I'm not even trying to be fair, impartial, or unbiased. This is a rant about people whose ahistorical bullshit and blood and soil appropriation of ancient cultures they have no relation to beyond living in vaguely the same place to make themselves feel better about working in cubicals pisses me off.
This shit just pisses me off. I did Viking larping for years, studied some Archeology, read a lot of very boring site reports. These guys are a bunch of neo-pagans, emphasis on neo, making shit up to fit modern white-supremacist notions of a mythical golden age because Romans and Christians showed up and turned everyone in to [misogyny noises].
There's just so much that pisses me off. The droning, and throat singing, and all that shit? Has nothing to do with Europe at any period in the last 10,000 years. Thoraboos just grabbed it from other parts of the world because they think it's dark and scary or something. What we actually have attested of viking, ei early medieval Northern European, entertainment consisted of what were basically rap battles, with people getting up to show off by dissing each other using an elaborate poetic language of word games, metaphors, allusions, and references that was, by design, hard to follow; Being clever and inventive was part of the game.
They're dressed like shit - Apparently the antlers are based on some artifacts found at Starr Carr, England. The Starr Carr site in 9,000 years old. It has nothing, at all, what so ever, to do with vikings, germans, or any people or culture recognizably related to Europeans.
idk what's with the dull colors. Vikings were kind of famous for wearing brightly colored clothes in clashing colors.
And the obsessive focus about droning on and on about Odin this and Odin that. For one, the Odin cult is fairly recent. I think after like 500ad, at best guess, with Thor and Freyr probably pre-dating that. And who knows what was going on prior to that. The people living in Europe at the time were almost entirely illiterate. They didn't write things down so we don't know what their pictures depict or what any of it meant.
My point is, mostly - "Norse Neo-Paganism" was invented in the 90s in Europe, and in the 60s in the US. In the US it was dreamed up by a white Neo-Nazi who was bored in Prison. It's totally, utterly, utterly ahistorical. It's just a mish-mash of neo-ager shit from the 60s, random Victorian esoteric-ism, terrible pop-history, and German romantic nationalism. And, I cannot emphasize this enough, the entire point of Germanic romantic nationalism was to create a unifying national mythology to convince all the German speaking people that they were part of the nation ethnic nation, which was flagrantly ridiculous and completely ahistorical. And it formed most of the basis for Nazi nationalism.
Nothing about any of this has anything to do with history or archeology. It's all about building a mythical golden age that conforms to modern nationalist and racial mythology. Europeans alienated by modernity and unsatisfied by Christianity are appropriating the practices of Indigenous people in order to try to create an indigenousness for themselves. It's pure what no theory does to a motherfucker. They don't like modern society, so instead of doing something about it they form a reactionary nationalist, racialized, and mythic rejection of it. And they don't even go for the cool parts, like dressing really pretty and combing your hair and singing poetry, that are actually attested; They make up this stupid militaristic grunting and growling bullshit while mashing together cultures thousands of years distant, spread across huge areas, all trying to create on through-going nationalist myth. They congratulate themselves about owning the Romans in Teutonberg forest, ignoring that Arminius was a Roman Equestrian, a Citizen, and that pretty much everyone at the time thought Rome was awesome since that's where the wine, engineers, bathes, and all the other cool shit came from. This nationalist "Romans vs. Germans" shit would have been completely bizarre to people of the time who didn't consider Romans an ethnicist (which they were not) and didn't consider themselves "Germans".
And then they jump 800 years forward to claim they're all vikings, a completely different culture with a different religion, different language, different economy, different everything. And then, without missing a single fucking beat, they start drawing medieval Icelandic Christian magic signs from the 1600s on themselves while reciting Snorri's 13th century Icelandic Christian fan-fic, in which the Norse gods are actually survivors of the Trojan war.
It's so fucking frustrating. Just jumping back and forth in history, snatching things from disparate periods, languages, and cultures, mixing in absolutely nonsense new-ager mysticism, flat out making things up that sound cool, dressing the whole thing up with hyper-masculine toxic dudebro bullshit, and, AND, fucking things up for the rest of us because now if I wear a thor's hammer or something people think I'm either a racist or a choose your own adventure idiot or both. Like if I hear one more asshole going on about how cool and germanic it was that his ancestors blew scary lur horns at the Germans and that makes him proud as a viking and would I like to see his authentic slavic pagan tattoos I'm going to throw my shield at his head. Some dipshit was like "Oh yeah the we know about the Germans because ibn Fadlan blah blah blah" and it's like you absolute fucking shithead, ibn Fadlan was hanging out with Rus on the fucking Volga!
