"Asatru" sounds ancient, yet as an organisation it is younger than many rock bands: the Icelandic association was founded in 1972 and recognised by the state in 1973, the largest German-language association in 2000. Behind it lies a long prehistory of Romanticism, antiquarian scholarship and, unfortunately, völkisch ideology. Here we go through who is organised how today, what the communities rely on, how they treat their sources, and where scholarship draws its limits.
The word Ásatrú is modern Icelandic and means "belief in the Æsir" or "loyalty to the Æsir". The Æsir are the main family of gods in Norse tradition, among them Odin, Thor and Frigg. In medieval Old Norse the word is not attested as the name of a religion. It is a coinage of recent times, and the study of religion places it in the orbit of Scandinavian national Romanticism. The Icelandic scholar Eggert Sólberg Jónsson set Ásatrú in this context, as Stefanie von Schnurbein summarises in the introduction to her book Norse Revival (Brill 2016).
Anyone who looks into Germanic paganism today meets a whole family of terms. Since the 2000s Scandinavia has favoured Forn Sed or Forn Siðr ("old custom"). The English-speaking world says Heathenry, and some groups prefer "Odinism", a word that Schnurbein traces back to the Australian Alexander Rud Mills and that parts of the scene still connect with right-wing currents. According to Schnurbein, Anglo-American groups later turned to "Asatru" to avoid the monotheistic ring of "Odinism". The German association Eldaring calls "Asatru" a common synonym for modern paganism in its self-description, and adds that most sources come from Scandinavia because the old religion survived longest there.
What the groups share is polytheism: many gods, plus ancestors, plus beings of nature. The Eldaring explicitly considers a fixed ranking of the gods unjustifiable. There is no holy book, no creed, no dogma. That is exactly what makes it hard for outsiders to describe "the" Asatru.
The story of organised Asatru begins, if you like, on a farm. Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson was a farmer and poet, and he became the first allsherjargoði of the Ásatrúarfélagið, founded in 1972. The allsherjargoði is the head of the community; the word picks up Old Icelandic goði, the chieftain who in the Viking Age combined cult duties with a judicial district. Iceland recognised the association as a religious body in 1973, a few months after its founding. Since then it has been among the registered religious communities, which are co-funded through the state parish fee (sóknargjald).
How many members does it have? Statistics Iceland records the figures in five-year steps, and the curve is strikingly steep. In 1990 there were 98 people, in 2000 just over 500, in 2010 around 1,400, in 2015 just over 3,200, in 2020 about 4,800, and in 2025 around 6,100, which is a little under 1.6 percent of the population. Two cautions apply. First, Iceland has only about 380,000 inhabitants, so small numbers look big. Second, being counted as a member does not mean practising. A register entry says nothing about how often someone attends a blót.
Since the 2010s the association has been building a house of its own. The Hof Ásatrúarfélagsins is rising on the slope of Öskjuhlíð in Reykjavík, designed by Magnús Jensson, a member of the community. The first sod was cut on 20 March 2015, and actual construction dragged on from 2017 because of problems with the ground. The cost estimate climbed from 130 million krónur (2015) to around 300 million (2020). Figures for size vary by source, from a 350-square-metre main room for no more than 250 people to roughly 800 square metres in total. The building was meant to open in stages. It shows how far a modern community stands from the historical cult houses: the hall is intended for weddings, naming ceremonies and funerals, so it is a place for rites of passage, not a sacrificial site with blood ritual.
The Icelandic community's stance on social questions is also telling. By its own account its priests have married same-sex couples since 2003, seven years before the state opened marriage. It also says it is open to everyone and explicitly distances itself from neopagan groups that promote white supremacy. Religion News Service reported this in 2024. These are self-descriptions, but they are publicly documented and have been consistent for years.
The Ásatrúarfélagið was founded in 1972 and registered by the Icelandic state as a religious community in 1973. The first allsherjargoði was Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson. According to Statistics Iceland, membership rose from 98 (1990) through about 3,200 (2015) to about 6,100 (2025), roughly 1.6 percent of the population. The ground-breaking for the Hof in Reykjavík took place on 20 March 2015.
