Hammerhof

  The lore is funny. First it was all written down by Christian monks in a time where you might not want to promote any sort of wild ideas about how cool pagans were. I recently picked up a book that a list of nine vices that Heathens will be punished for in Náströnd. Náströnd a place in Hel where Níðhöggr lives and chews on corpses. It is the afterlife for those guilty of murder, adultery, oath-breaking, and so on. Völuspá 38-39 talks about this realm and the book, which I will not mention, list locations in the lore where we can see examples of their vices and their punishments. This is an attempt to justify the vices. Punishments, and Náströnd itself. I have always been skeptical, thus these nine realms as a place of punishment for misdeeds have always seems suspect and a lot like the Christian Hell to me. So, a long time ago I put this aside and said… “I’ll get back to this.” Well, the time has come. So, let’s look at this. The nine so called vices are, murder, perjury, adult...

Throughout my Heathen life, I have tried to have daily routines that I do to bring spirituality to the world around me. We do not, and probably cannot, see the world the way The Ancestors [1] did. Our world is mundane, full of science and explanations to “why” things are. Seeing mysticism and magic doesn’t come easy. I sated that I “try” to have a daily routine. This does not always happen. In fact, most of the time it does not happen. Why? Well, because I let the modern world get in the way. Got to make coffee, get the kids up and off to school, go to work…and so on. By the time I think about a morning bede (prayer) I’m in the car and halfway too the office. I have read in several books, a few websites, and countless blogs that as Heathens we should have a daily ritual routine. I have read that The Ancestors did this and we should too. I amgoing to make an educated guess here and say that the idea that pre-Christian peoples, namely the Indo-European Tribes may have had some sort of d...

I have given a lot of thought to the cycles of the moon and lunar calendars. We know that the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic Tribes lived their lives by the cycles of the sun and the moon. We know that the months started and ended on the full moon and not the new moon. Contemporary written evidence shows us that the moon was used determine months in pre-Christan England.   The ancient English people […] reckoned their months by the course of eh moon, just as they were named from the moon just as they were named from in Hebrew and Greek. Accordingly, they called the moon móna, the month was called mónaþ. – Bede, De Mensibus Anglorum The archeological and written evidence that exists today shows us that t the sun, moon, and solstices all played a role in the everyday lives of the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons as well as their religious lives. The religious celebrations or holytides were placed throughout the year not by a calendar date for a lunar, solar, or seasonal cyc...

If you go to YouTube and look up Asatru, Germanic Pagan ism, or some sort of related topic you will find thousands of videos on the subject. A lot of these videos are very good, and I do watch a lot of them. Many of the presenters are pagan/heathens and in their professional lives are historians, archeologists, and anthropologists. I myself am a historian, so I can relate to them very well. Many of these videos discuss the history of the Germanic peoples “religion” versus modern Asatru practice. They discuss how Asatru was created by our contemporaries and most of the practices are NOT historically accurate. Now, being a historian, I completely agree, modern Asatru is mostly a fabrication by people over the past 50 years who are still alive today. Asatru is not historically accurate. Ok, I can deal with that. When I started down the pagan path, I knew that modern Asatru religion was not the religion of the Vikings, Saxons, or Germanic tribes of yesteryears…. I enter into Asatru with th...

Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson So, I watched a few YouTube videos on the topic of what to call the religion of the Germanic or Norse ancient peoples as it exists today for the modern practitioner. There was a lot of debate on the proper and politically correct terminology for the faith that I believe in. So, I am going to start with Asatru.   Asatru is Icelandic and a fairly modern term meaning "faith in the Æsir." The Æsir are one branch of Norse deities consisting of Odin, Frigg, Thor, Baldr, and so on. The term Asatru came into modern use in the 1970s in Iceland by the efforts of Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson and other Icelanders who had rejected Christianity and formed the Icelandic religious organization Ásatrúarfélagið ("Fellowship of Æsir faith"). The term Asatru was soon adopted in the United States and other countries. Stephen McNallen is possible the first American to make the term Asatru popular when he formed the Asatru Free Assembly in 1976 or there abouts. That bri...