Brute Norse Pod Ep. 28: Valhalla Pt. 2: To Valhalla? Norse myth, the military, & the nazis

When the soldiers of the 4th Mechanized Infantry Company of the Telemark Battalion rallied around Major Rune Wenneberg, their battle cry was a rite that solidified a sense of camaraderie between them, and helped them adjust to the reality of putting their bodies at the disposal of the international war machine. But as the words "To Valhalla!" rang out between the hills of northern Afghanistan, they did not yet know that this was the cry that would awaken Norway, almost a decade too late, to the reality of Norway's role in military operations abroad. The public erupted in a series of debates, wrestling to make sense of a warrior ideology that had apparently operated in secrecy under their very noses. Everyone from the tabloids to the Church, and the Defence Authority itself, poked at everything from toxic masculinity to the Nazi occult for answers. When perhaps what they should have done first of all, was look themselves in the mirror.

This episode also explores the myth and reality of appropriation of Norse mythology by the National Socialists during WW2.

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Some citations for this episode:
— Brunborg, Ole Martin. 2015. På sporet av en norsk krigerkultur: Holdninger til militærmakt før og nå. Militære sudier 1/2015. Forsvarets stabskole
— Dyvik, Synne. 2016. "Valhalla rising: Gender, embodiment and experience in military memoirs." In: Security Dialogue 47, 2016.
— Eggen, Torbjørn & Torleif Vik. 1944. Stiklestad valplass og symbol. In: Olavstanken. Centralforlaget: Oslo.
— Emberland, Terje. 2012. Himmlers Norge. Aschehoug: Oslo.
— Goodrich-Clarke, Nicholas. 2005. The Occult Roots of Nazism. Tauris Parke: London.
— Hagesæther, Alf Petter. 2010. "Norsk krigerkultur forankret i norrøn myologi eller i naturretten?" In: PACEM 13.
— Langeland, Fredrik. 2012. Soldater med lyst til å drepe - krigermaskulinitet i mannebladet Alfa. Norsk medietidsskrift vol. 19.

"The human race is going to die in 4/4 time": The Out-of-Step Pagan Philosophy of Moondog

Louis Thomas Hardin (1916-1999), aka. Moondog, is one of my greatest personal heroes. Among the most iconic figures of the American music underground, Moondog was seen almost every day at the corner between 53rd and 54th street and the Avenue of the Americas in New York City from the late 1940's to 1972. An dynamite-related accident left him blind as a bat at the age of 16, lending a distinctly Odinic look to this six foot tall character, who spent his days composing, and selling pamphlets of sheet music and poetry. Beyond that, he perhaps as famous for his music as he is for dressing in a viking inspired getup, consisting of hide shoes, poncho, cloak, and distinctly Wagnerian headdress, which was all too often mistaken for a childish publicity stunt. Making enemies in New York is easy, as Moondog biographer Robert Scotto noted, in a city that “offers a bewildering mix of talents and posers.”

Though the older Moondog looked like he had stepped right off the stage from Wagner's Ring Cycle, the young Louis Hardin was the son of a preacher, on a mostly bum-steered mission to convert American natives. Louis was greatly impressed by the otherness of their way of life, which would later prompt him to seek out a more primeval grounding for himself. His encounters with unflinchingly heretical chiefs offered him an alternative, authoritative point of view quite different from that of his father, who was lukewarm and distanced in all matters. His evangelical upbringing in an uncaring home resulted in his rejection of Christianity, and the staunchness of the Indians proved an excellent mirror to Moondog's own notorious stubbornness.

But it was the blinding accident that set the ball rolling: His creative thirst awoke when his sister read him Jesse Fothergill's novel The First Violin, a bildungsroman about an adolescent English woman studying music in Germany. This itself foreshadowed Moondog's own Teutonic journeys many years later. As he grew, his first encounter with the ancient North came by means of a braille transcription of Beowulf which, along with radio performances of Wagner, inspired the hope in him that he would one day write an opera of his own. His life as a composer proceeded with his move to New York in 1943, where he (barely) got by on street-level panhandling, and by posing for art students. He assumed the name Moondog in 1947, at 31 years old, in honor of a pet bulldog he once had that used to bark against the moon. He was yet unaware that the name in Old Norse, Mánagarm, is a poetic synonym for the mythological wolf Hati, destined to swallow the moon at the end of the world. The synchronicity later dawned on him, and Moondog shared with his mythological counterpart a certain contempt for the world he was dealt.