After Iceland the other Nordic countries follow, mostly in the 1990s. In Sweden the Sveriges Asatrosamfund formed in 1994 and renamed itself Samfundet Forn Sed Sverige in 2010. The Nordic Asa-Community, founded in 2014, is now considered the larger body there and says it has banned political symbols from its activities. The Forn Sed association, by contrast, takes open political positions, for instance against xenophobia. In Denmark Forn Siðr – Asatro og Vanatro Samfund was formed in 1999 and officially recognised in 2003. In Norway the Åsatrufellesskapet Bifrost was founded in 1996, with about 300 members in 2011, and Forn Sed Norge in 1998, with about 85 members in 2014. Both are state-recognised and may therefore perform legally binding ceremonies.
Norway also has Vigrid, a group that many classify as neo-Nazi because it teaches racial doctrines and uses the colours of the Nazi flag. That belongs to a sober inventory as well: the scene is not uniform, and some groups that invoke Norse gods have nothing to do with the communities described here. We return to this distinction below.
All of these figures come from the overview of modern paganism in Scandinavia that Wikipedia has compiled, which points to specialist literature. For groups this small, numbers shift from year to year, and membership lists are not a count of people who actually practise. As orders of magnitude they still serve.
That people turned back to Wodan or Odin in the twentieth century has roots reaching well before the 1970s. The ground was prepared in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Herder and the Brothers Grimm discovered Germanic language, legend and myth as national heritage. Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie of 1835 reconstructed a vanished world of gods from fairy tales, field names, superstitions and Eddic texts. What scholars began as collecting became, among poets, composers and painters, a fashion.
The religious history around 1900 is less harmless. In 1900 the Germanist Ernst Wachler published a pamphlet calling for the revival of a racially conceived ancient Germanic religion. Associations followed soon after: the Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft in 1907, a Guido von List Society in 1908, the Deutschgläubige Gemeinschaft in 1911, the Germanenorden in 1912. Guido von List, an Austrian occultist, invented an "Armanen" doctrine mixed with theosophy and racial ideas. What List presented as "ancient Germanic wisdom" has no basis in the sources. He also produced the version of the "Armanen runes" that still circulates in some circles; more on that in our piece on rune research.
The Weimar Republic had a colourful "German-faith" scene. Krause and co-authors (1977) distinguish four currents: Jakob Wilhelm Hauer's Deutscher Glaube, a racialist "Nordic" circle around Ludwig Fahrenkrog, Alfred Rosenberg's political-völkisch approach, and Mathilde Ludendorff's worldview. In 1933 several groups merged into the Arbeitsgemeinschaft der Deutschen Glaubensbewegung. Heinrich Himmler's interest in Germanic lore and the occult is a frequent topic; the historian Heinz Höhne judged that Himmler's neopagan customs remained largely a paper exercise, more planning and ceremonial design than lived religion. After 1945 the field was discredited, and völkisch groups regrouped from 1951, for example in the Artgemeinschaft.
Why tell this at such length? Because it explains why serious communities today keep their distance so clearly. In its self-description the Eldaring explicitly excludes theosophy and ariosophy, precisely the line running through List. The demarcation is not a phrase but an answer to a documented history.
The modern movement as we know it took shape in the 1970s in several places at once. Iceland had the association already mentioned. In Britain the Odinic Rite arose, whose founders developed the "Nine Noble Virtues" in this period, a list of values still quoted in many groups. An important point for readers looking for a shortcut to the source: this list of virtues is not in the Edda. It is a modern compilation that appeals to ideals echoing in sagas and in the Hávamál, but it was never handed down in that form.
In the USA Stephen McNallen founded the Viking Brotherhood in 1972, which developed into the Asatru Free Assembly in 1974 and ceased operations in 1986. From it came the Asatru Folk Assembly (AFA) in 1994 or 1995; the sources give both years. The word "Folk" is no accident, and we come back to its consequences in the section on demarcation.
For the question of what is "old" about this movement, the answer is: the texts are old, the organisational form is young. Association law, membership fees, newsletters and annual general meetings are unknown to any Viking Age source. The groups say so themselves; the Eldaring describes itself as a "dogma-free, inclusive, pagan community".
