Notes: "Norse Mythology for Smart People"

Notes for "Norse Mythology for Smart People," a website written by Dan McCoy."

This is commentary. And this is really good.

I'm not going to record every detail, just the really snappy awesome bits that Wikipedia never taught me. Some sections (Tales, Book Reviews, My Book, The 5 Best Books on Celtic Mythology, News/Updates, The 10 Best Norse Mythology Books) are not recorded here.

Sections

1. About Me
2. Gods and Creatures
3. Cosmology
4. Runes
5. Concepts
6. Other

About Me

• "My degree [in liberal arts] encompasses work in a wide variety of disciplines, with special concentrations in poetics, philosophy, religion, German, and ecology." 
• "The pre-Christian mythology and religion of the Norse and other Germanic peoples are enduring passions of mine. I've studied these topics both within academia and on my own since I was thirteen, and they've had a tremendous influence on me." 

Gods and Creatures

• The jotuns are "more properly called the 'devourers,' the chaotic spirits of night, darkness, winter, and death."
• Asgard is "located in the highest, sunniest branches of the world-tree." 
• Odin's status as the Allfather is "likely a relatively late development, and several convergent lines of evidence suggest that this role was originally occupied by Tyr." 
• "The word 'Aesir' is almost certainly derived from one of two Proto-Germanic words: *ansaz, 'pole, beam, rafter,' or *ansuz, 'life, vitality.' In either case, we see that the Aesir were thought of as being the powers that hold the cosmos together, the animating personalities of the 'forces of nature.'"
• Odin "often ventures far from their kingdom, Asgard, on long, solitary wanderings throughout the cosmos on purely self-interested quests. He's a relentless seeker after and giver of wisdom, but he has little regard for communal values such as justice, fairness, or respect for law and convention. He's the divine patron of rulers, and also of outcasts. He's a war-god, but also a poetry-god, and he has prominent transgender qualities that would bring unspeakable shame to any traditional Norse/Germanic warrior." 
• "Odin's name can be translated as 'Master of ecstasy.' His Old Norse name, Odinn, is formed from two parts: first, the noun odr, 'ecstasy, fury, inspiration,' and the suffix -inn, the masculine definite article, which, when added to the end of another word like this, means something like 'the master of' or 'a perfect example of.' 
• "This ecstasy that Odin embodies and imparts is the unifying factor behind the myriad areas of life with which he is especially associated: war, sovereignty, wisdom, magic, shamanism, poetry, and the dead." 
• "In contrast to more straightforwardly noble war gods such as Ty or Thor, Odin incites otherwise peaceful people to strife with what, to modern tastes, is a downright sinister glee. His attitude is not far from Nietzsche's dictum, 'You say it is the good cause that hallows even war? I say unto you: it is the good war that hallows any cause.'"
• Odin "maintains particularly close affiliations with the berkserkers [sic] and other 'warrior-shamans' whose fighting techniques and associated spiritual practices center around achieving a state of ecstatic unification with certain ferocious totem animals, usually wolves or bears, and, by extension, with Odin himself, the master of such beasts... Odin is principally concerned not with the reasons behind any given conflict or even its outcome, but rather with the raw, chaotic battle-frenzy (one of the primary manifestations of odr) that permeates any such agonism."
• Odin is the "divine archetype of a ruler" and the "legendary founder of numerous royal lines." 
• "Tyr has much more to do with rule by law and justice, whereas Odin has much more to do with rule by magic and cunning. Tyr is the sober and virtuous ruler; Odin is the devious, inscrutable, and inspired ruler." 
• "Like Odin, many such men [that were outlaws] were exceptionally strong-willed warrior-poets who were apathetic to established societal norms... The late twelfth-early thirteenth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus even relates a tale of Odin being outlawed from Asgard for ten years so that the other gods and goddesses wouldn't be tarnished by the vile reputation he had acquired amongst many humans."
• "Whatever their social stature, the men and women favored by Odin are distinguished by their intelligence, creativity, and competence in the proverbial 'war of all against all.' Whether such people become kings or criminals is mostly a matter of luck." 
• "For Odin, any kind of limitation is something to be overcome by any means necessary, and his actions are carried out within the context of a relentless and ruthless quest for more wisdom, more knowledge, and more power, usually of a magical sort." 
• "His [Odin's" shamanic spirit-journeys are well-documented" and he, "like shamans all over the world, is accompanied by many familiar spirits, most notably the ravens Hugin and Mugin, the wolves Geri and Freki, and the valkyries. The shaman must typically undergo a ritual death and rebirth in order to acquire his or her powers, and Odin underwent exactly such an ordeal when he discovered the runes." 
• "Even Odin wasn't excempt from such charges of 'unmanliness,' [that came from practicing seider] and was taunted for adopting the feminine traits and tasks that form part of the backbone of seidr. Saxo, in the passge on Odin's exile alluded to above, relates that 'by his stage-tricks and his assumption of a woman's work he had brought the foulest scandal on the name of the gods.'" 
• "The reference to 'being fertilized'... [is] a metaphor loaded with sexual implications that would have been immediately recognizable to any Viking Age or medieval reader or hearer of the poem." 
• "Odin's practice of seidr made him a largely transgender being incapable of fulfilling the expectations placed upon an honorable man. But we've already noted Odin's scant concern for honor. He isn't one to refuse any ecstatic practice, even those that bring him ill repute." 
• "Odin speaks only in poems, and the ability to compose poetry is a gift he grants at his pleasure." I definitely want Odin to make some kind of appearance in The Gods Have Hands, but the trick is going to be finding someone who can be referenced as Odin without making it too obvious. Dude without an eye or with a glass eye is obviously Odin. Of course, he doesn't need a missing eye to be Odin, so he might be holding off on that. Regardless, slam poetry session with Hel at a critical point in her Heroine's Journey? Hel yes. 
• "When they [the Romans] mentioned Odin, they glossed him as Mercury, the Roman psychopomp... This is significant, because it shows that Odin's associations with death were seen as being even more significant than his associations with war, or else he would have been glossed as Mars." 
• Odin "was a frequent recipient of human sacrifice, especially of royalty, nobles, and enemy armies. This was generally accomplished by means of a spear, a noose, or both-- the same manner in which Odin 'sacrificed himself to himself''...  in order to acquire knowledge of the runes. A common-- and chilling-- way of securing his favor in battle was to throw a spear over one's foes, sacrificing them to the god with the cry, 'Odin owns ye all!'"
