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Thank you! I love Ratatoskr here, perfectly adorable story.
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Apr 30, 2020 19:01
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Knowing how the common squirrel shrieks in alarm, it takes little imagination to assume he says something mean about you  This might be a good time to talk a little more about Yggdrasill, the World Tree. A truly massive Ash tree that is placed at the centre of the cosmos, it is about a holy place as can be, and forms the site for the gods to hold their daily things or governing assemblies. The exact placement and nature of Yggdrasill is of course contexted, but the sagas and eddas explain that it's branches reach 'far into the heavens', and it's three roots go into far locations, the well of Urdsbrønd (in the heavens, somehow), the spring Hvergelmir, and another to the well Mimirsbrønd. Urdrs Well may either refer to a norn named Urdr (one of the three fate-spinners that you have probably heard about), or the anglo-saxon concept of fate, also called Wyrd. Hvergelmir ("bubbling/boiling spring") flows over and between the antlers of a stag named Eikþyrnir, and is the source of a great many springs and rivers. Mimirsbrønd ("Mimer's Well") is associated with the being Mimer or Mimir, and contains the power of great knowledge on the drinker. Odin sacrificed one of his eyes to the well for a drink, and this is where much of his infinite cunning and knowledge comes from. According to the elder edda, we know that the root of Yggdrasill that goes to Mimirsbrønd also passes through Jötunnheim, land of the frost giants - and which lies where the primordial nothingness Ginnungagap used to be before the worlds were created! Many other creatures reside within Yggdrasill. The hawk Veðrfölnir ("Wind-Withered") sits on top of the (unnamed) eagle that Ratatoskr carries insults for to Nidhöggr - Snorri who relates this doesn't explain what the deal is with the hawk or why it needs to be there with no other mention, though the hawk may be associated with the wisdom of the eagle, or like Hugin and Munin it flies away to gather knowledge to pass to the eagle. There are also four stags: Harts there are also four, which from its summits, arch-necked, gnaw. Dâin and Dvalin, Duneyr and Durathrôr. ..who may be associated with the four winds, seasons or elements. One archeologist has suggested that since the dwarves standing at the cardinal points, Norðri, Suðri, Austri and Vestri, represent the corners of the world, and Däin and Dvalin also are dwarf names, perhaps this is also linked to the make-up of the cosmos. So what's the deal with Yggdrasill? It's hard to be sure. A prevailing theory, that I also support, is that it has shamanic significance. We know a lot about the general name and attributes of the nine worlds connected by Yggdrasill, but we don't have a lot of other info. Shamans journey into 'upper' or 'lower' worlds, either through tree roots and holes in the ground, or up the branches of a tree into the heavens. The rainbow bridge of Bifrost may symbolize such a method of journeying via the altered consciousness state of the shaman. Another good theory is that pre-christian peoples worshipped huge trees and pillars, thought to be connections to the divine or the actual centre of the world. One such pillar was Irminsul which was a central ritual ground of the Germanic pagans until that fucker Charlemagne cut it down. Bhurak posted:I lack the context to understand what the reference is here but a pet peeve of mine is it seems a not insignificant number of pagans treat deities like pokeymans and just accumulate and trade them between pantheons or if that doesn't work well enough make them up. It's easy to get angry at facebook pagans and wiccatru and what have you, but some of the oldest and most knowledgeable heathens I've met here in Scandinavia will worship gods from other pantheons. Annoying as it is, there is no central authority on what heathenry is - and that's probably also the reason so many organizations or individual heathens try to set themselves up as such. Unfortunately, their lovely personality cults and tendency to present UPG as heathen lore only muddy the waters further.
