, Finnish, Jewish, and Christian traditions.

LORE OF MIDDLE-EARTH

Tolkien worked on the mythology and legends of Middle-earth from 1914 until his death in 1973. In 1977, his son Christopher published an edited version of the lore as The Silmarillion. The book features much mythic material that is merely alluded to or mentioned in passing in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The Silmarillion includes tales of the Two Trees of Valinor; the coming of the Elves to Middle-earth; the creation of the Silmarils; the alliance of Men, Elves and Dwarves against the dark lord Morgoth; the fall of Gondolin and Númenor; the founding of Gondor; the forging of the Rings of Power; the capture of the One Ring by Isildur, and much more.

The book includes the origins of many characters familiar to fans of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, including Elrond, Galadriel, Sauron and the Dúnedain. Unforgettable characters take the stage, including the wondrous Elf-smith Fëanor, the great lovers Beren and Lúthien, and the doomed hero Túrin Turambar. The earliest tales focus on the Valar, the Powers that acts as gods for the denizens of Middle-earth. Terrible enemies fight the forces of light, including Orcs, Balrogs, the dragon Glaurung and the primeval spider Ungoliant.

CONTEXT AND INFLUENCE

Cover of the first edition of The Silmarillion

Over the nine weeks of the course, students read The Silmarillion in the context of Tolkien's fictional and scholarly work. Connections were drawn between the lore of the book and the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, with reference to other posthumous Tolkien publications such as Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth (1980) and The History of Middle-earth (1983-1996).

The class also learned about the many mythologies that influenced Tolkien's work. We traced their influences upon The Silmarillon, with recurrent reference to Tolkien's own statements about the creation and development of his mythology in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien (1981). We also discussed how Tolkien reconciled his fervent Catholicism with his great love for the pagan mythologies of Northern Europe.

STUDENT PROJECTS

Students created their own genealogies of The Silmarillion's cast of characters, which helped them to navigate kindred relationships and feuds as complicated as any in the Icelandic Eddas and sagas. I asked the students to create their family trees from scratch, rather than referring to the diagrams published in the back of the book. Whenever a new character or group made its first appearance in the text, students added it to their charts. Relationships were diagrammed and updated as they were explained in the narrative.

The Haunted Mountain by Mollie Hunter

As an optional project, students were encouraged to share their original artistic interpretations of the work, if the spirit so moved them. Purely for the fun of it, I suggested that they create shoebox dioramas of their favorite scene in The Silmarillion. I remember the fun I had as a middle school student creating a shoebox diorama of the Lairig Ghru from Mollie Hunter's The Haunted Mountain: A Story of Suspense, a wonderful tale set in Scotland and that features the sidhe and other elements from Celtic mythology.

I thought it would be enjoyable for my current students to have a bit of a break from the responsibilities of adulthood and to take some time for fun and crafting. I think they all did a great job on their projects!

SHOEBOX DIORAMAS

Jessica Rodriguez created this wonderful diorama of The Two Trees of Valinor. Here is how Tolkien describes the trees when they first appear in "Of the Beginning of Days," the first chapter of Quenta Silmarillion: The History of the Silmarils:

The one had leaves of dark green that beneath were as shining silver, and from each of his countless flowers a dew of silver light was ever falling, and the earth beneath was dappled with the shadows of his fluttering leaves. The other bore leaves of a young green like the new-opened beech; their edges were of glittering gold. Flowers swung upon her branches in clusters of yellow flame, formed each to a glowing horn that spilled a golden rain upon the ground; and from the blossom of that tree there came forth warmth and a great light. Telperion the one was called in Valinor, and Silpion, and Ninquelótë, and many other names; but Laurelin the other was, and Malinalda, and Culúrien, and many names in song beside.

The gold disks below the trees and the gold tiles behind them give Jessica's work the feel of a Gustav Klimt composition. Beautiful!

The Two Trees of Valinor by Jessica Rodriguez

Susie Jendro built this diorama of The Awakening of the Elves, based on a scene in "Of the Coming of the Elves and the Captivity of Melkor," the third chapter of Quenta Silmarillion:

It is told that even as Varda ended her labours, and they were long, when first Menelmacar strode up the sky and the blue fire of Helluin flickered in the mists above the borders of the world, in that hour the Children of the Earth awoke, the Firstborn of Ilúvatar. By the starlit mere of Cuiviénen, Water of Awakening, they rose from the sleep of Ilúvatar; and while they dwelt yet silent by Cuiviénen their eyes beheld first of all things the stars of heaven. Therefore they have ever loved the starlight, and have revered Varda Elentári above all the Valar.

Susie represented the stars in her diorama with electric lights. Her beautifully designed diorama really captures the magic of this powerful scene.

The Awakening of the Elves by Susie Jendro

Lauren Challinor's diorama portrays The Coming of Ungoliant, arguably the creepiest scene in the book. Here is part of Tolkien's description, from the eighth chapter of Quenta Silmarillion, "Of the Darkening of Valinor":

And in that very hour Melkor and Ungoliant came hastening over the fields of Valinor, as the shadow of a black cloud upon the wind fleets over the sunlit earth; and they came before the green mound Ezellohar. Then the Unlight of Ungoliant rose up even to the roots of the trees...

The light and pleasant hues of Lauren's piece are at odds with the darkness of the hulking spider in this perfect portrayal of the final moments of the Two Trees before all turns to darkness.

The Coming of Ungoliant by Lauren Challinor

Margaret Joyce chose to illustrate a scene from later in the book. Master of Doom shows one of the tragic scenes from "Of Túrin Turambar," the twenty-first chapter of Quenta Silmarillion. Tolkien describes Níniel's arrival at the scene of Túrin's slaying of the dragon Glaurung:

There she saw the dragon lying, but she heeded him not, for a man lay beside him; and she ran to Turambar, and called his name in vain. Then finding that his hand was burnt she washed it with tears and bound it about with a strip of her raiment, and she kissed him and cried on him again to awake. Thereat Glaurung stirred for the last time ere he died, and he spoke with his last breath...

Margaret shows Túrin unconscious upon his sword, Níniel (Nienor) weeping, and Glaurung glaring fiercely as he prepares to utter his dark final words. It's awesomely eerie.

Master of Doom by Margaret Joyce

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Adam Smith decided to bake Middle-earth treats instead of designing a diorama. He made three types of Lembas, as described in "Of Túrin Turambar," when Melian presents "journey-bread" to Beleg Cúthalion:

And she gave him store of lembas, the waybread of the Elves, wrapped in leaves of silver, and the threads that bound it were sealed at the knots with the seal of the Queen, a wafer of white wax shaped as a single flower of Telperion; for according to the customs of the Eldalië the keeping and giving of lembas belonged to the Queen alone. In nothing did Melian show greater favour to Túrin than in this gift; for the Eldar had never before allowed Men to use this waybread, and seldom did so again.

Adam baked three varieties: honey shortbread, banana bread, and raisin bread. He wrapped each piece in a banana leaf and tied it with a ribbon. All three varieties were quite tasty!

Lembas by Adam Smith

UP NEXT: THE ADVENTURES OF BILBO BAGGINS

This semester, I'll be teaching "The Hobbit: J.R.R. Tolkien's Mythic Sources." The course is open to the public, and no previous study is required. Registration is now open with discounts for students and seniors. Classes begin February 17. Click here for more information.

Translator’s Note

The Wanderer in the Exeter Book manuscript

The anonymous Old English poem known as The Wanderer is preserved only in the Exeter Book, a compilation most likely written down around the year 975. The poem provides a striking first-person lament spoken by an Anglo-Saxon warrior who wanders the world alone after losing his lord and companions.

The Wanderer's reflections on his past life experiences make no mention of overtly Christian concepts, despite the short bit of framing narration after the monologue that provides a devout gloss. Instead, we read of the workings of fate (wyrd) and the relationships of reciprocal gifting in pre-Christian warrior society.

Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson have remarked that the central figure is of "the heroic age" and "shows no awareness of Christian enlightenment." This is not to argue that the poem preserves a perfect pristine pagan worldview, but merely to suggest that even an ostensibly Christian poem can contain elements of an older belief system.

Discussing Anglo-Saxon verse, Graham Holderness writes:

While the confrontation and synthesis of pagan and Christian elements is necessarily foregrounded in the heroic and devotional poetry of the period, it seems to me that some of the 'deep-set patterns of belief' transmitted from the past into the consciousness of English Christians can also be traced in the elegies, poems regarded as quintessentially expressive of the spirit of the age, yet not formally or explicitly concerned with matters militaristic or theological.

I would argue that The Wanderer has elements of both heroic and elegiac poetry. As such, it contains holdovers from a past pagan age presented in a post-conversion package.

My translation of the poem is presented in the text boxes below. Between each section of the translation, my annotation addresses aspects of the poem including:

• Linguistic elements, such as comparison to Old Norse words

• Cultural concepts of Anglo-Saxon and Old Norse society

• Parallels to the Old English Beowulf, probably composed in the 8th century but preserved only in a manuscript of c1000

The Old English Rune Poem as it appeared in the first printed edition of 1705

• Parallels to the Old English Rune Poem, probably composed c1000 but preserved only in a printed edition of 1705; each verse of the Rune Poem explicates the meaning of a specific letter of the futhorc, the Anglo-Saxon runic alphabet

• Parallels to Old Norse poems of the Poetic Edda preserved in manuscripts of c1270 and later, with particular emphasis on Hávamál ("Sayings of the High One," i.e. the god Odin, well-known for disguising himself as an old solitary wanderer)

• Influence of the poem on later authors, most notably J.R.R. Tolkien

• Concepts that are of interest to practitioners of Ásatrú and Heathenry, modern religions that seek to reconstruct, reinvent and/or reimagine pagan Germanic religious traditions

Readers who simply want to read the poem can skip over the annotation and move from text box to text box.

Following translators of Old English such as R.D. Fulk and J.R.R. Tolkien, I have rendered all poetry as prose. The full text of The Wanderer in Old English can be found in Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson’s A Guide to Old English, available as a paperback in The Norse Mythology Store under Books → Dictionaries & Language.