• Further, Odin's "mastery of necromancy, the magical art of communicating with and raising the dead, is frequently noted. While there are several reasons Odin maintains this commerce with the dead, including his desire to learn what knowledge and wisdom they possess, the most significant reason is his dread-driven desire to have as many of the best warriors as possible on his side when he must face the wolf Fenrir during Ragnarok-- even though he knows that he's doomed to die in the battle." 
• "Odin is the primal animating force that permeates all life. Or, to put it in Nietzchean terms, he's the Will to Power (German die Wille ur Macht) that dwells at the heart of the world, by which the cosmos eternally strives to overcome itself, to grow and to flourish and to sweep away stagnation. The shamans, rulers, warriors, outlaws, poets, and sorcerers who enjoy Odin's patronage are the highest ambassadors of odr, the ultimate and unconditional life-affirming force." 
• "Thor, the brawny thunder god, is the archetype of a loyal and honorable warrior, the ideal toward which the average human warrior aspired."
• Thor "Owns an unnamed belt of strength (Old Norse megingjardar) that makes his power doubly formidable when he wears the belt."
• "Given his ever-vigilant protection of the ordered cosmos of pre-Christian northern Europe against the forces of chaos, destruction, and entropy represented by the giants, it's somewhat ironic that Thor is himself three-quarters giant... However, such a lineage is very common amongst the gods, and shows how the relationship between the gods and the giants, as tense and full of strife as it is, can't be reduced to just enmity."
• Thor "was appealed to by those in need of protection, comfort, and the blessing and the hallowing of places, things, and events. Numerous surviving runic inscriptions invoke him to hallow the words and their intended purpose, and it was he who was called upon to hallow weddings. (Evidence of this is preserved, amongst other places, in the tale of Thor Disguised as a Bride.) The earliest Icelandic settlers implored him to halow their plot of land before they built buildings or planted crops. Thor's hammer could be used to hallow as readily as it could be used to destroy-- and, in effect, these two properties were one and the same, since any purification necessarily involves the banishing of hostile forces or elements... Perhaps the most striking case of this, however, is his ability to kill and eat the goats that drive his chariot, gather their bones together in their hides, bless the hides with the hammer, and bring the animals back to life, as healthy and vital as before." 
• Thor's "seldom-mentioned wife, Sif, is noted for her golden hair above all else, which is surely a symbol for fields of grain. Their marriage is therefore an instance of what historians of religion call a 'hierogamy' (divine marriage), which, particularly among Indo-European peoples, generally takes place between a sky god and an earth goddess. The fruitfulness of the land and the concomitant prosperity of the people is a result of the sexual union of sky and earth." 
• In part because of his hallowing role, Thor was "the foremost god of the common people in Scandinavia and the viking colonies." 
• At one point, "Odin is conferring blessings upon a favored hero of his, Starkadr, and each blessing is matched by a curse from Thor. In the most telling example, Odin grants Starkadry the favor of the nobility and rulers, while Thor declares that he will always be scorned by the commoners." 
• "The prominence of Thor seems to have increased at the expense of Odin throughout the Viking Age... Late period sources describe Thor as the foremost of all the Aesir... Nowhere was this trend more pronounced than in Iceland, which was originally settled in the ninth century by farming colonists fleeing what they found to be the oppressive and arbitrary rule of an Odin-worshiping Norwegian king." Huh. Typos. "Norwegian" is only one letter off from "Norwegiant."  
• E.O.G. Turville-Petre: "In these [late Viking Age Icelandic] sources Thor appears not only as the chief god of the settlers but also as patron and guardian of the settlement itself, of its stability and law. [brackets original]"
• "There's yet another reason for the upsurge in the worship of Thor during the Viking Age... Who better to defend their traditional way of life and worldview from hostile, invading forces [Christianizing elements] than Thor? One of the many areas of life in which this struggle manifested-- and one of the easiest to trace by the methods of modern anthropology-- was modes of dress. In deliberate contrast to the cross amulets that the Christians wore around their necks, those who continued to follow the old ways started to wear miniature Thor's hammers around their necks. Archaeological discoveries of these hammer pedants are concentrated in precisely the areas where Christian influence was the most pronounced."
• "Loki often runs afoul not only of societal expectations, but also of what we today might call 'the laws of nature.'" 
• "In the tales, Loki is portrayed as a scheming coward who cares only for shallow pleasures and self-preservation. He's by turns playful, malicious, and helpful, but he's always irreverent and nihilistic." 
• Many times Loki "comes to the aid of the gods, but simply by being silly and outlandish, not by accomplishing any feat that a Viking Age Scandinavian would have found to be particularly honorable." 
• I wonder if the blind god Hod should be referenced in The Gods Have Hands or if his part should be entirely subsumed by Loki.
• "The gods eventually forge a chain from the entrails of another seldom-mentioned son of Loki's..."
• "Before the victory of Christianity, the Germanic peoples had no conception of what we think of as absolute moral 'good' or 'evil.' Some values and actions were appropriate for some people and some situations; others were inappropriate for those people and situations, but very well might be appropriate for other people and other situations... While most Viking Age men were held to the standards of honor and manliness exemplified by such figures as Tyr, Thor, or Freyr, for example, not everyone was necessarily held to these standards. Devotees of Odin... followed a path of ecstatic and creative self-actualization that often seemed fickle, ruthless, irresponsible, and even shameful by the standards of, say, a man of Thor." 
• The Norse mythos is a "worldview that seeks to affirm life unconditionally." 
• "The principle to which Loki corresponds... is the disregard for or hatred of the sacred as such. For Loki, the gods are 'not to be worshiped, but ignored, to be overcome, or in the last analysis mocked.'... One embodies Loki whenever one lives in a totally profane manner, without any reference to sacred models." As the text mentions, "this perspective has been enshrined as the norm by modern humanism." I would like to see a philosophy that does for Loki what some philosophies do for Satan. 
• Baldur is "so handsome, gracious, and cheerful... that he actually gives off light." 