In the German-speaking world the story runs differently, because the völkisch prehistory weighs particularly heavily here. Key dates from the overview of modern paganism in central Europe: Géza von Neményi founded the Heidnische Gemeinschaft (HG) in Berlin in 1985. It explicitly distances itself from far-right ideas and has published the magazine Der Runenstein for decades. In 1991, after a split within the HG, von Neményi reactivated the Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft. In the 1990s groups modelled on English-language examples appeared, such as the Rabenclan (1994), a German chapter of the Odinic Rite (1995) and Nornirs Ætt (1997).
In 2000 came the Eldaring e. V., at the time an offshoot of the American organisation The Troth. It is now one of the largest German-language communities, also serves members in Austria and Switzerland, and publishes the magazine Herdfeuer and the ritual book Eldariten (2022). The structure is deliberately lean. By its own account there are no religious offices and no ritual leaders appointed by the association: each blót group decides its own form. Members need not belong to any nationality or ethnic origin.
Switzerland is a special case. According to the overview there is no organised association of its own; a loose network called Firner Situ has devoted itself to Alpine paganism since 2006. In Austria the emphasis among neopagans lies more on Celtic-inspired currents, which has to do with the Hallstatt culture.
How many people belong? The Eldaring reported about 600 members in 2024. Reliable overall figures for Germany do not exist; even the boundaries are hard to draw, because many practitioners belong to no association. Research puts paganism worldwide at no more than roughly 20,000 people, a figure to read with caution because it rests mainly on organised members.
The great textual sources are the Edda, that is, the poems of the Codex Regius from the late thirteenth century and the handbook of Snorri Sturluson from around 1220, plus the sagas of Icelanders and the kings' sagas. Schnurbein notes that the Eddic poems were central to the reception, with Völuspá and Hávamál quoted most often. This is literature by Christians, written down two to three centuries after Iceland's conversion around the year 1000. It preserves older material, but it is not a ritual manual.
Where does it say how a sacrifice proceeded? There are accounts, but they are patchy: Snorri describes a sacrificial feast in Hákonar saga góða, Adam of Bremen around 1075 the temple at Uppsala, and Eyrbyggja saga the sanctuary of Þórólfr Mostrarskegg. These testimonies come from outsiders or from later writers. Archaeology adds a little: at Hofstaðir in northern Iceland cattle were beheaded over many years and their skulls displayed (Neil Price 2020). That is evidence of cult practice, not a ritual text. How mythology was lived in daily life remains largely open.
Scholars see a permanent problem here. Michael Strmiska described heathen beliefs as "riddled with uncertainty and historical confusion". Gregorius sees "no real continuity" between pre-Christian and modern religion, Pizza speaks of an "invented tradition", Blain of a "religion constructed from partial material". The overview article on Heathenry quotes them so. Anyone who engages seriously must admit that Asatru is reconstruction. Serious communities say so themselves. The Eldaring holds a "critical reception of the sources in the context of scholarly research" to be indispensable.
"Offerings to the gods are not an act of renunciation that we suffer, but an act of sharing and gratitude for our well-being."Eldaring e. V., Selbstverständnis (as of 2024); our English rendering
"Asatru is the ancient religion that survived in secret." There is no evidence for this. Research assumes a revival that begins in the nineteenth century and consolidates in the twentieth. The Icelandic community was founded in 1972, the Eldaring in 2000. What existed in Iceland and elsewhere was folk belief, tales of elves, trolls and land spirits, but no continuous pagan church. Drawing a line from the Middle Ages to today's associations goes beyond the sources.
Practice is at the centre. A blót (sacrifice, veneration) has three parts in most groups: an opening with the declaration of thing peace and invocation, the offering with libation and sumbel, and a closing in which the libation is poured out. The Eldaring's closing formula reads "From the gods to the earth to us, from us to the earth to the gods". The horn passed around in the sumbel goes back to Paul Bauschatz's research in the 1970s, which interpreted early medieval drinking feasts as ritual. A full account with all sources is in How do pagans celebrate today?.