Note: All passages quoted from Old English, Old Norse, and German texts in the annotation are my own translations.

The Wanderer
Translated from the Old English and annotated
by Karl E. H. Seigfried

The solitary one often awaits prosperity for himself, favor of fate, although he, troubled in mind, through sea-­ways long had to stir with hands rime-­cold sea, to trudge the paths of exile. Fate is fully inexorable! So said the wanderer, mindful of hardships, of wrathful slaughters, with the fall of beloved kinsmen:

Lagu rune is the third symbol on the inside of this Anglo-Saxon rune ring (8th-10thC)

The phrase "through sea-ways long had to stir" (geond lagulāde longe sceolde hrēran) is reminiscent of the Old English Rune Poem verse for the lagu ("sea") rune, which contains related vocabulary: lagulāde/lagu ("sea-ways"/"sea"), longe/langsum ("long"/"longsome"), sceolde/sculun ("had to"/"have to"):

The sea seems longsome to men, if they have to dare in an unsteady ship, and the sea-waves greatly frighten them, and the sea-steed does not heed the bridle.

Both poems reflect the difficulty and struggle of the long times at sea necessary for northern travel during this time period.

I am not arguing for a direct genetic relationship between the two poems, but rather suggesting that the similarity of vocabulary and imagery shows that they are both part of what Maureen Halsall calls "the shared word-hoard of alliterative formulas... which was the common property of the Germanic-speaking world and which manifests itself in many other poetic contexts outside the rune poems."

The Old English hrīm ("rime,""frost") is used here by The Wanderer's narrator in the compound adjective hrīmceald ("rime-cold"). Old Norse has a parallel hrím and hrímkaldr, but readers of Norse mythology are likely better acquainted with the noun compound hrímþursar ("frost-giants").

The narrator's declaration that "fate is fully inexorable" (wyrd bið full āræd) is well-known to readers of Bernard Cornwell's Saxon Stories (now on BBC Television as The Last Kingdom) as a favorite phrase of the protagonist, Uhtred of Bebbanburg. The statement is also paralleled in line 455 of Beowulf, in which the hero declares "Fate goes as she must" (Gæð ā wyrd swā hīo scel).

This sentiment appears in various forms in several Icelandic sagas, such as the statement by Grímur Ingjaldsson in Vatnsdæla saga that "it is hard to escape fate" (torsótt er að forðast forlögin). The idea is common enough throughout Indo-European literature. In the Sanskrit Rāmāyana, Rama states that "Fate is inevitable" (4.24.6); in the Greek Iliad, Hector says that "no man, I promise, has ever escaped his fate" (6.488).

Both The Wanderer and Beowulf use the word wyrd (translated here as "fate"), a feminine noun cognate with both Old Norse urðr and Modern English weird. In Norse mythology, Urðr is the name of one of the Norns, the mystical women who sit at the Well of Fate (Urðar brunnr) and determine the destinies of men. In Shakespeare's Macbeth, the Norns are paralleled by the Weird Sisters, three prophetic women who gather beneath "lightning and thunder" and discuss meeting "upon the heath."

Direct speech of the Wanderer begins at this point in the poem and lasts until the final lines.

Often I had to alone lament my care each day before dawn. No one is now alive that I would dare to tell him my heart openly. I as truth know that it is noble custom in a nobleman, that he should bind fast his spirit-­enclosure, should keep his hord-coffer closed, think as he will. Nor can a weary spirit withstand fate, nor the troubled mind provide help.

Reconstruction of Anglo-Saxon helmet found in York that likely belonged to a high-status noble c750-775

The Wanderer speaks of the "nobleman" using the word eorl (here in the dative as eorle), which is related to the Old Norse jarl and the Modern English earl. A character named Eorl is mentioned several times in The Lord of the Rings as the first king of Rohan and ancestor of the Rohirrim. His descendants are modeled on Anglo-Saxons (as demonstrated by Christopher Tolkien and Tom Shippey) and are known as Eorlingas (Eorl + ingas). While Old Norse patronymics used the -son suffix to mark a man's father, Old English used -ing to mark the ancestor of a family or a people. Therefore, the Eorlingas are the "people of Eorl."

The word þēaw (here translated as "custom") is used today by some modern followers of Heathen religions to refer to "practices which had proven beneficial or supportive enough of society to have become established standards for behavior or the standard way of doing things" (Eric Wódening, We Are Our Deeds). The Modern English spelling is thew.

Mōd (translated here as "spirit") survives in Modern English as "mood." The Old English word had a much wider range of meanings than does its linguistic descendant. Depending on context, it could mean arrogance, courage, disposition, heart, mind, pride, soul, spirit, or temper. In the compound ofermōd ("over-mood," i.e. "overconfidence,""overweening pride") it is a key term in the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon and is paralleled by the Middle High German übermuot, an important term in the Nibelungenlied's characterization of Prünhilt (the German equivalent of the Icelandic Brynhildr).

Therefore the glory-eager ones often in their breast-­coffers bind sorrowful mind fast, as my spirit, often wretchedly troubled, of ancestral home deprived, far from noble kinsmen, I had to fasten with fetters, since very long ago I covered my gold-­friends in darkness of earth, and I wretched from there went winter-­desolate over binding waves, hall-­sad sought bestower of treasure, where I far or near could find him who in mead-hall might know of mine, or me friendless would console, entertain with joys.

Sae Wylfing, a half-size replica of the Sutton Hoo ship

Ēþel (translated above as "ancestral home") appears here in the dative singular form ēðle. Like mōd, this is a term with a wide range of meanings: ancestral domain, ancestral region, hereditary estate, home, homeland, native land, and territory. The Old Norse parallel óðal covers a similar set of meanings: ancestral property, family homestead, home, inheritance, native place, and patrimony. The Old English Rune Poem verse for the ēþel rune reads:

Ancestral land is exceedingly dear to each man, if he may there in the hall enjoy what is right and fitting in prosperity most often.

Like The Wanderer, the Rune Poem makes a connection between "ancestral land" and the pleasures and rewards of life in the hall.

When the Wanderer refers to the "mead-hall" (meodoheall, here in the dative form meoduhealle), he uses a term that both Hrothgar and Beowulf use to refer to Heorot, the hall that is the site of Grendel's attacks in the night (lines 484 and 638). The Old Norse equivalent is mjöðrann, which appears in the Eddic poem Atlakviða (verse 9). However, mjöðrann is actually more closely related to the Old English medoærn, a term used by the Beowulf narrator to refer to Heorot (line 69).

Wynn ("joy," here as dative plural wynnum) is the subject of a verse in the Old English Rune Poem:

Joy he enjoys who knows little of woes, pain and sorrow, and for himself has prosperity and bliss and also the abundance of strongholds.

This expresses a concept of "joy" that is quite close to that of the Wanderer, centered as it is on contrasting mental states and the prosperity and shared experiences of the hall.

He knows who knows first-­hand how cruel sorrow is as companion to him who for himself has few beloved confidants: path of exile holds him, not at all twisted gold, frozen heart, not at all wealth of earth. He remembers retainers and receiving of treasure, how in youth his gold-­friend accustomed him to feasting. All joy has perished!

"Odin the Wanderer" (1886) by Georg von Rosen

The Wanderer's reflection on loss of "joy" (wyn) continues with more parallels to the verse from the Runic Poem quoted above. Shared vocabulary between this section of The Wanderer and the wynn verse includes cunnað/can ("knows"), sorg/sorge ("sorrow"), blæd ("wealth,""prosperity"), and wyn ("joy").

The lament of the man who "has few beloved confidants" (lyt hafað lēofra geholena) is echoed by the words of Odin in the Old Norse Hávamál ("Sayings of the High One," verse 50):

The young fir-tree withers, that which stands in an unsheltered place; neither bark nor needle shelters it. Such is the man whom no man loves – how should he live long?

Although the imagery is different, the two poems share an underlying concept of community.

The Wanderer's emphasis on "receiving of treasure" (sincþegu, here as accusative sincþege) from the "gold-friend" (goldwine) underscores the importance of reciprocity and reciprocal gifting between the lord (a Modern English word descended from the Old English hlāfweard> hlāford = "loaf-ward,""bread-keeper") and his dependents. The leader was responsible for providing food, shelter, and treasure for his retainers in exchange for their loyal service. This relationship is also at the heart of the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon.

In Hávamál, Odin mentions this relationship of reciprocal gifting (verse 42):

To his friend a man must be a friend and repay gift with gift.

The Wanderer makes a direct connection between loss of friends and the loss of gifting. Odin also seems to warn against the very situation in which the Wanderer finds himself (Hávamál, verse 41):

Those who exchange and those who give again are friends to each other the longest – if that continues to go well!

Clearly, things haven't gone well for the Wanderer.

Therefore knows he who must do without counsels of his beloved friend-­lord for a long time: when sorrow and sleep at the same time together often bind the wretched solitary one, it seems to him in his mind that he embraces and kisses his liege lord and on his knee lays hands and head, as he at times before in days gone by enjoyed the giving-­seat. Then the friendless man awakes afterwards, sees fallow waves before him, sea-­birds bathe, feathers spread, rime and snow driving mingled with hail.

Hrothgar doesn't look like he's in a giving mood in this illustration by Randy Grochoske

Bruce Mitchell and Fred C. Robinson suggest that the Wanderer's embracing of the lord and the laying of hands and head on his knee "is evidently a ritual confirming the close ties between the lord and his retainer." Laurence M. Larson writes, "There can be no doubt that the singer refers to his initiation into his lord's following. In several important particulars – the kneeling (which is implied), the kiss, the placing of the hand – this ceremony resembles the one described in Court Law."

The "giving-seat" (giefstōl, here as genitive giefstōlas) from which the lord rewards his retainers seems equivalent to the Old Norse "high-seat" (hásæti, hástóll, öndugi, öndvegi) that is mentioned so often in the Eddas and sagas.