By 1948, Moondog had grown sick of New York and decided to leave “Coca-Cola culture” behind. He hoped to go live among the Navajo in New Mexico, but they firmly rejected him. He noted how they envied the culture he had left behind, while he coveted the culture they themselves were leaving. The final straw came when a group of them lead him between lanes on a busy highway and left him there. He traveled around the country instead, and by fall 1949 he was back in New York with a new elkskin cloak and square, wooden drum. Both of his own design. His awkwardly cut, “square clothes” and self-invented instruments would soon become emblematic of his unique musical style and personality.

Moondog in his spot on 53rd and 6th.

Ever since Moondog first set foot in New York, he had the attention of celebrities, artists, hipsters, tourists, and flâneurs. Years before the full bloom of his “viking self”, he had already influenced, befriended, or been approached by today famous figures like Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Dean Martin, and Bob Dylan. Muhammad Ali always referred to him as either “Moon” or “The Dog”. He performed with Tiny Tim and once jammed with Marlon Brando, who played the bongos. All the while, he was making five dollars a day on the street while sleeping on the floor of his record producer's basement. It was there he wrote “All is Loneliness”, a harrowing composition which would later be covered by a range of artists, including Janis Joplin, usually in far simpler rhythms than Moondog himself intended. The English folk-revival band Pentangle later recorded a song about him, and the Beatles may have plagiarized his name when they first started performing as Johnny and the Moondogs. David Bowie would later claim the sight of Moondog as his first distinct New York memory. He was less than enthusiastic about modern pop music: “The human race is going to die in 4/4 time”, he joked sardonically.

If people saw him as a living anachronism between the skyscrapers of Midtown, it should be said the feeling was mutual. Moondog claimed he never felt like an American. He idealized Northern Europe and referred to himself as a European in exile. When the music brought him to Germany in 1974, he was delighted to visit sites such as Teutoburg Forest, where Germanic tribes under the military leadership of Arminius lay waste to three Roman legions in the year 9 CE. As well as the Sachsenhain monument in Verden, where Charlemagne allegedly subjected thousands of pagan Saxons to forced baptism, before executing them en masse on the banks of the rivers Aller and Weser. These pilgrimages must have spoken to Moondog's yearning towards a more native and ancient atmosphere, as well as the Machiavellian sentiments of his personal philosophy. Every now and then, I make little pilgrimages of my own to Moondog's corner, where only his ghost remains to those who still remember, or are otherwise initiated into the secret of his existence.

While people tend to imagine Moondog busking on “his corner” on 6th Ave, this was not usual. For the most part, Moondog’s daily routine consisted of standing in the shadow of the Manhattan skyline, tapping along as he wrote music in braille. He composed poetry, sold his own sheet music, sipped coffee, relished the sounds and rhythms of the city, chatted with strangers, joked with friends, and disarmed hecklers, rain or shine. For his poetic and philosophical content he relied heavily on the mnemnonic wonders of poetry, much like skaldic poets and bards did in the absence of the written word. When he wrote these poems down, he usually kept it down to only a few keywords in braille in which the poems were immanent, and used them recall their poetic content and structure like a true singer of tales. He composed hundreds of simple couplets in iambic septameter, mapping his unique view of the world. Here are but a few:

᛫ It seems that hills are made to fall, that dales were made to rise,
that mediocre nondescripts were made to compromise.

᛫ The only one that knows this ounce of words is just a token,
is he who has a ton to tell, but must remain unspoken

᛫ We grope with eyes wide open toward the darkness of futurity,
with faith in outermost instead of innermost security.

᛫ We were few and far between in prehistoric times,
and we'll be few and far between in posthistoric times.

᛫ There was a time when goods were made for wear instead of tear.
There is a time when goods are made for tear instead of wear.

---

Moondog in Hamburg in 1974. Copyright: Beatrice Fehn, via Moondogscorner.de

Extraordinary expectations often follow extraordinary appearances. The bizarre viking image that made him so famous was, and is, far too often mistaken for a device he used to bring attention to himself. Moondog's image may have been carefully crafted, but was not intended as a cheap publicity stunt. Rather, it was an expression of who Moondog truly thought he was. Though his weirdness gained him some notoriety, it was also an opportunity for his critics to lash out against him. Some considered him no more than a naive autodidact, whose eccentricities awarded him undeserved fame. Even in the avant-garde, Moondog remained an outsider throughout much of his life.