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Apr 30, 2020 20:16
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A note about Veðrfölnir, the only source for there being a hawk sitting on top of an eagle is, as far as I know, Snorri's Prose Edda. All of the surviving sagas alternate between words and kennings for hawk and eagle, and only ever mention one bird being there. Dr. Crawford's hypothesis is that there was only believed to be a bird of prey of some sort, and the authors of the poems just used whatever words worked for that stanza, and Snorri came up with the hawk sitting on top of the eagle to try to reconcile this (this isn't the only time when Snorri clearly just came up with some synthesis of conflicting sagas for his Prose Edda) Dwarves also commonly took the form of animals, such as in the Volsungsaga where there's a dwarf who is an otter Internet Wizard fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 21:14
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Double-posting because tonight was the first thunder of the year. Did what little I could without leaving my apartment because of the lockdown, meditated on my porch for a bit and offered some mead to Thor. Hopefully soon I'll be able to join the local group for some proper offerings.
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May 3, 2020 01:24
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Hail Thor, to better times for us all! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=se78ttwyrcQ
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May 3, 2020 19:37
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Tias posted:
Alhazred fucked around with this message at 11:34 on May 4, 2020 |
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May 4, 2020 11:30
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I don't believe that at all. Hermod as messenger only appears in Snorri's Edda, and Snorri was a christian with classical training who probably thought it fit snugly to have a norse pendant to Hermes - all this happened after the fall of heathenry. In the poetic edda and old sagas Hermod is just a king who is known mostly for going into exile and/or receiving king Haakon the Good into Valhalla.
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May 4, 2020 11:50
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Even so, there's little reason to believe that the norsemen were that dogmatic. People who lived up north with sami people practiced both religion because they believed it made them more powerful.
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May 4, 2020 15:41
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They were very likely pragmatic about such things but there is a difference between syncretism with your neighbors and making a personal stable of mismatched gods you found on the internet. The Finnish life is not that far removed from the Danish. It is however very different than the Egyptian or even the Mediterranean. It just feels frivolous and unauthentic to me but it affects me not in the slightest if someone wants to treat the gods and goddesses like shirts at a shopping trip to Walmart. Clearly it is working for them at some level and I am not any sort of authority or asapope or whatever, just an irritable rear end in a top hat.
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May 4, 2020 17:18
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The original heathens were probably syncretic - we know for a fact that norsemen dual-classed christianity and paganism because their polytheism wasn't trumped by the first commandment I'm more, like Bhurak, annoyed with folks who worship Thoth and Freya because why not, rather than any explicable connection to the Egyptian pantheon.
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May 4, 2020 18:21
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This is more a question about old Norse Heathenry rather than reconstructionist Heathenry, but I'm hoping someone will know. Did the old Norse have a tradition of individual worship of the gods? I'm maybe not asking the question well, but I'm more familiar with Greco-Roman paganism, but there worship was communal and contractual, which is to say that rituals were the community coming together and saying to a god or gods, "We're going to conduct this ritual/make this sacrifice to you/do you honor, and in exchange, you're going to give us a good harvest/make our animals fertile/give us success in battle/whatever. It wasn't a matter of individual belief so much as it was of community responsibility and shared practice. An individual might say, "Mercury, if I come back safe from this trip, i'll sacrifice a sheep to you", but you don't have people going around saying "I worship Mercury", or even spending much time thinking about Mercury outside public festivals to him.
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May 4, 2020 19:08
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Epicurius posted:This is more a question about old Norse Heathenry rather than reconstructionist Heathenry, but I'm hoping someone will know. Did the old Norse have a tradition of individual worship of the gods? I'm maybe not asking the question well, but I'm more familiar with Greco-Roman paganism, but there worship was communal and contractual, which is to say that rituals were the community coming together and saying to a god or gods, "We're going to conduct this ritual/make this sacrifice to you/do you honor, and in exchange, you're going to give us a good harvest/make our animals fertile/give us success in battle/whatever. It wasn't a matter of individual belief so much as it was of community responsibility and shared practice. An individual might say, "Mercury, if I come back safe from this trip, i'll sacrifice a sheep to you", but you don't have people going around saying "I worship Mercury", or even spending much time thinking about Mercury outside public festivals to him. We don't know that much since the vikings didn't write that much about their religion (or anything really). What we do know is that the man/ of the house usually lead the daily rituals. We don't really know to what degree people thought of their religion outside public festivals.