Hæl ("hail," here as dative hagle) is featured in one of the verses in the Old English Rune Poem:

Hail is the whitest of grains; it whirls from heaven's sky, storms of wind toss it; afterwards it is made into water.

Perhaps a bit more prosaic than the other verses quoted above, but there it is.

Then wounds of the heart are the heavier, sorely longing for the beloved. Sorrow is renewed. Whenever remembrance of kinsmen pervades his mind, he joyfully greets, eagerly examines companions of men; they often swim away. Spirit of floating ones does not bring there many familiar sayings. Care is renewed for him who must very often send weary heart over binding of waves. Therefore I am not able to think throughout this world why my spirit does not grow dark, when I fully ponder life of noblemen, how they quickly abandoned hall, brave young retainers. So this middle-­earth each of all days declines and falls; therefore a man can not become wise, before he has a portion of winters in the kingdom of the world.

Hávamál illustration (1908) by W.G. Collingwood

"Middle-earth" (middangeard, "middle-yard") is the Old English equivalent of the Old Norse miðgarðr (also meaning "middle-yard"). The former is the source for Tolkien's "Middle-earth," the latter for "Midgard" in Modern English translations, retellings, and reimaginings of Norse mythology.

The emphasis on wisdom and experience is reminiscent of sections of the Old Norse Hávamál in which Odin speaks of the "unwise man" (ósnotr maðr, verse 26):

An unwise man thinks he knows all, if he has for himself a corner to stay in.

That is to say, the fool who never leaves home considers himself wise – an observation that still holds true in this age of internet trolls.

We still use the Old English word winter (here as genitive plural wintra). Both the Anglo-Saxons and the Norsemen measured a person's age by winters instead of years. Beowulf rules his kingdom for "fifty winters" (fiftig wintra, line 2209) before the dragon attacks; Helgi of the Völsunga saga goes off to war when he is "fifteen winters old" (fimmtán vetra gamall, chapter 8).

The wise man must be patient, must not be too hot-hearted nor too hasty with words, nor too weak a warrior nor too reckless, nor too afraid nor too obsequious, nor too wealth-greedy nor never of boasting too eager, before he clearly has knowledge. A warrior must await, whenever he speaks a vow, until stout-­hearted he knows clearly whither thought of his heart will turn. A wise man must understand how terrifying it will be, when the riches of all this world stand deserted, as now in various places throughout this middle-­earth walls stand wind-­blown, rime-covered, the buildings snow-­swept.

Cattle in the winter snow of Exter, England

The qualities given here of "the wise man" (wita) parallel those discussed by Odin in Hávamál. Both the Wanderer and Odin place an emphasis on moderation (Old English metgung, Old Norse hóf). In Viking Age Iceland, Jesse Byock connects this idea to the reciprocity discussed above: "Success in maintaining reciprocal agreements... required conformity to a standard of moderation, termed hóf. An individual who observed this standard was called a hófsmaðr, a person of justice and temperance." Maybe today's Heathens who adhere to the "Nine Noble Virtues" should consider adding "moderation" to the list. In today's world of overheated online rhetoric, a little restraint couldn't hurt.

The Old English word feoh appears here joined to the word gīfre ("greedy") to form the compound adjective feohgīfre ("wealth-greedy"). The Old English feoh and Old Norse fé have two ranges of meaning: (1) cattle, livestock and (2) property, wealth. In his Dictionary of English Etymology, Hensleigh Wedgwood writes, "The importance of cattle in a simple state of society early caused an intimate connection between the notion of cattle and of money or wealth." Related words in Modern English include fee, fief, and feudal.

Feoh is the subject of the first verse of the Old English Rune Poem:

Wealth is a consolation to all people; though each man must deal it freely, if he wishes to obtain glory before the lord.

As in The Wanderer, the importance of reciprocal gifting is underscored.

Beorn (here translated as "warrior") is a word that only appears in Old English poetry (i.e., not in prose works) and is used to mean man, warrior, prince, nobleman, or chief. Both beorn and bera ("bear") are cognate with the Old Norse björn ("bear"), but the meaning of björn seems to have evolved from the animal to the human. Tolkien tapped into the transformation of the word when he created The Hobbit's Beorn, a mysterious character who shifts between bear and human form.

The Wanderer stresses the gravity of making a vow (bēot). Mitchell and Robinson write that "the speaker is warning against rash vows... uttered in public, since a man would earn contempt if he failed to carry out what he boasted he would do." This view of vows is held today by many modern practitioners of Heathenry, and the seriousness of making oaths is discussed at length by contemporary Heathen authors such as Patricia M. Lafayllve, Diana L. Paxson, and Eric Wódening.

Edoras (translated here as "buildings") is the plural form of the noun edor ("place enclosed by a fence,""dwelling,""house"). Again connecting the Rohirrim to the Anglo-Saxons, Tolkien gives the name Edoras to their hilltop fortress in The Lord of the Rings.

The wine-halls decay, rulers lie deprived of joy, troop of seasoned retainers has all perished, proud by the wall. War took some away, carried into the way forth, a bird bore away a certain one over the high sea, a gray wolf shared a certain one with death, a sad-­faced nobleman hid a certain one in an earth-­grave.

The imagery of animals preying on the battle-dead should be familiar to readers of the Norse myths and sagas, which feature ravens and wolves as the battlefield-haunting creatures of Odin. The Wanderer's statement that "a gray wolf shared a certain one with death" (sumne se hāra wulf dēaðe gedælde) brings to mind Odin's rationale for gathering heroes to Valhalla in the Old Norse poem Eiríksmál: "the gray wolf gazes at the homes of the gods" (sér ulfr hinn hösvi á sjöt goða).

So the creator of men laid waste this dwelling place until, devoid of the revelry of the population, the ancient works of giants stood idle.

Sword with Anglo-Saxon silver inlay found in a grave in Heggestrøa, Norway

"The ancient works of giants" (eald enta geweorc) here refers to buildings, but a similar phrase is used in Beowulf to describe a sword when the hero finds an oversized weapon during his battle with Grendel's mother (line 1557):

Then he saw among the war-gear a victory-fortunate blade, an ancient sword made by giants (ealdsweord eotenisc) strong in edges.

In Old English, ent (here in genitive plural enta) and eoten (here in the adjective form eotenisc) both mean "giant." The latter word is related to the Old Norse jötunn ("giant"), a word that may derive from eta ("to eat"). The sense of the enemies of the gods having enormous appetites is also present in the Sanskrit texts of India, in which the rakshasas are defined by their monstrous hunger. Like the jötnar (plural of jötunn) of Norse myth, rakshasas appear in Indian texts as both terrifying ogres and beautiful women.

The phrase "works of giants" (enta geweorc) also appears in several other Old English poems: Andreas, Beowulf, Maxims II, and The Ruin. In his Mittelerde: Tolkien und die germanische Mythologie ("Middle-earth: Tolkien and Germanic Mythology"), Rudolf Simek explains why the Old English poems credit "giants" with the construction of ancient structures: "To these old giants, people in the early middle ages attributed the creation of the prehistoric stone-monuments and also the Roman streets and buildings, which were still visible then in great ruins." Earl R. Anderson writes of a "theme of an awed regard for Roman ruins" in Old English poetry: "These ancient stone structures have endured the ravages of time, wind and weather, and are admired [by the Anglo-Saxons] in part because of their antiquity."

Tolkien credits the creation of the Ents in his own mythology to this line of The Wanderer, writing to W. H. Auden (letter 163) that his giant figures of the forest "are composed of philology, literature, and life."

He who then wisely considered this foundation deeply meditates on this dark life, wise in spirit, often remembers large number of slaughters far, and utters these words: Where has the horse gone? Where has the young man gone? Where has the treasure-giver gone? Where have the seats of the feasts gone? Where are the hall-­joys? Alas, bright goblet! Alas mail-­warrior! Alas, glory of the prince! How that time departed, grew dark under helm of night, as if it never was. A wall wondrously high, decorated with serpent shapes, stands now in the track of the beloved troop of seasoned retainers. Powers of ashen spears have taken noblemen away, weapons slaughter-greedy, fate the glorious, and storms batter these stone cliffs, falling snowstorm binds the earth, tumult of winter, when dark it comes, night-­shadow darkens, sends from the north fierce hailstorm to the warriors in hostility.

Warriors drink in the hall Beowulf illustration (1939) by Lynd Ward

The Wanderer uses the word frōd ("wise") in the phrase frōd in ferðe ("wise in spirit"). In J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey points out that Frodo is "the one name out of all the prominent hobbit characters in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which Tolkien does not mention or discuss." Given that "wise in spirit" seems such an apt description of the Ring-bearer, perhaps this half-line from the poem Tolkien knew so well played some part in his naming of Frodo.

The Wanderer again refers to reciprocal gifting when he mentions the "treasure-giver" (māþþumgyfa). Of course, gyfa ("giver") is related to gyfan ("to give") and gyfu ("gift"), the latter of which is the subject of a verse in the Rune Poem:

The gift of men is honor and praise, support and respect; and help and substance for each wanderer who is without other.

This reminds us that the Wanderer is not bemoaning the simple loss of material things, but of the relationships and cementing of status that the giving and receiving of gifts represents.

The Old English symbel ("feast," here in the genitive plural symbla) is parallel to the Old Norse sumbl. In The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture, Paul C. Bauschatz presents a detailed analysis of usage of both terms in the literature of the two languages, arguing that Beowulf and several poems from the Poetic Edda provide evidence for a Germanic ritual based on drinking of an alcoholic beverage, making of speeches, and giving of gifts.

Bauschatz's theories have been widely influential on modern Heathen practice. So far, every book that I have found published by a Heathen author that discusses the contemporary version of the symbl or sumbl ritual cites his work. Our Troth, a two-volume religious guide by the Troth (an American Heathen organization), states that nearly all practitioners "who have written or spoken on the meaning of the sumbel in latter years have drawn their understanding of the rite from this text."