For one thing, Moondog considered himself a sort of pagan. “I believe in the Norse gods,” he said. “When you think of the deity, you raise up your head, you just salute the invisible; it can happen any time; if you feel like communicating with something beyond humanity, you just do it.” Moondog's out-of-step spiritual convictions often go overlooked or understated when people write about him. No wonder: The average member of the public will have enough trouble coping with the weird viking costume, never mind making sense of the exotic and strange spiritual realm he inhabited. But to be fair, his odd brand of pagan ideas are idiosyncratic even by Modern pagan standards. Moondog longed for a different time and place, more 'true’ and authentic to his being. The clothes symbolized his rejection of those chronological and spiritual circumstances he was born into, as well as his strong affinity for the Nordic pre-Christian traditions. His fascination with the subject matter may have been difficult to reconcile with the sexy mystique of jazz, the music press, and the gatekeepers of the classical music intelligentsia. But it pervades his work, and he kept bringing it up in interviews. To add further emphasis with his syncopated out-of-stepness with modernity, he operated with an alternate calendar system of his own design, with the dawn of agriculture as its point of departure. Moondog's year zero is 8000 BCE to us.

A poem submitted by Moondog to the Norwegian-American newspaper Nordisk Tidende, December 30th, 1965.

Even if the spiritual dimension of his aesthetic and musical life never gained traction with the media or public, his notions about a pagan revival outside of the confines of centralized religion seem to have gone with him wherever he went. Throughout his work he made many surprising references to Norse culture. For example, the dense and esoteric title Logrundr, which he used for a large cycle of numbered compositions, is comprised of the Old Norse words lǫg meaning law or canon, and grundr meaning ground. In a different, musicological sense — Moondog's sense — ground is a repeating bass pattern played under a cascade of musical variations. This is technique is essential to Moondog's cataolog. Then there's the Heimdall Fanfare, a monumental rally composed for nine horns. Ginnungagap, Hugin and Munin, Buri - Bor, the heroic-lyrical Thor and the Midgard Serpent, and the epic poem Thor the Nordoom, to name a few. Some monumental compositions, like his magnum opus The Creation — based on the Norse cosmogony —, have only been partially performed. Most of his overtly pagan material was never formally published or recorded, at least not by himself. He envisioned a grand Edda Day ceremonial on the summer solstice. This was supposed to be a festival of avant-Nordic (dare I say, Scandifuturist?) panegyric celebration. A feast of poetic recital, musical performances, and ecstatic dance. In one sense, this dream was realized in a performance at the royal mounds in Uppsala in 1981.

Moondog at the Royal Mounds in Uppsala, 1981. Copyright: Stefan Lakatos, via Moondogscorner.de

One, seemingly more incidental recording reveals much more about Moondog's inner nature than you first may think: Frey and Freya Chewing on Two Big Soup Bones is exactly what the title states. However, it's not the gods Frey and Freya the title refers to; it's his dogs. In one recording he says:

“That's a great sound, you know, it’s... You can, you can see what's going on, you can see it all just from the sound, you know. All those white teeth shining there in the night, in the moonlight, yeah. There's snow all around. You can hear them breathing there as they're chewing. That's a very primitive sound. Oh my, it's primitive.”

For what Moondog lacked in eyesight, his vision burned bright in the world of noises. He loved all kinds of sounds, whether the symphonies of Bach or the rattle of the passing A train going up and down Manhattan. Though he insisted on a mutual rejection between himself and the modern world, the rattling of the subway train never seems far away in Moondog's “snaketime” rhythms.

Where but New York could such a man come to exist? Nevertheless, he ended up relocating to Germany in 1974. By then he had become so ingrained in the New York scene that many simply assumed he had died. Rather, it was in Germany that he enjoyed many of the fruits of his labor, living as a composer and touring musician until he died at the age of 89 in 1999. Or rather the year 9999 according to his own calendar.

