An FBI Operation, Germanic Heathenry, and Media Representation

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The god Bragi sings while the goddess Iðunn reclines in an 1895 illustration by Lorenz Frølich. From Wikimedia Commons.

Media misrepresentation is a problem for minority religions in the United States. New religious movements and minority religions generally receive little media attention until some negative event occurs. In these cases, provided details regarding an associated minority religion can often be misleading or outright fabrications. Wicca, for example, experienced exactly these issues—likely resulting in the conviction (and subsequent placement on death row) of Damien Echols, for example—until a shift in its media representation occurred largely in the 1990s and into the 2000s.*

Germanic Heathenry is a religion (or a group of religions) often grouped together with Wicca as a "Neopagan religion". Germanic Heathenry has seen an explosion of adherents over the last few decades and it may well be eclipsing Wicca in terms of both media representation and number of adherents. However, no such media shift as seen with Wicca has so far occurred with coverage of Germanic Heathenry. Signs of change regarding this situation may be appearing via positive media reports about Iceland's Ásatrúarfélagið and by way of the efforts of some dedicated heathens and educators such as Karl E. H. Seigfried, but all too often a misleadingly hyper-masculine, prison-associated, and white supremacist version of the religion dominates media attention of the topic.

Recently such an example has been given renewed attention due to media reports around an undercover FBI operation that resulted in charges that two men in Virginia were planning to attack black churches and Jewish synagogues as well as a variety of other felonies. However, as Heather Greene at The Wild Hunt writes, the fact that the accused plotters claimed a form of Germanic Heathenry as their religion has become a media angle:

As written in the FBI report by Special Agent James Rudisill, “Doyle and Chaney … ascribe to a white supremacy extremist version of the Asatru faith.”

After news broke, the Asatru angle quickly went from a footnote in a long FBI report to a news maker and, in some cases, even a headline. A Richmond Times-Dispatch article, one of the first, clarified to its readers, “Asatru is a pagan religion.” And, the media cycle moved from there.

Some news agencies, such as CNN and ABC, did not ever mention the men’s religious affiliation, choosing to focus on the foiled crime. Others offered varying degrees of explanation from simply quoting the FBI document verbatim to inserting some limited facts about the religion. The Washington Post, for example, simply added “neo-pagan” into the FBI quote. Then, others went further exploring the white supremacy connection to Asatru. The Daily Beast went so far as to interview such a group with the added commentary, “Because pagans gonna pagan.”

Readers are encouraged to read the rest of The Wild Hunt's article here.

END NOTES
* See for example Pike, Sarah M. 2012. "Wicca in the News" in Winston, Diane (editor). The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media, pp. 289-303. Oxford University Press.

Babbel.com Feature on Old Norse Influence on English

Online language learning resource Babbel.com has published a feature on the influence of the Old Norse lexicon, most famous as the language of the vikings, on Modern English. From the article:

Two figures from a Vendel Period plate from Öland, Sweden, probably not discussing cake.  Image from Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to the cross-cultural fermentation that occured [sic] in the Danelaw – and later when England was temporarily absorbed into Canute the Great’s North Sea Kingdom – the English language is much closer to that of its Scandinavian neighbors than many acknowledge. By the time that the Norman conquest brought the irreversible influence of French, Old English had already been transformed beyond its Anglo-Saxon roots.

The article goes on to list 139 words from Old Norse found in modern English, from names for days and animals to words regarding war, violence, society, and culture. Also, cake.

The article also links to a fascinating 2012 study claiming English is a Scandinavian language, and a list of Yorkshire dialect words from Old Norse.

Potential Viking Age Site Washed Away by Flood in Southern Iceland

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The volcano Hekla as depicted in a 16th century illustration from Olaus Magnus's Historia de Gentibus Septentrionalibus. From Wikimedia Commons.

An unexcavated archaeological site, potentially from the Viking Age, was washed away by a glacial lake outburst flood in South Iceland earlier this autumn. Iceland Magazine reports:

Uggi Ævarsson, the Cultural Heritage Manager of South Iceland[,] tells RÚV that the ruins had neither been charted nor catalogued, let alone explored by archaeologists.

This is all the more serious because the ruins could have dated back to the Viking Age, he tells RÚV: “This is a great loss. Now we are missing another piece of the puzzle which is the settlement history of Skaftártunga region. These floods come regularly here, and then the nearby volcano Hekla also has her regular eruptions, all of which makes the settlement history of this region extremely interesting.”

Glacial lake outburst floods are highly destructive. Outside of priceless loss to the historic record that the loss of such a site may cause, this particular flood caused significant damage to the region, washing away a road and causing damage to several farms in the region, resulting in losses of "ISK Hundreds of Millions" as reported by Iceland Review Online.