• "Snorri likely omitted a key element of Baldur's character: a warlike disposition... One of the characteristics that stands out [in Saxo Grammaticus' accounts] is Baldur's constant eagerness to engage in battle. He's even depicted as something of a warlord. This, combined with the many kennings (elaborate stock metaphors used in Germanic poetry) that link Baldur's name with weapons and war in general, suggests that Baldur was much more of an active fighter and less of a passive, innocent sufferer than Snorri makes him out to be."
• Baldur "seems to have been regarded as the divine animating force behind the beauty of life at the peak of its strength and exuberance. His death marks the beginning of the decline into old age, night, winter, and ultimately the rebirth that characterizes Ragnarok." 
•  "Frigg knows the destiny of all beings, implying that she also has the power to alter them if she so chooses. Frigg's weaving activities are likely an allusion to this role." 
• "Freya owns falcon plumes that she and the other Aesir use for shapeshifting into that bird, and Frigg possesses her own set of falcon feathers that are used for the same purpose." 
• "In the Viking Age, the volva was an itinerant seeress and sorceress who traveled from town to town performing commissioned acts of seidr in exchange for lodging, food, and often other forms of compensation as well. Like other northern Eurasian shamans, her social status was highly ambiguous-- she was by turns exalted, feared, longed for, propitiated, celebrated, and scorned." 
• "During the so-called Volkerwanderung or 'Migration Period'-- roughly 400-800 CE... one of the core societal institutions... was the warband, a tightly organized military society presided over by a king or chieftain and his wife. The wife of the warband's leader, according to the Roman historian Tacitus, held the title of veleda, and her role in the warband was to foretell the outcome of a suggested plan of action by means of divination and to influence that outcome by means of more active magic, as well as to serve a special cup of liquor that was a powerful symbol of both temporal and spiritual power in the warband's periodic ritual feasts... [which] are indispensable for the upkeep of the unity of the warband and its power structures." 
• "This 'politico-theological conception' was based on the mythological model provided by the divine pair Frija and Wodanaz, deities who later evolved into, respectivaly, Freya/Frigg and Odin. Wodanaz is the warband's kind or chieftain, and Frija is its veleda." And the Aesir are a warband, then? 
• Freya's husband is named Odr but this is likely a pseudonym for Odin. 
• "Freyja and Frigg are similarly accused of infidelity to their (apparently common) husband. Alongside the several mentions of Freya's loose sexual practices can be placed the words of the medieval Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus, who relates that Frigg slept with a slave on at least one occasion." 
• "Freyja, 'Lady,' is a title rather than a true name. It's a cognate ofthe modern German word Frau, which is used much the same way as the English title 'Mrs.' In the Viking Age, Scandinavian and Icelandic aristocratic women were sometimes called freyjur, the plural of freyja. 'Frigg,' meanwhile, comes from an ancient root that means 'beloved.'"  
• Do not speak of "areas of life over which a deity presides" but "areas of life within which the deity manifests itself." 
• "During the Viking Age, the formal warbands of earlier times gave way to informal, often leaderless groups of roving warriors." 
• "Taken together, certain verses in Old Norse poetry seem to indicate that Heimdall was once considered to be the father of humankind, and possibly to have established the hierarchical structure of Norse society as well." 
• "Heimdall's hljod is hidden beneath the world tree Yggdrasil and is somehow associated with the eye that Odin sacrificed. The word hljod has a wide variety of meanings, and could equally plausibly refer to Gjallorhorn, Heimdall's hearing in an abstract sense, or his hearing represented in concrete form as an ear. Did Heimdall sacrifice one of his ears for some great reward, much like Odin did with one of his eyes? We simply don't know." There is definitely a theme of self-sacrifice and self-mutilation running through Norse mythology: Odin's eye, Tyr's hand, and (if this is true) Heimdall's ear. 
• "The tale of the loss of his hand suggests that Tyr was appealed to not only in matters of war but also in matters involving law, justice, honor, oaths, and upholding traditional sources of authority." 
• "One can potentially learn much about an aspect of a religious tradition that's an offshoot of the Proto-Indo-European parent tradition by studying the parent tradition itself." 
• "Fascinatingly, the modern English words 'day' and 'deity' both come this same root [*Dyeus]." 
• "Tyr's name simply means 'god,' and its use can be found in contexts that have nothing to do with Tyr with a capital 'T.'" 
• "One of *Dyeus's roles was that of a guarantor of justice, one before whom oaths were sworn." 
• Bragi is "the divine archetype of ancient Germanic court poets... According to the Prose Edda, oen of the Old Norse words for 'poetry' (bragr) is derived from the name of this god. One Eddic poem depicts him as having runes carved on his tongue." It is confirmed. Self-mutilation as a road to power. Omw I love Norse mythology. Also, maybe Hel encounters Bragi rather than Odin. 
• "Euhemeristic explanations for the origins of myths and the figures who populate them... evidence a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of myth, at least as traditional societies conceive of it." 
• "Jotunn comes from the Proto-Germanic *etunaz and means 'devourer.' Þurs is derived from the Proto-Germanic Þurisaz and means something like 'powerful and injurious one' with a secondary connotation of 'thorn-like.' 
• "When the Norman (French) William the Conqueror seized control of England in 1066 CE, the English language became filled with French words. Among the loanwords was the Old French geant, the ancestor of the modern English word 'giant,' which replaced the Old English eoten. Geant referred to the Giants of Greek mythology, who were a group of spiritual beings who, like the jotnar of Germanic mythology, were the enemies of the gods. The Greek ancestor of geant, in turn, was once used to translate a Hebrew word that denoted beings of enormous size in the Bible, and over time this connotation of  'giant' became the word's dominant meaning." 
• "Thus we see that the Aesir are the innangard beings par excellence, while the devourers are the utangard beings par excellence... The Aesir are the benefactors and protectors of civilization, while the devourers are constantly trying to drag it back to primordial chaos (and, at Ragnarok, they succeed). They're forces of destruction, entropy, and decay." 
• "The devourers have a necessary and ultimately positive role to play in the universe and its cyclical destiny." 
• "The gods themselves are almost all descended from devourers; for example, Odin is half devourer, and Thor is three-quarters devourer. The gods don't seek to annihilate the devourers, but rather seek to keep them in check so that the cosmos remains in balance. This mitigation and partial control also seems to have been the goal of the worship or propitiation of the devourers during the Viking Age. Thus, while attempts were made to keep the devourers at bay, their value was also recognized. Paradoxically, these forces of entropy are also the forces that ultimately guarantee the survival of the universe." 