ᛈ ᛈ ᛈ
If you would like to learn more about Moondog, check out Robert Scotto’s biography Moondog: The Viking of 6th Avenue (2007), and the excellent online resource Moondogscorner.de.
For Spotify users I have compiled a playlist of some of Moondog's available music.

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Brute Norse Podcast Ep. 21: Discussing Dharma with Leornende Eald Englisc

What drives you? In this episode, Eirik sits down for a talk with Kevin from Leornende Eald Englisc, who makes educational youtube videos on Old English informed by his particular spiritual convictions. We talk about linguistics, the problem with translations, old Germanic languages, cosmic law, accepting the passage of history, devotinal service, and the importance of good intent and deeds. May we be reborn and do good deeds again!

vWatch Kevin's content here:
www.youtube.com/channel/UCLnwScGuOxVlaN5aV9in9ag

Mentioned works:
Peter Wessel Zapffe, The Last Messiah
philosophynow.org/issues/45/The_Last_Messiah

Bhagavad Gita
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagavad_Gita

Sallust, On the Gods and the World
en.wikisource.org/wiki/Sallust_On_…ds_and_the_World

Support Brute Norse on Patreon, or head on over to the Teespring store for some retrofuturist fasion.

"To the Unknown God", Friedrich Nietzsche (1864)

Once more, before I move on
and set my sights ahead,
in loneliness I lift my hands up to you,
you to whom I flee,
to whom I, in the deepmost depth of my heart,
solemnly consecrated altars
so that ever
your voice may summon me again.

Deeply graved into those altars
glows the phrase: To The Unknown God.
I am his, although I have, until now,
also lingered amid the unholy mob;
I am his—and I feel the snares
that pull me down in the struggle and,
if I would flee,
compel me yet into his service.

I want to know you, Unknown One,
Who reaches deep into my soul,
Who roams through my life like a storm—
You Unfathomable One, akin to me!
I want to know you, even serve you.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, 1864

Published with kind permission from the translator, Michael Moynihan. Drawn from Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan. Arcana Europa, 2018.

The "Valknútr" Does Not Exist

It's bogus, it's a sham. The valknut, a staple not only of the study of Norse religion, but of modern heathenry and neopaganism as well, is actually an entirely spurious term: There is no evidence for a “knot of the slain” in any Norse source whatsoever. It's never mentioned even once. More importantly: No evidence connects the name to the symbol pictured above.

This may be a shocking and provocative statement to make in the face of the thousands of people who have the so-called valknut symbol tattooed, even branded, or carved into their skin. Who sold t-shirts, and those who bought them. The uncountable masses who wear it as a pin on their jacket. This demographic makes for a significant chunk of my reader base, and if you are one of these people, then please bear with me. You may find some solace from my iconoclastic rampage in the fact that I am one of you.

At the age of 18 I found myself in the blissful and rare situation of having few financial commitments, yet an abundance of spare cash. This younger, less discriminating version of myself went down to my local tattoo parlor, and asked for a dotwork valknut on my forearm, which I got. In retrospect, I suppose my perception was pretty standard. My teenage self would say the valknut was an odinic symbol of sacrifice and fate. By permanently fixing it to my skin, it showed my appreciation for the things in life, both good and bad, that are beyond our personal agency and control. While I no longer accept this as the be all and end all interpretation of the symbol, it still retains a personal significance to me.

Regardless of source-critical status, it worked as the personal reminder I intended it to be. If anything, the connotations have developed and matured with me. I don't believe academic nuance has damaged my relationship with the symbol. Actually it's quite the opposite! I believe source criticism matters: It is not the enemy of fanciful speculation. Rather I find that it informs it. Obviously, I cannot argue with personal ideas and connotations, and I didn't write this article to burst any bubbles. Rather, I hope I am adding something to public discourse that should have been said a long time ago.

I will still make the case that the valknut is a great example of spiritual idiosyncrasy drawn from faulty reasoning, which consequently brings more darkness than light to our understanding of pre-Christian religion.

Possible lid or cutting board from Oseberg. Oslo University Museum

*Valknútr and Valknute, same but different

Credit goes out to the research of Tom Hellers who wrote an entire book on this. His “Valknútr”: das Dreiecksymbol der Wikingerzeit [“The triangular symbol of the viking era”], is a solid piece of work that would have been earth-shaking, had it only been written in English instead of German. My arguments lean heavily on his groundwork. 