Then there are festivals through the year. Here the details matter, because the frequently cited "eight festivals of the wheel of the year" are a modern scheme and not identical with the attested Germanic festival calendar. More in The Germanic festivals and our blót calendar. And there are celebrations that accompany a life, namely naming, wedding and farewell, which we treat separately in the piece on pagan rites of passage.
According to Religion News Service the Icelandic community mainly holds two blóts: a summer blót in April and a winter blót in October. It says there is no revealed truth and no strict commandments, only "polite recommendations". That sounds different from the impression some films or games give of Viking religion, and it fits a religion whose texts hand us no dogma.
The Eldaring e. V. describes itself in its self-description (as of 2024) as a "dogma-free, inclusive, pagan community", politically neutral, without religious offices, with blót groups that run themselves. It excludes racism, right- and left-wing extremism, homophobia, sexism, and theosophy and ariosophy, and expels members who are later assigned to such a grouping. This is the documented self-presentation; whether every single group keeps to it, this source naturally cannot check.
To understand why the term causes so much dispute, you need a map. For Norse Revival Stefanie von Schnurbein conducted about 25 interviews, mostly in 2010, with leaders from Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, the USA, England and Germany. Her scheme has three currents, which never appear in pure form.
The first she calls racial-religious: religion is tied to a biological concept of race. According to her this current has been increasingly marginalised since the 1990s. The second is ethnicist, which others call "folkish": religion is tied to a shared heritage of landscape, climate and culture, and it tends towards cultural essentialism. The third is a-racist, which others call "universalist": it rejects race as a category and understands culture as fluid and mixed. The middle of today's scene, Schnurbein says, moves between the second and third. The sociologist Mattias Gardell distinguishes, for the USA, an anti-racist, a radical racist and an "ethnic" group in a similar way. A 2015 survey found, according to the overview article, that more heathens held universalist than folkish views. A caution: surveys in such small, self-recruited groups are not representative studies.
Schnurbein sums up her thesis briefly: the growing respectability of Ásatrú rests on two linked shifts, the sacralisation of culture and the culturalisation of religion. That means myth and custom are met as cultural heritage, and that heritage is then given religious weight. The Romantic link between nature, ethnicity, culture and religion has, in her view, travelled from the radical right into the mainstream, which is why it always pays to look closely at who means what when they speak of "heritage" or "roots".
The connection between Germanic symbols and far-right ideology is historically real, and it can be pinned to concrete cases. We name only what is documented.
Set against this are documented self-commitments by other communities. The Ásatrúarfélagið declares itself open to all and distances itself from racist neopagans. The Heidnische Gemeinschaft in Berlin, according to the overview, "explicitly" distances itself from far-right ideas. The Eldaring invokes the free democratic basic order, the General Equal Treatment Act and internationally recognised human rights. In the USA several kindreds have published inclusion statements, such as the one known as "Declaration 127", which the group Hrafnar, for example, has signed. In Sweden the Nordic Asa-Community marks its position by banning political symbols.
"Anyone who venerates Germanic gods is on the right." That is a shortcut the sources do not support. There are far-right groups with Germanic vocabulary, and there are communities that explicitly separate themselves from them and present themselves as "inclusive". Conversely: anyone who considers the demarcation superfluous ignores the prehistory from List to Lemke. Both hold at the same time, and individual cases are a pointer, not proof about "the scene". We judge nobody; we only point to the state of the sources.
On worldview the Eldaring names a few cornerstones that recur elsewhere. There are nine worlds, as handed down in the Edda; wyrd, fate, is seen as a web in which the actions of all beings come together. Ancestors are honoured, "often not only one's personal forebears", from which responsibility towards descendants is supposed to follow. As magical practices the association names seiðr, spá and galdr; it considers harmful magic unethical. It also sees the scientific and the magical worldview as complementary, not opposed.
Historically, caution is needed. The nine worlds appear in Völuspá and Snorri, but no source provides a list that every interpreter reads the same way. Wyrd is an Old English word; the picture of a web is, as we show in our piece on the Web of Wyrd, a modern coinage. Seiðr is attested in sagas and Eddic poems, and there it often carries suspicion, a magical practice mostly ascribed to women, with consequences for reputation. That today's groups fill the terms with their own content is understandable. It has little to do with historical reconstruction in the strict sense.
