Hammerhof

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...