As mentioned, I assert that there is no sound evidence to support claims that the valknut was primarily a symbol of fate, sacrifice, death and binding. While iconography is sometimes cited, the interpretation is mainly based on the etymology, which assumes that it comes from an Old Norse term meaning "knot of the slain". However, the elephant in the room is that the word *valknútr does not exist in the Norse language at all. The term was arbitrarily applied to the symbol in modern scholarship, but the historical precedence is non-existent.

This this not to say that the valknut isn't a real term. However, the name was taken from Norwegian valknute, which specifically refers to an entirely different range of symbols and ornaments that appears in textile- and woodworking. First and foremost, many Norwegians know it already as a square, looped knot (⌘) used to designate points of interest on maps and road signs. It's also identical to the command key on Apple keyboards.

Norwegian tapestry with valknute ornaments (detail). Norwegian Museum of Cultural history.

Hrungnir's heart?

I can only speculate why such an arbitrary term was picked in the first place, but it has spawned decades of circular and anachronistic reasoning, based on the etymology of the symbol's recently applied name. What was it originally called? Nobody is alive to tell us, but the Icelandic chronicler Snorri Sturlusson mentions in Skáldskaparmál, that the giant Hrungnir had a "famous heart": It was jagged, with three edges or protrusions, and Snorri mentions that it looks like a carved symbol (ristubragð) called hrungnishjarta derived from the myth. If this is true, the connection to Odin and sacrifice is severely shaky, seeing that Hrungnir was an adversary of Thor.

The traditional ornamental valknute (also known as "sankthanskors", St. John's cross), has no clear association with death as far as I know. The etymology is uncertain, but it's no given that the prefix val- is the same word as Old Norse valr, meaning slain, war-dead, though this is commonly assumed. There are other, equally plausible explanations for the prefix val-, cf. Old Norse valhnott - "french nut". You'd be hard pressed to find a connection to the triangular symbol either way.

They don't have many stylistic traits in common either. In terms of design, the Viking Era symbol and its derivatives are triangular, effectively trefoil in shape, usually consisting of interlocking, yet separate elements, while the traditional valknute is square and singular: The square valknute is easily drawn in a single line, and most versions of the nameless, triangular viking symbol are not.

Hellers' fivefold typology of the symbol (2012: 74)

As there is neither a typological, nor any linguistic basis to connect the two, their association remains problematic and speculative. Hellers makes the effort of discussing whether or not it even was a symbol, or merely an ornament, but concludes that the former is most likely. I find it hard to disagree: Often, it seems deliberately placed and meticulously carved. The carver had some kind of intent, but the question of significance remains.

A multivalent symbol

While it is popularly called a symbol of death and binding, few people stop to ask what the evidence is. It is true that the symbol occurs in funerary contexts, but so do most viking era artifacts: Boats, shoes, crockery, swords, coins, seeds, food and drink, combs, animals, and grinding stones, are all found in graves, but are not items we automatically consider symbols of death.

It's not wholly impossible that there was a connection to death still. There are some iconographic sources that are strongly suggestive of death and sacrifice, and a connection to the god Odin as well. The strongest case in favor of the death-fate-binding-sacrifice-hypothesis famously comes from a panel on a Gotlandic picture stone, Stora Hammars I, depicted at the top of this article. The symbol hovers above a man forcefully bent over what might be an altar, as if he is being executed – perhaps sacrificed. The character forcing him down carries a spear – an attribute of Odin, also used in human sacrifices and what we may deem “odinic killings” in the sagas. To the left, a warrior hangs from the limb of a tree (Odin is famously the god of the hanged). To the right, another man offers a bird, maybe a falcon or a raven, and an eagle flies above the symbol. All of this is heavily suggestive of the cult of Odin.

The Nene River ring. British Museum

However, there are contexts where this association seems unlikely. If the symbol was associated with the aforementioned hrungnishjarta, and the myth of Thor's battle against Hrungir, then such a connection does not seem likely at all. Additionally, the symbol frequently occurs in  other contexts where an interpretation favoring death and sacrifice is very far-fetched. The depiction on Stora Hammars I appears to be the exception rather than the rule. 

