04.06.12
Posted in Marion mouths off at 3:02 pm by marion
Today is the full moon after the spring equinox; which I am told by those who can keep time-reckonings straight, is Éostre/Ôstara’s holy tide. The month of April equates, according to Bede, to Eostur-monað, during which the goddess was venerated, and his remarks in reference to Xian Easter indicate that the full moon should be the peak of the celebration. However, on the Continent they spoke of Ôstarûn, which is a plural (and for those who speak German, is why the modern German Ostern ends in n). That and Bede’s harping on the month auggest a multi-day celebration – similar in that respect to Yule, perhaps, or simply a month focused on its midpoint, the full moon.
And there, sadly, the trail goes cold. Possibly because there is nothing in Old Norse lore about Éostre/Ôstara, she’s a bit neglected by many modern heathens. A lot simply celebrate the equinox itself, along with the wiccans. It’s been suggested she’s Iðunn, which is a bit odd – the apple trees are only now blooming in the mild climate where I am, but of course the chickens and other birds have been busy laying.
And of course we’re all (except those unfortunates still waiting for the snow to get out of the way; and the antipodeans) rejoicing in the springtime. Things are growing again. There are fresh greens at the farmers’ market. Gardening is more than reading seed catalogs and trying to protect things against frost and wind. Everything is leaping out of the ground, in most places, and the trees are setting about clothing their bareness. The animals are glad of the warmth and the longer days, and so are we.
Éostre/Ôstara’s name is cognate with those of various Indo-European dawn goddesses, and although the beginning of the heathen year is back at the start of Yule, this is the start of the growing year; recall that our forefathers started the day at sunset, which is why Hávamál advises us not to praise the day till evening – when it is over and the new one beginning. We’ve made our way through the dark days, the evening and the night of the beginning year, and now here is the sunshine of morning.
So I hailed and thanked Éostre this morning, and will continue to do so as this (lunar) month continues. It is churlish to forget her just because the Norsemen apparently hid her away under some other name – or Snorri forgot to mention her. (We have lost so much. Maybe he did not approve of the traditional rites of the tide, such as running barefoot in the fields, juggling eggs? Maybe he wasn’t aware she could be related to Greco-Roman?) At least the Anglo-Saxons and Germans preserved her name, and they preserved so little, we should value it all the more. Besides, the springtime is a lovely time, even for those who love the winter. It’s a time of promise and possibility.
Hail Éostre, hail Ôstara.
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03.06.12
Posted in Marion mouths off at 10:12 pm by marion
One bugaboo that haunts our and others’ thoughts about the gods is Georges Dumézil’s Tripartite Theory.
Briefly, based on an analysis of “mythologies” of the Indo-European language family, and using texts such as Rígsþula as keys, Dumézil grouped the gods (and as an afterthought the goddesses) into one of three functional niches: sovereignty, war, and fertility (often referred to as first, second, and third function respectively). He saw the first function as characteristically divided between two gods: a “sovereign god of law” and a “sovereign god of magic” (his type examples are Mitra and Varuṇa, respectively). The second function is pretty easy to understand: gods like the Hindu Indra, the Greek Ares, and the Roman Mars. For the third function, he was heavily influenced by Greek and so regarded fertility gods as also having to do with death: chthonic. Dumézil saw the fertility gods as characteristically paired and associated with twin-ness; this partly because of the Greek Dioscuroi and Vedic Aśvins, both divine twins, and partly because sexual relations require two bodies. The Vanir seemed to him to obviously fit this third function, and this is probably why so many heathens have absorbed the notion that Freyja and Freyr are not just sister and brother, but twins. It was in fact the Germanic pantheon that led him to divide the first function, that of sovereignty, between two gods: in order to accommodate both Týr and Óðinn. Some of the details of his theory show this quite clearly: the first kind of sovereign deity (Mitra, Týr) embodies divine Law and is implacable, while the second (Varuṇa, Óðinn) manipulates things and is from a human point of view cruel and capricious. Týr is god of the þing and does not laugh; Óðinn is called furor (fury) by Adam of Bremen and rather often kills his followers. Whereas Mitra and Varuṇa tend to be contrasted by calling one day and the other night, one the god of the visible and the other of the invisible, and so forth; a lot more abstract.
Dumézil’s theory was developed primarily based on gods of ancient India and the Zoroastrian figures that are successors to them and on Roman history, legend, and custom that tell us about the effaced pantheon of ancient Rome. In these materials, there is quite a clear element of social stratification, the Indian castes being quite blatant. One way of defining mythology that is widely accepted in academia is as stories that teach social relations in religious terms. In some sense of course, this is obvious; we learn a little bit from every story, in particular about human relations, behavioral options, and morals, and a story about the gods, being important, is thus particularly influential. But Dumézil glommed onto the threefold class heirarchy presented in Indic texts in particular, and welcomed Rígsþula as an almost unambiguously similar statement among Germanic texts. So there is a definite element of classism behind his analysis: he does indeed regard the gods of the first function as superior to those of the second, and those of the second as superior to the agricultural gods of the third function. Applied to heathenry, this leads to the idea that Thor is a god of churls and that followers of Óðinn are inherently better – as sometimes seen in the works of Edred – and to dismissal of the Vanir. It’s also been the main point of protest against Dumézil now that the shine has worn off his work since he died: he was personally enamored of class and authoritarianism, and anti-imperialist nativists are among the main attackers of the whole Indo-European enterprise, so they don’t like that at all.
But in any case – this doesn’t fit heathenry at all well. To begin with Rígsþula: that’s an anomalous poem about a god otherwise unmentioned in the lore, whose name is the Irish word for king, and who may or may not be Heimdallr. It also breaks off after defining four classes: Kon Ungr, the prototype of the king, is Rígr’s grandson, the son of the last of his three sons. And where is the support in the rest of the lore for social stratification related to different gods? All I can think of is the gibes in Harbarðsljóð.
“Gods of the peasantry” is a poor way to think of the Vanir. They were winning the war against the Æsir at one point – they devastated Asgard so that it had to be provided with a new wall by the giant builder. Freyr is betstr allra ballriða (best of all warriors – Lokasenna), folkvaldi goða (leader of the host of the gods – Skírnismál), and even ása iaðarr (lord of Æsir – Lokasenna again). Lest we think these terms are tongue-in-cheek, let’s recall that in addition to being the or one of the leaders of an army that breached the defences of Asgard, he not only killed a giant with a stag’s antler – he could have done it with his bare hands (Gylfaginning). And he’s called veraldar goð (god of the world, a term that lived on in Sami religion) in both Ynglingasaga and Flateyjarbók. That’s your “warrior function” as well as your “sovereign function.” And in any case, Germanic armies have always been fairly meritocratic. They started as levies of all the suitably aged men of the tribe and continued as levies of the menfolk of a shire or a country. That’s the same guys who farmed the fields. And in the Viking Age, the viking went out harrying to get treasure – with which to settle on a farm. (Unless of course he made himself king of some place like Sicily.) Classes of people who don’t farm, let alone a middle caste who only make war, are a late development in Germanic society, only really coming about under feudalism. As we see from both the sagas and the lore of the gods, such a division of labor is just not Germanic, especially the brushing off of farming. What mattered more was how free the farmer was.
And our gods all have something to do with sex. Thor blesses the marriage with his hammer! In fact, Thor single-handedly casts the tripartite division into doubt. He’s not a muscle-bound brute – he’s djúphugaðr, the deep-thinker (Haustlǫng), and he bests the dwarf Alvíss (all-wise, heh) handily in a contest of wits. Conversely, pretty much all our gods have to do with war – Týr, Óðinn, and Thor are often grouped together as “war gods,” and of course Týr is particularly identified that way. Not with rulership; some people don’t even known he is also god of the þing. Dumézil was troubled from the start by this “flattening” effect whereby “first function” gods of sovereignty were “pushed down” to the “second function” of war, and he became so troubled by the variety of manifestations of strength in Germanic “myths” that he bisected the second function, too, to account for Thor’s associations with fertility and the earth and for the frequent occurrence of chaotic warriors in Germanic stories. Of course, that meant he had each of the three “functions” divided between two types, making it simpler and potentially more accurate to resolve the system as a dualistic opposition between constructive and destructive.