The section of The Wanderer beginning "Where has the horse gone?" should be familiar to readers of The Lord of the Rings. In The Two Towers, Aragorn recites the "Lament for the Rohirrim":

Where now the horse and the rider? Where is the horn that was blowing?
Where is the helm and the hauberk, and the bright hair flowing?
Where is the hand on the harpstring, and the red fire glowing?
Where is the spring and the harvest and the tall corn growing?
They have passed like rain on the mountain, like a wind in the meadow;
The days have gone down in the West behind the hills into shadow.
Who shall gather the smoke of the dead wood burning,
Or behold the flowing years from the Sea returning?

At it's opening, Tolkien's poem is quite close to the lament of the Wanderer. Although the language quickly diverges, the spirit, mood, and imagery remain very similar.

When Aragorn performs the poem for his companions, he is himself a wanderer standing next to "the great barrows where the sires of Théoden sleep." The character name Théoden is from the Old English þēoden ("prince, lord") which appears in this passage of The Wanderer as the genitive þēodnes in the phrase Ēala þēodnes þrym ("Alas, glory of the prince"). In Peter Jackson's film of The Two Towers, three non-contiguous lines of Aragorn's lament are transferred to Théoden, with editorial "improvements" of language by the movie's producers.

All is fraught with hardship in the kingdom of earth, the creation of the fates changes the world under the heavens. Here wealth is temporary, here a friend is temporary, here oneself is temporary, here a kinsman is temporary; all this foundation of the earth will become worthless!

"December" by Hans Thoma (1839-1924)

The second sentence here is quite close to a popular passage from the Old Norse Hávamál. The Old English uses the word feoh in its opening phrase, and the Old Norse uses fé at the start. As discussed above, both words can mean either "wealth" or "cattle." In the words of the Wanderer, the meaning is generally accepted to be "wealth" or "property"; in the words of Odin, it is clearly "cattle." Verse 76 of Hávamál states:

Cattle die, kinsmen die, the self dies the same, but the glory of reputation never dies for the one who gets himself a good one.

Two pairs of the Old English and Old Norse words are related: feoh/fé ("wealth"/"cattle"), frēond/frændr ("friend"/"kinsmen"). The parallel nature of the two verses is obvious. However, the worldview expressed by the two endings are quite different.

The Old English poem responds to the realization of the transitory nature of life by denigrating the worth of the world itself, and suggesting that the afterlife is all that truly matters (as made explicit in the narrator's Christian conclusion below). The Old Norse poem replies to the same situation with an insistence that deeds in the world are what matter, that the only immortality is in the reputation we leave behind. One attitude is world-denying, the other world-affirming.

Direct speech of the Wanderer ends at this point in the poem.

So said the one wise in spirit, sat himself apart in secret meditation. Good is he who his maintains his faith, nor ought a man ever his grief too quickly of his breast make known, unless he, the nobleman, before then knows how to bring about amends with courage. Well is it for that one who seeks mercy for himself, consolation from the Father in the heavens, where for us all the fastness stands.

The narrator returns and states that the Wanderer sat alone "in secret meditation" (æt rūne). The word rūn (here as dative rūne) refers to the secret and mysterious nature of the act, not to the runic symbols. What we would today call a rune was known in Old English as a rūnstæf ("runic letter").

Trēow (as accusative trēowe) is here translated as "faith," but also means "trust" and "loyalty." It is related to the Old Norse trú ("faith,""belief") which is used today as part of the Modern Icelandic term for the contemporary Heathen religion Ásatrú ("Æsir Faith," belief in the Norse gods).

The poem ends with the narrator's statement on Christian "mercy" (ār, as accusative āre) and "consolation" (frōfor, as accusative frōfre). However, the final image is that of a "fastness" (fæstnung) "in the heavens" (on heofonum), which fits well with the Wanderer's nostalgia for bygone days of drinking in the stronghold of his lord.


Anderson, Earl R. "The uncarpentered world of Old English poetry."Anglo-Saxon England 20 (1991): 65-80.

Bauschatz, Paul C. The Well and the Tree: World and Time in Early Germanic Culture. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.

Carpenter, Humphrey, ed. The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.

Dronke, Ursula, ed. The Poetic Edda, Volume III: Mythological Poems II. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Eiríksmál. Heimskringla website, heimskringla.no/wiki/Eir%C3%ADksm%C3%A1l.

Fulk, R.D., Robert E. Bjork, and John D. Niles, eds. Klaeber's Beowulf and the Fight and Finnsburg. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

Gundarsson, Kveldúf, ed. Our Troth, Volume Two: Living the Troth. BookSurge Publishing, 2007.

Halsall, Marueen. The Old English Rune Poem: a critical edition. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1981.

Holderness, Graham. "From Exile to Pilgrim: Christian and Pagan Values in Anglo-Saxon Elegiac Verse." In English Literature, Theology and the Curriculum, 63-84. Edited by Liam Gearon. London: Cassell, 1999.

Homer. The Iliad. Translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Free Press, 2011.

Larson, Laurence M. "The Household of the Norwegian Kings in the Thirteenth Century."The American Historical Review XIII (October 1907 – July 1908), 459-479.

Mitchell, Bruce and Fred C. Robinson. A Guide to Old English. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Rāmayāna, Book Four: Kiskindhā. Translated by Rosalind Lefeber. New York: New York University Press, 2005.

Shakespeare, William. Macbeth. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Shippey, T.A. J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000.

Simek, Rudolf. Mittelerde: Tolkien und die germanische Mythologie. Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2005.

Tolkien, J.R.R. The Lord of the Rings, Part Two: The Two Towers. New York: Ballantine Books, 1981.

Völsunga saga. Heimskringla website, heimskringla.no/wiki/V%C3%B6lsunga_saga.

Wódening, Eric. We Are Our Deeds: The Elder Heathenry, Its Ethic and Thew. Baltimore: White Marsh Press, 2011.

This modern English translation and annotation
© 2016 by Karl E. H. Seigfried

Click here for more free full text online translations from the Old English.

College of Saint Benedict in St. Joseph, Minnesota

I fairly regularly receive emails from students with school assignments that include interview projects. There are far too many requests for me to respond to all the questions, but I have written detailed answers to various young people over the past few years and posted them in the For Students section of The Norse Mythology Blog.

In 2011, I answered a series of questions from a high school student. In 2012, I wrote replies to a middle school student. In 2013, I was interviewed by a sixth grader. In 2014, I provided answers for another sixth grader. I somehow never got around to working on one of these interview requests in 2015, but this post features the first group of my answers to a college student who is researching Norse mythology and religion.

Lily Hauger is a nursing student taking the Religions of the World class taught at the College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Minnesota by Dr. Hans Gustafson, a member of the Theology Department at the University of St. Thomas and Associate Director of the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning.

For her semester project, Lily chose to study Ásatrú (“Æsir Faith”), a modern iteration of Norse religion. She sent me some very interesting questions that show how deeply she has thought about these issues – and that reflect the excellent research she has already done on the subject.

I’m very happy that Dr. Gustafson is encouraging his students to study religions with which they may not be familiar. The two of us have been corresponding for a couple of years, and he has been a great supporter of the inclusion of Ásatrú in interfaith dialogue. He asked me a while ago to recommend texts on historical and modern Heathenry (Germanic polytheism) to include on the recommended reading list for his world religions course.

It’s great that Dr. Gustafson is so welcoming of minority religions in an academic and theological context, and it’s wonderful that Lily decided to research the topic. I hope that the answers I’m posting this week and next will be of some help to other students curious about Ásatrú and Heathenry.

1. In what ways have you blended your religious beliefs with Western culture?

An English map of the world from c.1265

My religious beliefs are rooted in Western culture, and Western culture is rooted in my religious beliefs. Let me try to explain.

I used to teach in the religion department of a private liberal arts college where “Western Heritage” is taught with the “foundational texts of the Western intellectual tradition.” This preserves an older, Eurocentric way of teaching college students that accepts a colonialist division of the world into West and East or, to use the old-fashioned terms, Occidental and Oriental.

Strangely, this division stretches a definition of the West in order to concentrate on a Christian view of culture that jumps in time and place from Latin antiquity and Biblical times in southern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to the early modern period in western and northern Europe.

In the first semester, students read works from ancient Greece (southeastern Europe), Italy (south-central Europe), Africa (south of Europe) and the Middle East (east of Europe). The latest text is from the fourth century. In the second semester, the students skip ahead one thousand years and read texts from the fourteenth century and later. They are introduced to works from England, France, Germany, and other nations of western and northern Europe.

This raises two questions. What was happening in western and northern Europe in the years between the fourth and fourteenth centuries? Does any literature survive from this time and area?

To answer the first question: a lot was happening. As the Roman Empire collapsed and the Huns pushed westwards, the so-called Migration Age began in the late fourth century. Change was the order of the day as various Germanic tribes fought for and consolidated power over a wide geographical area in what we now call Europe. These tribes slowly converted to Christianity from paganism over the next centuries.

By the time the Viking Age began in the late eighth century with the first raids on England, the Scandinavian invaders were seen by the Christian English as terrifying pagans – despite the fact that the Anglo-Saxons had themselves worshiped the same or similar gods scarcely more than a century earlier. By the end of the Viking Age in the eleventh century, almost all of Scandinavia was Christian; paganism in Sweden held on until the mid-twelfth century.

When we look at the surviving evidence for Germanic religions between the fourth century and the twelfth century, we have to acknowledge that we are talking about a large number of divergent peoples who held a great variety of religious beliefs and engaged in a wide array of religious practices. There was no one great Heathen religion with a common theology and praxis; there was an array of somewhat related beliefs and practices that differed with period and location.

We can, in the most general terms, say that this era saw the flowering of Germanic religions with roots that we can trace back to around 2000 BCE. Unfortunately, it also saw the willful eradication of the religions by Christian clergy and political leaders.