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May 4, 2020 19:23
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Alhazred posted:We don't know that much since the vikings didn't write that much about their religion (or anything really). What we do know is that the man/ of the house usually lead the daily rituals. We don't really know to what degree people thought of their religion outside public festivals. Do we know what the daily rituals were that a family would perform?
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May 4, 2020 19:32
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I'm currently wading through Grimm's Teutonic Mythology and he seems to think that some folk had a fairly personal relationship. He has pages talking about a family named Freyrsgothi or freyrlings. There is the story in Eyrbyggja of one of the Thorsmen tossing the godpole over the side of the ship and following it to find a new place to live. The sagas (naturally) speak about heroes interactions with Odin that all end in a predictable fashion. Beyond that like Allhazred said there isn't much known.
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May 4, 2020 19:35
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Epicurius posted:Do we know what the daily rituals were that a family would perform? Not really? Norse religion were not an organized religion so each family was more or less free to perform the rituals they wanted in the way wanted to do it.
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May 4, 2020 19:41
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Epicurius posted:Do we know what the daily rituals were that a family would perform? Thryms lay might have an accurate wedding. The volsung saga has a morning prayer that people debate whether it is real or not. A prayer to Sunna
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May 4, 2020 21:45
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Alhazred posted:We don't know that much since the vikings didn't write that much about their religion (or anything really). What we do know is that the man/ of the house usually lead the daily rituals. We don't really know to what degree people thought of their religion outside public festivals. This. Though, going on the sagas, it appears pretty clear that many individuals dedicated themselves mainly to one god, often Odin, Frej or Thor. The sagas may or may not be a reliable source in this regard, though, so we'll never know for sure.
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May 7, 2020 18:25
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On a purely pragmatic level, many of the local heathens I know also maintain some level of belief in the local Dreaming stories. Personally, Odin is the god of my ancestors and me, but he is from another country and the Country I live on has its own stories, and so to communicate with him it just makes sense to ask the local spirits to pass the message on and to pay them the appropriate level of respect as a journeyer on their Country. It's no different to acknowledging the elves and the trolls. EDIT: Whoah, didn't notice that conversation had petered out. Timestamps, what are they?
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May 19, 2020 09:52
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Well, it's a good point. I definitely eat up all the stories of local spirits from other lands so I can beseech and placate them should I go traveling. As a hard polytheist, I mostly believe all gods and entities exist in some form, just not that they are always relevant for me.
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May 19, 2020 13:00
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My garden is planted, and I am awaiting parts and materials to continue the various projects hounding me so I will crank out the next literature review. As per my original post I'm doing these chronologically as I read them as a reflection on my journey and because I don't care to organize them in any orderly fashion. One of the deficiencies I find in the popular practice of heathenry is that the focus is either on original sources (recon) or being a wizard. Recon is important because that is the surest way of knowing the god(esse)s as they were and what they represent. I definitely find myself leaning hard in that direction. The problem is that the lore is a thousand years old and much was lost when the church did their best to stamp it out. We are not the same culture as the norse were. I personally don't feel a compulsion to slay my neighbor for a haystack. I've never slit the throats of my captives over a cauldron to divine the future. (sadly)Wizards are also important because from them we can develop new practices that work. The problem with this approach is that many folk can't hear the gods even if they can feel the calling and many of the wizards have accumulated a new age stank which can be off-putting. Not everyone wants to play dress up and cast spells. If the religion is fated to grow we will need a grounded mythology that (relatively) normal people can grok that isn't millennia old. The next book I read is a collection of short stories titled "They Walk With Us" written by John T. Mainer. I believe this is his aim. Mainer served in the Canadian army and as far as I remember saw action in the Yugoslavian civil war in the 90's. Sometime in the last decade as a sworn Odinsman he lost one eye and broke his neck. Motherfucker is legit. As a soldier he is definitely used to seeing things from the bottom up which is a perspective that is sorely lacking in the circles we inhabit here in North America. This perspective permeates many of the stories he presents and I appreciate it. In short, I like it. Reading it puts me into the frame of mind of standing on a hilltop in the blowing sleet staring grimly at the future. We need more modern mythmakers so that with a large enough body of work we can see what survives and what doesn't as lore and begin to organically replace what was lost. I'd say buy it. It's a short read. To get an idea of his writing his blog can be found here. Next on the block is the second edition Our Troth.
