Norse heathenry

What it is

The modern revival of pre-Christian Germanic and Scandinavian religion, known as Ásatrú (loyalty to the Æsir), Heathenry, Forn Siðr (the old custom) and other names depending on country and group.

Its gods are familiar even to people who know nothing else about it: Óðinn, seeker of knowledge and hanged sacrifice to himself; Þórr, defender; Freyja and Freyr of the Vanir; Frigg; Týr, who lost a hand binding the wolf; and Loki, whose status among modern heathens is genuinely contested.

Its distinctive values, as modern practitioners generally frame them: hospitality, the binding force of an oath, frith — right relationship within a community — and wyrd, a conception of fate as woven rather than decreed, in which past action constrains but does not eliminate what follows.

Where it came from

The source problem is severe and should be stated first.

Almost everything known about Norse religion comes from texts written after Christianisation, by Christians. The Prose Edda was composed around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson, an Icelandic chieftain, politician and Christian, as a handbook for poets who needed to understand the old allusions. The Poetic Edda survives in a single manuscript from around 1270. The sagas are later still.

So the tidy pantheon and mythology are transmitted through a man writing two centuries after his country converted, for a literary purpose, and shaped by his own Christian education. Where archaeology, place names and skaldic verse can be checked against him, he is sometimes confirmed and sometimes not.

Tacitus's Germania (98 CE) describes Germanic practice from a Roman distance and with Roman purposes.

The modern revival began in the early 1970s. Iceland's Ásatrúarfélagið was founded in 1972 by the farmer and poet Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson and granted state recognition as a religion in 1973 — the first modern pagan body anywhere to receive it. It is now building a temple in Reykjavík. Comparable organisations formed in Denmark, Britain and the United States.

How it is practised

Blót — offering, historically of animals and now generally of drink, food or objects, shared with the gods and then with the community.

Sumbel — a ritual of shared drinking in which the horn passes and each person toasts, boasts of what they intend, or speaks of the dead.

Reverence for ancestors and for local land-spirits, seasonal observance, and — in some groups — the runes discussed under their own article.

Seiðr, a form of magic associated in the sources with Freyja and with Óðinn, is practised by some modern heathens. The sources associate it with women, and describe it as bringing ergi — shame, with strong sexual connotation — on men who practise it. Modern reconstructions handle that inheritance in various ways.

What we can and cannot say

We can say the political fight is the central fact about modern heathenry, and that the community is largely winning it.

The split is between folkish heathenry, which holds that the religion belongs properly to people of Northern European descent, and universalist or inclusive heathenry, which rejects that outright.

The folkish position shades into and overlaps with white nationalism, and the largest folkish body in the United States, the Asatru Folk Assembly, is designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

And the response from within heathenry has been organised and public. In 2016 more than a hundred heathen organisations across many countries signed Declaration 127 — named for a verse of the Hávamál about not tolerating an enemy — publicly repudiating the AFA and refusing to work with it or its members.

Iceland's Ásatrúarfélagið has been consistently explicit. It performs same-sex marriages, its high priest Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson has spoken repeatedly against racist appropriation of the tradition, and the organisation has stated plainly that anyone attempting to use the gods for racism is not welcome.

This matters because the runes, the symbols and the imagery have been used by the far right, as the runes article sets out, and heathens carry that whether they chose it or not. The community's response is one of the clearer examples in this site's territory of a tradition organising against its own extremists rather than ignoring them.

We can say the reconstruction is genuine and acknowledged. Serious heathens are generally frank that this is a modern religion built from fragmentary sources, and do not claim unbroken transmission — which distinguishes it from several traditions covered elsewhere here.

We cannot say what pre-Christian practice was like in any detail. The sources are late, filtered and thin, and honest practitioners say so.

Further reading

• The Poetic Edda, in Carolyne Larrington's translation.
• Neil Price, The Children of Ash and Elm (2020) — the archaeology and what it does and does not support.
• Declaration 127, and the Ásatrúarfélagið's public statements.