First page of Beowulf in the surviving manuscript

To answer the second question: yes, literature survives. Beowulf’s events take place during the Migration Age; the lengthy poem that is generally considered the first great work of English literature was probably composed in the eighth century and is preserved in a manuscript from around the year 1000. The German Nibelungenlied is also inspired by events in the Migration Age and was written down in approximately 1200; another version of the story is told in the thirteenth-century Icelandic Völsunga saga– both texts influenced the composition of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen and J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. There are German poems going back quite far, like the Hildebrandslied of around 800, which share characters and themes with much later texts.

The great flowering of Icelandic literature in the thirteenth century preserved both the poems that are our primary source for Norse mythology and the sagas purporting to portray life in pagan northern Europe – and, most importantly, of the Viking Age – through shelves full of what would later be called novels, five hundred years before Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding. Almost all of these texts are available in translation for you to read.

So, the earliest literature of western and northern Europe grows out of the events of the Migration Age and the Viking Age. This time period set the stage for all the ups and downs of European history into our own times. The earliest beginnings of what later came to be the kingdoms, empires, and nations of Europe began at this time. The Germanic languages became ever more distinct from each other and set the stage for the evolution of the languages we speak today, like English, German, Dutch, and Norwegian.

The literature of this period did not simply record the events of the past; it interpreted them according to the times of its creators and influenced generations of listeners and readers to this day. Why academic study of “Western Heritage” so often skips over this time period and this literature is a complicated saga in itself, but it is beyond the scope of this already overlong answer to your question. I would, however, encourage students to ask their teachers why they skip over this period of one thousand years.

My point is this: my religious beliefs are grounded in the history and literature of one of the most important and foundational periods of Western culture. All of the texts I mentioned preserve literary evidence for the beliefs and practices of the pre-Christian religions that, since the early 1970s, have been revived, reconstructed, and reimagined as Ásatrú and Heathenry.

Thor's Hammer Pendant from the Viking Age Bredsätra, Öland, Sweden

I look to scholarly work on this period and to the literature that survives for inspiration. The scholarship provides information on how the old pagan religions may have been practiced while offering theories on the worldviews and beliefs of what some practitioners today call Elder Heathens or Arch-Heathens. The literature preserves some of the mythology (unfortunately a mere drop in the ocean of what is forever lost) and gives us insights into pagan life preserved by writers and chroniclers relatively close chronologically to the events described.

The fact that a well-educated and inquisitive college student like you would see this religious tradition as something separate from Western culture makes me a bit sad, because it means that there is a hole at the heart of our modern educational system. It also makes me more determined to continue my own projects and to promote the work of others who work to keep this material alive.

2. As a student who is studying Ásatrú and Norse mythology for the first time, what do you think is vital for me to know?

Ásatrú has often been called “the religion with homework.” Many of today’s Heathens are deeply engaged with scholarship and literature. Some have earned advanced academic degrees and have created their own scholarly works; others have moved from reading the old literature to creating new Heathen poetry and story.

For a college student who wants to dive into the subject, I would suggest this reading list. All of these books are included on the “Highly Recommended” page of The Norse Mythology Store. In an ideal world, I would ask you to read all of them in this given order. In a realistic world, I would ask you to read the descriptions and start with the one that seems most relevant to your own interests.

A manuscript of Snorri Sturluson's Edda Iceland, 18th century

Edda by Snorri Sturluson, translated by Anthony Faulkes
We owe a great deal to the Icelander Snorri Sturluson for his work preserving Norse mythology. This book is the primary source for most of the myths you find retold by later authors. It’s important to keep in mind that Snorri was a Christian writing more than two hundred years after the official conversion of Iceland and that elements of Christian worldview creep into his book. It’s also key to remember that this is not a holy book or bible of Heathenry, but rather an instructional work for poets of his time that teaches the major myths as part of Iceland’s literary heritage.

The Poetic Edda translated by Carolyne Larrington
Written down in the thirteenth century, these poems were preserved orally from the pagan era in Iceland. They tell of gods and goddesses, dwarves and dragons, heroes and Valkyries. You will read the great Prophecy of the Seeress that tells of the creation of the world and its dissolution at Ragnarök, and you will enjoy the Sayings of the High One, in which Odin shares his wisdom, tells of his experiences, and speaks of runes and magic. I suggest reading this after Snorri’s Edda, since the poems are quite dense and can be somewhat mystifying without having first having read Snorri’s more straightforward prose accounts.


Gods and Myths of Northern Europe by H.R. Ellis Davidson
Although it was first published in 1964, this is still my favorite introduction to Norse mythology, religion, and culture. Davidson introduces us to each of the major deities in detail as she discusses not merely literature, but archaeology, theology, history, place-name analysis, visual arts, and more in a virtuosic work that is very accessible to the casual reader. I have repeatedly assigned this as a required textbook for my own courses on mythology and religion.

Simek's Dictionary of Northern Mythology

A Dictionary of Northern Mythology by Rudolf Simek
Translated from the German, this brilliant work is really more of an encyclopedia than a dictionary. Simek’s 1992 preface to the English edition explains the breadth of this wonderful work, stating that

an English audience will associate most of the material presented in [the book] with the northern mythology of the Eddas and sagas of medieval Scandinavia. The scope of the book is, however, wider than that: the mythology and religion of all Germanic tribes – Scandinavians as well as Goths or Angles and Saxons – have been dealt with insofar as they are Germanic in origin; hence, of the English mythology of heathen times, the religion imported by the Germanic tribes is included, but not that of the older Celtic population.

Many Heathens today (myself included) have an expansive sense of the historical background of the modern religions. We look to not only Icelandic sources, but to those from England, Denmark, Germany, and elsewhere. Simek’s work is beloved by many of us for both its inclusion of a wide range of material and its insightful drawing of connections between diverse sources.


A Practical Heathen’s Guide to Asatru by Patricia M. Lafayllve
There are many books available in what is often called the “Ásatrú 101” category. Written by practitioners, they usually give a brief overview of Heathen history and mythology, introduce the deities and wights (land-spirits), explain theological constructs, and describe the general rituals and celebrations performed today. Lafayllve’s book provides all of this in a clear and concise format, is recent enough (2013) to represent current ideas held by the average Heathen (if there is such a thing), and is both widely available and affordable. It’s a good entry point into the modern traditions, but remember that this is only one of the many perspectives in today’s Ásatrú and Heathenry.

Jennifer Snook's American Heathens

American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement by Jennifer Snook
This is the first peer-reviewed academic book on American Heathens written by an American Heathen, and it is also the first long-term professional ethnographic study of the subject in the field of sociology. Published last year, it combines an insider perspective with a scholarly approach. Snook investigates such issues as the interaction of Heathenry and Wicca, the relationship between religious experience and academic research, the use of the internet to build (or tear down) communities, the many roles of women, and the place of ethnicity and heritage. You can introduce yourself to Snook’s work by reading my three-part interview with her here.

To be continued in Part Two.

Click here for Part One.

3. I read on your blog that you are a musician. How have you integrated your religion into your music?

There are several ways that I have consciously incorporated my religion into my music. Here are just two of them.

Blue Rhizome by The New Quartet

First, I believe in interfaith dialogue and inclusivity, even if the “great religions” don’t really return the favor. I wrote the extended composition that appears on my Blue Rhizome album for mixed quartet. Not only were the players mixed in the sense of playing a non-standard combination of instruments, but they came from a mixed religious background: Ásatrú, Baptist, Jewish, and Greek Orthodox. The beginning of my liner notes explain the spiritual impetus for the music:

The composition of this piece was inspired by a crisis of faith. Not religious faith, but faith in humanity. 150 years from now, it is guaranteed that everyone now alive will be in the ground or consumed by flames. There will be no exceptions. All our efforts, dreams, and hopes will end as all biographies must.

In these few years that we have of consciousness and life, we divide ourselves into tribes. Our choice of friends, lovers, and colleagues is based on comfort with what we see as members of our own group. Ethnicity, race, religion, culture, and nationality are used as an excuse to shut out love, new experiences, challenges to our habits, and expansion of our experiences. The Other is judged and the Like is embraced, whether consciously or not.

Thor vs the World Serpent by Ernst Hansen

The music plots a psychological trajectory from “the sadness and despair of those wandering between tribes” through stages including “a meditation on the transitory nature of life” to “the glimmer of hope that we may find kindred spirits across tribal lines.” The peak of the piece is “Destroy All Monsters,” my electric guitar duet with drummer Chris Avgerin, which “represents the anger that can grow out of sadness, whether the Monster is racism, sexism, or the Snake That Encircles the World.”

That last bit is, of course, a reference to the World Serpent, the great enemy of the god Thor. The thought behind the guitar solo was inspired by a famous verse from the Sayings of the High One in which Odin says:

Where you recognize evil, call it evil,
and give no truce to your enemies.

I have been called a “social justice warrior” by online wags for daring to suggest that racism and sexism are evils and monsters that we must confront. Such is life.

Second, I believe that the subjective experience that I often have of composing and improvising music is the same basic experience that the Elder Heathen conceived of as inspiration by the god Odin. When I recorded some of the guitar and bass tracks for Of Alien Feelings, my collaboration with the great drummer Calvin Weston that featured a cross-section of legendary prog rock and jazz players from the last half-century, I simply hit the record button, closed my eyes, and opened my mind so that the music could flow through me without the commentary of my conscious mind. This is not always an easy thing for a trained musician to do!

Odin by Lorenz Froølich

In the best moments, I would feel like the music was coming from outside of me, that I was not consciously creating it. This is the experience of pure creativity that I think was understood as possession by Odin or as the effect of drinking his magical Mead of Poetry.

Intellectually, I understand that creativity can come from our brains combining past experiences in novel ways, that it can be partially explained by the science of the mind. I also understand that, in the actual moment of creativity, I am not aware of whatever electric connections are being made inside my skull.

Scientific theories are necessary for our understanding of reality, but there are also needs that can only be filled by religion, spirituality, and the arts. I believe that the creative experience transcends time, space, and culture, and I think of these bright moments as times when Odin’s inspiration briefly touches me.