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May 27, 2020 15:42
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Full moon blót coming up, anyone going? I know in the US it's time for 'Frejablót', but we don't really have that here.
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Jul 24, 2020 15:13
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I’ve been trying to go to my first blot for pretty much this whole year but the safety precautions haven’t really made it possible at all. Some incredible bad luck that when I finally decide to put effort into not just being a solo practitioner happens right when everybody had to become a solo practitioner.
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Jul 24, 2020 15:54
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Sorry if this was already discussed or is otherwise a painfully obvious question, but what’s the relationship between Norse mythology and Germanic mythology? About all I know is Odin is there and his name is Wotan. Are there any good books on Germanic mythology?
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Aug 15, 2020 02:15
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So, the grand old, uh, young man of viking science, Neil Price, is causing a stir! https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2020/08/16/viking-warrior-woman-trans-man-non-binary-gender-fluid-sweden-neil-price/ While I can't vouchsafe for the academic arguments he's making (who knows, really), I heartily welcome this path into a queer trans viking future!
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Aug 18, 2020 22:17
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I’m going to have to try to track down any journal articles on it, but my gut feeling is that using the words that we use now to describe trans and queer experience is misleading and doesn’t do a good job of describing how it would have been then. There’s a lot of evidence that while a feminine person acting masculine was common enough to be unremarkable, a masculine person acting feminine was not generally accepted. Even concepts like drengr and argr are deeply gendered, with argr being the negative and feminine of the two. There’s also the possibility that the reason why a man practicing seidr was so shameful was because it required cross dressing. I’d love to be wrong about all of this though.
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Aug 19, 2020 01:33
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I feel like the article is doing an okay job of mentioning that identities like queer and trans are not strictly applicable to an age that didn't have any notion of that identity, but it's a breath of fresh air in a religion that is struggling with huge amounts of homo- and transphobia that has no strict religious basis.
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Aug 19, 2020 07:46
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Oh absolutely, it’s always great when evidence comes along demonstrating how, when compared to their contemporaries, the Viking age of Scandinavia was remarkably cosmopolitan and integrative. It’s infuriating how the worst elements of the heathen community have been able to dominate the conversation for so long. And they don’t even have the historical record to support them!
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Aug 19, 2020 14:22
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That article is dog poo poo. The skeleton in question was unearthed over a hundred years ago. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birka_female_Viking_warrior Me, I question identifying somebody as a warrior because they are buried with weapons. Nobody is suggesting the women in the oseberg ship burial were sailors. That said, there's plenty of other evidence for Norse women warriors in art. The trans thing seems to be bizarre shoehorning but I haven't read the book, and again, lovely article so maybe there is some justification.
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Aug 23, 2020 03:27
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Oh, for sure. If I wasn't being precise enough: I don't know if the article has scientific merit. It is of interest to heathens, though, that a guy of (until now, maybe) impeccable scholarship and impartiality comes out and says something like this - if nothing else because we deal with a lot of 'blood and bacon' types who insist in spite of all established knowledge about the vikings that they had calcified 1950s heteropatriarchal gender roles and the gods in general support what they, low IQ white supremacist goons in 2020, want to be true. Once again, the only certainty in viking lore is that we can't say for certain what their society is like. Going on available sources and the recorded body of sagas, though, things were a lot more nuanced than the revisionist fascist types hope for. E: seems like Price admits in the article to guesswork, too: quote:He continued: “We think the most likely explanation is that this was a female warrior, but there are other ways of reading this. Tias fucked around with this message at 07:58 on Aug 25, 2020 |
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Aug 25, 2020 07:50
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Thirteen Orphans posted:Sorry if this was already discussed or is otherwise a painfully obvious question, but what’s the relationship between Norse mythology and Germanic mythology? About all I know is Odin is there and his name is Wotan. Are there any good books on Germanic mythology? Germanic mythology IS norse mythology, same gods, different variants and pronounciations, often 'Germanic' and 'Norse' are even interchangeable in academia. Are you thinking about southern German stuff? Like, there's "Continental Germanic Mythology", about which we know precious little - I would recommend the Merseburg Incantations, the Muspilli and the Lay of Hildebrand. All ought to be available online.
