Asgard as a Multi-Racial Society [View all]

[icymist]

On the internet and in the news media, unfortunately, one will come across the completely whacked-out idea that heathenry has something to do with racism. (I’m part Native American, so, I would not have been welcomed in heathenry if that were true.) Whether one is talking about universalist heathen sects (which are inclusive by charter), or folkish sects attempting to recreate specific tribalisms with descendants of specific tribes, the concepts of race and race purity just do not fit in heathen religion and mythology. The idea of race is a modern concept.

The ancient heathens were tribal peoples. The Saxons and the Celts did not think of themselves as the same people. They were different tribes with different languages and different gods. They were “other” to each other, and yet, they also intermarried. Heathens of the ancient world traded, raided, married, and had sex with pretty much any group of people they encountered. They had no concept of racial purity. If a Norse Viking brought a Celtic woman home to Norway and they had a son raised in his village, he was Norse. Adoption and fostering of children and the mutual adoption of adults through blood-brotherhood ceremonies were common and accepted practices, and once one was adopted, one was just as much family as birth family was. That was the practice among humans, and it was the practice among the gods in the mythology stories those humans told.

The gods in Norse mythology are pretty much the same gods as in other Germanic cultures, with a few regional variations. But the mythology we have to work with was largely written down in Icelandic because Iceland happened to be the last heathen / pagan culture to convert to Christianity, in the year 1000. There are other texts to work with that were written by ancient Romans and Arabs in explaining the heathen cultures, but the stories we tell of the gods are pretty much the ones written down a few hundred years after the conversion, in Old Norse and Old Icelandic. This presents challenges in reconstructing exactly what the ancient heathens actually believed.

http://eternalhauntedsummer.com/issues/summer-solstice-2014/asgard-as-a-multi-racial-society/