I legit had an argument with some jackasses who were "reclaiming" the black sun, the SS one, and I could not hammer throught their fucking heads that Himmler made the fucking thing up and there was nothing to reclaim.
This ahistorical made up bullshit drives me absolutely fucking bonkers. Modern people trying to project their modern noias and alienation back on to ancient cultures we barely know anything about and coming up with weird fashy nationalist shit. Just absolutely infuriating at every level. And god forbid you tell any of these dipshits that there's lots of evidence that the adoption of Christianity across Europe was gradual and voluntary. Many of them are very strongly latched on to having a colonialism narrative of their very own so they can cry about the big mean christians who destroyed their manly natural magical authentic pan-european pagan golden age! Never mind that pretty much all of their fucking written sources ARE CHRISTIANS. Their whole conception of these cultures is mostly uncritically based on Christian fiction written for entertainment! Often hundreds of years after any of the cultural or religious practices described would have actually occured, if they were real at all!
Also apparently there are no drums to be found in "viking age" sites in Scandanavia?!?!?!
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
This reads like it was written by an ancient norse person who hibernated for a thousand years, Army of Darkness style, then woke up and is now looking around with
Its because white people like the idea of the whole 'rape and pillage might make right manly white man' Viking myth invented by white supremacists
I mean that one was invented by the English, which I suppose makes it invented by white supremacists. But only indirectly .
Isn't that basically how the Vikings operated though (except, of course, they wouldn't think of themselves as white)?
The thing sort of is that Vikings werent "a people" but specific people doing specific actions for profit, its like how you can engage in piracy and be a pirate because of that, but pirates are not "a people".
"Vik" is generally held to mean small fjords that pirates would launch out of using fast rowed ships to over-take heavier, less maneuverable merchant vessels. Vikings, according to this thought, were people who attackes from viks, and yeah, they were pirates.
The vast, vast majority of them were farmers, fishermen, crafts people, or slaves to the above three. Going viking was something a small portion of the population did, usually to raise seed money for a farm, fishing vessel, or their own viking expeditions. Vikings engaged in as much trade as pillaging but since every written account we have is from Christians who were absolutely fucking terrified of them (baring some corner cases like ibn Fadlan), they were mostly written about as horror movie monsters. They were famous travelers and traders - There's Muslim coins in Scandanvian medieval sites, for instance. Half the reason they were turning up in Inland France is that they had better ships than almost anyone in Europe, far more sea-worthy, faster, and often capable of navigating fairly shallow rivers. So they could go pretty much anywhere they wanted, and did, and a lot of them were pirates and pirates are exciting and scary so people wrote about the pirates and not the guys who showed up with five tons of salt herring, cat fur, and seal skins to trade for whatever the fuck French people had to trade for. Probably mud and heresy.
Re: Thinking of themselves as white; Beowolf is a spear-Geat or something. there were about eighteen flavors of Geats at the time and they all hated each other when they weren't fucking. He wasn't Swedish because the idea of Sweden didn't exist yet, because Nation-States were invented in the 17th and 18th centuries by assholes. Hrothgar wasn't Danish, he was a Scylding.
I would also like to hear more expert opinions on this, but I think it's always safe to keep in mind how the powerful of their times influenced the perception of the Vikings. Most of what we know outside of artifacts was written about by romans who has incentives to lie significantly about as much as possible. I follow a similar line for Romans to how I deal with Nazi propaganda: assume everything is a lie until corroborating evidence arises from sympathetic or more neutral sources. I guess we also have some evidence of later Vikings from the Norman invasions, but I'm still just unconvinced they were unique in terribleness or might-makes-right acts.
Most of what we know outside of artifacts was written about by romans
????? A good chunk is from the sagas, another good chunk is from Arab writers, and then you've got a lot from the English. While there were roman wirters who wrote about the vikings, that's only in the context of Varangians interacting with the Roman empire.