But in Germanic terms, it simply won’t wash anyway. Freyr won’t fit well into his system; Thor won’t fit well into his system; Óðinn frankly won’t fit well into any system; and what about Freyja taking half of those who die in battle? If that is simply the death part of being a “chthonic” deity, then what about the other half, that Óðinn takes? And looking at sovereignty, don’t Baldr and Forseti fit that model quite as well as Týr? One of the big problems is that war was the ultimate way of settling judicial questions in Germanic culture; this remains so even after the custom becomes accepted of saving general bloodshed by having a duel between designated representatives stand in for battle between armies. So it simply isn’t true that sovereignty and legal judgment resided in a sphere distinct from war. War was a legal judgment and the ruler had to be a warrior, not just a general. Dumézil’s class stereotypes don’t fit, and Germanic tribes did not set roles apart even in the manner of the three Vedic castes. Also, Freyja’s magic (and many names) are a counterpoint to Óðin’s. And where does Ullr fit in the neat system? Never mind Loki . . .
One reason the Germanic pantheon busts out of Dumézil’s system may simply be that we have an unusually large number of gods and goddesses recorded. Snorri tried to say there were 13, presumably on the model of the Greek pantheon, but there are far more in his own work. But those we know most about fit least well into the niches. And the whole thing presupposes that the Germanic pantheon changed only slightly after the tribes left the Indo-European homeland. That flies in the face of a lot of evidence. The Æsir-Vanir war and subsequent treaty. The substantial indications that Týr and Ullr are older gods. (One cannot have it both ways – if Týr was originally the same figure as the Greek Zeus, and a sky god, then it’s plain his role in the pantheon has changed.) In fact the rigidity of Dumézil’s theory and its problems accommodating our gods and goddesses cast into question the closeness of our pantheon to other Indo-European ones. It reminds one of how different the Ṛg-Veda and the Greek and Roman myths are from our lore. They have very different themes and obsessions (gods and goddesses manipulating people; gods giving people a whole raft of rules to live by . . . ) That’s why Rígsþula is so anomalous – it’s more like those other scriptures than the rest of our stuff is. And it’s the contact point with Dumézil’s theory.
So I think we’re better off not letting it color our view of the gods; and rolling back the influence it has had in our thinking, such as Edred’s assertions about Odinists being superior to Thorians, the comparative neglect of the Vanir, and views of kingship as inherently Germanic.
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12.21.11
Posted in Marion mouths off at 3:13 pm by marion
Mothers’ Night is tonight – so, the dísir.
The dísir are a problem for academics. They seem superfluous. Norse belief has so many spirits: vættir, huldrufolk, fylgjur, valkyries . . . and there’s obvious blurring around the edges, or confusion. For instance, what is one to make of Þiðranda Þáttr, in which nine black-clad dísir on black horses or kin-fylgjur fight with nine light-clad dísir or fylgjur on white horses over an eighteen-year-old who out of hospitality has disobeyed orders not to open the door on Winternights, and slay him, in an elaborate play-acting of the struggle between heathenry and Xianity in late-10th-century Iceland? The story ends with a vision of all the vættir emerging from their underground homes as Xianity triumphs. The lad who is the victim is described as humble – a natural Xian. (The writer probably didn’t care that hospitality is more of a heathen virtue than a Xian.) But those dísir or fylgjur – the story uses both labels – are a weird valkyric blend. Why not just call them fylgjur – or valkyries – and have done with the dís label? Again, nobody calls gods vættir (except in Anglo-Saxon, where wiht, “wight,” simply means “being” or in some compounds, “thing”) or calls goddesses fylgjur or valkyries (although many academics regard Þorgerðr Hǫlgabrúðr and Irpa as valkyries rather than goddesses). But Freyja is Vanadís (dís of the Vanir) and Skaði is Ǫndurdís (snowshoe dís). Further confusion is added by the role of the idisi in the Old High German First Merseburg Charm: they tie and untie battle-fetters. This is the classic role posited for the valkyries by KveldulfR Gundarson, and reflected in a couple of valkyrie names (Hlǫkk and Herfjǫtr). And in Anglo-Saxon idis simply means “lady.” So a very confused, messy picture out of which no discrete role emerges for the dísir.
However, take it from the other side, and this is a rare case indeed in which we have attestations from the entire span of historical heathenry, and all the sections of the Germanic world. The names Ǫndurdís and Vanadís tell us that in Old Norse dís can, or does, refer to someone divine. In fact Freyja is also called Vanaguð (deity of the Vanir), just like Freyr and their father Njǫrð, and Skaði can also be called Ǫndurguð. Also we have mentions of the dísablót – blót to the dísir – and the name of the Swedish January fair, Disting, which must originally have been associated with that as Dísaþing. And most decisively the story of King Aðils of Sweden dying when he profanes the dísarsálr – the hall of the dís (often misinterpreted by academics who should know better as plural dísir, but the “r” makes it singular in form, sacred to one dís). One academic posited with some reason that dís was an older word for “goddess,” pointing out that the goddesses, including Freyja, are usually referred to in the texts as ásynjur, but that actually only means female Æsir. This has been roundly ignored, but at least one other scholar thought similarly: Gwyn Jones titled his translation of “Þiðranda Þáttr” “Thidrandi Whom the Goddesses Slew.” In Anglo-Saxon, although we don’t have anything but prosaic uses of the word idis, we do have Bede’s laconic words on Módranect (various spellings), “Mothers’ Night,” being the beginning of the heathen year and celebrated all night (the night of the Winter Solstice, which at the time was the official date of Xian Yule, too, although the calendar had in fact slipped by a few days since it was established in Rome). And the “Matrones” for whom Germanic people paid for scads of votive tablets and altars in Roman-occupied Europe are also mothers. Plus of course the First Merseburg Charm idisi – and one cannot overemphasize how precious information on heathenry among the continental Germanic tribes is; we have hardly anything left.
So from that point of view, we have two different words, the (i)dís word and the term “mothers”, but thanks to the German evidence, it looks as if it all belongs together; and we have roles, or natures of the beings, that flummox the academics. Part of this may be change over vast time (and fragmentation of the culture). Anglo-Saxons had clearly lost any association of the word idis with heathenry. Whether before or after the conversion is hard to say, but they appear to have buried Freyja (Fréo) where the Xians couldn’t find her name, so there may have been some speaking in code and euphemisms involved. (Indeed there was in Old Norse: Freyr and Freyja are known to us by what must originally have been titles, “lord” and “lady”). They kept the associated holy tide as the less specifically heathen “Mothers’ Night.” The Germans kept memories of the idisi as slayers, as fighters who go up against the other side – which is also the role of the dark dísir in “Þiðranda Þáttr,” but with horses and swords rather than spells. Only the Norse texts give us examples of a single dís – in Skaði’s and Freyja’s alternate names, and in the dísarsálr, which may have been a temple to Freyja.
Modern heathenry has taken an approach based on what Bede says and supported by the Dísablót, and identified the dísir as our female ancestors. But usually they are seen as being particular female ancestors, who are strong enough to take on a role protecting the family descended from them, or who choose to do so. As such, they’re regarded as individuals. All those plurals – Matrones, idisi, Módranect, Dísablót – suggest they were usually thought of en masse. As indeed were the gods – heathens in Scandinavia clung to the custom of referring to the gods as an indissoluble totality, with the neuter plural words like guð, bǫnd, hǫpt, and regin/rǫgn. Possibly what has happened is that with the attenuation of the heathen tradition in the roughly 1,000 years of the gap, the number of dísir has dwindled. But it’s certain that the customary honoring of them is for all of them.