• "Hel is generally presented as being rather greedy and indifferent to the concerns of both the living and the dead." 
• Skadi's name "comes from another Germanic root preserved in the Gothic word skadus and the Old English sceadu, both of which mean 'shadow.' Her name is likely related to the name 'Scandinavia,' but whether Skadi lent her name to the land-mass or vice versa is uncertain." 
• "Skadi lives in the highest reaches of the mountains, where the snow never melts." 
• "The giants... are predominantly forces of darkness, cold, and death. Skadi fits this pattern, and seems to have had particular associations with winter."
• "Ymir's body is a close match for the concept of 'flesh' articulated by the twentieth-century French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In Merleau-Ponty's vision, the physical world is better thought of as living, intertwining flesh than as inert matter." 
• Fenrir means "He Who Dwells in the Marshes." 
• "As he [Fenrir] howled wildly and ceaselessly, a foamy river called 'Expectation'... flowed from his drooling mouth. As the river's ominous name implies, this was not the end of Fenrir." 
• "There's good reason to think that many of the other wolves mentioned in Old Norse literature are actually Fenrir going under different names." 
• "Nidhogg's actions have the intention of pulling the cosmos back to chaos, and he, along with his reptilian cohort, can therefore surely be classified among the giants." 
• "Nighogg is also said to preside over a part of the underworld called Nastrond ('The Shore of Corpses'), where perjurers, murderers, and adulterers are punished."
• "In Old Norse, Vili means 'Will,' and Ve means 'Temple' and is etymologically closely related to other words that have to do with the sacred, and hallowing in particular."
• "Intriguingly, the Proto-Germanic names of Odin, Vili, and Ve would have been, respectively, *Wodanaz, *Weljon, and *Wixan. This alliteration can hardly be coincidental, and suggests that the triad dates back to the time when the Proto-Germanic language was spoken-- well before the Viking Age began in approximately 800 AD, and quite possibly no less than a millennium or two prior to that date." 
• "Gefjun's apparent promiscuity makes Snorri rather ridiculous when he claims that Gefjun is a virgin and that girls who die virgins go to her company when they die." Lol. 
• "Why didn't the Norse and other Germanic peoples just have one single goddess of this type, then? To modern tastes, that would have made things more efficient by eliminating redundancy. But one of the defining traits of ancient Germanic religion was its lack of systematization and rationalization, and the fluidity that existed between various divine figures. You could say that the 'earth mother goddess' of fecundity was a divine model buried somewhere deep within the Germanic psyche... and that the model was allowed to be expressed in any way that it and its worshipers chose."
• Hierogamy even in day-to-day life: "The famous Indian marriage formula wherein the groom addresses the bride, 'I am heaven, thou art earth.'" 
• "Hodr and Baldr were two great war leaders who marshaled their armies against each other due to a dispute over the hand of the beautiful maiden Nanna. Baldr had been nourishing himself with a special, spiritual food that conferred invincibility, and Hodr knew that he would be unable to defeat Baldr by normal means. So Hodr undertook a long and perilous journey to the underworld. There, he obtained a weapon that had been charged with magical powers that would enable him to overcome Baldr's own magically-induced strength. Soon thereafter, Hodr wounded Baldr in combat, and Baldr died of his wounds some days later. However, Hodr was then himself slain by Baldr's avenger, who is here called 'Bous.'" 
• "A 'stick to the sources' approach will only lead us astray and allow us to be bamboozled by Snorri and the like, just as Snorri's overly-trusting Hodr was by Loki. To fill in the gaps, to restore much of what has been lost, we need an approach that is at the same time more critical and more intuitive. We must identify elements that are common to multiple sources, fit them together to form a more comprehensive framework, and add uncorroborated details only cautiously and tentatively."
• "Once, Odr went far away from the other deities. His destination and the reasons for his departure are never stated. Freya searched in vain forhim, and wept tears of hold in his absence." 
• "It seems that by the medieval period at the latest, and quite possibly in the earlier Viking Age, Odin had been split into two gods, and Freya/Frigg had been split into two goddesses. This change must have occurred relatively shortly before the 11th century, given how indistinguishable the characters of the bifurcated deities still were to each other by the time the major Old Norse literary sources were written." 
• "As with the two pairs of deities we've been considering here, it's difficult to to point to any concrete features that distinguish the Aesir and Vanir. There may have been differing tendencies or differences of emphasis, but any formulation that states that 'the Aesir were the gods of such-and-such' and 'the Vanir were the gods of these other things' is oversimplifying... [which] in turn begs the question of why the gods were being cut into two groups just prior to the 11th century."
• The sun and the moon were the "shining priest" and the "bright bride" respectively.
• "While the relationship between the Aesir gods and the giants is ambivalent at best, and often marked by considerable strife, Aegir and Ran enjoy an overwhelmingly friendly relationship with the gods. The gods are apparently regular guests at Aegir's magnificent feasts." 
• "Garm is said to be to canines what Odin is to gods and what Yggdrasil is to trees-- that is, the greatest among them, the exemplar." 
• "Some scholars have also linked Garm with the nameless hound of Hel mentioned in another Eddic poem, Baldrs Draumar. The reference to the dog in the poem is only in passing; he barks at Odin as the god rides into the underworld... Cave imagery is used to depict the underworld in mythologies from all over the world, which makes the suggestion that Gnipa Cave is an entrance to the underworld, and Garm its guardian, far from unreasonable." Does this mean that Garm is related to Cerberus? Interestingly, the article also points to evidence that Garm and Fenrir are one, which would have interesting implications for the hound of Hel. 
• "Regardless of whether or not Garm, Fenrir, and the hound of Hel are the same figure, they certainly seem to be little more than multiplications of the same type of figure: a canine associated with the underworld and the forces of chaos who breaks free at the world's end as an omen of its destruction and in order to aid its destruction." I accidentally typed "young of Hel" the first time, so... idea for an underworld goddess with canine children, one or more of whom guard the gates of the underworld. 