I guess I meant from before the sagas, because most people are referring to before the times when Vikings were highly influenced by other Europeans when they talk about the ruthlessness of Vikings. Maybe I'm the one wrong here though. Arab writers is totally new to me though, but that also sounds like it would be from much more recent times that the ahistoric fans are referring to
But do the sagas seem to paint a picture of a particularly dangerous/ruthless society? I was always kind of under the impression that they were fairly normal relative to pretty much every other culture's early stories
The "Viking age" is typically measured from the raid on lindisfarne in 793 AD to 1066 when the Normans conquer England. While "Going viking" was a phenomenon before this and also later, this also roughly fits with the most active period of Viking activity and so it useful.
The "saga age" was roughly from 800 to 1100 and overlaps therefore quite nicely with the "Viking age". While quite a few sagas were written later, and some aspects of their culture were only written about later, the most active period of writing was contemporary with the "Viking age". And typically done by people who were writing about events that happened quite close to their own life.
The Arab writers were very contemporary too. They wrote about their interactions with the vikings, and typically in their capacity as envoys or diplomats.
Ibrahim ibn Yaqub wrote about vikings in the context of trade with the Danes in Schleswig, Abu al-Khattab was writing about diplomatic contact between Viking kings and the Cordoban court while serving in the court.
Ahmad ibn Fadlan was writing about his own travels with vikings, and his views and prejudices are the origin of a lot of our stereotypes of vikings. The idea of vikings as uncouth and unwashed brutes is from him. Because he was writing from the perspective of a highborn envoy interacting with merchant traders who did not have a religious demand to wash thrice a day.And what is true is that the various sources give us different views of the vikings. Vikings being written about by the victims of their raids (Discounting Andalusian but not other Iberian sources) describe them as almost demonic, because they see people popping out of the dark to raid, steal, pillage, abduct and burn.
Writers who live in Viking conquered lands typically write about them as a ruling elite (Here it is interesting to note English writers writing about how vikings were all obsessed with grooming, and as seducers of all the womenfolk, in marked contrast to the Arab perspective)
Writers with neutral or trade relations write about them as seafarers and travellers from far off lands.
And the Romans in Miklagaard write about them as a combination warrior caste, immigrants and barbarian threat.It is hardly realistic to assume they were evil in any spectacular sense if we look at the full picture. But a Viking raider (A partly tautological term) was a slave trading murdering robber on a boat. Its just that this fact gets acknowledged in a way we don't typically acknowledge the contemporary European knight as the same on horseback.
Very interesting, thanks a ton! I am still under the impression that those who make ahistorical claims are referring to some earlier periods, or at least that's how I'm usually interpreting it because of comments about the lack of influence of "eastern cultures" or about some fictional isolation. But I was totally unaware about those Arab connections, that's pretty fucking cool.
Last paragraph is exactly what I was hoping was true, because it's kind of my begingpoont for such discussions. Viking were murdering slavers in a time and material context where that was unfortunately normal, and we're not uniquely savage or particularly powerful outside of good raising boats
those who make ahistorical claims are referring to some earlier periods
They're usually just mashing together whatever they think is cool and germanic and [misogyny noses] without any real understanding of history or culture or anything. It's very incoherent.
And yeah, Muslims and Scandanavians both went all over the place and interacted on the edges of their spheres of influence. You find medieval Muslim stuff, mostly coins, in Medieval Scandanavian sites and they were definitely trading for exotic luxury goods, including I am 100% sure but don't have a citation silk from China.
Yeah the incoherence is exactly what I mean; classic fascists shit
There is some silk found from the era in Scandinavia, but most people assume it's from Central Asia or Roman (Byzantine), because at that time the Romans had a steady domestic silk production. I think the most "Exotic" stuff we know of in that sense is the presence of Indian goods in Scandinavia. There's a rather famous statue of Buddha known as the Helgö-Buddha which was found in alongside Coptic, Roman and Irish luxury items on the small Swedish island of Helgö in a dig dated to the Viking age.
It is much more common in "ahistorical" narratives surrounding vikings to project later innovations back unto the vikings rather than projecting previous era forwards unto the vikings. Because in a sense Scandinavian history starts here. Not in the sense that there weren't people here, or that they didn't interact meaningfully with history (The great migration, the Cimbri, the Geats and the goths [Bearing in mind here that the Goths had wandered out of Scandinavia centuries before they became what we now know them as] are all proof that his is obviously not the case), but in the sense that much of what went on prior is to this day a big ol' question mark.