I think it is an alternate word for “goddess” – that’s what it is in Vanadís and Ǫndurdís! But it also, clearly, refers to our ancestral mothers. I have no explanation of the sex imbalance here; there is clearly something wrong with seeing the Álfablót as the corresponding honor done to our male ancestors if it implies that they change species after they die, as it seems to; unless it has to do with the incontrovertibility of descent in the female line. The child visibly issues from a particular woman’s womb. (And here I will make the obligatory shoutout to Heimdallr, with his nine mothers. Some mysteries remain mysteries.) But what the academics seem most freaked out about is that the dísir/idisi sometimes kill people. Like valkyries. And after all, is that so strange? Ours is not a culture in which women wielding swords are something totally weird – although the lore is strangely silent on the goddesses killing (except for Þorgerðr Hǫlgabrúðr), I am sure they are all perfectly ready and able to do so. The literary development of the valkyrie, who becomes a princess running around in armor who falls for a hero and aids him in battle (just like Þorgerðr Hǫlgabrúðr), can be seen as evidence of Xian titillation with warrior-women. It’s strange in their culture, not in ours. And that may be the whole story about why the dísir don’t seem to fit well – they are a part of ancestor veneration and they have always been ready to take up the cudgels for us, and these became strange things as time went by and ways of thinking shifted. So did remembering that our families – which the vast majority of us nowadays think of as nuclear families, plus a few aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces – are in fact parts of a whole fabric. We are all related to uncounted numbers of others, living and dead. And so our dísir are tribal whether we are or not.
And so as the world turns over into a new year and the time out of our normal lives, to be with our families, to consider our goals, and to honor the gods for 12 nights and days that is Yule begins, we should honor the dísir, our mothers, for they connect us to our origins and they help and defend us today. I do not think the academic had it exactly right – a dís is not a goddess, but a goddess may be called a dís. It is an old word of honor, a layer laid down in the Well, and not effaced. We should honor all our mothers as well as our gods and goddesses, and tonight is the night for the Mothers.
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10.17.11
Posted in Marion mouths off at 1:55 pm by marion
Veitztu hvé rista skal?
Veiztu hvé raða skal?
Veiztu hvé fá skal?
Veitztu hvé freista skal?
Veiztu hvé biðia skal?
Veiztu hvé blóta skal?
Veiztu hvé senda skal?
Veiztu hvé sóa skal?
Betra er óbeðit
en sé ofblótit–
ey sér til gildis giǫf.
Betra er ósent
en sé ofsóit.
Svá Þundr um reist
fyr þióða rǫk,
þar hann upp um reis,
er hann aptr of kom.
(Hávamál 144-45)
I have the new third volume of Ursula Dronke’s edition of the Elder Edda sitting here beside me. Sadly, she has not assembled for Hávamál anything like the tremendous edifice of notes and analytical material that she did for Vǫluspá. There is no commentary on verse 145, that great crux of heathen praxis, at all. She regards 144 as “a roundup of ritual obligations.” That makes it still odder that she did not talk about the contrast with 145. If the questions in 144 carry the weight of “You must do this,” then why is 145 saying quite directly, “Better not . . . “? She seems to have been fired more by seeing echoes of Xianity: in the windswept tree passage (138, Veit ek, at ek hekk . . . , “I know that I was hanging . . .”) she sees “the pathos of the abandoned Christ” in Við hleifi mik sældo | né við hornigi, “They did not hearten me with a loaf | or a horn of ale.” That makes her no good judge of sacrifice; she’s thinking gratuitously of a very different one. Also, where before she had a gift for threading her way through the labyrinth of scholarly viewpoints, highlighting and linking those that her own scholarship told her were worth attention . . . now she has just decided Hávamál “gather[s] together the high moments of pagan and Christian tradition” and that Óðinn pierces himself with Gungnir both because in the Gospel according to John Jesus got poked with a spear to make sure he was dead and because Folke Ström says a spear dedicates someone to Óðinn. The latter is of course not only basic heathenry needing no scholarly citation, it’s in the text: ok gefinn Óðni, | siálfr siálfom mér, “and given to Óðinn | — myself to myself.” And the former a wild-eyed piece of craziness, which the Dream of the Rood and the Ruthwell Cross do nothing whatsoever to support.
With that major reservation noted, here’s her translation of the “list of obligations.”
“Do you know how one must carve them?
Do you know how one must construe them?
Do you know how one must tint them?
Do you know how one must test them?
Do you know how one must supplicate?
Do you know how one must sacrifice?
Do you know how one must send off the soul?
Do you know how one must stop up the breath?”
This is basically accurate. Skal does not mean “how you are going to, ” it does indeed mean “how you must” do each thing. Clearer and better than the more familiar Hollander translation: “Know’st how to write . . . ?” And she rightly links the last item, sóa, to A-S swógan, “suffocate,” while Hollander has “sacrifice” there and the synonym “offer” where she has “sacrifice.” Scholarship has decided that there must have been a ritual method of slaughter using suffocation. I’m not so sure – blood was needed for reddening the harrow, quite apart from its putative use in divination using hlautteinar – but the word in that half-line seems to denote stopping breathing. Rendering biðia as “supplicate” sounds wrong – heathens don’t beg – but that’s the word the Xians used for “pray” and so is always going to be problematic in its connotations. I would probably use the simplest possible word: “ask.” That’s what she has used for the opening of verse 145: “Better to have asked for nothing.” And that’s what Hollander has for biðia – but he has confusingly used “supplicate” for senda. He sees the first four half-lines as being about runes, the other four about blóting and addressing the gods. That has a certain logic with verse 145 about to come along – which is all about blóting and addressing the gods. So presumably he’s thinking “send a message.” That’s also closer to the attested meanings of the verb than her “send off the soul”; she’s assuming “the soul” is unstated because she has this notion that the verse is about the entire span of religious obligations in heathenry. But quite apart from the fact that “send off” is idiomatic English, but senda just means “send” – and where is one sending the soul to? – it’s used for throwing spears, but the word “spear” is somewhere in the passage for clarity; and it’s used with “message” implied, as we can write in somewhat archaic English, “Send to him that . . .” – but I don’t know of any attestations where what is sent is simply left for the guessing. Her theory is leading her by the nose here. On freista, I’m more sympathetic: Hollander has “understand,” which just echoes the meaning of ráða (her “construe,” his “read”) – he’s wimped out and given a synonym of what he already said, as he often does. She’s correctly noted that it basically means “test” – both in the basic meaning of “make an attempt” and in the Xian religious meaning of “tempt.”
But what does “test” mean with reference to the runes? Her note sums up the “obligations” as follows: “to cultivate runes to link men with the occult world; to supplicate and sacrifice (to the gods): to dispatch the dead with the right ritual.” So she apparently thinks sóa, as well as senda, refers to the human dead. Surely “send” the blóted animal is a plausible reading, and “suffocate” more obviously relates to an animal than a human? The obligation to use runes is problematic – especially as an obligatory link to “the occult world.” I think she’s been listening to too many wiccans. And there are eighteen uses of runes coming very soon in the last section that render her view of the purpose of runes very simplistic. “It’s all the occult” doesn’t fit this poem well. But I remain unsure what she thinks the test involves. Instead of spelling out which lines are on which “obligation,” she has expounded on how the dead were “sent” to a destination – notably in ship burials, which she for some reason thinks were “always metaphorical.” I do not see why the existence of ship burials on dry land means there were never actual flaming ships sent out over the water. (Nor do I see the point as adequate support for senda meaning “send off the dead” anyhow.)
In her introduction to the poem, she speaks of different voices interrupting each other. That’s the way Hávamál sounds to many of us, especially with the third-person references to Óðinn by many different names, like the one to Þundr in verse 145. She describes verse 144 thus: “Another voice brusquely interrogates: ‘Can you perform the eight ceremonies of your creed, the secret writing, the wishing prayer, the muffled sacrifice . . .?’” “Brusque interrogation” is indeed how it must have struck many a modern heathen, because sadly, what we have most clearly lost is the ceremonial how-tos. Indeed, do we know how we must blót? No. We can only try. And piece together the clues we have (and hope we are not emphasizing stuff some Xian was wrong about) and hope the gods let us know what works and what doesn’t. Actually there is a heartening piece of evidence that there was no one correct way to offer to the gods among the ancient heathens: Jonas of Bobbio’s Vita Columbani mentions Alemanni doing a beer-blót to Wodan (Vadono); they had for the purpose a vas . . . magnum, quod vulgo “cupam” vocant, . . . cerevisia plenum – a “large vessel . . . which they call in the vulgar tongue a cupa, . . . full of beer.” But notice that she refers there to “the eight ceremonies of your creed.” This is even clearer than “roundup of ritual obligations”; she has in mind an analogue to Xian sacraments. In that case, where is marriage? and confirmation/coming of age? and baptism/name-giving, which is mentioned in Hávamál itself? One might also expect a theoretical list of heathen sacraments to include inheritance. Instead she has related the first four to the runes – that doesn’t accord well with the eight lines representing eight distinct ceremonies, and makes the list even more obviously not a complete set of religious obligations (if such existed). Her theory has run away with her.