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Aug 28, 2020 15:00
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Tias posted:Germanic mythology IS norse mythology, same gods, different variants and pronounciations, often 'Germanic' and 'Norse' are even interchangeable in academia. Are you thinking about southern German stuff? Like, there's "Continental Germanic Mythology", about which we know precious little - I would recommend the Merseburg Incantations, the Muspilli and the Lay of Hildebrand. All ought to be available online. Related question to what Orphans asked, I guess, but if I'm reading a text about Germanic tribes in the early medieval period (say, 600-800) and Wotan comes up, is that just a regional name for Odin? Like, if we could take our hypothetical Goth or Saxon and send him north to visit his relatives in Scandinavia, would he recognize their god as his own? I'm most familiar with this kind of thing from how the Roman and Greek pantheons get compared and, while there's a basic Zeus=Jupiter etc match up it's not exactly 1:1.
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Aug 28, 2020 15:20
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Yeah, Wotan=Odin=Wodan= whatever the Anglos were using that became Wednesday. There’s a lot more direct comparison between the various Germanic groups than between the Romans and Greeks. Just like they’re all from the same branch of the Indo-European language family, the Germanic, Norse, and Anglo-Saxon religions are all from the same branch of the I-E religious family.
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Aug 28, 2020 15:31
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Tias posted:Germanic mythology IS norse mythology, same gods, different variants and pronounciations, often 'Germanic' and 'Norse' are even interchangeable in academia. Are you thinking about southern German stuff? Like, there's "Continental Germanic Mythology", about which we know precious little - I would recommend the Merseburg Incantations, the Muspilli and the Lay of Hildebrand. All ought to be available online. I was interested in the myths of the Teutonic tribes. According to the family oral history we are descendants of them. (I can prove one ancestor came from Switzerland in the mid-1700’s but that’s as far back as I got.)
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Aug 28, 2020 20:42
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Are we talking specifically about Teutons, or a descendant tribe? Because Teutons are scandinavians (northern Jylland), and would very likely have been norse pagans since the inception of the faith. Before then they would have been pre-norse animists, worshipping the sun and fertility dieties. I'd be wary of saying "Yes, they believed in Thor and Odin" of Teutonic peoples in general (their origin area definitely did since at least 8-900s from hard archeological evidence, but when are we going on?), since they might have brought their own theological constructs (see the Lay of Hildebrand, Merseburg Charms (this one references Odin!) and Musspili I mention above). E: Nerthus also seems relevant here. Tias fucked around with this message at 08:38 on Aug 31, 2020 |
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Aug 31, 2020 08:30
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So, our neighbor while we're down here in Germany has this crap flying 24/7. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Rahmenlos-Original-Design-Flag-Vikings/dp/B07BFWY5NM As a class exercise, please name the multiple ways that this crap is wrong, insulting and typical of neo-nazis appropriating viking age symbolism. For bonus points, use Google and find out how many blatantly neo-nazis sites are selling this and similar flags.
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Sep 14, 2020 16:43
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Triskelion design not akin to anything found in norse mythology, save perhaps the Danelaw Irish/scots whom I don't know a lot about. Knotwork not reminiscent of Mammen, Ringerike or other historical norse patterns, though clearly inspired someone who didn't understand their proportions. Wack rear end helmet also, the runes are seriously uninspired. Like, too lazy to write anything, just smack the runes up next to each other.