• Ask and Embla are mirrored in Life and Lifthrasir: "The emergence of the progenitors of humanity from wood--trees, logs, or a forest-- has several parallels in the ancient and medieval sources that form the basis for our present knowledge of the worldview and religion of the Norse and other Germanic peoples... The Roman historian Tacitus relates that at least one continental Germanic tribe of the first few centuries AD held that their ancestors emerged from a particular grove of trees in their territory. And in a later Germanic folktale, a shepherd hid in a tree as humanity was ravaged by a plague. When the epidemic had passed, he came out again, and he and his family repopulated the world." 
• There is also strong imagery of the tree and the pool of water, as seen in the dew that sustains Lif and Lifthrasir and Yggdrasil and the well of Urd. 
• "So, then, why do Lif and Lifthrasir and their counterparts in the heathen Germanic world emerge from trees and water? It is because their spiritual essence is inseparable from that of trees and water. Like engenders like, and wherever trees and water come into being, so must men and women, too. Destiny, the inscrutable force that links all agency throughout the cosmos, assures that. The question 'Where did humanity come from?' could have been answered: 'From wood and water, and, more fundamentally, from destiny. Humanity is destined to exist; therefore we exist.'"
• "Historian of religion Rudolf Simek has proposed that Surt is the animating force of 'the (volcanic) fire of the Underworld," a personage who would surely had have a profound emotional resonance for any early Icelander."
• Surt burns the world with a sword of fire before it is submerged beneath the sea. 
• "This sexual symbolism works on what one might call a visual level as well. The upright trunk of the ash tree is quintessentially phallic, and the concave basin of the well is quintessentially vaginal." 
• The Norns "shape destiny by carving runes into the trunk of the tree, or, in some sagas and poems, by weaving destiny like a web or tapestry. Their names are Urd (... "What Once Was"), Verdandi (... "What Is Coming into Being"), and Skuld (... "What Shall Be"). A common misconception is that they correspond to the past, present, and future in a linear conception of time. A more sensitive analysis shows that they correspond instead to past, present, and necessity in a cyclical conception of time."
• "While there may be only three Norns with a capital 'N,' there are countless norns with a lowercase 'n'-- norn is an Old Norse word for a generic practitioner of magic." 
• Hugin and Munin "are derived from hugr, 'thought,' and munr, 'desire,' both of which are distinct parts of the self in their own right. Perhaps they're avian manifestations of Odin's hugr and munr, or perhaps they're fylgjur with the attributes of those other mental faculties." 
• "It's often claimed that Munin's name means 'Memory,' but for this to be so, it would have to be derived from minni, 'desire,' rather than munr, 'desire.'... For Odin to state that he's worried about losing his memory in a poem where he recites, in brilliant poetic form, a remarkably systematic description of the entire cosmos in considerable detail would be highly ironic, to say the least."
• "Some have even questioned whether the Scandinavians and Icelanders themselves thought of Freyha, Freyr, and Njord as belonging to a separate clan known as 'Vanir' before the writings of the Christian historian and poet Snorri Sturluson." 
• "Freya presides over the afterlife realm Folkvang, whose inhabitants she selects from among the warriors slain in battle." 
• "Seidr is a form of pre-Christian Norse magic and shamanism concerned with discerning destiny and altering its course by re-weaving part of its web." 
• Tacitus: "On an island of the sea stands an inviolate grove, in which,veiled with a cloth, is a chariot that none but the priest may touch. The priest can feel the presence of the goddess in this holy of holies, and attends her with the deepest reverence and attends her with the deepest reverence as her chariot is drawn along by cows. Then follow days of rejoicing and merrymaking in every place that she condescends to visit and sojourn in. No one goes to war, no one takes up arms; every iron object is locked away. Then, and then only, are peace and quiet known and welcomed, until the goddess, when she has had enough of the society of men, is restored to her sacred precinct by the priest. After that, the chariot, the vestments, and (believe it if you will) the goddess herself, are cleansed in a secluded lake. This service is performed by slaves who are immediately afterwards drowned in the lake. Thus mystery begets terror and a pious reluctance to ask what that sight can be which is seen only by men doomed to die." 
• "I've seen a few attempts to translate these lines in a way that renders them morally neutral or positive, but these are utterly spurious and are based on nothing more than wishful thinking by people who would do well to come to terms with the fact that historical 'pagan' religions typically had a mostly negative-- albeit ambivalent-- view of magic and the people who practiced it." 
• "Ancient Germanic society's ambivalent attitude toward magic was mirrored by its similarly ambivalent attitude toward wealth. On the one hand, wealth was desirable for the comfort, security, and prestige that it brings, but on the other hand, it was seen as a socially disruptive thing that had to be distributed in such a way that social harmony was preserved." 
• Spirits of the land "can bless or curse those who live or travel within their land, and be blessed or cursed by them in turn. They're fierce protectors of their native lands, seldom tolerant of mistreatment and dishonor, and seem to have a very passionate disposition in general." 
• "The deities [the Aesir and Vanir] sealed their peace treaty by coming together to produce an alcoholic drink by an ancient, communal method: everyone in the group chewed berries and spat out the resulting mush into a single vat. This liquid was then fermented. In this particular instance, the fermented liquid became the god Kvasir, whose name is surely related to Norwegian kvase and Russian kvas, both of which mean 'fermented berry juice.'" The tale reminds me of a certain Hindu myth. 
• The mead of poetry was brewed by mixing Kvasir's blood with honey. 
• "There's no evidence that there was ever a cult of Kvasir. He seems to have been solely a literary figure who epitomized the qualities of the Mead of Poetry. Since the Mead of Poetry became the exclusive property of Odin shortly after its production, it should come as no surprise that the defining characteristics of Kvasir's personality are all attributes that are more commonly and more powerfully associated with Odin himself." 
• "The shamanism of the pre-Christian Norse and other Germanic peoples took several different forms... and often occurring within the context of certain formal, initiatory military groups. These 'warrior-shamans' typically fell into two groups: the berserkers (Old Norse berserkir, 'bear-shirts') and ulfednar (...Old Norse for 'wolf-hides')... [which] shared a common set of shamanic practices, with the only substantial difference being that [of] the totem animal... These names are a reference to the practice of dressing in a ritual costume made from the hide of the totem animal, an outward reminder of the wearer's having gone beyond the confines of his humanity and become a divine predator." 