Also, her translation of 144 doesn’t match up well with her translation of 145, which is:
Better to have asked for nothing
than sacrificed excessively–
always a gift expects to be paid for.
Better no souls escorted
than too many lives smothered.
Þundr-Óðinn carved that
before the close of men’s history,
at the place where he rose up,
when he returned.
Here, she uses “asked for” where before she used “supplicated” – confusing, but also in this verse it is connected to sacrifice; so the two cannot be distinct ceremonies/obligations. Worse, in translating and explicating 144, she saw senda as referring to (metaphorically, in her view) sending off the dead to the afterlife, and sóa as also related to funeral ritual; she says it “also relates to a type of sacrificial killing of animals by smothering.” Note that “also.” In the introduction to the poem, she attributes 145 to a different voice from 144, one that “fear[s] excess”, and paraphrases the fourth and fifth halflines thus: “Better no soul escorted to the otherworld, than that humans should be killed to accompany it.” She refers in the notes to Ibn Fadlan’s account of the funeral among the Rus, which includes the killing of the slave girl. (But she does not explicitly mention that killing there; just the use of ships.) So apparently in her translation of sóa in 144 she was thinking of human sacrifice to accompany a dead person as a heathen obligation – and in 145 she sees the speaker recoiling against this waste. This is extremely tenuously supported. It makes far more sense to relate sóa to animal sacrifice – to blót – because there are no contextual clues for taking senda in that odd meaning of “send off to the afterlife.” That comes from her assumption that 144 is a set of distinct heathen obligations. And 144 and 145 are both clearly talking about sacrifice; in both cases it is less of a stretch to see a continuation of the same idea.
That’s the root of her interpretation of the problem verse, 145: she sees Óðinn as having learned from hanging on the tree a “humane knowledge,” “a kind of mercy, a moderation in judgement.” All of which is of course unsupported in the text. The name Þundr takes us nowhere useful so far as I know: it’s the name of Óðinn that mysteriously seems etymologically connected to the word for “thunder,” but how that connects here . . . I got nuthin’. However, we do know it refers to Óðinn, and we have been told why he hung on the tree: to seize the runes. That verse is 138. The runes in relation to other forms of magic precede it; matters of the runes follow it; what follows 144-45 is the recitation of charms or chants (galdrs – the poem refers to them as lióð, songs or as Dronke renders the word, lays). There is nothing about learning mercy, although of course manifold benefits to people as well as means of attack are mentioned. And is it in character for Óðinn to have learned mercy from his ordeal? Not judging by most of his names . . . and not with any support in lore that I can think of, although this poem does contain his regrets at how he has treated women.
Also she’s either sidestepped or overlooked the crux of the problem in 145: what we are being warned against. With Xian virtues in mind, she plumps for the most popular interpretation: “Better to have asked for nothing | than sacrificed excessively–” is, for example, Hollander’s “‘Tis better unasked | than offered overmuch.” (Hollander gives up and simply repeats this where she has “Better no souls escorted | than too many lives smothered.” Clearly he, like me, sees the sending and the killing as also referring to blót and asking.) The prefix of- does usually mean “too much.” However, it can also be an alternate of um (usually printed as a separate word; the manuscripts do not reliably distinguish prefixes from separate words), and in fact both um reist and of blótit in 145 are cited as examples under that header in the first edition of Cleasby-Vigfusson. The meaning of this “enclitic particle”? Unstated. In the more usual form um, it is simply omitted in translations. If we omit it here, we get: “Better not to have asked | than to have blóted . . . Better not to have sent | than to have sacrificed [a beast].” Better not to have asked the gods at all for a favor than to have followed it up with a sacrifice”? That’s a plausible alternate reading that fits the line I omitted: ey sér til gildis giǫf (usually translated, “a gift asks for a gift”). In Hyndluljóð, Freyja is not at all upset at Ottar for having made his harrow like glass with blood of sacrificed oxen:
“Hǫrg hann mér gerði
hlaðinn steinum,
- nú er grjót þat
at gleri orðit; –
rauð hann í nýju
nauta blóði;
æ trúði Óttarr
á ásynjur.”
(Hollander is particularly recherché in his wording here, so here’s Bellows’ version:
“For me a shrine | of stones he made,–
And now to glass | the rock has grown;–
Oft with the blood | of beasts was it red;
In the goddesses ever | did Ottar trust.”
Ottar blóted a lot, and she approves. What he didn’t do is ask for something and then follow it up with a blót. So I suggest that “It would be better not to ask than to ask and follow it up with a blót, because the gift in a blót makes it a demand for a gift in return” is a possible interpretation.
Or maybe she’s right. There is after all a passage explicitly urging moderation in Hávamál – the one advocating being “middling wise” (meðalsnotr; translated that way by both Dronke and Hollander; and repeated three times). Odd though that seems coming from Óðinn, who gives not his eye teeth but his eye for wisdom. And hangs himself and runs himself through for nine nights for wisdom. And wanders the worlds for wisdom. And studies seiðr (and gives Freyja half the slain with first pick, possibly in exchange for that knowledge). And who knows what-all else he does for wisdom! That passage says that the reason to be middling wise is because otherwise you will know the awful things that are coming. But still, he repeats it three times. And one could legitimately say that any sacrifice is a gift – that’s simply what it is.
Dronke doesn’t help the issue by translating the “gift” line obscurely. Literally, “Always a gift looks for a payment.” (And Hollander has “gain.”) But gildi can also mean “honor,” “tribute,” a “guild” and a “banquet” (related meanings). I’ve written about the word before, drawing on her own analysis of Vǫluspá 23. So “a gift looks for a gift back” (reciprocal honoring) lurks behind the wording just as much as “A gift exacts a tax.”
Which interpretation one prefers comes down to theology: do you see the gods as wanting us to blót – but not to use it as a way to get them to answer prayers? Or do you see them as having a problem only if the blóts – of which prayers are normal parts – are too frequent? I prefer the former. I think the notion of asking is natural in Xianity, but not so much in heathenry. Ottar didn’t ask, he just trusted and blóted.
It’s also a theological issue whether you see the Hávamál passage as a blend of Xianity and heathenry, as Dronke does. The second half of 145, Þundr etching these runes after he returned to life, gives her some support if the hanging on the windswept tree is seen as a deliberate analogy to Jesus hanging on the cross. And thinking that way, you expect heathenry to have sacraments and lists of obligations. But for me that requires a tin ear for heathenry and serious ignoring of the context within the poem, which is runes and sacrifice (Óðinn gives/sacrifices himself to himself), and in which these two verses are set together for a reason. I think she’s lost her nose.
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09.27.11
Posted in Marion mouths off at 7:02 pm by marion
Reading this heathen blog entry provoked me to put into words why I disagree.
Many people make a distinction between “spirituality” and “religion.” I’ve written elsewhere about my disagreement with this dichotomy. It implies that what you do and why you do it can be separated. This violates the heathen principle that “We are our deeds.” What we do matters. If we set aside actions by classing them as “religion” and separate from “spirituality,” then why are we doing meaningless things, rather than investing them with spiritual meaning or doing them because we mean them? Is it just that we’re conforming to expectations? Are we in fact being hypocritical, performing actions that do not reflect our “spiritual” convictions? Then we should stop performing those actions. Or do them for a reason. For example, it’s dishonest, and an insult to the gods, to participate in the worship rituals of deities who are not yours. If you are multi-faith, that’s one thing. But if not, going to church and honoring the Xian god, or attending rites of religio romana, is a betrayal of our gods and also a trivialization of the other(s). Because these rites have meaning. As another example, if you believe you only truly honor our gods in meditation or by faring forth to them, and that meeting with other heathens for blót is “mere religion,” then don’t do it. Do what you believe to be the most meaningful and proper thing to do. Heathenry does not have a text saying “Blót with a kindred or else!” The one text speaking of mandatory blóts – thrice yearly – is Heimskringla, and that’s hardly binding on your conscience. And in fact we do have a lore text speaking very sternly of not blóting wrongly: Hávamál 145, “Betra er óbeðit en sé ofblótit.” That covers blóting when you would prefer to do something “more spiritual.”