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Sep 14, 2020 17:31
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Nationalists can suck it, the vikings were surprisingly ethnically diverse. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2688-8
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Sep 16, 2020 19:23
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Came to post that, as well as this: https://www.norsemyth.org/2020/09/i...xlCM40ZS8MXD3DI which is also making the rounds in heathen circles. While some academics are rightfully calling out some of Siegfried's sources as sus, and the dig at the Troth is in extremely poor form as I see it, there are also some very good points. Reconstructed heathenry has definitely adopted a view of some gods and actions as representing safety, order and civilization, and other gods and actions as representative of the the untamed forces of nature, creation and 'chaos' - and to claim otherwise is not really in keeping with the worldview and feelings of a majority of recon heathens today. Representatives of the 'order' faction are the aesir, particularly Thor and Tyr, and the cycle of gift-giving actions and honoring the gods and spirits - representatives of the 'untamed/chaos' faction would first and foremost be the Jotunn, though I would argue that all trolls, spirits and all of the Vanir belong here, even if the latter like Frej, Njord and Freja get a free pass because marriages and the heroic saga narratives make them honorary aesir. Anyway, the article is neat, and if one is interested in what part of our mythology and theology is commonly twisted and misunderstood by nazis and brosatru, look no further.
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Sep 17, 2020 13:31
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Tias posted:Came to post that, as well as this: https://www.norsemyth.org/2020/09/i...xlCM40ZS8MXD3DI which is also making the rounds in heathen circles. I was pretty sure I'd seen that before and I had. It's a repost of an article he posted on the Wild Hunt back in January. The whole inner yard/outer yard thing always felt like a shibboleth to differentiate themselves from the wiccans that they had splintered off from in the 80's/90's. The fellow has beef with the Troth. Gods know I do and I'm a fan and member of them. Not sure if he's the guy that thinks that the group isn't inclusive enough because they aren't actively proselytizing to POC or someone else. He pissed off all the lokeans by comparing him to T-rump back in 2018. Largely doesn't matter to this though. He's not wrong about the concept being not rooted in lore. Or at least thus far in my readings it is not and others whom have read more than me and I trust also haven't. Ultimately the concept of inner/outer yard is just dunbars number wearing a horned helmet. I also think clifford geertz did a bit on tribalism. I'd have to go rifle through my books though (Just checked and I couldn't find it but I didn't look very hard). Humans are inherently tribal and the tribalism is fairly fluid. This just gives it a name. Even being inclusive you are still declaring a tribe and excluding those who disagree. That being said, this quote also pisses me off Some Guy Angry Posting at Nazis, Real or Imagined posted:The counter-question I would ask is, “what in Grønbech appealed so powerfully to Nazi officers and ideologues?” As a follow-up, I would ask, “what are the implications of American Heathens being attracted to the same twentieth-century text that so captivated the leaders of the Third Reich?” This is a bad take because by this logic we need to throw out all the lore. My gothi often points out in literature discussions that until recently "all anyone had were three books." The old timers on this side of the pond, who I often complain about were working with the best they had at the time. We are at a good time right now because the amount of literature is exploding. I remember reading something at the beginning of the year that some never before found and translated batch of old lore was currently being translated and due to be out soon. Of course I'm a bad heathen and I can't remember what it was and when it was supposed to be out. I think it was being put into norwegian first. Also his claims about american heathens using it Some Guy Angry Posting at Nazis, Real or Imagined posted:describing people outside their insular Heathen community as subhuman denizens of the utangard"  Anyway, I haven't been on this forum or any social media since the happenings so it's good to see this still going and to read a thing and post angrily on the internet.
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Sep 18, 2020 04:54
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Thanks for your perspective, honestly. US heathen politics are completely incomprehensible from the outside, and it helps a lot getting several viewpoints. Personally I don't mind so much the division between civilized aesir-related structures and chaotic jötunn/vanir/loki-related chaos, I'm just real leery of US brosatru telling me I don't know my lore because I don't subscribe to two words that don't even exist in norse.
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Sep 18, 2020 17:00
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