The Odinist Fellowship

Else Christensen and her husband Alex founded the Odinist Study Group in Canada in 1969, renaming it the Odinist Fellowship around 1971 after Alex's death. Else went on running it alone for decades, publishing the periodical The Odinist first from Canada and later from Crystal River, Florida, and became known within the movement as the "Folk Mother," a title that captures both her longevity in the role and the ancestral, ethnically framed version of the religion she taught.

That framing is the reason the Odinist Fellowship matters to the movement's later history as much as its own. Jeffrey Kaplan's academic study of the group places it squarely within a folkish current, the position that the old Northern gods belong specifically to people of northern European descent, in explicit contrast to a universalist current that later Heathen organizations, The Troth prominent among them, were founded partly to stand against. The split between those two positions remains one of modern Heathenry's most publicly argued fault lines, and the Odinist Fellowship is where an organized American version of the folkish side first took durable institutional form.

Christensen also grafted an anarchist political framework onto her Odinism, an unusual combination that set her apart from later folkish organizations as much as from universalist ones. The Fellowship did not survive her: she died in 2005, the organization dissolved, and much of its remaining membership moved to the Odinic Rite.