But in fact, the problem lies in the dichotomy. Action is real and meaningful – we are our deeds, our deeds express who we are and what we believe. If you don’t believe something is right or useful, don’t do it. If you do think it has some purpose, then that’s a reason to do it. “Religion” is not what you do to please (or shock) the neighbors. Either it’s the outward expression of “spirituality” – and therefore in my opinion it’s more useful to use “religion” for the whole shebang. Or if you prefer, “way.” Or it’s the sum total of your inward and outward relationship to deity, in which case carving spirit out of it is just impossible.
And that’s the thing. Separating the “spiritual” from the rest of life doesn’t make sense in a heathen context.
We hear tell of the gods interacting with humans right here, in Midgard/Middangeard. Thor and Loki stopped off at a farmer’s house to have dinner and spend the night; Thor provided the meat. Rígr went for a walk and engendered three sons on mortal women at the three houses he stayed at (or three generations in the same family over time, judging by the couples’ names). Hávamál is very clear: the guest knocking at your door may be a god. In Grímnismál, a man who had been fostered by Óðinn failed to recognize him. “It’s not like that now,” you might say. But then why honor these gods, if they are no longer interested in us, or no longer real?
What do the gods do, when they aren’t knocking on mortals’ doors? Jörð/Eorþ has something to do with the earth. . . . on which we all live, and from which come all our crops. Thor/Þunor sends the lightning. . . and protects all of this world, and blesses our marriages, and the lightning fixes the nitrogen and ripens the grain. Yngvi Freyr/Ing Fréa makes the weather kind and makes all things flourish, including humans. His father Njörðr/Neorð provides the fish our fishers catch, and blesses us with wealth. And so on. None of these is divorced from the material world. I have to think really hard to think of a god or goddess of ours who is abstract. Ægir? Nope, brewing and the ocean deep as well as poetry. Bragi? A better case, largely because we know less about him – but he’s married to Iðunn, and those apples are real enough. Freyja? Hard to deny the reality of love and sex, and the spiritists are the last to deny the reality of seiðr. Maybe this is another reason Óðinn is so popular; but he really does a lot of concrete things. He hangs himself for nine days and nine nights. He shape-changes a lot. He wields the spear – and throws it over armies, and changes a reed into a spear. And he is the Wanderer. He knocks on all those doors and walks down all those roads. As his particular dévotés recognize, it’s him you are most likely to meet in a dark alley or on a deserted headland.
How do we conventionally honor the gods? We share a drink with them (or traditionally, the boiled flesh of a slain beast). In the lore and the sagas, people blót. The private temples that pious heathen Icelanders supposedly built (whether or not they are just reflections of Xian chapels) are blóthúsar – blóthouses. Even if you prefer to talk with the gods in your head without offering them a drink, even if you consider that a more appropriate way of relating to a deity, you have to admit they take drink and food offerings, now as always.
What have the gods done in the past? Made Midgard/Middangeard. Made Asgard/Esageard and fought a war over it. Killed one of their number through trickery. These are all concrete things.
Also, let’s pause over Midgard/Middangeard. That’s our home, and they made it for us to live in it. Thor/Þunor busts a gut protecting it (as well as Asgard/Esageard) so that we (as well as the gods) have a safe place to live. He doesn’t go on dangerous trips into Giantland just for kicks and to fish for humongous serpents; he’s knocking himself out to keep us all safe. (And getting mocked in Hárbarðsljóð for not instead spending his time romancing cute giantesses.) Isn’t it rather ungrateful to regard this world as just a honeypot or a cage, luring us or keeping us from living in a spiritual world? And how can it not be spiritual when it’s provided for us by our gods, visited by our gods, constantly tended by our gods? This earth beneath our feet is Jörð/Eorþ’s place. Not some clod to be cast aside. The ancient heathens sealed blood brotherhood by walking and mingling blood on the soil beneath an arch of living sod. We pour out blót drink on the soil. Many of us prefer to blót in the open air, as Tacitus says all the tribes of Germany did in his time. And of course there is the story that the gods formed us of trees . . .
And what about our minds? The gifts of the sons of Bor to Askr and Embla were: volition, movement, and human skin (or human senses, in the alternate version). Our minds are the gift of the gods. Even if you are not as literal as me, how can you deny the sacredness of mind to a god named for óðr? and who strategizes constantly, not least to save all that is from the looming menace of Ragnarǫk?
Dreams are not to be sneezed at. They are often the first way we hear and see the gods. They offer us portents and guidance. The ancient heathens had a healthy respect for them and discussed them with each other. But the gods do not only live in our dreams. And Óðin’s eye was a pledge, and is gone in the well now. It’s not a kind of periscope. (If it were, would he feel the need to talk with Mímir’s head?) Trancing is sacred to some people, and can be very useful. But we are not to spend our lives sleepwalking. That would be a waste of the gods’ gifts to us, and an insult to their presence in the here and now. And I could of course add that being heathen is not just about the gods. We are also surrounded by a multitude of vættir; this world is also sacred to them, and if we have a happy home, we have housewights.
It’s an error of conceptualization. If we dichotomize, declare only the internal world real and good, then of course the “surface” world becomes illusory and a trap. But that “tyranny of onliness” comes from our own division of things. Humans have both minds and bodies. Which dreams, the mind or the body? They both do, for they are indivisible. Even when you fare forth, you do not permanently cut the link between your hamingja/hama and your body. To do so would be death. Heathenry is a holistic religion. We have vés, sacred places, both human-made and natural; and we have all been in places that are blighted and sterile. But in general, the divine is interwoven with the ordinary in our worldview. Our forefathers and foremothers blóted at home with ordinary utensils; it’s our modernness that leads us to use special bowls and drinking vessels, and some of us to wear special clothes. Those are modern options; people didn’t use to have so many possessions. Although the ancient Germanic people were noted for their love of jewelry; both its beauty and the amount they wore and consigned to the ground with their dead. Perhaps grave goods are one of the most powerful testaments to the sanctity with which solid, real things can be invested. For after all, the realm of the gods is not unreal. It overlaps and interweaves with our sphere of existence. We can go “inside” to talk to the gods, yes. But we can also speak out loud; that is the conventional way of doing it, in our Way. Just as the walls of a prison cell cannot keep us from talking to our gods, so they are no more present in the innermost recesses of our spirits than they are in the “external” world. Yes, there is distraction from our gods in the constant yammering of advertising and of peer pressure. Yes, just as many of us seek a quiet and beautiful place to commune with the gods, so many of us need mental quietude to focus on them and to hear them. But there are many modern stories of them making themselves heard regardless – in a classroom, in a car in traffic, in a conversation with someone. To assume that we cannot focus on them, cannot reach them, cannot hear them, except in a world away from the real, or except by turning off our minds, or to argue that the entire world has been poisoned by the unheathen to the extent that we can only get away from their mindset in dreams – is to grant them victory. It is an alien division between sacred and secular. There is no fully secular thing in heathenry; we can, after all, all hallow a vé and we can all blót without a priest. This is not, of course, to say that all is sweetness and light upon Midgard/Middangeard. There are very bad things. Nor do I condemn inner practices for those who are drawn to them. But the gods are right here as well as there, and their vés are right here in their green and blue world.
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09.12.11
Posted in Marion mouths off at 9:17 am by marion
On August 22, the Old English Wikipedia was saved from proposed deletion. This leads me to thoughts in two related directions . . .
First, that’s a commendable project. As the comments on the proposal page made clear – increasingly so, as, as someone said, people started piling on to reject deletion – having a Wikipedia in the Anglo-Saxon language is inspiring and delighting a lot of people, including people who are studying the language in colleges, and is serving as a forum for people to hack out how to use Anglo-Saxon to talk about things now. This is something we have an interest in. Obviously, the more people practice reading Anglo-Saxon – and Old Norse – the better they’ll be able to read the lore. And almost as obviously, there’s a lot of reluctance to be overcome – “It’s too hard, it’s boring, it’s all old” – and this is the kind of multifaceted, contemporary application that can really help to overcome that, including attracting people who might not even have realized Anglo-Saxon existed. It also helps to offset the advantages Old Norse possesses – in being associated with Vikings, and in having a descendant, Icelandic, that has changed very little, is promoted by feisty and creative (and extremely literate) native speakers who have done and are doing all the work keeping the vocabulary up to date for today’s needs . . . and as a result already has a Wikipedia. Of course there’s a danger that people will be influenced by newer meanings in Icelandic and misread lore passages. But there’s already the ever-present danger of being led astray by weird scholarly interpretations and emendations, and overall the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. It’s all practice; it’s all attention for languages we use to read and understand lore, and publicity that may even attract people who didn’t know about those languages (never over-estimate the quality of education on anything pre-20th-century or less than obviously relevant to patriotism in the country concerned) . . . and some people master languages by using them and so writing an article in Anglo-Saxon on a computer game, or improving the article on Woden, may be just the ticket.