The term "invented tradition" goes back to Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger and describes customs that look old but were assembled recently. Applied to Asatru it does not mean something is worthless. It names a working method: you take fragments from several centuries and several countries and join them into a sequence that never existed. A blót with thing peace, sumbel rounds and a closing formula is such a construct. Parts are attested: the word blót, the formula til árs ok friðar ("for a good year and peace"), shared drinking to gods and ancestors. The order, the texts and the formulas are new.
Many communities say so openly. That is the real strength: anyone who says what is reconstruction can talk to specialists. The writer and medievalist J. R. R. Tolkien gave the phenomenon a form of its own, which we look at in our piece on him: he invented worlds from source fragments but never claimed they were historical.
A comparison shows how differently the same idea can work. In Iceland Asatru is a recognised, comparatively large religious community with priests, legal standing and a building whose cost was most recently estimated at around 300 million krónur. The country has a long tradition of treating Edda and sagas as national literature; joining an association there means moving in a broad cultural space of resonance. In Norway, Sweden and Denmark the communities are small, partly state-recognised, with authority for legally valid weddings. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland, finally, the scene moves in an environment burdened by National Socialism. That explains the emphasis on constitutional loyalty and anti-discrimination that one finds in German statutes.
A further peculiarity is that in the German-speaking world not only Nordic tradition counts. The Eldaring says explicitly that older traditions of the region from the North Sea to the Alps are part of the heritage too. There is evidence for this, such as the Merseburg Charms from the ninth or tenth century, the only surviving pagan charms in Old High German, or Roman-period votive stones to the Matrons in the Rhineland. There are limits as well: from the Rhineland we have inscriptions but no rituals, and drawing a line to present practice remains design.
We are a workshop for laser-engraved natural slate, not a faith community, and we sell no worldview. Our motifs come from the tradition, and we keep to a simple rule: a motif is strong when its story is right. With topics like Asatru that means we name sources, label hypotheses as hypotheses, and do not hide the prehistory. If you value documented symbols, you will find a yardstick with us that applies here too. A piece like this one does not want to advertise or convert; it wants to sort things out.
What does Asatru mean? The Icelandic word means "belief in the Æsir" or "loyalty to the Æsir". It is a modern coinage for contemporary Germanic paganism; in the Middle Ages it is not attested as the name of a religion.
Since when has Asatru existed as an organisation? The Icelandic Ásatrúarfélagið was founded in 1972 and recognised by the state in 1973. In Germany the Heidnische Gemeinschaft was founded in 1985 and the Eldaring in 2000.
Is Asatru a religion handed down from antiquity? No. The communities understand themselves as reconstruction based on the Edda, sagas and archaeology. Scholarship speaks of revival and, in part, of "invented tradition".
How many followers are there? In Iceland about 6,100 people were members in 2025, roughly 1.6 percent of the population. For Germany there is no reliable overall figure; the Eldaring reported about 600 members in 2024. For paganism worldwide, research gives no more than roughly 20,000.
Do Asatru communities have anything to do with right-wing extremism? Some groups do, others do not. Far-right appropriation is documented, for example in the American AFA, which the SPLC has listed as a hate group since 2018. Serious associations such as the Eldaring or the Icelandic Ásatrúarfélagið explicitly exclude racism.
Are there priests or a holy book? In Iceland there are priests (goðar); the Eldaring has no religious offices. There is no holy book anywhere; Edda and sagas are read critically, not as revelation.
For courage. For remembrance. For legends that live on.
How do heathens celebrate today? · The Germanic feasts · Seiðr – the magic · The Merseburg Charms · The Norse pantheon.
All Festivals & Belief articles →
“Under all roots is rest.” More and more people wish, at the end, not for a cool stone but for a tree – a living place …
Read more →Scarcely an image is so bound up with the Vikings as the burning ship drifting out to sea with the dead. The ship was …
Read more →They appear almost in passing in the old texts, yet they are everywhere: the disir, female spirits who watch over a …
Read more →Forget the translucent veil-ghost. The draugr of the Old Norse sagas comes back in the flesh – heavy as an ox, darkly …
Read more →