The Northern Path

In July of this year the Danish organization Forn Sidr received permission to establish a Heathen cemetery in the town of Odense. Although this isn’t exactly breaking news, the coverage in English-language media has been somewhat sparse, so here is a translation of the original Danish story in the (yes, Christian) newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad.

Admirers of Odin and Thor get their own cemetery
July 7, 2008   Now Asatruar can be buried in a shared Heathen grave in Odense. Yet another sign that the Danish government is demonstrating openness toward smaller religious groups, says expert

Laura Elisabeth Schnabel
For the first time in a thousand years, Danish admirers of the old Scandinavian gods Thor, Odin and Loki will have a burial ground that is theirs alone. The municipality of Odense has given the green light to the establishment of a Heathen cemetery at the Assistens Cemetery in central Odense by the end of the year.

The membership of the largest Asatru organization, Forn Sidr, has tripled to 600 members since it was recognized as a religious community by the Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs in 2003. Thus the cemetery is also badly needed, said Søren Fisker, Forn Sidr’s vice president and cemetery liaison.

“When you establish a religious community, you should also be able to serve your members from cradle to grave, so getting a cemetery is a big breakthrough,” said Fisker.

In the past, Asatruar have had to have their ashes scattered at sea or be buried in a churchyard. But not everyone is happy with this arrangement:

“Many Asatruar define themselves precisely by being different from the majority of Christians. Therefore they don’t want to have parochial Christian church councils deciding on the gravestones, symbols and plants at their gravesites either,” says Søren Fisker.

Forn Sidr has already chosen a row of large stones that will form the outline of an 18 meter-long Viking ship, thus forming the boundary of the shared Heathen cemetery. Søren Fisker hopes that other municipalities that operate cemeteries in larger towns will also be sympathetic to establishing cemeteries for Asatruar.

If the Center for Cemeteries, which oversees the five cemeteries in the municipality of Copenhagen, is approached by Forn Sidr, the Center would be positively disposed right away.

“They could certainly rent an area. We have a very broad definition of what is permissible. But of course we would say no if they suddenly wanted to raise stones that were 15 meters high,” said Tom Olsen, the daily director of cemeteries.

Forn Sidr is the only one of 35 Asatru groups in the country that has been recognized as a religious community.

René Dybdal Pedersen of Aarhus University, who has done research on Asatru and written a book on new religious groups, estimates that there are a couple of thousand Asatruar in Denmark in total.

According to Pedersen, the Heathen cemetery is part of a general movement in which people from different religious communities want to be buried in separate places under separate conditions.

“I think this will develop into a liberalization of burial practice, so that there will be an opening for people to be buried according to their wishes,” he said.

He sees the Asatru cemetery as an expression of greater openness toward religious communities other than Christianity.

“Previously the Ministry for Ecclesiastical Affairs recognized religious communities. Now this is done by a committee of theologians, lawyers and sociologists of religion among others, which has created a greater opening for the government not to focus exclusively on Christian groups. We have been living in a religiously diverse society for a long time. Now this is spreading to the public system,” said René Dybdal Pedersen.

Among other things he points to the fact that Muslims have gotten their own cemetery, and to a new law that makes it possible to establish cemeteries in Denmark’s forests.

I’m spending a a week in Stockholm, and today I made a day trip out to Gamla Uppsala, which I hadn’t visited since 1987. While the somewhat murky Blackberry photo shows a quiet scene, it’s actually a fairly busy place, with people coming and going and the air ringing with the chatter of birds, tourists and schoolchildren.

The sixth-century mounds are indeed monumental in size, rising from rich agricultural land that must have helped Uppsala become the power base and population center it was by the third century.

At the entrance to the mounds is a round museum building reminiscent of a yurt or a muffin. The locals objected when it was built, saying it looked like a spaceship had landed, but once you are inside the design seems absolutely right: one wall of the museum is made of glass, providing a remarkable view of the mounds that is echoed by the round interior space.

I was slightly alarmed to find that I didn’t really know how to respond to this place. There were so many fences and trails and signs in the visible landscape and such a jumble of fragments from Adam of Bremen and Ynglinga Saga floating around in my head that a pure emotional, aesthetic or spiritual response was simply out of the question.  However I felt better after seeing a museum exhibit showing how the site had been used over the centuries as a backdrop for all sorts of political and romantic statements, from Gustav Vasa to Rudbeck to Bernadotte, from students drinking horns of mead to Pope John Paul holding mass there in 1989. (There was no mention of the return of practicing Heathens to the site.) Nearly every illustration showed the mounds absolutely crawling with people, all watching some sort of spectacle and with no idea what the hills they were standing on represented or contained.  And indeed very little seems to be known about their contents, even to this day. For me this place remains even more of a mystery than it was before.