For example, it the symbol frequently occurs with horses on other Gotlandic picture stones - maybe suggestive of a horse cult? While pagan Scandinavians believed they could reach the world of the dead by horseback, it's not obvious that the riders in these depictions are anything but alive and well, if we rid ourselves of the preconceived notion that the so-called *valknútr was a symbol of death. It also occurs on jewelry, coins, knife-handles, and other more or less mundane objects. The magnificent Oseberg ship burial contained two examples. Firstly a flat wooden object, possibly a lid or a cutting board, and secondly it was carved into a bedpost. There is no reason to assume that it was carved in conjunction with the burial. It might well have been present when the bed was still in nightly use. 

The truth behind the symbol eludes popular interpretations. It's difficult to connect all the varied contexts of occurrence. There is a Facebook page solely dedicated to documenting and uncovering more examples of the symbol, run by the Czech living history group Marobud. If you're interested in the subject, I highly recommend you check it out. Like Hellers, they include the triquetra in their study. It's up for debate whether triquetras constitute “true” examples of the symbol, but the similarity is definitely greater than the case is with the Norwegian valknut-ornaments. They could, for all we know, simply be variants of the one and same symbol. 

Conclusion

From a source-critical viewpoint there can be no doubt that the term *valknútr/valknutis dubious and unhelpful. Evidence suggests that the symbol's original contents go far beyond the common themes of interpretation, which are none the less fossilized in both scholarly and neopagan discussion. There seems to be more to the symbol than death and sacrifice.

I can't offer a good alternative name. Gungnishjarta is too tentative, but maybe I am overplaying the harm a misnomer can do. Nevertheless, I think that the terminology has done more to cloud the symbol, rather than clearing it up. This should concern anybody invested in shedding light on pre-Christian Scandinavia.

Now, if you find yourself stirred because you, like me, have a tattoo, or maybe you have benefited from the symbol in some other idiosyncratic way; don't cry. This revelation should not take any pleasure away. Let it instead be a vessel for deeper appreciation to whatever attracted you to it in the first place, and let yourself be enchanted by its mystique. We will probably never know.

Addendum : Converning the etymology of “Valknute” (10.25.2018):

Since the original publication of this article, I realized that I had overlooked a more convincing etymology to the prefix val- that we see in the term ‘valknute’. It is probably neither valr “corpse” nor valir “French, Breton, foreigners”, but “something rounded”. This etymology seems to be taken as a given among folk art experts and I believe it stands up to scrutiny. Compare for example with Norwegian ‘valk’ “roll, flab of skin” or English ‘wallow’ “to roll about”. Hence the term valknute appears to refer to the shape of the symbol: ⌘. Plain and simple.

This "looped square" ornament or symbol predates its triangular impostor by centuries and should therefore, if anything, be reserved for that specific shape. I have also come to partially accept the terminology proposed by David Stříbrný et. al. (of Marobud fame), that the term “triquetra” is preferable in many, if not all situations. While triquetra is more commonly used about trefoil symbols and ornaments, it really only means "three-cornered" and is thus a more neutral term than the heavily loaded "valknut". At least from a semantic viewpoint, which is all I care about in this question. There is ample evidence to suggest that the two symbols are interconnected, even overlapping in the early Norse world.

ᛉ

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In Defense of Magic (Norse metaphysics pt.1)

Hey kid, wanna hear about magic in Viking and medieval Scandinavia? This is the first article in what will eventually be a whole series on magic and metaphysics in the Viking and Norse world. In it, I'll offer explanations and explorations on key subjects and terms, such as galdr (chants and incantations), seiðr (let's just call it “textile-magic” for now) and gandr (spirit emissaries). There will be magical projectiles, incantations, sigils and symbols, voodoo doll-like effigies and fetishes, divination, supernatural sodomy, and the massive can of worms that is runic magic. Dear lord, I will most definitely step on a few toes, but hopefully I will give more than I take away.

The viking and medieval world was full of magic, for protection, harm, to predict future events and communicate with forces and spirits. Naturally, all was integrated into how they made sense of the world around them, which was full of unseen entities. A lot of the terms we'll get into have some level of overlap, and grants us a glimpse of the taboos, beliefs and symbols that shaped their day to day experiences.

I presently aim to cover the most important bits of Viking and medieval magic over a span of several months, but I won't shy away from covering the zany world of contemporary spirituality and new religious movements either. Will there be Nazi occultism? Minoan runic sex cults?? Ancient aliens??? Who knows! It all depends on how far down the rabbit hole I decide to go.