4. How have you connected with others who practice Ásatrú?

There are many ways that Heathens find each other. Sometimes, it’s just a pleasant surprise, like when I reconnected years ago with a close friend from high school. We had drifted apart over the long period since we were teenage Motörhead fans together, but when we found each other again, somehow we were both Heathens. The Norns are subtle.

The Norns by Carl Emil Doepler

I have sought out others because I was interested in their writing or academic work, and others have sought me out for the same reason. Intellectual discussion often develops into friendship. I have also met Heathens in places where one would expect to find them, like visiting the headquarters and attending the events of the Ásatrúarfélagið (Ásatrú Fellowship) in Iceland.

There’s also the internet, of course. On one hand, you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. There are trolls lurking everywhere, but that is not a necessarily Heathen phenomenon. I’ve seen equal nastiness in Tolkien fandom and discussions between professional musicians. It’s just an unfortunate element intrinsic to online interaction.

On the other had, what we old graybeards used to call “the Information Superhighway” can also be a great way for members of religious minorities to find fellow practitioners. I have found Heathens on social media who I have subsequently met in this thing called life. Jennifer Snook’s book on Heathens in the U.S. has a great discussion of the pros and cons of Heathenry’s relationship with the internet.

5. How are Ásatrú, Heathenry, and Paganism related?

Thor's Hammer pendant from Erikstorp, Odeshög, Ostergotland, Sweden, probably before 1016

In very general terms, you could say that each is under the umbrella of the next. Basically, you can think of each one like this.

Ásatrú refers to religions that largely center on the Old Norse sources, meaning that they focus on the deities, myths, and practices as described in Icelandic literary sources and various other texts and archaeological finds that are related to them.

Heathenry is a larger term for Germanic polytheistic traditions that include Ásatrú as well as related religious beliefs and practices such as Theodism (which emphasizes Anglo-Saxon sources) and a wide range of praxis based on local and regional traditions (recreated or newly made).

Paganism is a yet wider term that encompasses Heathenry, Wicca, Druidism, and a large number of religions that claim connection to various cultural backgrounds (Baltic, Hellenic, Italic, and so on).

As with any religious terminology, these definitions are widely contested and argued. Some practitioners see Ásatrú and Heathenry as synonymous while others see them as oppositional. Paganism sometimes seems to only mean Wicca, especially as it used by mainstream booksellers (see, for example, the “Witchcraft, Wicca & Paganism – Modern” section at Barnes & Noble).

I once had a religion editor at a cable news network condescendingly explain to me that “Heathenry and Wicca are denominations of the religion of Paganism.” I think you would be hard-pressed to find many Heathens or Wiccans who would agree with his construction. We may argue over the fine shadings of the terms, but there are also some clear divisions.

6. I read an article that was written recently about how Iceland is building the first Norse gods temple in one thousand years. How has not having a place to worship affected your religious practice?

Valheim Hof in Denmark, dedicated to Odin and the gods

Like your question about Western culture, this makes me a bit sad. It suggests that the mainstream media misrepresentation of Heathenry has permeated popular perception to the same degree that academic misdirection of the trajectory of history and literature has shaped student views.

First, the hof (Heathen temple) being built in Iceland is not the first temple to the Norse gods built in the past thousand years. It’s not even the first one this decade. There are Heathen hofs on private property around the world, but we don’t know exactly how many. They are private places of veneration and ritual that are not publicly announced but are used by individuals, families, or groups.

We do know of several temples currently in operation around the world, including in Maryland, California, Denmark and England. We can definitely say that when it is finished – likely in winter 2017 or later – the Icelandic temple will be the first large-scale public hof built in Iceland in the last thousand years.

The story of the future Iceland temple went viral in a media frenzy a while ago, but most of the online articles misrepresented what was really happening as they plagiarized content and lifted quotes without attribution. Such is today’s religion journalism.

This is my temple, no walls needed: Michigan's Upper Peninsula in 2015

Second, I think we have to be careful about using generic concepts of “a place to worship.” The idea that religious ritual requires a brick-and-mortar structure for large congregations to gather in front of an ordained clergyperson is not universal.

Much Heathen ritual takes place outside, where we tend to feel closer to the gods and wights. I personally feel closest to the wights when we are out walking quietly in one of America’s beautiful forests. The woods have always been a mystical place for me. We planted and dedicated a Thor’s Oak in our back yard, and that is where I speak and make offerings to the Powers in a conscious emulation of fragmentary descriptions of Germanic ritual in the surviving texts.

We also celebrate the high days of the Heathen calendar in our home, with family gathered around the table or in front of the fireplace. This also has a basis in historical practice, in which the home was often the center of family religious activity. So, I think not having a big, public, tax-exempt structure listed on Google Maps has had absolutely no effect on my religious practice.

7. I have been reading a lot about the traditional Norse deities. For example, Thor, Odin, and Freyr. What roles do these gods have in modern Ásatrú? Do you actively worship them?

Freyr, Odin and Thor by Wilhelm Kaulbach

There are many gods, goddesses, and wights that inhabit the Heathen world. Their roles are multiform and multivalent.

You often hear that Thor is the god of thunder, but I would question what function thunder has. Is Thor’s role as a deity to make noise during storms? That seems fairly limited in scope. I would say, instead, that thunder is one manifestation of his power. Thor has many roles, including protector of humanity from the threatening forces of the uncultivated world, bringer of the rains that enable life to grow and flourish, and the one who hallows life events such as marriages and funerals.

Another Heathen may say that one or none of these are true descriptions of Thor’s role in her life. She may not pay much attention to Thor, instead focusing on Odin, Freyja, or another deity in her thoughts and actions. In polytheistic religions, the many gods play many roles and are open to many interpretations.

I would also question use of the word worship, contemporary use of which tends to privilege ways of relating to godhood that are rooted in the monotheistic traditions of the Middle East. Heathens often talk of reciprocal gifting with the gods or of honoring their ancestors, which are both quite different modes of religious action from praising an almighty deity. When I raise a drinking horn to Odin, to the spirits of the land, or to my deceased father, the action and the meanings behind it have very little to do with, for example, the praising and flattering of God that I have often seen in Evangelical churches where I’ve been hired to play bass for services.

My ritual drinking horn, carved by Jóhanna G. Harðardóttir

One of the best poems by one of the best poets of the Elder Heathen Era both rails at Odin for the premature death of the poet’s sons and thanks him for the gift of poetic ability which enables his expression of grief. This understanding and acceptance that the gods bring both good and bad, both suffering and joy, is one of the defining areas of difference between polytheism and monotheism. Heathens don’t ask why God allows bad things to happen to good people. They accept that the gods, like everything in this cosmos, are complicated.

8. What role do the Nine Noble Virtues have in your practice?

None. I mean no offense to those who place value on them. I understand that the Nine Noble Virtues are meaningful to some Heathens, that they are a source of inner strength, and that they are a way to focus on positivity in their lives. It is not anyone’s business to tell someone that her personal religious beliefs are invalid. That way lies fundamentalism. However, I steer clear of the NNV in my own practice for several reasons.

The Seven Heavenly Virtues date to the 5th century. What motivated modern Heathens to imitate them?

They were supposedly “codified” from the poems of the Poetic Edda. To begin with, I don’t believe that poetry can truly be translated. There is too much cultural meaning and association packed into each word, especially when you go back to poetry from over a millennium ago. How do you translate a symphony written for orchestra by Beethoven? If you play it on solo xylophone, it simply is not the symphony any more.

Following from this, I really don’t believe that poetry can be codified, especially religious poetry. How do you codify a symphony by Beethoven? If you reduce it to a few isolated and unconnected single notes, you are destroying the core of what defines the work – the act of listening to its complete duration and experiencing it in its fullness. The same goes for religious poetry. Codifying a poem or set of poems into a list of single nouns is simply not something I can get behind.

It’s also a bit odd that Odin himself violates each of the Nine Noble Virtues, right there in the poems themselves. To avoid fighting frost-giants (Courage), he gives a false name (Truth) as he breaks his pledge (Honor) to a giant-maiden (Fidelity). He can’t resist personally insulting Thor (Discipline) and refuses to help him (Hospitality), even though Thor fights the giants for him (Self-reliance) while he’s off having love affairs (Industriousness) or cursing a foster-son for his imperfections instead of continuing to mentor him (Perseverance).

You could go through this same exercise with other deities in the poems and myths. I think this further undermines the assertion that the NNV were codified from the poems.

Odin doesn't seem all that concerned with virtue. Sculpture by Herman Ernst Freund

What these polytheistic poems paint for me is a portrait of a complex set of worldviews that offers no simple answers. Odin is subtle, and Sayings of the High One resists reduction to tidy, unambiguous virtues. The very idea of creating a list of guidelines for behavior seems to imitate the concept from patriarchal monotheist religions of revealed law, to create a simple code that functions like Ten Heathen Commandments carved onto rune-stones and brought down the Rainbow Bridge from Asgard.

To make a different religio-cultural comparison, the NNV assert a simple, communal, universal dharma for all Heathens as opposed to a complex, localized, individual dharma for each Heathen. The NNV are thus internally contradictory as they simultaneously advocate for rugged individualism and for conformist groupthink.

As I said at the beginning of my answer to this question, I realize that some Heathens find value in the Nine Noble Virtues. I don’t deign to tell them how to believe or practice. I simply don’t find the NNV valuable, and the above outlines some of the many reasons why. Your mileage may vary.

Thank you for your thoughtful questions. I hope that my answers will encourage you to dig deeper into historical and modern Heathenry. Please keep me posted on your studies!

Odin actually does look a bit like Karl Marx. Odin the Wanderer by Georg von Rosen (1843-1923)

In the online world of Ásatrú and Heathenry, the reprimand “stop mixing religion and politics” is a regular refrain. On Facebook and Twitter, on blogs and websites, in discussion groups and comment sections, accusations are often made that a given individual or group is polluting the religion with personal political bias. This phenomenon is not specific to a particular position; invective is hurled from both ends of the political spectrum.