It’s also, of course, a significant step towards revivifying Anglo-Saxon as a language heathens use, rather than just read. That’s a lot more controversial. There are good points to be made on both sides. Again, many people can’t get a grip on a language purely passively. They have to have a try at rearranging the elements to form new sentences; they may even have to speak it and/or hear it. And those are important ways to form an appreciation of poetry; Beowulf and the Poetic Edda were never intended to sit on a page. They’re also the high road to understanding the nuances of meaning and of connotations, although to hear modern scholars speak, one might think a frequency list was better. To many experts, it’s a truism that a language brings with it modes and patterns of thought, and it would then follow that to understand the ancient heathens and what they left us by way of writing, we need to use their languages. That’s why many of us blót using Old Tongues. But on the other hand . . . I will borrow Ingeborg Nordén’s formulation: The gods are not stuck in a time-warp over Northern Europe. They didn’t go into suspended animation during the dark centuries when we are unaware of there having been any heathens. They are perfectly capable of understanding English (or any other modern language.) After all, they respond when people don’t feel up to Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, or Old High German, and just use Hollander, Brodeur, Auden, Dronke, Tolkien . . . or their own words. Or when we mangle the Old Tongues horribly. (At one time, I am sure I was a fixture in the weekly Asgard blooper reel. For one thing, I learned German first and still can’t stop myself from pronouncing it hóf (hoof) when I mean hof (temple).) Also, the notion of writing as better than speech and the concomitant obsession with correct text came in with Xianity and the concept of Holy Writ. (Maybe foreshadowed by Romans obsessed with military regulations and reports, but I don’t know how obsessed the Romans were with paperwork on the frontier.) Whereas our ancestors used poetry, and specifically alliterative poetry, in order to string words together in a memorable way. Had two gods of poetry. Celebrated heroes in long epics and spoke of a good man’s fame as never dying (if it had been a matter of written record, nobody’s vital statistics would have ever died, in theory at least – they were talking, in “Hávamál,” in Beowulf, and elsewhere, of word of mouth, of stories passed down through the generations by tale tellers and proud descendants). And notably, revered skálds who concocted complex poems on the fly, or at most immediately before they were called before the tyrant to prove their ability. What we have is the leavings of a culture of extemporizers with trained ears and immensely good memories. They would have been at best puzzled and likely shocked to see a typical modern blót with everyone standing around clutching a sheaf of computer printout and reading their words from it. One could say that the time and effort we spend on trying to speak Anglo-Saxon, Old High German, Old Norse, or even Icelandic – and trying to figure out how to say “My name is Joe Blow and I major in computer science with a minor in medieval lit. at Podunk State U” in Anglo-Saxon, Old High German, or even Icelandic – is a waste and we would be better off using that time to read the entirety of both Eddas and, yes, to blót, learning to stand before the gods and speak eloquently from the heart, and to listen for a response.
Acrimonious though it may get, I think the debate over the use of Old Tongues is inevitable – the gods may well not have changed much, but we are certainly rather different from the ancient heathens – and not in every way bad. Because it leads us to consider the Old Tongues, and what may please the gods, and how to adapt to our modern situations. But whichever way we decide on those issues, we need to be able to read the Old Tongues, and it’s in our interest for colleges to teach them, for editions as well as translations of lore and history texts to be available, and for scholars to be doing work on them that gives us information.
And that brings me to the other thing about the debate over whether the Old English Wikipedia should continue to exist. Which is that the proposal and the way it was made is a sad example of an all too common thing: opposing study of the ancient Germanic languages, belittling them as unimportant and as a weirdo interest and a waste of time. Somehow, Latin is ok, the revivals of Hebrew and Irish in the past century are ok, but the study of ancient Germanic culture and languages is an intolerable waste of resources. This is all around us. As just one sad scholarly example, I will cite Stefan Arvidsson’s Aryan Idols (first published in Swedish in 2000). This goes from justifiable suspicions about Dumézil’s politics and their link to his espousal of a three-caste system as natural to questioning the entire utility of studying ancient gods: “Had not Odin, Venus, Indra, Anahita, Taranis, Freja, Perún, Nasatyas, Mitra, Jupiter, and the other Indo-European gods played out their roles long ago?” (translated ed., p. 3) – and although coarsely expressed, that dismissal of gods that humanity has supposedly “outgrown” is almost a required tenet of modern scholarship, with the word mythology used as an alternate to religion for those faiths where the academic does not expect to ever confront believers, or expects he can laugh at them with impunity. No one says Jesus has “played out his role long ago,” or even calls him a symbol. And of course the author reserves his major scorn for Germanic studies. “[A]s folklore gained more influence . . . . the Indo-Europeans began to look less and less like Indians and Iranians, and more and more like Germans. This meant, in turn, that they became less civilized and more primitive and barbaric.” (translated ed., p. 141). This is pure and simple snobbery at our expense. For one thing, where is the censure of the Romans, whose religious stories feature plenty of farting, fornicating, and stabs in the back? or for that matter the Greeks, with that whole thing about the Titans involving Zeus’ dad eating all his sons in turn and culminating in Zeus slaughtering the lot of ‘em? Not ideal family relations . . . and as Martin Bernal has argued starting with Black Athena, causing tremendous upheavals in academic departments, Greek religion can be plausibly argued to be not Indo-European but Semitic, closely related to Egyptian – where the sky-god and the earth-goddess are forcibly ripped apart during coitus, and other goings on occur that are not ideal among kin. For another, isn’t it convenient that the two held out here as more “civilized” and less “primitive and barbaric” happen to have developed monotheistic traditions? Indeed, polytheism passing into or “really” being a symbolic way of talking about monotheism is a recurrent day-dream of Indo-Europeanists from the start. But the subject of the book is the history of the ideas behind Indo-European studies – this one the author does not seem to have examined in himself. Unfortunately, all too common, especially when tarring the study of Germanic “mythology” with the brush of pointlessness. Again, describing the Grimms’ nationalistically tinged effort to identify specifically German sources on Germanic religion, he gives the impression that there were none – while simply asserting in contrast that both the “classical” and the “Judeo-Christian” traditions are unassailably worthwhile: “One step in this project [of (re-)creating a strong German culture that could free itself from dependence on 'foreign' cultures] was to show that there existed a rich ‘German’ mythology that could successfully compete with classical and Judeo-Christian traditions.” (translated ed., p. 131) With respect to the “Judeo-Christian,” the so-called “rich mythology” is basically the Bible (!) With respect to the Greco-Roman, this is circular – they were part of the Indo-European construct he is exploring as a “myth.” But “classical” exists and “Judeo-Christian” gets a pass because that’s his religion – the existence of Germanic culture is taken as illusory. He then overstates the Grimms’ rejection of Norse material (“since the Germans [would then be] placed in a dependent relationship to the Nordic culture”, translated ed., p. 132), despite the fact that there is examination and comparison with records of Germanic culture in other places, primarily Scandinavia but also Anglo-Saxon England and the Merovingian Franks, on every page of Teutonic Mythology. As everyone knows who’s used it as a comprehensive reference work. He glosses over the very careful examination and comparison of sources in Grimm and makes it seem as if the fairytales were the foundation of the scholarship, when they were only the first step. (I don’t see, for example, any appreciation of Jacob Grimm’s work on the history of German law.)
Jacob Grimm was pretty bad at Anglo-Saxon and many of his analyses are badly flawed. He loved to jump to etymological conclusions based on simplistic similarities. He betrays sad 19th-century sexism in constantly trying to combine all the goddesses into one or two. But basically Arvidsson is biased against the Grimms for being interested in Germanic material, which he does not regard as as worthy of study as “classical” – let alone “Judeo-Christian.”