It is much more likely for someone to project the idea of a "Sweden" back on to a person living in the area in 900 CE than for someone to project Cimbrian culture unto a guy living in Jutland in 900 AD because what the fuck is Cimbrian culture? What does that entail? Are those guys even Germanic they could be fucking Cimmerian or Celtic for all anyone knows.And while again I don't want to project unique evil unto the vikings, it is worth bearing in mind that the vikings were the center of the European slave trade at the time. The demand for European slaves in the Middle East/North Africa/Iberia was largely satisfied by varangians and vikings either semi directly through the rus or indirectly through venice/italy and Constantinople. The Muslims who went to Norse lands did so to negotiate either reprieves from raids or the price of slaves. Abd al-Rahman III, the guy who employed Abu al-Khattab, purchased about 10000 slavic slaves from Venetian traders, and those guys would have ultimately been captured by varangians/vikings.
And while again I don't want to project unique evil unto the vikings, it is worth bearing in mind that the vikings were the center of the European slave trade at the time. The demand for European slaves in the Middle East/North Africa/Iberia was largely satisfied by varangians and vikings either semi directly through the rus or indirectly through venice/italy and Constantinople. The Muslims who went to Norse lands did so to negotiate either reprieves from raids or the price of slaves. Abd al-Rahman III, the guy who employed Abu al-Khattab, purchased about 10000 slavic slaves from Venetian traders, and those guys would have ultimately been captured by varangians/vikings.
Holy shit I had no idea it was happening at that scale. Something new to look in to.
Some of the larger slave trade hubs would have castration houses to supply the eunuchs. The whole thing is fucking wild, and the medieval slave trade just sort of gets written out of history.
(Here it is interesting to note English writers writing about how vikings were all obsessed with grooming, and as seducers of all the womenfolk, in marked contrast to the Arab perspective)
And note; ibn Fadlan's encounter with the Rus on the Volga was like no shit THREE THOUSAND MILES from London, so who knows if they even had the same practices.
before the times when Vikings were highly influenced by other Europeans
They were always highly influenced by other Europeans. No one was ever really isolated. There was always trade and travel and people showing up in weird places. Viking ships could do like 100 miles a day or something absurd like that under good conditions. they were trading with people in Spain.
Probably should've made clearer that I intended to say "before intermingling resulted in significant cultural assimilation with other, more well known, Europeans like those in Rome, Spain, Russia, or turkey. These fascistic ahistorical people in referring to imagine such a time when the influence was so low that the "wimpy European culture" hadn't "fucked up the Aryan viking culture." I also realize that isolation was rarely ever a reality (though the coins thing from your other comment is also news to me, cool shit)
What do you do when music is intriguing, but the message and imagery are somewhat repulsive? When the visuals are fascinating, but you come away a bit queasy?
No, I’m not talking gangsta rap, although the same issue has occasionally been known to arise (cf Cardi B, my current favorite vocalist…)
I know it's not the subject of the post but holy shit shut the fuck up you fucking loser
This kind of shit somehow manages to only ever be written about rap and not about, say, the several decades of rock music where every band was obligated to have at least one song that's about pedophilia.
I really love just singing the worst songs written by a band when someone says they like them. It's easily the worst thing I do at parties. Oingo Boingo fans get BTFO every single time.
Gangsta rap is far more authentically viking than Heilung and I will kill people on this hill until I have raised up a mountain of skulls for my throne.
I know a few (left wing) Astaru practitioners and they're all very, very clear that they're appropriating symbology to make something entirely new and that there's way less continuity even compared to say Egyptian neopagans (And we're pretty clear on what Egyptians believed and how it developed, unfortunately much of the practice violates whatever the equivalent of the human remains act is in your country.)
Pretty sure if they saw someone with a black sun they'd have a black eye to go with it.
Yeah, Norse neopagans are either rad as fuck, or literal Nazis, with no in between
I unfortunately know a number of turbolib and centrist "neopagans" who basically practice the grab-bag version that our comrade is ranting about in the opener, and they practice it due to being white but wanting to be "interesting".
As a pagan myself, I know exactly the kind of person your talking about. People who put zero research or thought into their practice and just treat everything like a spiritual mad lib.
