Norse
The Norse people buried their religion in the ground. Not figuratively. Literally. They buried it with their dead, deposited it in lakes and bogs, carved it into stone, and pressed it into metal. The textual sources for Norse religion were written by Christians. The...
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
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
Odin gouged out his own eye and threw it into a well. Then he hung himself on a tree for nine days with a spear wound in his side. He did both of these things voluntarily, in exchange for knowledge. That tells you everything that matters about who this god is and what...
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