• "Candidates for Germanic military societies underwent such a process [of ritual death death and rebirth] before being admitted into the group: they spent a period in the wilderness, living like their totem animal and learning its ways, obtaining their sustenance through hunting, gathering, and raiding the nearest towns. To quote the esteemed archaeologist Dominique Briquel, 'Rapto vivere, to live in the manner of wolves, is the beginning of this initiation. The bond with the savage world is indicated not only on the geographic plane-- life beyond the limits of the civilized life of the towns... but also on what we would consider a moral plane: their existence is assured by the law of the jungle.' The candidate ceased to be an ordinary human being and became instead a wolf-man or a bear-man, move a part of the forest than of civilization." 
• "We have only the haziest idea of the techniques used to reach this ecstatic trance state, but we know that fasting, exposure to extreme heat, and ceremonial 'weapons dances' were among the shamanic toolkit."
• The Ynglinga Saga: "Odin's men went armor-less into battle and were as crazed as dogs or wolves and as strong as bears or bulls. They bit their shields and slew men, while they themselves were harmed by neither fire nor iron. This is called 'going berserk.'"
• "In the biting or casting away of their shields, we see a reminder that their ultimate identity is no longer their social persona, but rather their 'unity with the animal world' that they have achieved through 'self-dehumanization.' A warrior's shield and weapons were the very emblems of his social persona and status; they were given to a young man who had come of age by his father or closest male relative to mark his newfound arrival into the sphere of the rights and responsibilities of his society's adult men." 
• "Like other northern Eurasian shamans, Germanic warrior-shamans are occasionally depicted with 'spirit-wives,' in this case from among the valkyries, the female attendant spirits of Odin."
• "It should come as no surprise that many of 'Odin's men,'... were also warrior-poets. These were no ordinary soldiers; their battle frenzy, with all of its grotesqueness and violence, was of a rarefied, even poetic sort-- and, being a gift from Odin, it was inherently sacred." 
• "The elves are luminous beings, 'more beautiful than the sun,' whose exalted status is demonstrated by their constantly being linked with the Aesir and Vanir gods in Old Norse and Old English poetry. The lines between elves and other spiritual beings... are blurry... It's especially hard to discern the boundary that distinguishes the elves from the Vanir gods and goddesses." 
• "Elves commonly cause human illnesses, but they also have the power to heal them, and seem especially willing to do so if sacrifices are offered to them. Humans and elves can interbreed and produce half-human, half-elfin children, who often have the appearance of humans but possess extraordinary intuitive and magical powers. Humans can pparently become elves after death, and there was considerable overlap between the worship of human ancestors and the worship of the elves."
• "A dwarf... is a certain kind of invisible being... No one really knows what the word 'dwarf' and its cognates originally meant, but there's no indication that it had anything to do with a small stature." 
• The dwarves are pitch-black in appearance and live underground in Svartalfheim, a place which was probably thought of as a labyrinthine complex of mines and forges. The dwarves are more often noted for being extremely skilled smiths and craftspeople... They're also extremely knowledgeable, wise, and magically powerful. They turn to stone if exposed to the rays of the sun." Would dwarf-derived treasure dragons do the same? Interesting dragons.  
• "Four dwarves... hold aloft the four corners ofthe sky, evidencing their colossal strength." 
• "The lines between the dwarves, elves, and dead humans are very blurry. The dwarves are occasionally called 'black elves'... and in some instances they're described as being dead or resembling human corpses." 
• "The dead remained in their community's collective memory long after their passing, and were perceiving to confer blessings upon the land and the people they left behind." 
• "The most frequent gift of the ancestors is the fertility of the land, which, it hardly needs to be pointed out, corresponds very well to the ecological role of a decaying body-- providing nourishment for other, living members of the ecological community. The hamingja ('luck'), one of the semi-autonomous parts of the self in the indigenous Germanic worldview, is often passed on to a descendant. He or she is thereby granted the ancestor's propensity for success. Sitting on a burial mound in order to receive creative inspiration or an answer to a burning question is another common practice. In addition to these specific questions, the ancestors are petitioned for help in all areas of life. It may have been held that those who had brought especial prosperity to their people during life were held to also be able to grant especial prosperity to their people after they had died and become an ancestor." 
• There was a king whose reign was marked by good climate and successful crops. After his death the people were divided over who would claim his corpse, so the body was divided into parts. 
• "Land spirits and elves occupied much the same role as the ancestors in what we today would call the religious customs of the pre-Christian northern Europeans. They were propitiated in much the same way and held influence over many of the same aspects of the lives of humans. Even the dwelling-places of these types of beings overlapped; elves were traditionally associated with the burial mounds and chambers of the human dead, and would commonly receive sacrifices at these places." 
• "To some extent, this tendency toward sanitization [of the valkyries] is present even in the later Old Norse sources, which focus on their love affairs with human men and their assisting Odin in transporting his favorites among those slain in battle to Valhalla, where they will fight by his side during Ragnarok." 
• "The valkyries have always had such characteristics, but in heathen times they were far more sinister. The meaning of their name, 'choosers of the slain,' refers not only to their choosing who gains admittance to Valhalla, but also to their choosing who dies in battle and using malicious magic to ensure that their preferences in this regard are brought to fruition."
• In Njal's Saga, "twelve valkyries are seen prior to the Battle of Clontarf, sitting at a loom and weaving the tragic destiny of the warriors (an activity highly reminiscent of the Norns). They use intestines for their thread, severed heads for weights, and swords and arrows for beaters, all the while chanting their intentions with ominous delight. The Saga of the Volsungs compare beholding a valkyrie to 'staring into a flame.'"
• Among the Anglo-Saxons, for example, the valkyries... were female spirits of carnage." 
• "Whether in their loving or bloodthirsty modalities, the valkyries are best understood as part of the extensive and dynamic complex of shamanism that permeates pre-Christian Germanic religion. Much like the ravens Hugin and Munin, they're projections of parts of Odin, semi-distinct beings that are part of his larger being." 