They tend to be the more new-agey types who's beliefs are unknowingly and uncritically parroting Helena Blavatsky and her fascist nonsense.
There is an entirely legitimate left-wing queer af reading of Norse mythology and I greatly support it. Like I am so angry about this because I actually believe in and try to live by a lot of the ideas presented in Norse mythology. Ideas like stoic endurance in the face of an undeniable fate, Integrity in the face of great hardship, being a lying cheating bastard, and transing your gender to do magic (Odin is trans deal with it). It all pisses me off so much. They create Odin as this great Teutonic Wagnerian war god when he's actually the god of being a lying cheating sneaky bastard who trans's his gender to do magic, always believes the ends justifies the means, back-stabs everyone, and does it all with a clear goal of pursuing a greater good by postponing Ragnarok.
All these dorks want to go to Valhalla. In Valhalla you wake up every morning, eat breakfast, and then spend the whole day being murdered by the most vicious psychopaths who ever lived. It's a warrior afterlife. Something pursued by people who had a fatalistic monomaniacal love of death and slaughter and wanted to do that forever. All these modern dipshits have never even swung a sword in anger, never killed anyone, have probably never tasted their own blood. They go out in to the woods wearing entire hides they bought from a thrift store and grunting and smearing themselves with shit pretending to be warriors when they've never fought for anything in their lives.
And it's misogynist as hell. Odin get's HALF OF THE VALOROUS DEAD. FREYJA HOSTS THE OTHER HALF IN FOLKVANGR! If you die in battle you've only got a 50/50 chance of chilling with Odin. You're just as likely to end up in Freyja's halls having to hang out with icky women. We all remember Freyja, right? One of the Norse gods of war? Rides around on a chariot pulled by cats, goddess of hunting, everyone is terrified of her? Odin this, Odin that, so much fucking wanking abut Odin when Freyja is his co-equal Goddess of war, equally sharing the valorous dead with him. Frankly, if I get shot by the cops, I hope I end up in Folkvangr because I don't want to deal with all these Odin worshiping dipshits.
God and so much of Norse mythology is literally just Thor and Loki going on road-trips and getting in to trouble. Where do they get all this chest beating hyper-masculine warrior stuff? Like Thor's hammer gets stolen one time and the Aesir blame it on Loki because they blame everything on Loki so Loki makes it right by getting Thor gay-married to a giant and theres a whole sequence at the wedding feast where the Giants are just in awe of Thor's feminine ability to eat the whole feast and drink everyone under the table. And yeah, when Thor gets Mjolnir back he flies in to a rage and kills all the giants, but up until that point it's a silly comedy about gender and masculinity where Thor, the mightiest and most loved of the gods, is humiliated and made to look foolish.
And where does the racism come from? The Aesir have a big fucking war with the Vanir and how do they settle things? Genocide? No, they make peace and start fucking. The Jotnar are the mortal enemies of the Aesir, except half the Aesir are married to Jotunn or banging Jotunn on the side! Loki fucked a horse for fuck's sake, and then Odin was like "Damn Loki your horse son is cool as hell I'm going to hang out with him all the time and ride him in to battle and we're going to be best buds." SLEIPNIR IS HALF-HORSE HALF JOTUNN. ODIN HAS NO PROBLEM WITH THAT AT ALL. It's all total bullshit. If anything the core message of Norse Religion isn't racism and "blood and soil" and "muh proud European ancestry". It's "Fuck everyone you meet, especially if you were just at war with them". The Aesir would solve the European refugee crisis by having a phenomenal amount of sex, not by "defending their bloody soil" or whatever the fuck Nazis think.
Did I mention that in some times and places in medieval Northern Europe men were thought to be too dumb to do math and handle property so women ran all the houseland logistics and finances, often owned the property, and gave their husbands allowances so they wouldn't have to worry their silly little heads with doing sums?
Or that there were pretty robust divorce laws where women retained their independence and property at some points?
