Today's date: óðinsdagr 28. harpa eða 22. may 2013 CE

Tag archives for norse

Ek em heiðinn

By Sabin Published June 24, 2012

After a 20-year journey, I declare myself today a Heathen. It’s time. The tide of religious superiority must change, and those beliefs left trampled and broken by the Christian onslaught must rise from the ashes and reclaim what is theirs. I’ve sworn my oath. Stained the runes. This is a short piece about why.

The forced subjugation of the Northern European Heathen societies — and all pagan societies around the world — by the Christian church has done near irreparable harm to the earth and humanity. In Europe alone, centuries of artistic, societal, and cultural discoveries were destroyed along with the people who made them.

Jaweh — proclaimed a god of “love” by his adherents — has inspired more mass destruction, murder, rape, and pillaging than any other god ever worshiped. He is a god of subjugation, torture, and sorrow. Though claimed to be omniscient and omnipotent, he allows murder in his name. He allows corruption at the highest levels of his church. Misogyny, pedophilia, pestilence and disease. Either he’s not there or doesn’t care.

He is a dictator and his rules are anathema to humanity. His adherents must satisfy themselves with the life they’re given — no matter how humiliating — and wait for death to be redeemed. They are promised heaven; to be with everyone they once loved. His real plan as dictated by scripture is for them to eternally labor in the fields in sight of his palace, but never allowed to enter. All of this in the name of “love”.

The Heathen gods in contrast serve as moral and ethical examples of human behavior. They ask nothing more of their followers than what is common human courtesy: friendship for those who earn it; hospitality for the weary; defense of the helpless; honor, respect, love for the family; to celebrate when appropriate and mourn when necessary. Negotiation or trade before war. They ask us to live well.

They inspire through their own actions, not with threats or promises of an invisible future. Their own quests for wisdom and lore are guidelines for human existence. They show us to look for life in the face of death. To continually seek knowledge and to share what we find. They teach the perseverance of courage in the face of fear. Their occasional punishments are just and fitting for the transgression.

In the end, what the Heathen gods ask of us is nothing more than to be human. To accept what that means and to discover the rest for ourselves.

Posted in heathenism, humanity, philosophy, runes, thoughts Tagged: christianity, havamal, heathen, humanity, norse, philosophy, runes, thoughts | Leave a comment

Displaying an Old Norse date

By Sabin Published February 17, 2011

I’ve been working on a Norse calendar for a couple of weeks. My goal is to get a repeatable system that I can build against an active Gregorian calendar and start tracking time with it. During my search for ideas and information, I came across a good site over at http://norse.ulver.com. The site is in Russian, but there’s a page — here http://norse.ulver.com/calendar/script.html — where a guy named Tim Stridman has posted a Java applet — complete with winter/summer and cross-quarter symbols — and JavaScript script to convert the current Gregorian date to a displayable Norse date. I liked it so much that I ported it to php and am running it at the top of my site (that thing in red up there).

While it’s based on his code and algorithms, any mistakes in the php are mine alone. The version I ported was from his JavaScript file, so I don’t have the cross-quarter dates, easter timing, or any of that other cool stuff. I may get to a point where I reverse engineer it and add it in later.

At any rate. Thanks, Tim, for providing cool stuff for the web. Well done.

My translations of the rune poems are coming along quite nicely. I’ve completed the Old Icelandic poem and am more than 2/3rds of the way through the Old Norwegian one. I will be reading the Old Icelandic — both the original and my translation — in Hardwick, VT on February 25, so I’m focusing more on pronunciation than new translations.

Posted in runes, thoughts Tagged: calendar, code, date, norse, old norse, php, runes | Leave a comment

Rune Explorations: Fehu

By Sabin Published April 18, 2010

FEHU (FAY-hoo) is the first rune of the three rows or Aetts of the Elder Futhark. The word FEHU comes from the Proto-Germanic and is the origin of our modern word “fee”.

The literal and pictographic representation of FEHU is the domesticated cattle. Cattle were often used to pay debts, settle disputes, and establish other types of trade. The use of cattle in this way is documented in Tactitus’ “Germania” (Germania 12.80) as a way of paying societal or criminal fines. The rune still brings to mind that kind of association we have with “fee”: the stuff we use to pay our debts and obligations. Though sought after and valued as a means to an end, this is not the kind of wealth you want to focus on for your entire life.

FEHU represents money and the problems caused by valuing it above all else. “Money is kinsmen’s quarrel,” the rune poem says. “Path of grave-magic,” it continues, then “fire of the sea” or “flood-tide’s token”. Retrieving the wealth FEHU describes can require a dangerous and strife-filled path if we’re not careful. The Anglo-Saxon poem says it’s better to give it out if you have it. The Havamal and many of the sagas support this opinion.