Cosmology

• "Asgard is the ultimate model of the innangard, while Jotunheim, the 'Homeland of the Giants,' is the epitome of the utangard. Migard ('Middle Enclosure'), the world of human civilization, is, as the name implies, somewhere in the middle-- not quite as innangard as Asgard and not quite as utangard as Jotunheim. But Midgard is a space enclosed, on a geographical plane, by fences, and on the psychological plane by norms and laws. This makes it much closer-- at least in theory-- to Asgard than to Jotunheim. In other words, Asgard is the divine model upon which the pre-Christian Norse people patterned their world." 
• "Some scholars have gone so far as to claim that Vanaheim was invented by the thirteenth-century Icelandic Christian historian and poet Snorri Sturluson... [but] we can be reasonably certain that it was a genuine element of pre-Christian Norse religion." 
• "This psychogeography [of innangard and utangard] found its natural expression in agrarian land-use patterns, where the fence (the -gard...) separated pastures and fields of crops from the wilderness beyond them. Of the Nine Worlds, two are innangard spaces: Asgard and Midgard, the world of human civilization. Both ofthese contain -gard in their names and are depicted as having a fence or fortification surrounding them. The rest of the Nine Worlds' names end in -heim, and there's no reference to their being enclosed in any way, which seems to indicate that they're essentially utangard places... Thus we can infer that Vanaheim, like the Vanir themselves, is somewhat more wild or 'natural,' and less 'cultural,' than the world of the Vanir's Aesir counterparts, or even that of humanity." 
• "With the exception of Midgard, these are all primarily invisible worlds." 
• Rudolf Simek: "Nine if the mythical number of the Germanic tribes." 
• "He [Simek] speculates that this number's importance could be derived from the lunar calendar's 27 days being a multiple of nine. 
• "Valhalla, Folkvangr, and the other names for the abode of the dead in Old Norse literature were never separated into cleanly distinct worlds until the writings of the thirteenth-century Icelandic Christian scholar Snorri Sturluson."
• "Snorri had little knowledge of Norse mythology that isn't known to any modern expert (in fact, we possess the great majority of Snorri's sources), and no particular interest in giving an accurate presentation of Norse mythology; his works contain numerous demonstrably false claims, and no uncorroborated statement of his [can] be taken at face value." 
• "On the whole, though, the underworld seems to have been roughly analogous to the world of the living. The dead continued to live in some way in their graves; death wasn't as much an abrupt break with life as it was a transition to a different modality of life." 
• "One had to travel in order to reach Hel," perhaps by crossing through mists, past a "raging torrent," by a bridge, and past a wall. 
• The killing of chickens may have some connection to Norse funerary custom. 
• "Hel was located underground-- down and to the north, the realm of cold and general lifelessness. It was reached by descending from a higher point with the help of a guide," such as a dead woman. "After traveling through darkness and mist, one would come to a river, perhaps a torrential river of water, but more commonly a river of clanging weapons. There was a bridge over the river that one had to cross. After a time, one would finally arrive at the wall surrounding Hel, but, for reasons we don't entirely understand, it wasn't thought wise to attempt to enter through the gate. More surreptitious ways were preferred. At that point, one would be, in spirit, in the world of the dead in their graves, and one had to take extreme precaution to ensure that one didn't become trapped there while accomplishing one's purpose." 
• "Yggdrasil and the Well of Urd weren't thought of as existing in a single physical location, but rather dwell within the invisible heart of anything and everything." 
• "Even modern English, a Germanic language, still has only two tenses: 1) the past tense... and 2) the present tense... Unlike Romance languages such as Spanish or French, for example, Germanic languages have no true future tense. Instead they use certain verbs in the present tense to express something similar to futurity... Rather than 'futurity,' however, what these verbs express could be more accurately be called 'intention' or 'necessity.' The Well of Urd corresponds to the past tense. It is the reservoir of compiled or ongoing actions that nourish the tree and influence its growth. Yggdrasil, in turn, corresponds to the present tense, that which is being actualized here and now. What of intention and necessity then? This is the water that permeates the image." 
• "Here, time is cyclical rather than linear. The present returns to the past, where it retroactively changes the past. The new past, in turn, is reabsorbed into a new present, whose originality is an outgrowth of the give-and-take between the waters of the well and the waters of the tree." Idea: Time traveling civilization attempting to beat entropy by going back to an earlier period again and again, erasing all that happened previously but keeping records of the now-erased past. 
• "All beings who are subject to destiny have some degree of agency in shaping their own destiny and the destinies of others-- this is the dew that falls back into the well from the branches of the tree, accordingly reshaping the past and its influence upon the present. All beings do this passively; those who practice magic do it actively." 
• "In the image of Yggdrasil and the Well of Urd... creation is an ongoing process in which everything, from a goddess to a speck of dirt, participates... The Germanic model implictily claims that we are all created creators, carrying forward the world's ceaseless reinvention of itself." 
• John Muir: "I used to envy the father of our race, dwelling as he did in contact with the new-made fields and plants of Eden; but I do so no more, because I have discovered that I also live in creation's dawn." 
• Valhallr means "'rock of the fallen,' a title given to certain rocks and hills where the dead were perceived to dwell in southern Sweden, one of the greatest historical centers of Odin-worship." 

Runes

• "The runes are presumed to have been derived from one of the many Old Italic alphabets in use among the Mediterranean peoples of the first century CE, who lived to the south of the Germanic tribes. Earlier Germanic sacred symbols, such as those preserved in northern European petroglyphs, were also likely influential in the development of the script." 
• "The transmission of writing from southern Europe to northern Europe likely took place via Germanic warbands, the dominant northern European military institution of the period, who would have encountered Italic writing firsthand during campaigns among their southerly neighbors. This hypothesis is supported by the association that runes have always had with the god Odin." 
• "From the perspective of the ancient Germanic peoples... the runes were never 'invented,' but are instead eternal, pre-existing forces that Odin himself discovered by undergoing a tremendous ordeal."
• "Directly below the world-tree is the Well of Urd, which contains the entirety of the past within its depths, and is therefore a source of incredible wisdom. The runes themselves seem to have their native dwelling-place in its waters." 
• Catharina Raudvere: "Words create reality, not the other way around." 
• "No one would hang from a tree without food or water for nine days and nights, ritually wounded by his own spear, in order to obtain a set of arbitrary signifiers." 
• "The runes were not only a means of fostering communication between two or more humans. Being intrinsically meaningful symbols that could be read and understood by at least some nonhuman beings, they could facilitate communication between humankind and the invisible powers who animate the visible world, providing the basis for a plethora of magical acts." 