Or a bunch of other shit that would be considered progressive today? Mixed in with plenty of horrible shit, and this was only some jurisdictions at some times, but "My wife owns our house and gives me an allowance because I'm dumb and irresponsible" doesn't really line up with all the viking tradwife barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen bullshit. z
And like all the warrior stuff is for warriors. The Eddas and all the Sagas are basically about comic book heroes, not normal people. They were written as exciting adventure tales about revenge and violence to be told (probably sung) in the hall in the middle of winter when everyone was bored out of their minds. They probably don't depict the normal lives of normal people. I am convinced there were plenty of people who were perfectly satisfied to go to Hel's hall when they died and skip the whole death and glory operation that Frejya and Odin were running. It's not like people were rushing off to get themselves killed; There are plenty of stories of old people being buried with swords in their hands to try to trick the gods!
BLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH
There's a large overlap between the two. To my understanding Odin is a more aristocratic war god, being also the god associated with royalty. The association with deceit, sorcery, wisdom and runic writing also sets him apart from Tyr who is more like a "noble warrior" kind of god. Odin have up his eye to gain wisdom, Tyr gave up his arm to chain the wolf Fenrir.
Notably, Tyr gave up his arm because he gave Fenrir his arm as a pledge that the Aesir were being honest. The Aesir, as we know, were not being honest, and Tyr sacrificed his hand to Fenrir. I think that's a really important example of honor; Tyr sacrificed horribly for the good of his people and was also scrupulously honest and principled in dealing with his enemies. He didn't say the Aesir weren't up to something; He said that if they were he'd give up his hand. Details details!
Integrity in the face of great hardship, being a lying cheating bastard,
Aren't those at odds with each other?
I guess, but when I hear integrity it doesn't just conjure institutional/societal norms like don't steal from a supermarket or don't lie on government forms (EDIT: or don't ever lie to your boss), it also implies don't lie to individual people. Lying to your SO reflects on integrity, unless we're going off different definitions.
I agree that "integrity" as in being an honest leader reflects differently if the system is inherently corrupt though, versus like a country in a higher level of socialist development, if that's what you mean.
Most egyptian practices weren't around corpses, those are just the ones we have the greatest insight into. It's the mother of all preservation biases because they made sure their dead will be there forever and actually wrote down what they did with the dead. They had many other festivals and practices we just don't know as much about because the books written on them were either used until they weren't usable anymore and recycled or discarded, or intentionally destroyed by later religious movements. Only the books intentionally left out of use and in a safe space made it to modern times.
What's up with adding "neo" to things to make them shittier?
I think this "choose your own adventure" approach to spiritually is pretty symptomatic of our atomized world where we can pick up these ideas like we're at a buffet. You've got corpos cherry picking parts of Buddhism as a lifestyle-ism, and you've got lots of people picking up paganism and witchcraft as glorified fashion statements.
I don't think these are deeply held beliefs. They just think these things are cool, and traditions imitate meaning, so they can fool themselves into thinking they're deeply connected to something ancient despite the fact that it was destroyed centuries ago.
Right now sucks. So if you make a modern version of anything it is adding the suck from modern society to old stuff.
Alot of this is just ad hoc attempts to relive alienation you are right on the money there. Also it clearly works though, so there is something important to take away from this. We need to make it so white supremacy isn't the only group with nice things.
That was an incredibly cathartic effortpost. This shit passes me off to no end as well.
I have some sympathy with them. If it wasn't for the rascist shit that would all be cool as hell. I known I would want to feel connected to a fantasy tradition that linked me to all the people's of the world thst have been forgotten. Cause, you know how the founding fathers were neo-romans? They brought back the senate, conquest and slavery? Fuck yeah put me on the other team. The picts and the saami have more in common with me than I have with Rome. The problem is with whiteness I don't even have any connection to whatever my own ancestors were. So any attempt to feel connected to anything beyond my self feels just as fake as it is with this fake stuff. So why would any particular person not simply pick and choose since we are alienated enough all things are equal?
Alternatively we have two genders here. Renfair were created by queer comunists theater people around the red scare. So that is other gender of a historical fantasy. If we look at renfaor tiktok it seems seems pretty queer. So there might be a solution here and it is nerds beefing over turf.
I'm joining the war on reactionary cultural appropriation of colonized people by fascists that idolize their destroyers, on the side of queer cultural appropriation of foofy aristocratic fashion and vagabond mercenaries.
(unironically renfairs are cool as shit, and it is 100% zero surprise that they have roots in queer communities, because theatre kids will be theatre kids.)