From one side come cries of “SJW.” Given the ideologies of many who favor its usage, I long thought this stood for “Single Jewish Woman,” but it is actually used to accuse an opponent of being a “Social Justice Warrior.” Logically, this implies that the accuser is a “Social Injustice Defender,” but logic is not often strong in online confrontations. “Cultural Marxist” is another term popular with the same social set. I assumed it was used for people who demand free streaming music as a basic human right, but it refers to those who supposedly aim to destroy “Western culture” by promoting democracy, intellectualism and protection of minority rights – despite the fact that many would consider these to be bedrock ideals of “the West.” Ironically, those Heathens who decry multiculturalism are arguing for a society in which members of marginalized minority faiths like Ásatrú are denied their rights by members of majority faiths whose prejudices are pandered to by corporate candidates and corporate media.

From the other side comes the No True Heathen fallacy, which asserts that no Heathen would subscribe to extremist philosophies such as “white nationalism” or conspiracy theories such as “white genocide.” When Heathens repeatedly pop up who promote these concepts, the boundaries of the assertion are reset to state that no true Heathen would hold these beliefs. This is parallel to the meme stating that members of ISIS are not true Muslims and that members of the KKK are not true Christians, despite the fact that ISIS clearly declares itself to be thoroughly Muslim and the KKK has long been rooted in Protestantism. Likewise, the intersection of Heathenry with extremist ideology has a lengthy and continuing history that has been well documented by academics. Declaring that agreement with liberal politics is the litmus test to be considered a “true believer” strangely puts progressives in the position of arguing for a reactionary notion of religious purity and identity policing.

The one thing both sides agree on is that the other is injecting politics into religion, while they themselves are simply expressing the true spirit of Heathenry. Each accuses the other of hijacking Heathenry to promote their political views. However, the idea that religion and politics are somehow separable goes against Heathen history, mythology and theology.

History

Althing in Session by W.G. Collingwood (1854-1932)

Before the conversions to Christianity, variations of the term goði were used in the Nordic lands. The title, dating to the fifth century or earlier, referred to an individual who held dual secular and sacred roles, who was both chieftain and priest. The goðar (plural) in pagan Iceland traveled each year to the national Althing, the island’s version of the great assemblies that were known throughout the Germanic world. Throughout the north, these meetings ranged in size and jurisdiction from local to national as they straddled the sacred and the profane.

Archaeological and written sources from the first century through the thirteenth attest to the sacred nature of the cultural institution that decided political, economic and legal matters. A third-century votive inscription on Hadrian’s Wall in England set up by Frisian auxiliaries in the Roman army refers to Mars Thingsus (Mars of the Thing), the god who presided over the assembly. The large annual assembly of the continental Saxons appears to have featured large-scale religious rituals. The ninth-century Life of Saint Lebuin, most likely written by a Saxon author, mentions that the meeting included prayer to pagan gods.

Given this history, is it so odd that modern Heathen leaders who have appropriated the ancient title of goði speak on secular issues? The allsherjargoði (very roughly translated as “high priest”) of Iceland’s Ásatrúarfélagið (Ásatrú Fellowship) has spoken out in support of gay marriage rights in Iceland, which has drawn the ire of right-wing Heathens and the support of left-wing ones. The alsherjargothi (an Americanized spelling) of America’s Asatru Folk Assembly has publicly spoken out against Muslim immigrants in Germany, which has brought down the fury of left-wing Heathens and the cheers of right-wing ones.

In both cases, supporters insist the leader they like is expressing the deepest ideals of the religion, and opponents declare that the leader they don’t like is perverting the religion for political ends. At root, this is a basic human inability to see faults in ourselves that we observe in others. This tendency tends to terminate any attempt at decent discussion by degenerating into denunciation and name-calling.

I am not in any way suggesting a moral equivalency between the two leader’s positions or arguing that we should not speak out strongly against those who we believe promote troubling views. Instead, I am offering the idea that responses to statements such as these should move beyond what amount to accusations of heresy and demands for silencing that sometimes become what the media calls fatwas.

Historical goðar were involved in both religious and political matters, and they arguably would not have made much distinction between the two spheres. Members of the community sometimes strongly disagreed with prominent people, just as they do now. If historical Heathens could argue issues at the assembly without calling for excommunication or declaring someone anathema for holding a political view they found distasteful, maybe we can likewise respond to opposing opinions without demanding that there should be no discussion allowed.

Mythology

Referring to mythological lore to support one’s political ideas has always been popular. The poems of the Poetic Edda provide problems for both sides of the political aisle, yet both happily quote them to shore up their positions. One oft-cited verse from Hávamál (“Sayings of the High One,” i.e. Odin) has been read in radically different ways.

Away from his arms in the open field
A man should fare not a foot;
For never he knows when the need for a spear
Shall arise on the distant road.

Some Americans read the text fairly literally, arguing that it gives a Heathen stamp to the notion of gun ownership and carrying rights. Some Icelanders read it metaphorically, suggesting that it is a poetic image about being intellectually prepared for the struggles of life. The literalists argue that they are following what the text actually says, the liberals that they are finding what it really means.

Hávamál by W.G. Collingwood (1854-1932)

The argument between these two modes of reading religious texts is nothing new. Just ask your local rabbi. In the fourth century, the Christian bishop Gregory of Nyssa famously wrote on the difficulties of choosing between literal and allegorical readings. Interestingly, allêgoria posed a bit of a problem for early Christians, since the method was associated with the old pagan philosophy. In any case, both readings of the Hávamál verse owe more to modern cultural concepts than they do to ancient Heathen views. One side is justifying conservative American ideas of gun rights, the other is expressing liberal Icelandic ideas of intellectual life. Both use the same verse from the Old Icelandic literary heritage as a touchstone for their modern views.

The poem Rígsþula (“Lay of Ríg,” a god usually taken to be Heimdall) causes some political problems for both right and left. It tells how the wandering god fathers the social classes of slaves, free farmers and nobles before tutoring Konr ungr (“young kin,” but a word-play on konungr, “king”) in the way of a ruler. Is this a religious or a political text? For those who argue against multiculturalism, the poem presents a god with a Celtic name in a narrative that – with its religious endorsement of a caste system and a descended god who teaches royal behavior – is closer to the sacred social structures of the ancient Hindu epics than it is to the Protestant work-ethic expressed in the Nine Noble Virtues. For those who champion progressive Heathenry, the poem shows that the gods gave social inequality to you. Rígsþula is awkward for both sides, but it clearly mixes the sacred and the social. Like those in so many other religious traditions, we pick and choose which parts of the lore to emphasize and which to minimize.

Another poem that is problematic for all concerned is Hárbarðsljóð (“Song of Graybeard,” i.e. Odin), which features a verbal sparring match between Thor and a disguised Odin as they compare their accomplishments. One of the best-known moments is Graybeard’s taunt that “Odin owns the nobles who fall in battle | and Thor owns the race of thralls.” The rugged individualist crowd is faced with a poem portraying Odin himself stating that class warfare continues into the Heathen afterlife. By rallying the slaves in Þrúðheim (“Home of Power”), is Thor acting like a Social Justice Warrior? By hosting them in his hall, is he providing public assistance to the poor?

On the other hand, the progressive pagan crowd is faced with the inconvenient truth that the one thing the wise god and the protecting god agree on is that it would be fun to rape a young woman together. Somehow, this section of the poem doesn’t get publicly mentioned very often. The victim the gods discuss is a “linen-white girl,” which (if the internet was a logical place) should lead to protests and petitions against Thor and Odin by the far-right crowd that rants against Idris Elba playing Heimdall (“the whitest of the gods”) and thinks there’s an international conspiracy against white women. Even leaving an in-context interpretation of “white” aside, the fondness of the gods for rape is problematic for both sides. Should we pretend this poem never existed? Should we tell the gods to stop talking about hot-button political issues?

Theology

Contemporary Heathen theology also argues against the separation of religion and politics. To say that Heathenry is a “world-accepting” religion is to say that Heathens move in the world. Our focus is on the lived life, on the world around us as we move from the past through the present and into the future. If we disengage Heathen life from the wider world and insist that Heathen action only happens in religious contexts, then we are drawing a hard line between the sacred and secular much stronger than that in any ritual hallowing.

If “Heathening” only means participating in and discussing ritual and belief, then it also means disengaging from the world – the very antithesis of “world-accepting.” Few seem to argue for any such extreme disengagement, but it is not uncommon to come across use of the Old Icelandic term for “within the yard” to state “not my innangarð, not my problem.”

Sacrifice to Thor by J.L. Lund (1777-1867)

The Heathen mantra that “we are our deeds” asserts that what matters is what we do. Like the Hindu concept of dharma, the Heathen idea of right action defines the making of a good life. What is important in life is how we act in the world, not just how we behave while participating in blót. If Heathen ethics only affect our behavior around other Heathens, we imitate “Sunday Christians” by becoming “Sumbel Heathens,” and we imitate the “churchy” by becoming “kindredy.”

It would be quite odd for members of a religion that seeks to reconstruct or reinvent practices of the wide-ranging wanderers of the Migration Period and the Viking Age to turn inwards to innangarð insularity. To say we have a “Heathen worldview” suggests that we see the world beyond our doorstep and take action within it.

None of the above argues against the separation of church and state, which most of us agree is good policy, despite the fact that it owes more to the Enlightenment than to the Heathen Age. Rather, this article addresses how we address the interaction between the religious and political beliefs of both ourselves and those with whom we disagree.

For Heathens, religion and politics are always already linked. By acknowledging that, maybe we can move beyond the childish name-calling and purity inquisitions to discuss the issues and challenges of living in the world today – and how we can each take action that is consistent with our own diverse Heathen worldviews.

This article originally appeared at The Wild Hunt.

One of the entrances to the University of Chicago

This week, a letter from the Dean of Students in The College of the University of Chicago to incoming freshmen received much media attention. The letter by Dean John (Jay) Ellison welcomes incoming students of the Class of 2020, congratulating them on their acceptance and thanking them for choosing to attend the University of Chicago as undergraduates. A large part of the letter is standard and uncontroversial.