And that is a pervasive attitude. Mixed in of course with the old canard that the Nazis promoted heathenry (they imprisoned known heathens, and there was a power struggle over how far enthusiasts like Himmler and Goering would be allowed to pursue their vague yen for occultized Germanic symbology, such as calling a daughter “Edda” and building a knights’ chamber for top SS men that owed more to Wagner’s Parsifal and the Arthurian Round Table than to any heathen tradition, but was to have had a few runes on the chairs and in the stained glass) and with Jung’s notion that Odin is responsible for German bloodthirstiness.
It’s very hard to study either Anglo-Saxon or Old Norse in a college in either the US or the UK, these days. And medieval studies is dominated by people who are mainly interested in Catholicism and its writings; that and “demythologizing” figures of Germanic history are preoccupations of many of the remaining students of the Viking Age and the Germanic literature of the early Middle Ages. Plus of course it’s a logistical nightmare to study and work in the entire Germanic field; Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, and Old High German have been walled off from each other as distinct disciplines, with only Cambridge University, that I am aware of, facilitating combining the first two: but the price of that is that you must also study Celtic literature and culture. Our history and culture are constantly marginalized. The discussion about the Old English Wikipedia, while small in the scheme of things – and while there are good reasons to call that Wikipedia a waste of time that could be better spent on other things, and there are also arguments to be made against the Indo-European hypothesis, particularly since it has become yet another whip to try to get us to turn our attention instead to Greco-Roman studies, or Celtic studies, or to regard Germanic literature as impoverished by comparison with these, or heathenry as a precursor to monotheism or as a construct of romanticizing nationalists – is both a good example and a rare bit of good news. It got kept because, surprisingly, person after person appeared to argue that it should be. That an encyclopedia in Anglo-Saxon was interesting, harmless, even useful.
Good. Let’s continue to be aware of both the attacks and the interest. Just as we should be aware of all the Germanic data – the German folklore, the few pieces of information from ancient Germany, and the bits we can sift out from the Xianity in our Anglo-Saxon sources, and all the stuff from elsewhere – as well as knowing our Old Norse sources. So, likewise, whatever our stance on Old Tongues and their uses, their suppression is bad for heathenry and their use helps us. And maybe I’ll go over there one of these days and fix that article on Woden.
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08.22.11
Posted in Marion mouths off at 1:09 pm by marion
I thought I’d inaugurate this set of writings with something relatively unerudite and contentious, but not in-your-face, instant shouting match contentious.
Most of us long-time heathens have hit the wall by now: burned out to the extent of just not having infinite patience with silly questions. You can probably think of your own. Maybe you didn’t have patience with some things even when you were a new heathen. And the most annoying thing is when it isn’t a question, but a certainty. “Freyja is the queen of the valkyries” does it for me. “I’m not a Germanic heathen, I’m Asatru” – meaning, “I am unshakeably convinced ‘Germanic’ means “German’ and I’m only into vikings” – tends to get to me, too. I wrote a whole Germanic History 101 and I still got that. But sometimes it is a question, or more like a demand . . . “Which lore do I really need to read? . . . No, that’s too much.” “I started reading the ‘Prose Eddas’ but I stopped after the Prologue. Tell me the stories, I’ll pick it up that way.” “Hollander’s too hard to read. Can’t you translate the eddic poems for me so they’re easy to read?”
I feel like a real curmudgeon recalling these questions. And I know it’s hard.
Most of us grew up bathed in the religious stories of one of the desert god’s religions. We even got fed those stories at school, in many cases. Not only that, there was a crib sheet: part of being a child in most places in the Western world is getting told what the take-home message is from the stories. Some of us just got that and were spared the actual stories. Kind of like everyone knows a bit about Hamlet but not everyone is forced to read it. Heathenry doesn’t even have the take-home message, or not so you’d recognize it if you grew up with the Ten Commandments and all that. (The Nine Noble Virtues are modern spoonfeeding.)
Increasingly many of us are terrible at foreign languages and haven’t even read much material written in a 19th-century style. Snorri’s style is genuinely easy for me – now. But I remember when I read The Arabian Nights and stuck at the constant theeing and thouing. Hollander deliberately uses archaic words; people like Bellows can’t help it; and crucial bits of the Poetic Edda are either extremely hard to translate or the best minds of the last century and a half have not been able to crack the code of what they actually mean. And if you check the original – which is to be encouraged – you find that scholars have been rearranging the order of bits, disagree on meanings or how to render them (sometimes so badly that it’s hard to figure out which bit in translation X corresponds to which bit in translation Y), and you sooner or later run into the problem that actual Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon manuscripts spell things every which way . . . and that with Anglo-Saxon, there’s no agreed-upon standardized spelling so that things are still spelled every which way in the printed editions. Making using the dictionary even harder. (All pre-printed languages are that way, but all that is kept behind the curtain in editions of Latin and Greek.)
The dictionaries are hard to get hold of, the online versions that some genuine heroes have made available are buggy and explain things in Victorian English (with Latin abbreviations), there’s enough lore that it’s expensive to amass a personal library and increasingly, local libraries don’t have any of it, and you sooner or later run into a saga or just a little þáttr that simply isn’t available in print anywhere. Or was only published in the 1880s in German. For a beginner, it’s often as if long-time heathens are playing a game of “Top this lore reference,” constantly moving the goalposts just to prove they have access to the best university library anywhere. Or to shut up people who just asked an innocent question, like “Did they have temples and what did they look like?” Then the argument starts about what’s lore – does it include Tacitus? Does it include the Historia Norvegiæ? Oh yes, both of those are in Latin . . . the newbie is still going to get the message they should have read both already.
Sometimes it sounds like a contest to see who can pronounce this stuff with the most confidence. Can you say Historia Norvegiæ? Can you say Vǫluspá? Can you say Hrafnkels Saga? Actually, that should be “Do you use the same guesstimated pronunciation I, my goði, or my favorite big heathen leader/scholar uses?” Let me let you in on something. Virtually none of the standard heathen pronunciations of Old Norse is correct: not the way I’ve heard people say Æsir (stress should be on the first syllable), not the way I’ve heard people say Vanir (again, stress should be on the first syllable), and not any of the major guesses at how to say Vǫluspá . . . and there are two academic schools of thought concerning the pronunciation of Old Norse (and the dialect to which to normalize Anglo-Saxon, but there I really do digress), so Edred Thorson and I (for example) say things differently. Heck, Icelanders say things differently depending where they’re from and Eiríkr Magnússon and Guðbrandur Vigfússon disagreed about how to spell it.
. . . So yes, it’s hard. You almost have to go into the territory of grad seminars.
But there’s a yawning gulf between these issues and “Can’t you just tell me the stories?” or “Can’t you make a translation of the poems for me that’s easy to read?” It’s kind of like the gulf between “I’m puzzled at how Jacob Grimm can have thought so many of our goddesses were really one and the same, and checking into that I found real scholarly disagreement over Gullveig and Gefjon and all the ‘handmaids of Frigg,’ even Fulla, who occurs in one of the Merseburg Charms as well as in a kenning, so I’m wondering how much is legitimate scholarly skepticism about Snorri’s motives and how much is simply latent sexism; can I ask you your opinion?” (which would make many of us adopt a deer in the headlights stance) and “I only really need one goddess and I figure Freyja and Frigg are the same anyway because she’s the queen of heaven – umm, Asgard.”
The thing is . . . well, several things, all in a chain. Hávamál tells us again and again that fools should shut up and listen to the wise folks talk. But Hávamál also says explicitly that the lame and the blind are not to be thrown away – they are useful. That friendship is good and should be nurtured. That a dead body with no sons to bury it is a tragic thing. And that your reputation is what will live on. We were all beginner heathens once (even those very, very few of us who learned to know the gods in infancy.) And I daresay all of us can remember embarrassing mistakes we’ve made and wrong assumptions and misinterpretations we’ve belatedly realized were just that. (Did you realize Vanir isn’t pronounced like veneer? You probably didn’t realize my first ever post to a heathen list was to say that we shouldn’t blót because we can’t possibly know how to do it right.) It’s always possible that today’s unbelievably callow newbie will be tomorrow’s mainstay of heathenry. Unless of course some jaundiced expert forgets that even the blind are useful and drives them away. If you’ve had it up to here with newbie questions – don’t respond to them for a while. Or only respond to the ones where you can remember that a newbie is not an enemy. Rather, an ally and potential friend; someone who was wise enough to ask (rather than going off and making another wiccatru website that promulgates idiocy and insults our gods and goddesses); someone to carry your reputation – and heathenry – forward after you are gone. It’s well established that when you don’t know much about something, you’re all the more likely to believe you do. (It’s called the Dunning-Kruger effect.) Idiots who engage, especially if they actually ask rather than opining, are thus showing wisdom and willingness to learn. (And once in a blue moon, they know more than one might assume. That callow first on-list pronouncement of mine was based on solid scholarship but is outweighed by other scholarship and Unverifiable Personal Information.)
