Norse Paganism

The gods fall into two groups, the Aesir and the Vanir, said to have fought a war and settled it by exchanging hostages. Odin presides, associated with poetry, sovereignty, the dead and the pursuit of knowledge at any price, and he is not a safe figure to deal with. Thor defends gods and humans against the giants, and appears far more often in personal names and in amulets than Odin does, which suggests the literary record overstates Odin relative to ordinary devotion. Freyr and Freyja, of Vanir origin, govern fertility, prosperity and love. Tyr is connected with law and with the binding of the wolf Fenrir. Loki has no attested cult anywhere.

Practice centred on the blot, a sacrifice at which an animal was killed, cooked and eaten, its blood sprinkled on the participants and the precinct. The sumbl was a formal round of drinking in which toasts, boasts and oaths were made binding before witnesses. Rites took place in halls, at open-air enclosures and at natural sites; purpose-built cult buildings are attested archaeologically but were not the norm.

There was no single doctrine of the afterlife. Warriors chosen by Odin go to Valhalla, half of the slain go to Freyja, the drowned to Ran, most of the dead simply to Hel, and a strong separate tradition has the dead remaining in the burial mound near the family farm. Ragnarok, the destruction of gods and world followed by renewal, is described most fully in the poem Voluspa, which was written down after conversion and may carry Christian influence.

Underneath much of it lies a sense of fate as already laid down, which honour requires one to meet well rather than escape.

The difficulty is that the Norse wrote almost nothing about their religion while they were practising it. Runic inscriptions are short and formulaic. What survives is largely Icelandic and largely Christian.

The Prose Edda was written around 1220 by Snorri Sturluson, a Christian chieftain, lawspeaker and politician, roughly two centuries after Iceland converted. He wrote it as a handbook so that poets could still understand the mythological references traditional verse depended on. He is systematic, entertaining and the single richest source, and he is also arranging into a coherent narrative material that may never have been coherent. His prologue explains the gods as human kings later mistaken for divinities, a standard medieval device for handling pagan matter safely.

The Poetic Edda is a collection of anonymous mythological and heroic poems preserved in the Codex Regius, a manuscript of about 1270. Some of the verse is older than the manuscript; how much older is argued over. The sagas, written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, describe pagan practice at several removes and with literary purposes of their own.

Outside observers add a little. Ibn Fadlan, an Arab envoy, watched a Rus ship burial on the Volga in 922 and recorded a human sacrifice. Adam of Bremen wrote about Uppsala without going there.

Archaeology supplies what the texts cannot: hammer amulets, the Oseberg and Gokstad ship burials, the Gotland picture stones, hall sites with deposits of animal bone, and place-names compounded with divine names. Where the texts and the ground disagree, current scholarship generally follows the ground.

Modern Heathenry is a new religion that takes its gods and much of its practice from the old sources. It has no continuity with pre-Christian worship and does not usually claim any. The Asatruarfelagid was recognised by Iceland in 1973 and has become the country's largest non-Christian religious body; comparable organisations exist across Scandinavia, in the United Kingdom, in North America and elsewhere. Practice centres on blot and sumbl, on hospitality and oath-keeping, and on the household and local group rather than congregational worship.

The movement has a persistent political problem, and it is better stated than avoided. Norse symbolism was appropriated by German nationalists before and during the Nazi period, and is used today by white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups, who have carried hammers, valknuts and runes at rallies and use them extensively in prisons. A minority of Heathen organisations, usually described as folkish, restrict membership by ancestry.

The response from the rest has been explicit and public. In 2016 a statement known as Declaration 127, named for the stanza of the Havamal that tells you to speak out when you see wrongdoing, was issued in denunciation of the Asatru Folk Assembly after that body stated that non-white and LGBT people were not welcome in its tradition. By 2022 it had been signed by around 180 organisations in more than twenty countries. Iceland's Asatruarfelagid has repeatedly and publicly rejected racial readings of the religion, and did so from its founding, when the Lutheran bishop opposed recognition on precisely those grounds.

The symbols are worn overwhelmingly by people with no such politics, which is exactly why the dispute matters so much to Heathens themselves.