Postmedieval Issue - Hoarders and Hordes: Responses to the Staffordshire Hoard

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A forthcoming issue of postmedieval on the Staffordshire Hoard is calling on the community for crowd review. The issue, edited by the Material Collective, will be published spring 2016. The edition will utilize Crowd Review instead of the more traditional peer review making this issue of postmedieval a community project, and redefining scholarly review in the process. From their website:

Selections from the Staffordshire Hoard. Image from Wikimedia Commons. 

Selections from the Staffordshire Hoard. Image from Wikimedia Commons. 

“In the spirit of our collaborative process, we now ask contributors–and the broader public–to respond to one another’s work in the form of a crowd review. We ask for comments, queries, suggestions, and ideas for new direction. As a reviewer, you are charged with being part of the collaboration, part of the Hoard/Horde. Our goal in this open review process is not to change the form of these experimental contributions, but rather to collaborate to expand, clarify, and refine. The crowd review mirrors the dialogic and collaborative form of the volume itself, and so we have generated an interface that allows for threaded comments in which readers can respond to one another as well as to authors directly. Our hope is that a lively month-long discussion will become its own kind of response to the Hoard, and we intend to archive the threaded comments on the Material Collective website. Authors may also incorporate suggestions into individual essays before final publication of the volume in summer of 2016.”

If you are interested in the Staffordshire Hoard, feel free to contribute, even if you are not a traditional academic. This special issue follows postmedieval’s efforts to redefine academia and include all interested parties, no matter your education level or scholarly discipline.

Viking Age Sword Found by Hiker in Norway

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A hiker in Haukeli, Norway has discovered a Viking Age sword. The grip has decomposed, but the sword otherwise remains in fantastic condition. A future excavations is planned at the site. As reported by thelocal.no:

A 19th century illustration by Johannes Gehrts depicts a scene from the Old Norse Völsunga cycle, in which the god Odin plunges a fateful sword into the tree Barnstokkr. The Völsung family and their guests are shocked by the sight. From Wikimedia Commons.

“Jostein Aksdal, an archeologist with Hordaland County said the sword was in such good condition that if it was given a new grip and a polish, it could be used today. 
 
‘The sword was found in very good condition. It is very special to get into a sword that is merely lacking its grip,’ he said. 
 
‘When the snow has gone in spring, we will check the place where the sword was found. If we find several objects, or a tomb, perhaps we can find the story behind the sword,’ he said. 
 
He said that judging by the sword’s 77cm length, it appeared to come from 750-800AD.”

The sword is to be sent to the University Museum of Bergen, where the artifact will be preserved.

Interview with Sociologist Jennifer Snook at Norsemyth.org

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A chart from a page of Emilé Durkheim's The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912, originally published in French as Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse). Durkheim (d. 1917), mentioned by Snook, was a founding sociologist.

Karl E. H. Seigfried published a three-part interview on Norsemyth.org with sociologist Jennifer Snook (formerly University of Mississippi, now Grinnell College) focused on matters relating to her recent book, American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement (July 2015).

Notably, while also an academic, Snook is herself a Heathen, and the interview focuses on both her research on Heathenry and her personal experiences as a Heathen in the United States.

A sample from the interview:


KS – There is a ritual element to your academic work. In 2003, you made an oath at a blót [Heathen ritual] that you “would honor the time that others had sacrificed to help me by publishing my work.” Throughout the book, you refer to “our faith,” “our strengths,” “our weaknesses,” and so on.

How do you think this open identification as a believer in the minority faith tradition you write about will impact reaction from the wider academic community?

JS – There’s a conversation going on in Pagan Studies circles right now about how insider-scholars who write about their own groups are too apologetic and not critical enough of their own experiences and observations. And certainly this has been a problem with some insiders, or anthropologists “going native” in the field, losing their ability to be “objective” about their subject.

However, at the same time, social science has gone through somewhat of a shift where we now recognize that objectivity, in the old positivist use of the term, isn’t a concrete thing. We can’t really achieve 100% objectivity in this work, because we ourselves are products of our socialization into cultural and social “realities.”

But there’s also a push for more critical analysis of gender, race, privilege, and other aspects of society – studying “up” to the elite, rather than simply focusing on the disadvantaged. My training and the influences from which I draw inspiration are in this critical tradition.

I think that scholars who read my work will have the common language of this critical perspective and understand that my insider status gave me insights that outsiders may not have had, but that the work is ultimately a critical examination highlighting both the subjectivities of Heathens, but also the context in which they practice.

A Swedish Island, Witchcraft Folklore, and Stone Age Excavations

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An illustration of the Swedish island of Öland and some of its neighboring shores from Olaus Magnus's Historia de gentiles septentrionalibus (1555). To the top right of the island is a small island with a crown upon it, representing Blå Jungfrun.