There used to be an awesome group at the Minnesota Renfaire that just went full Sun-King and made it gay as fuck - makeup, high heels, pastel, tights, brocade, walking sticks, the whole Versaille thing, and it was glorious.
Picts also had slaves. Romans weren't doing anything special in terms of brutality, they just had good farming conditions and access to trade that made them way better at it.
What we actually have attested of viking, ei early medieval Northern European, entertainment consisted of what were basically rap battles, with people getting up to show off by dissing each other using an elaborate poetic language of word games, metaphors, allusions, and references that was, by design, hard to follow; Being clever and inventive was part of the game.
Ooh, like old Scottish flyting traditions. Or the pwnco sometimes carried out during Mari Lwyd. Way cooler than than all that grungy droning shit that has to be obligatorily wedged into everything that tries to be pagan.
I appreciate this post and am gonna send it to all my Heilung fan friends
There's something so distasteful to me about this shit. These religions died. You could at least let them rest with some dignity instead of Frankensteining a bunch of shit together.
Giving the old gods some new prayers is nice. They just need not to be shitty rasicsts about it.
They're not "The old gods". They're pastiches of characters from Medieval Christian fiction, blended in to slop and piped in to molds created by modern Christians alienated from their lives searching for "authenticity" to give them a sense of place and meaning. They are the McChicken McNugget of religion; Where the McNugget was once a living animal it has now been stripped of all resemblance and relation to the creature from which it was derived. In the same way medieval Northern European Religion has only the vaguest, most tenuous connections to modern neo-paganism, and that really only amounts to a handful of names hastily glued to 19th century Prussian militarism.
They are the McChicken McNugget of religion
You have no idea how much this line makes my brain tingle in delight
The shadow of Prussia once again just makes stuff worse.
I would counter that while they might not be the old gods, the old gods weren't the old gods. As unless I am very mistaken about several things gods aren't real. The "old gods" are what we can imagine of life before neoliberalism and unalienated connection to others. Which is still way better than what people would worry about with their time otherwise.
Okay, I have sympathy for that. I understand that people want connection, want meaning. I'm so mad about this because I strongly disagree, both with the choose your own adventure history while claiming authenticity, but also with the violent, crass, and reactionary interpretation of the mythology.
If ancient religious people were anything like modern religious people there were levels of devotion and doctrinal observance. Back when the old gods were just the gods people were all just making it up same as we do now. There were probably malcontents that held to fantastic versions of older gods rituals back then same as now. Even with them having the capacity for real faith we lack today.
It wouldn't be so bad today if people wanted to have an Dionysis orgy to being a good harvest. I'd do my part judt in case. No, the only thing people want to bring back is social violence.
Are we doing "historical accuracy in videogames" but for music now lol
Any media that advertises itself as historical should be scrutinized on if its actually historically accurate or just larp that distorts history.
This isn't about if the village people are historically accurate.
Have Heilung ever claimed to be "historically accurate"?
(the answer is no)
No, we are doing historical accuracy for white supremacist mythology LARPs that claim to be authentic magical healing rituals while dressed like idiots. For their crimes against fashion alone they should be punished. If it wasn't super-homophobic I'd accuse them of being unmanly, which according to their very true and authentic and spiritual history which is real and not made up would require them to fight me to the death on the spot to prove that my accusation was false, or else forfeit all their rights and property and become as wolves, with all people forbidden from aiding or sheltering them, and like wolves they could be hunted and killed without consequence.
[Torngy the Lawspeaker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torgny_the_Lawspeaker play me out!)
I just once, once in my life, want to fight someone to the death on a little island that only appears at low tide over some obscure point of honor.
…and that pretty much everyone at the time thought Rome was awesome since that's where the wine, engineers, bathes, and all the other cool shit came from
Hasn’t that been the justification for imperialism since for ever?
Well, the justification when you don’t wanna seem racist/xenophobic/etc.
No, I think even the people who ended up being crushed by the empire thought indoor plumbing was cool before they were killed. Having cool stuff is not a moral philosophy
Every italian ethnic group dropped their culture and adopted Roman identity markers in the 1st century BC after the social wars. Germanic tribes invading Italy in the 5th century intentionally adopted Roman culture and intermarried locals when they could. Every major group conquered by Rome has tried to claim to be it's successor at one point or another. Most peoples conquered by Rome despised the invasions that came into their land as barbarian compared to the Roman identity they now had. Every empire has claimed to be civilising the conquered, Rome's the closest we get in Europe to someone actually doing it. This doesn't justify it by any means, just shows that a lot of Europeans knew their culture was shit.
