Norse
Every winter, across the German-speaking world, the dead ride through the night sky. In Middle High German they were called Wuotanes Her, Odin’s Army. In modern German, Wutendes Heer, the Furious Host, or Wilde Jagd, the Wild Hunt. The scholar Jacob Grimm...
Norse
The most common mistake new practitioners make is treating the Prose Edda like a Bible. They read it as though Snorri Sturluson was a reporter faithfully transcribing a living religious tradition. He was not. He was a 13th-century Christian Icelandic politician...
Norse
Charlemagne’s forces spent three full days destroying the Irminsul in 772 CE. Not hours. Three days of sustained effort to dismantle a wooden pillar. That is not the effort you put into removing an inconvenient object. That is the effort you put into destroying...
Norse
The Asatru Folk Assembly argues that Norse and Germanic paganism can only be practiced by people of Northern European ancestry. Their founding documents describe an integral link between ancestry and religion, between biology and spirituality. This is a specific...
Norse
When Christian missionaries encountered the Norse account of the world’s end, they recognized it immediately as something like their own apocalyptic tradition. Fire, destruction, the death of gods, the end of the present world order. They were not entirely wrong...
Norse
“Wyrd bith ful araed.” Fate is inexorable. That line comes from the Old English poem The Wanderer, and it is one of the most famous sentences in the entire Old English corpus. Scholars and practitioners quote it regularly. Most of them do not explain what...
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