The magic of magic

Now, magic is an extremely fascinating subject, but it is sadly misrepresented (and -understood) in public discourse. This warrants an introductory rant to kick us off, which will also serve to clarify my academic and philosophical stances and biases on the subject.

Firstly, I do not consider the notion of magic to be primitive in itself, but rather a feature of human psychology that may manifest itself in various forms of belief and behavior. The Vikings like any other pre-modern society, was not populated solely by superstitious twits who naively wasted their time and resources on self-deceptive practices that never actually worked. They wholeheartedly did believe in its existence, and they certainly felt that it granted them some benefit. Yet, perhaps not in the way people tend to think. Conversely, absence of witch trials is by no means evidence of a lack of magical thought in modern Western society. There's no need to turn to the occult: As an anthropologist might tell you, you'll find endless examples of pseudo-magical thoughts and practices by throwing a brief glance at the world of business and advertisement.

Fantastic and vivid descriptions of magical wonders, as well as their strange and wacky physical effects, are as old as the hills, and I'm sure that snake oil salesmen and quacks of all sizes have always thrived withi.n our ranks. This doesn't take away from the fact that magic has always encompassed a wide range of functions, ideas, and practices beyond whatever hocus pocus our minds might usually consider magic in a strictest sense. A magician may offer counseling and meditation therapy, strengthen social bonds, give pep-talks, and so on. Besides this, there may be many other culture-specific functions of magic that are difficult to pin down and properly discern. Even in the twilight realm of magic and medicine we find, at the very least, the time-tested and scientifically proven placebo effect. 

If we are to talk about naive magical notions, then basing one's entire perception of magic on, say, Lord of the Rings says more about the modern reader, than it tells us about the witch doctor.

Believers in magic: village idiots of popular histor

Magic is commonly used as a cheap trick to demonstrate a supposed lack of sense and logical thought, particularly in past societies. Contemporary cultures with strong magical traditions, especially the non-industrialized, are thought of as intellectually or philosophically deficient. There's no room for such nonsense, or so we're told, in the world of scientific materialism and Cartesian rationalism. 

Subjectively, I simply don't think this true. Rather, it shows the arrogance of Whig history at its very basest. That is to say: The idea that history is something akin to a bumpy train ride, ever rolling towards inevitable moral truths and intellectual progress. Every year is de facto better than the last, as we await a coming state of societal perfection. I'm no historian of ideas, but people guilty of such thoughts do tend to pity those poor souls unfortunate enough to be born in the horrid, dark chapter of human history colloquially known as the past. 

Such an attitude neither helps us understand how past man thought, nor does it bring us any closer to understanding ourselves (except, perhaps, for shedding light on intellectual snobbery). I am not about to unleash a crackpot narrative of a past paradise, but I will scoff and pass judgment on those who squarely pass water in the faces of the giants whose shoulders they stand on.

In my unrewarding struggle to defend past man against slander, the supposed mental simplicity of medieval and ancient people is probably what I hear the most, whether we are debating art, ethics, or religion. Mind you, this does not correlate with low education: There are many academically trained, talented individuals who treat anybody born before the 18th century as downright dumbasses. So it's not characteristic of lacking intelligence or education, by any means – but I do believe it is a distinguishing mark of someone lacking historical literacy, and perhaps a basic grasp of human psychology.

I hope I'm not too crass. It's obviously no crime to disagree with (or not care about) the beliefs of people who died ten centuries ago. But it is important to realize, despite any chronologically imbued misanthropy that, anatomically, their brains were no different than ours. It's unlikely that a random person born in the 10th century was any dumber than you, unless you are some kind of genius. Either way, the psychology of magic is probably as old as mankind itself. Irrational as it may seem, there are probably rationally justifiable, Darwinian reasons for its presence in the human brain. It won't ever disappear, but if it should I highly doubt its loss would be an enhancement to human life.

The academic study of the history of magic, it should be noted, is a fairly young and marginal discipline. Traditionally, Old Norse scholarship seemed more interested in how and when to distinguish magic from religion. When reading older works in particular, they often have an ethnographic tinge, and scholars seldom demonstrate any particular interest or competency in the history of magic proper. Luckily, a lot of great research has been published in recent years, which we shall dive into in future parts of this series!