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
"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.