The Havamal says (trans. Carolyne Larrington):

Even a man who knows nothing
knows that many are fooled by money;
one man is rich, another is not rich,
he should not be blamed for that.
…

Fully stocked folds I saw for Fituing’s sons,
now they carry beggar’s staffs;
wealth is like the twinkling of an eye,
it is the most unreliable of friends.

I believe that FEHU should not be used to represent some kind of originating force or essence. It’s connection with monetary wealth and the dangers of same are so obvious that the esoteric leap to originating force seems to me a stretch. To call it also an originating force of the universe (as Edred Thorsson does), we are in essence saying that the origins of our universe are connected to money. Disposable cash. If FEHU is a beginning or originating force, it may be as the means to undertake a journey, but not as the journey itself, and certainly not as some primal force.

It is significant that FEHU is the first rune and OTHALA — the rune representing homestead, hearth, permanent home — is the last. FEHU is the beginning of the journey. The hacksilver in your pocket or on your wrist that gets you from one place to another. It’s your cab fare, bill money, the stuff you need on hand in order to make ends meet. It’s never the end goal, however. It’s just your first step. A head of cattle aren’t worth much if you’ve got no farm on which to feed them, an old Norse philosopher might say.

So with FEHU must come the understanding that a quest for money for its own sake is foolish and possibly dangerous (“grave-magic” and the story of Fafnir’s gold come to mind). Goals in life should be broader, farther-reaching, and have more personal and societal impact than simply wanting to accumulate disposable wealth. Money is fleeting, the Havamal tells us. It’s best not to rely on it more than necessary. Perhaps FEHU is a fitting rune for us to meditate on even — or perhaps especially — in the 21st century. FEHU is the money itself, the advice on how to use it best, and a warning against greed.

Posted in philosophy, runes Tagged: fehu, havamal, norse, runes | Leave a comment

Elder Futhark and Runic thinking

By Sabin Published March 31, 2010

I’ve been studying the runes for almost 20 years now. I was in my freshman year of high school when I first stumbled across these mysterious symbols as I was doing research for a chemistry paper: a picture of a Viking-era sword whose blade was etched with a combination of “Isa”, “Nauthiz”, and “Tiwaz”. I didn’t know that at the time, of course. All I knew was that they called to me. Reached out to me from that CD-ROM and dared me to understand what it meant. I’ve done what I could over the past 20 years to answer that dare.

During that period of time I’ve seen many ebbs and flows in the direction of the studies of the masses into runes and rune-lore. I’ve tried some of them on, and dismissed others out-of-hand. From those chintzy pewter necklaces based on the Blum book in the eighties, to the quasi-neo-nazi symbolistic revival of Asatru as the “true religion”, to the scholarly advances of Edred Thorsson and everything in between. While I wouldn’t say that every attempt has been without merit, not one attempt has contained enough real truth for my satisfaction.

If you’re reading this and are close to the study of rune-lore, this is where you will point out that since we have so few primary source materials about the original study of runes, we will never come close to the truth. Maybe you’ll say that what we have is a good enough approximation that we can get by with it. I won’t disagree with you outright. I will challenge, however, that out of all of those attempts, little has been done to relate our studies of runes to the daily culture of the originators. That’s not to say we haven’t accounted for differences in semantic meanings, but I believe we’ve not come very far in understanding and then transposing original meanings into contemporary culture.

For example, fehu’s meaning as money, mobile wealth, cattle is certain. We have reference to as much within the runic poems, the etymology of the word “fee” can be traced back to “feoh” which is a derivative of the proto-Germanic “fehu”. Good. However, what we haven’t done is a good enough job of interpreting the originating culture’s concept of money for our contemporary age. Instead, we’ve tried to glom some quasi-supported esoteric “creative energy in the multiverse” meaning to fehu which doesn’t make any sense. That’s the equivalent of saying that the concept of mobile property, money, cattle, etc. brought to mind the creative energy of the multiverse to a 7th century godi. Seriously? Since when does the power to barter bring to mind a mythological creation of time?

What I’m advocating is not a cease and desist on meditative practices or individual understanding of runes. I’m advocating an increase in intensity the anthropological/sociological research into the cultures who used the runes in order to understand how they applied to them. By doing so, we can then use our meditative practices to interpret their meaning to us in the 21st century.

I’m referring specifically to Edred Thorsson’s book “Futhark” and the website runesecrets.com. I have a copy of Thorsson’s book and have perused RuneSecrets. While I don’t hold any ill will towards either site — there is good information within both — I tend to have more faith in the approach of the Rune Net group. A tempered and historically-driven search for evidence of mystical meaning that is then backed by the meditative findings of the individual. That’s all I ask.