It's notable that Rome was not a modern nation-state built around a fictive shared national identity. Romanness was conveyed by Roman citizenship and the performance of the associated religious, civil, and political roles. People of any ethnicity could become Roman if they had the right connections and resources, or if they completed a term of Legion service. Romanness wasn't about an Italian ethnicity. There were Germanic Romans, Syrian Romans, north African Romans, Briton Romans. This is very different from modern Imperialism; An Algerian or Vietnamese person will never really be French. Frenchness is predicated on language, geography, but also ethnicity and skin color. There wasn't any real equivalence in Imperial Roman culture. The Barbarians were barbaric because they didn't speak Latin and practice Roman culture, not because of their ethnicity.
Notably, much of the Germanic leadership fighting against Rome were themselves Romans, being citizens of Rome who could speak Latin. They wanted Romanness and the technologies, trade goods, and other advantages it offered, and afaik didn't see any contradiction in fighting against other Romans as part of territorial and political disputes. Romans were very familiar with civil war, after all.
Roman settlers were also different from modern settler-colonialism. From what I recall many Roman settlers were Romans returning home after their period of service in the legion, now owning Roman citizenship and having been granted land as their reward for legion service. German Romans were going home to Germania to establish Roman style farms and homesteads, spreading Romanness among their own people as they went. That said, I may be remembering this incorrectly.
Yeah I'm not sure when the whiteness mutation happened in Europe, and Starr Carr would have been so many waves of migration ago without looking at the DNA reports I have no idea.
Can someone recommend me some good sources/books/videos on paganism or polytheism and norse "lore" that is at least more historical than the made up bs from modern times?
"Paganism" literally just means "Not Christian". There is no Paganism. There are countless non-Christian religions that have existed in different cultures at different points in time. Trying to lump all of it under a fictive category of "Paganism" is silly nonsense. You need to specify a time and a place. Almost all actual information from the "Norse", ie medieval Northern European period comes from Christian Writers. Most of the high-fantasy stuff about Odin and Thor and whatnot is based on the Prose and Poetic Edda, with all the various Sagas and stuff like Beowulf to fill it out. There isn't very much of it, and what there is is often infected with the nationalist and romantic brainworms of it's translators. If you just want to read something for fun the Prose Edda in it's modern translations is a lot of fun. Neil Gaiman has a "Norse Mythology" book if you like him. But remember; It's all fiction written for the entertainment of Christians centuries after anyone actually believed these things or practiced these religions. We can make educated guesses but we have no idea what "real" vikings thought because with a very, very, vanishingly small number of exceptions they didn't leave any writing behind and we only know what other people from other religions and cultures wrote down.
I see. I actually don't know anything about paganism so that was very informative and I will look out and avoid the weird stuff. So does that mean old Norse paganism is just made up? Is there no practical side to it, that we know of for sure?
It's complicated. There were old-norse religions. There's lots of artifacts, lots of carvings, lots of helmets with cool brass plates, mjolnir pendants everywhere. It existed. But we don't know much about it because the people who practiced it either didn't write, or wrote relatively little on materials that didn't survive.
When actual scholars try to reconstruct this stuff we go by the evidence we have. For instance, Mjolnir, the Thor's Hammer, shows up over a very long period of time over a wide swath of Europe. It was clearly important to people. Based on how old the hammer symbol is and how wide spread it is it's believed that Thor, or the figure we now call Thor, is probably much older than the Odin figure and even when the Odin character started to become important Thor was still also very important. Check out the Wiki page to get an idea of how complicated this is, how little we actually know, and how much speculation we have to do to try to fill in the gaps;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mj%C3%B6lnir
Like we don't even know for sure what "Mjolnir" actually means. We have to carefully piece together the evidence we've got and then start guessing.
It has to be said that it's most likely that Mjölnir just means "Smasher"
but it's true that it could mean something else if you just change the sounds like in the wiki page.
Mjöll is a word for lightly drifting snow, Snow White is called Mjallhvít in Icelandic.