Moreover, this is a whole different age from any of the ages in which lore was written. We’re not even in an age like the Grimm brothers’ (whether one regrets that or is glad of it). Some heathens would like to roll back their personal clocks and live as far away from modern multiculturalism as possible. But . . . the gods are still calling people, so clearly they haven’t given up. And ours is not a reality-denying way. So instead: let’s face it, everybody nowadays goes to a school, and schools nowadays teach by spoonfeeding. They have to – they get closed down if a ridiculously high proportion of their students don’t pass everything. And the kids can’t concentrate and schools aren’t set up to encourage that anyway. So to a greater or lesser extent, everybody’s primed to expect information to be delivered in little chunks, with a pause between them, simultaneously visually and aurally, with the list of points to remember written in advance somewhere, with no hard words or tangents, and with it all tied up in a bow at the end . . . and you need to remember it till the end of the week but then it’s on to the next set of morsels. And you remember it as a set of points and details because the test tends to ask about the details. It’s hard to test on the big picture. I didn’t put a clear thesis statement at the start of this blog entry, and some of my paragraphs are a bit long. And I’ve zigged and now I am zagging. If you’ve found this piece off-putting, then maybe you can understand that one person’s spoonfeeding is another’s “But of course I need this accommodation.”
And the ultimate cause of this defining feature of modern education? The religions of the desert god with their creed of submission to masters. Of never interpreting for yourself, and the great importance of learning the correct version. Which is of course also the religious mindset most of us were raised in. Hence the thing that keeps coming up in discussions of why we need goðar today, and is prominent in Manny Olds’ typology of the goði: teacher. Lore-interpreter and trainer of the young. It’s very hard to shake this off one’s boots – especially while not becoming one of those Hávamál idiot big-mouths. When newbies ask to be spoonfed, they’re concerned about getting it right. That’s to be encouraged.
Again with the Hávamál on the blind and the lame . . . and the aged father . . . the one respect in which heathenry today is a tribal religion is not that some of us form groups that we call tribes, or dream of living in voluntary communities, or even that folkish heathens regard the blood-tie as defining. It’s that heathenry is for all sorts of people. Even the stupid, the foolish, the nutty. Hávamál does not say “Cast the idiot out of your family.” It keeps on saying what the idiot should do. Because they’re heathen too. Just like all too many families – and there are some awful families in the sagas – we’re lumbered with some twits, some cowards, some shiftless lazyboneses, and some psychotics. Yes, they should try to improve themselves. They should take their meds, they should stop being so lazy and self-absorbed, they should sit down and read some lore or at least a FAQ and they should think before they opine based on the exact wording of a Hollander translation as if it’s holy writ, or assume “Germanic” is a fancy way of saying “German,” or . . . It’s plain as day that rolling your sleeves up and getting stuck in is the heathen way. But they shouldn’t be told to get out until they are worthy – heathenry is not a mystery religion for the initiated elite. And we should know better than to emulate Víga-Glúmr – he’s a warning, not a model. (Rather like Hamlet.) Seeing him as a model . . . is expecting the lore to spoonfeed us examples of heathen behavior. Scholars have made that error. The people who concocted the NNV have made that error. Self-reliance is only possible in a rich, specialized modern society – or if you’re a heck of an outdoorsperson. Exile was a dire punishment to the ancient heathens. What is the heathen way is making shift with what you have, finding a way. Making do with the newbies we have.
Another alien concept of religion is lurking here too, I think. Every non-indigenous religion I can think of has a goal. Adherents more or less play the game of life: the whole point is to try to attain something. Heathenry doesn’t have that. We lose a lot of people who cannot be happy without one. It’s not about being a good heathen or blóting more or better. Or reading more lore. A corollary to that is that the newbie is nothing to sniff at. I’m not ahead of them in some contest; they are not distracting me from contemplating the ineffable Truth and thereby retarding my progress toward anything, or drawing the gods’ attention away from me. If they’re annoying or revolting, that’s all it is. The lore and the stories are replete with examples of conflict, rivalry, and revenge. But they never say, “Live like this guy; it’s the right way to live.” And only poems in praise of rulers claim to teach how to get into Valhalla . . . or imply that’s what it’s about. This is not a game, it has no defined objective, it doesn’t have rules you can get ahead by knowing really well. You never know when you’re being the idiot Hávamál warns about. The very first stanza warns you to be on your guard when you go into a hall, because you never know what you will encounter. Later you’re reminded never to go anywhere unarmed. You never know when you’re going to prove to be the newbie, the fool. Wisdom is to be alert and fore-armed; including being ready to realize the fool raised an issue you weren’t ready for. (Víga-Glúmr wasn’t. He didn’t think someone else might be favored by a different god. There’s more than one.)
. . . And sometimes it’s just the principle of generosity. A cup of wine and a bit of bread. Man’s delight is man. We’re in this together.
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07.29.10
Posted in Uncategorized at 10:27 am by marion
*Agilaz
*Alaric
*Alboin
Alfred
Roald Amundsen
*Angantyr of the Goths and Gizur of the Geats
*[Anglo-Saxon princess who forced Radigis to marry her]
*Ariovistus of the Suebi
*Arngrim
*Aslaug
Douglas Bader
*Albert Ball
Alexander Graham Bell
*Beowulf
*Bismarck
*Björn Ironside
*Bödvar Bjarki
*Brynhild
Leonard Cheshire
Chrocus of the Alemanni
James Cook
Charles Darwin
Michael Faraday
Eirik Hákonarson
Friedrich II of Prussia
*Genseric
*Guðmundr
*Hagbard
*Haki
*Hakon Jarl
*Harald Hardrada
*Heidrek
*Háma
Harimann
*Helgi Haddingjaskati
*Helgi Hjörvarðsson
*Helgi Hundingsbane
*Hengest and Horsa
*Hermann the Cheruscan
*Hervor
Hildólfr
*Hjalmar
Hlöd
Hothbrodd
Hroðgar
*Hrólfr Kraki
*Max Immelmann
Ingeld
Edward Jenner
Kjárr
T.E. Lawrence
*Ragnar Lodbrok
Horatio Nelson
Isaac Newton
Niðhad
Florence Nightingale
*Offa of the Angles
*Örvar-Oddr
*Palnatoke
Emmeline Pankhurst
*Penda
*Radbod
Raus and Rapt, kings of the Hasdingi Vandals
Hanna Reitsch
*Rerir
*Richthofen
*Rommel
Robert Scott
Ernest Shackleton
Sigi
*Sigmund
Signy
*Sigurd
*Sinfjötli
Skjervald Skrukka and Torstein Skevla
*Starkad
George Stephenson
*Styrbjörn the Strong
*Svafrlami
Svanhildr
Svipdagr
*Theoderic the Great/Dietrich von Bern
Alan Turing
*Ernst Udet
Valdar
Víkar
Völsung
Weohstan
Weyland
Frank Whittle
*Wiglaf
William Wilberforce
—————————–
Grimm brothers
Wagner
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07.01.10
Posted in Þæs dæges word at 1:00 pm by marion
hróffæst (adj.): with a firmly fixed roof
healle hróffæste
se hrófsele: roofed hall
Nǽnig wæter him for hrófsele hrínan ne mihte–”No water could touch him for the roofed hall”
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Posted in Þæs dæges word at 12:56 pm by marion
se hrófstán: roof-stone, stone forming part of a roof
Of ðám hrófstáne yrnð dropmǽlum swíðe hluttor wæter–”From the roofstones runs drop by drop very pure water”
séo hróftigel: roof tile
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