Blót and the year’s wheel, cult sites and living heathenry – belief then and now.
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When the nights are longest and the fire in the house is warmest, the departed draw nearer. Yule, the midwinter feast, is not only a feast of light …
Read more →For our ancestors the year was no sheet on the wall but hard, beautiful work: to sow, to tend, to harvest, to store. The feasts sat exactly on the …
Read more →The old faith of our ancestors has not died out – it is being lived again. “Ásatrú”, literally “true to the Æsir”, is today the common name for …
Read more →“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 where memory keeps growing …
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 their most precious possession …
Read more →They appear almost in passing in the old texts, yet they are everywhere: the disir, female spirits who watch over a family. Sometimes protecting …
Read more →Forget the translucent veil-ghost. The draugr of the Old Norse sagas comes back in the flesh – heavy as an ox, darkly discoloured, uncannily strong …
Read more →In the sagas of the North, no one sleeps harmlessly. A dream there is rarely a mere echo of the day, but a messenger: it announces death, a battle, a …
Read more →A ring is a closed circle – no beginning, no end. No wonder the people of the North laid their most binding promises upon a ring. On the altar of the …
Read more →The old Norse people did not think of a person as a sealed self inside a skin. A life involved more powers than that: a spirit that followed you, and …
Read more →A word that tastes of cold air and carved staffs: Gandreið. The “magic ride” carries us to the dark frontier of Norse sorcery, to the place where the …
Read more →For our ancestors death was no taboo but a passage accompanied with care. They closed the dead one's eyes, made him ready for the last journey, drank …
Read more →The Germanic year knew no spring – only summer and winter. And its feasts followed the rhythm of field and war. Snorri names three great blóts; to …
Read more →January, February, March – these names are Roman, and late arrivals at that. Only between the 16th and 18th centuries did they finally win out here …
Read more →While elsewhere a round man with a reindeer sleigh rolls in, in Iceland thirteen troll boys come down from the mountains – and their mother keeps a …
Read more →A fire in the open, a drinking horn passed from hand to hand, a few words to gods and ancestors, and at the end a draught of mead poured into the …
Read more →A life has its great thresholds: the arrival of a child, the coming-together of two people, the farewell to a loved one. Heathen thought has a feast …
Read more →There are cosier Christmas figures than a house-sized cat that prowls through the winter night to check who did not receive a new piece of clothing …
Read more →Before a Viking ship glided toward home, the crew took the carved dragon-heads down from the prow. Not out of modesty, but out of consideration …
Read more →Between the years lies a time that ticks differently: the Rauhnächte, the Twelve Nights around the winter solstice. The world holds its breath, the …
Read more →Emperor Barbarossa sits in the Kyffhäuser, his head propped on the table, his beard grown through the stone slab, waiting until one day he returns …
Read more →The summer solstice is the longest day of the year – and was one of the great feasts of pagan Europe. Germanic peoples, Celts and Slavs celebrated it …
Read more →The Vikings had no capitals, but they had places of power: sites where law was spoken, sacrifice made and the ancestors remembered. Two Swedish …
Read more →In the middle of January, when the wind scours Iceland and the days have only just begun to lengthen again, Icelanders set a table with soured ram's …
Read more →Through the long winters of Iceland's farmsteads ran a fear that had nothing to do with trolls or giants and everything to do with the neighbour next …
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