A Glad Midsommar to Heathens all over the world from the Northern Path.
Today I give thanks to Sunna for her warming rays, and for the summer’s bounty. This is a wonderful point on the wheel of the year, and a time for light and laughter.
Hail Sunna!
I’ve just finished Land of Wooden Gods, the first book in Jan Fridegård’s trilogy set in Viking-era Sweden. This trilogy should provide a bracing antidote for tendencies to romanticize Viking-era Heathen religion or tribal society. The story takes place near ninth-century Birka, and there is action and drama aplenty, including raids, fights, and one of the great nine-year blots at Uppsala.
However, the heroes are the household thralls, and we are given a very unsentimental view of their lives and challenges. The chieftain is not a noble warrior who doles out rings, but a bowlegged bully with food in his beard and a penchant for exposing babies. Holme the smith, the male protagonist, is trying to make a living and protect his family in a savage era. Fridegård narrates the tale with a cool, dispassionate, almost clinical tone that provides an ironic contrast to the vivid plot.
Religion certainly looms large in the story, where the Heathen majority are visited by eager Christian missionaries. But the overall view of religion of any sort is largely cynical, as befits a work of social realism.
The translation by Robert Bjork includes a lengthy essay placing Fridegård and his smith-hero in the larger context of Scandinavian literature. The book is out of print, but there are plenty of used copies at Amazon.com. It should provide an interesting read for anyone seeking an imaginative but unsentimental view of what it might have been like to live in a Heathen society on the verge of conversion.
The Norwegian paper Aftenposten reports that the Viking graves from the famous Oseberg and Gokstad ship burials will be reopened in September for further study.
Experts fear the human remains from Viking times may be in the process of disintegrating, if they haven’t already. They want to try to extract them to apply new methods of studying bone matter that can yield new information on the Vikings’ genetics and background.
Bone fragments from one of the Oseberg women were subjected to DNA analysis earlier this year. The tests showed a link to the Black Sea area.
Both ships can be seen at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.
Swedish archaeologist Dr. Martin Rundkvist has written up a brief article on a gold foil figure die that his team found in April. He has published the preprint on his blog.
The die would have been used to make small gold foil figures known as guldgubbar. Guldgubbar, which are only found in Scandinavia, date from the Vendel period and depict men and women singly and in pairs. The figures have been interpreted as gods or heroes, although contemporary scholars are beginning to dispute this interpretation.
This piece depicts a single woman. The line drawing at left shows the woman’s dress and posture; she may be sitting on a low stool. Although the meaning of their iconography is unclear, guldgubbar are the expression of a high Heathen aristocratic culture. Rudolph Simek’s paper Rich and Powerful: the Image of the Female Deity in Migration Age Scandinavia is a detailed interpretation of exactly this type of figure. Simek’s student Sharon Ratke has a website where she shares her own research, along with more information such as maps, a bibliography, and lots of pictures.
In November 2006, the Danish Asatru group Forn Siðr dedicated a contemporary runestone outside the Danish village of Jelling. Jelling is the site of the famous runestone erected by Harald Bluetooth to announce the Christianization of Denmark. With the modern stone, Forn Siðr celebrated their ninth anniversary and their recognition by the Danish government — choosing Jelling as a location to “tell the world that we’re back, and that Harald failed in his mission.”
The Forn Siðr website features an informative account of the runestone project in English. The account includes a translation of chairman Linda Nørgaard’s dedication speech, which details the mixed reception that met this project:
…We’ve also heard from many Danes that rejoyce and look forward to the unveiling of this stone. People that regard Forn Siðr and the stone project as interesting, even sympathetical, and certainly not provocative. The anger we’ve met during this project, has almost exclusively been from christians. We have no perception of any anger coming from ordinary Danes regarding this celebration of our anniversary, only from christians. So I’m forced to say, short and simple, in a language everyone understands: We really can’t be bothered with it.
She also gives a vision for Asatru in Denmark:
That is why I hope that the work of art you’ll be seeing in a moment will bring people joy, and bring pleasure not only to the members of Forn Siðr, but to all people locally and nationally, who enjoys an exciting work of art and believes that there is room for The Old Ways in this country. Forn Siðr is non-missionary, which means that Asatru is a belief that everyone needs to find and embrace by themselves. But I personally believe that many more are ready to embrace Asatru, if only they can find the strength to free themselves of their given limitations and of other people’s expectations. So it’s not the purpose of the stone to facilitate mass conversion of people to Asatru, or in any other way force something upon people, but only to act as an inspiration in many ways.