However, this paragraph stood out:

Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called "trigger warnings," we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual "safe spaces" where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.

Interestingly, both trigger warnings and safe spaces were presented in quotation marks, while academic freedom was not. This guided the reporting on and discussion of the letter in both mainstream media and social media. Many accepted at face value that the university was taking a principled stand for freedom of speech.

However, as a member of a minority religion in the University of Chicago Divinity School's graduate program, I have had many personal experiences that directly contradict the letter's assertions that all perspectives are welcome at the institution. Since I joined the program in 2014, there have also been several reported incidents that suggest the university has ongoing issues with equal rights for many kinds of minorities. These problems are not unique to this institution.

Given these issues, I recently revived the dormant Interfaith Dialogue organization at the school and now serve as president. Upon seeing the dean's letter, I immediately made a public statement declaring Interfaith Dialogue to be a safe space for members of minority faiths.

I was soon contacted by Beth McMurtrie, Senior Writer for The Chronicle of Higher Education. She asked to interview me for "a story about reaction on campus to the U of Chicago's letter to new students about safe spaces/academic freedom." As happened in my past interviews with The Daily Beast, OnFaith, Public Radio International, and The History Channel, only a tiny bit of my answer was used for the article as published. In this case, Ms. McMurtrie only used one sentence of mine.

I completely understand. Journalists must collect and review a great amount of information, then condense and select what they have gathered to create a clear narrative. However, I would like to offer my full answers here, since they place in perspective the small quote that was used in Ms. McMurtrie's article.

What follows are her questions (in bold) and my answers. This is a complicated issue, and there are no easy solutions.

What's your reaction to the letter?

Interfaith Dialogue at the University of Chicago

I immediately and publicly declared Interfaith Dialogue, the registered student organization I lead as president, to be a safe space for members of minority religious traditions.

As the first practitioner of Ásatrú (a modern iteration of Old Norse polytheistic religion) in the Divinity School's graduate program and as someone who had family in death camps in the mid-twentieth century, I feel a particular responsibility to stand with minority faith adherents whose voices have not been widely heard and whose experiences have not been openly addressed.

What do you think the administration was trying to say and why?

The University of Chicago Divinity School

One of the things we learn early at the Divinity School is that we cannot know what is in the heart of someone who creates a text. We can only deal with the text as it stands and discuss various modes of reading and interpretation.

That being said, the online and social media reaction to the letter has been noteworthy.

Members of the extremist alt-right community have been high-fiving the university for standing up for "free speech" and against "social justice warriors" and "cultural Marxists." The same segment of society is using the same terminology to cheer the university as it has been using to cheer the most disturbing elements of Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Whatever the original intention of the letter, this is troubling and should be publicly addressed.

Any broader comments about the larger debate around safe spaces and trigger words that academia is wrestling with?

Projecting an image of diversity at the University of Chicago

There has recently been heated discussion of these issues by academics, students, media, and commentariat. We are taught in the Divinity School to interrogate what is behind questions asked and to examine power dynamics of such interactions.

Within the academy, who is standing up on either side of this debate? Many very emotional issues are at play here, but I worry that stances against safe spaces and trigger warnings by faculty and administrators in the name of free speech are sometimes made in order to maintain a status quo in which young women and members of underrepresented minority communities do not feel safe questioning the often traditionally patriarchal systems in which they find themselves.

How do we balance the right to free speech of tenured professors with equal rights for undergraduate students whose worldviews have long gone unheard in the academy? I am not sure that receiving such a letter from upper administration effectively communicates the University of Chicago's true and real dedication to an open dialogue in which a young Latina student can raise her hand in class and strongly challenge a statement made by a senior faculty member without fear of reprisal.

On Thursday, a journalist from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis contacted me with questions about Ásatrú and Heathenry, modern iterations of Norse and Germanic polytheistic religions. John Reinan was writing a local-focus piece involving the traditions and was researching background on the religions to give context to his article.

The core of Mr. Reinan's story was Camp Courage's cancellation of a booking by the Asatru Folk Assembly, an extremist organization that planned to use the Minnesota campground for what was presented as "a harvest-type festival." The AFA's reservation was cancelled when Camp Courage management determined that the group's "mission and areas of focus significantly conflict with [our] core values."

Logo of the Asatru Folk Assembly

Mr. Reinan did due diligence on the subject, speaking to practitioners of Ásatrú within and without the AFA, and wrote a piece that leaves no doubts about the racialist views of this particular organization. His article, "Minnesota camp cancels booking of Nordic heritage group with white supremacist bent," rises above past reporting on Ásatrú by Religion Dispatches and Religion News Service.

Across the globe, Heathens come from a wide variety of nationalities, ethnicities, economic circumstances, educational levels, and gender identities. There are African-American Heathens, Latinx Heathens, transgender Heathens, and Heathens who are members of LGBTQ+ communities. Ásatrú and Heathen organizations and individuals have repeatedly and publicly denounced the AFA as a fringe group that does not represent the overwhelming majority of those who practice the various associated traditions.

The questions that Mr. Reinan asked me were more insightful and interesting than many I have been asked by mainstream journalists on the topic of Ásatrú. Due to the space limitations of his article, he didn't use most of my answers. He has kindly given me permission to post his questions (in bold) along with my full replies.

In general, what is your view on the current state of Norse-focused religions? Are they gaining adherents in the United States? I’ve seen your 2013 census – do you still think that’s accurate?

Worldwide Heathen Census was conducted in 2013

Ásatrú and Heathenry are definitely growing in the United States. The results of the Worldwide Heathen Census I conducted in 2013 led me to estimate the number of adherents in the U.S. at nearly 20,000. The number has surely grown since then, and I am planning a follow-up census to reflect this growth.

My original study was designed to complement works like the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey by the Pew Research Center, which disappear members of minority religions into categories like "New Age" or "No Religious Preference." Such erasure distorts the rich web of small religions in the United States.

To what do you attribute the appeal of Nordic heritage religions?

The various revivals, reconstructions, and re-imaginings of pre-Christian Norse and Germanic religions appeal to a wide base of people for a wide variety of reasons.

In Iceland, members of the Ásatrúarfélagið ("Ásatrú Fellowship") can trace their family trees directly back to the pagan heroes of the sagas, so they are literally returning to the religion of their ancestors. This connection cannot be claimed by those who practice Heathenry in the other ninety-seven countries in which adherents have self-reported.

Bronze Age rock carving in Sweden

Some are attracted by the powerful pagan poetry of Iceland from the Viking age, some by the magnificent myths of the gods and heroes that have survived. Some people are drawn to the mystery of archeological finds documenting religious practices dating to nearly 2000 BCE – practices as old as the earliest beginnings of Judaism.

What makes Heathenry different from the majority of world religions is that the vast majority of its followers today choose to participate in the religion. This distinguishes the tradition from so many faiths – Christianity, Judaism, Islam – in which one basically continues the religion in which one was raised.

Through such a lens, Heathenry is a religion of free will and adult choice, and the others are based on family practice and ancestry.

What makes a group a religion rather than a cultural enterprise?

What makes any group a religion rather than a cultural enterprise? If we define "religious practice" to mean only a sacred moment in which one is engaged with the numinous, then Heathenry qualifies just as much as Christianity or any other better-known faith.

But the lines between religion and cultural enterprise are blurred for all of us. How often do we hear that a friend is "culturally Catholic" or "culturally Jewish"?

There is more to belonging to a tradition than that moment when one eats the communion wafer or raises the horn to Odin.

How accurate or authentic are the religious beliefs and practices observed by these religions? In other words, do you think they’re some actual approximation of pre-Christian beliefs and practices, or are they more a wishful re-creation in modern terms of what people hope or guess they were like?

There is a variety of approach to ritual and belief in worldwide Heathenry, just as there is for any religious tradition.

First-century ritual of the goddess Nerthus (Emil Doepler, 1900)

Like Christians who insist that today's practice must approximate as closely as possible the rituals of the first century of Christianity, there are Heathen reconstructionists who insist that ritual and worldview must be based on rigorous study of primary and academic sources.

Like liberal Jewish practitioners, there are Heathens who believe that their religion must change with the times and incorporate modern developments in science, human rights, and so forth.

Is it fair to ask a Muslim today how "accurate or authentic" her religious beliefs and practices are? Religious traditions are very complex and interesting things.

Do you consider the Asatru Folk Assembly to be a white supremacist group?

Since its inception, the leaders of the Asatru Folk Assembly have defined the organization in opposition to the tolerant mainstream of Heathenry.

McNallen is profiled in Gods of the Blood

Stephen McNallen, the organization's founder, told religious historian Mattias Gardell that the founding of the group was in reaction to "liberals, affirmative-action Asatrúers, black goðar [priests], and New Agers" populating American Ásatrú.

For decades, McNallen and prominent members have issued screeds against racial minorities, claimed that religious affiliation is determined by DNA, and insisted that their version of the religion is only for white people.

The group's tactic has long been to use dog-whistle terms while simultaneously engaging in activities such as recruiting at white-power conventions, as reported by Media Matters and confirmed by sociologist Dr. Jennifer Snook. Recently, the new leadership has abandoned the old caution and openly used white nationalist rhetoric in public statements.

At this point, with decades of history and documentation, it is difficult to see the AFA as anything other than a hate group on the extreme fringe of Heathenry.

In your view, how widespread are supremacists in the Nordic folk religions versus those who are involved for benign cultural reasons?

White nationalists vs. regular Heathens as % of total Heathen community, based on research of sociologist Jennifer Snook

Every religion has an extremist fringe. Many groups have racists that appropriate their traditions to promote far-right ideologies.

Heathenry is no different, yet the coverage of Heathenry is different. Almost without exception, journalists and academics will only cover the racist element. This is quite different from treatment of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

The tiny percentage of extremist Heathens is repeatedly held up for public scrutiny while the mainstream of everyday Heathens is completely ignored. This is a shameful practice, and I hope that – with the growth of the Heathen population in the United States – this will change.