Off the southeastern coast of Sweden is a small island once known as Blåkulla (Swedish ‘blue hill’). Today the island is known as Blå Jungfrun (Swedish ‘blue maiden/blue virgin’) and is home to a Swedish National Park. In Swedish folklore, the island has had an association with witchcraft since at least the mid-16th century, yet the island may have had a particular folk associations of peculiar danger long prior (a location called “Blaakulla” is referenced in such a manner in 1410—for more on this, see, for example, Stephen Mitchell’s 1997 “Blåkulla and its Antecedents: Transvection and Conventicles in Nordic Witchcraft” in Alvíssmál 7 pp. 81-100).

With that background in mind, a team of archaeologists that have been excavating the site since 2014 have made some interesting assessments of the site, including that the site may have attracted particular religious activity during the Stone Age. According to a recent Livescience article on the topic:

“The results are astonishing and reveal extensive human activities on the island in the Mesolithic Stone Age,” the archaeologists wrote.

People who travelled to the island may have practiced various rituals inside the two caves, archaeologists say. One cave contains what may be an altar where offerings could have been made to deities. Meanwhile another cave has an area that could have been used like a "theater" or "stage."

"In two caves, distinct ritual features were identified," wrote the team members, who hail from Kalmar County Museum and Linnaeus University, both in Sweden.

Seljord Folkehøgskule's "Viking Course"

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Seljord Folkehøgskule, a Norwegian Folkehøgskole in the remote and mountainous area of Seljord, Norway, has received international media attention for offering a class on “vikings” (outlets include for example, Time.com and the internet extensions of the Guardian and Russia Today). The course is nine months long and seems primarily focused on crafts, with some time spent in York, England, a major trade center controlled by the Norse during the Viking Age.

According to Arve Husby, head teacher of the school, the program has also received a significant response from potential students, perhaps motivated by modern popular culture:

Portrait of N. F. S. Grundtvig by Constantin Hansen. Grundtvig, an iconic figure in Danish history, was the ideological founder of the folk school concept, which is now widespread in Scandinavia, Germany, and Austria. The concept has also inspired scattered schools throughout the United States.

“We’ve been overwhelmed by the response to our Viking course,” said Husby. “I think it appealed because there’s a real interest from TV shows like Game of Thrones and Vikings. Plus we’re in a proper Viking location, surrounded by what many people call ‘Norway’s most beautiful mountains’ – we call them ‘hills’ – and overlooking Lake Seljord, where the Seljord monster is supposed to reside, like Norway’s Loch Ness. So Seljord is just as it would have looked in Viking times.”

For more information regarding the program, see Seljord Folkehøgskule's official site for the course:
http://www.seljord.fhs.no/linjer/viking

"Heathenry in Iceland, America and Germany: The mainstream and the fringe" via Icelandic Magazine

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An illustration of a historical Hammer of Thor, worn as a pendant by North Germanic pagans during the Viking Age. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Iceland Magazine has published an article on Germanic Neopaganism (also widely known as Heathenry): "Heathenry in Iceland, America and Germany: The mainstream and the fringe". Focused on Germanic Neopaganism in Iceland, Germany, and North America, the brief article primarily examines responses to the Ásatrúarfélagið's decision to conduct gay marriage ceremonies (which we previously reported on here). The article is authored by Karl E. H. Seigfried, who runs "The Norse Mythology Blog", a blog focused on Germanic paganism and topics such as J. R. R. Tolkien and Richard Wagner.

 

International Saga Conference Archive Now Online

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The goddess Sága chats with the god Odin in an illustration by Danish artist Lorenz Frølich (1895). Image from Wikimedia Commons.

From the start, the papers delivered at the conferences were published, either afterwards, as proceedings, or, increasingly, beforehand, as preprints, the idea being that one could read a printed version of a paper before hearing it presented. Although many of these conference papers subsequently appeared in revised versions in proper publications, the bulk are only available in this form and have become increasingly hard to get hold of. The purpose of the present website, maintained by the Arnamagnæan Institute at the University of Copenhagen and sanctioned by the Advisory Board of the International Saga Conference, is to collect materials from these conferences and make them available on the web for use by scholars and other interested parties.

The archive currently holds PDF versions of over 1300 papers and/or abstracts by some 600 scholars, scanned in most cases from the original proceedings/preprints. Where revised — or simply more legible — versions exist, these too can be made available if the authors so wish.

This is a massive amount of useful material available to many scholars for the first time that will certainly further all involved fields. Hats off from mimisbrunnr.info to the Arnamagnæan Institute and the Advisory Board of the International Saga Conference for making this publicly available!