Concepts

• "The invisible, spiritual world is not somehow separate from the visible, tangible world, but instead exists 'in its heart,' to borrow the worlds of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. To put it another way: the visible world is the flesh of the invisible gods." 
• "For a pantheist... the whole world is a revelation, a 'scripture' that anyone can 'read' to understand the divine." 
• "From such a [pantheist] perspective, the idea of salvation is unnecessary and even ridiculous; we are already wholly divine and wholly immersed in divinity. Whereas Christians commune with Jesus in a particular ritual where specially consecrated bread and wine become his body, a pantheist communes with his or her gods all the time, with every breath, every piece of food, and every mosquito bite." 
• "Through the crime, the outlaw had demonstrated that he or she was an utangard being rather than an innangard one, and since the criminal was beyond society's control, he or she was accordingly stripped of society's protection. The very words related to outlawry demonstrate this transition from being a civilized person to a wild one: outlawry was called 'going into the forest'... and the outlaw was called a 'man of the forest.'"
• "The utangard was not seen as being entirely destructive and negative. In fact, at times, men and women would deliberately venture into the utangard for a particular constructive purpose. For example, the process of initiation into a warband (a particular kind of military society) involved spending time alone in the wilderness and overcoming a situation fraught with extreme vulnerability."
• "The utangard was seen as being a matchless source of raw power that could be directed into constructive, innangard pursuits. In the same way that the scream is the origin of all speech, order can only be fashioned out of primal chaos, and is therefore dependent upon it for continued existence." 
• "However much destiny may be altered by gods, humans, and other beings, its initial framework is established by the Norns." 
• "Seidr wasn't a fitting activity for men, to say the least. According to traditional Germanic gender constructs, it was extremely shameful and dishonorable for a man to adopt a female social or sexual role. A man who practiced seidr could expect to be labeled ergi (Old Norse for 'unmanly') by his peers-- one of the gravest insults that could be hurled at a Norseman... This taunt was nevertheless fraught with tense ambivalence; unmanly as seidr may have been seen as being, it was undeniably a source of incredible power-- perhaps the greatest power in the cosmos, given that it could change the course of destiny itself." 
• "Magic is something very differently from what it's usually claimed to be nowadays... Magic produces change by working directly with the consciousness. Its effects often spill over into the physical world, but this occurs only indirectly. This is, in an important sense, the exact opposite of what modern science does. Science causes changes in the physical world in accordance with the 'laws' of the physical world. Magic and science not only work by different means; they also work toward different ends, and, in fact, this difference in ends accounts for the difference in means." 
• "Magic is as alive and well in the modern world as it's ever been-- it's just been brilliantly disguised." 
• "In order to bind another-- that is, to transform the desires of another so that they aid the fulfillment of one's own desires-- one must work with the other's existing desires. To compel someone to believe or to do something in accordance with one's own will, one must present the belief or action in such a way that the person feels it to be in accordance with his or her will, thereby satisfying the desires of both the enchanter and the enchanted." For animists, this applies even to animals, weather systems, and so on. 
• "The person who binds most successfully is the person who knows the beings to be bound and their desires the most thoroughly." 
• "The Old Norse vocabulary of magic revolves around conceptions of knowledge." 
• Catharina Raudvere: "Prophecies, dreams and dream interpretations were treated with the greatest concern... They reveal a tension between freedom and dependence." 
• "Politeness aside, however, the 'mechanistic philosophy' of Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton, and their ilk has utterly failed to erase magic from the modern world, or even to diminish its influence. Magic occupies as prominent a place in modern society as it ever has. We just prefer to call it things like 'psychology,' 'sociology,' 'advertising,' 'marketing,' and 'personal development' rather than 'magic.'" Okay. Next time anyone asks, I'm majoring in Communication with an Emphasis in Magical Bindings.
• "Instead of discussing animism in terms of individual 'souls' that can be cleanly separated from a 'body,' Hallowell introduced the term 'other-than-human persons' to denote those beings that the Ojibwa people of south-central Canada perceive to have the fundamental qualities of personhood: consciousness/sentience, will, and the ability to communicate with other persons." 
• "The animist 'person' should be understood not as an 'individual,' but rather as a 'dividual,' which she defines as 'a person constitutive of transferable particles that form his or her personal substance'-- or, to put it another way, there is no hard and fast boundary between self and other, but rather a spectrum or a continuum."
• "For Heidegger, a being is never an isolated thing, but, rather, is itself only in the particular context within which it exists and the meaning it has for itself and for others-- hence the 'in-the-world' element of the term. For example, water is never simply 'water,' but is always necessarily 'water-in-the-ocean,' 'water-in-the-glass,' 'water-falling-from-the-sky,' and so forth. A dividual, therefore, is defined not by some isolated and static essence (a 'soul'), but rather by the dynamic web of relationships within which he or she is enmeshed." 
• "Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of die Wille zur Macht... is most often translated as 'the Will to Power,' but could be just as accurately rendered as 'The Will to Make' or 'The Will to Creative Agency.' The Will to Power is, as the term implies, a will that permeates all life: 'where I found the living, thee I found will to power; and even in the will of those who serve I found the will to be master.'
• Nietzsche: "And life confided this secret to me: 'Behold,' it said, 'I am that which must always overcome itself.'"
• "Buber describes two ways of interacting with the world and speaking to or about the world. The first, 'I-It,' consists of merely speaking about something in a manner that implicitly denies the personhood of the one who is being spoken about. The one who is spoken about is reduced to an object with no agency or sentience of its own. This objectifying mode of discourse is opposed by 'I-You,' which consists of speaking to someone else, treating the other as an animate person much like oneself."
• "For a polytheist, the world in its entirety is ultimately sacred. The sacred encompasses the profane and sacralizes it, rather than merely negating it." 
• William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "One law for the lion and the ox is oppression." 
• "A myth is the meaning or context that one perceives in the phenomena one encounters. It's the basic structuring element of the invisible component of perception. As such, it's an inescapable part of all perception and all thought, and is the foundation of any worldview. Images, narratives, and, yes, even concepts are all forms that myths can and do take. Thus, for example, the view that everything is conscious is a myth. So is the view that only the human mind is conscious... So is labeling something an 'oak tree' rather than pure, riotous chaos. Myth is pretty pervasive, isn't it?" 
• "For our purposes here, shamanism can be considered to be the practice of entering an ecstatic trance state in order to contact spirits and/or travel through spiritual worlds with the intention of accomplishing some specific purpose." 
• "The active shamanic practitioner receives an additional boon: an upper hand in life's battles and a position of dignity and glory within the all-subsuming process of the cosmos's ceaseless, Nietzschean 'self-overcoming,' a position as an especially vigorous facilitator of growth, renewal, and re-beautification."
• "Remember the cats, ravens, and other familiar spirits who are often the companions of witches in European folklore? These are fylgjur (pronounced 'FILG-yur') in the plural and fylgja (pronounced 'FILG-ya'; Old Norse for 'follower') in the singular. The fylgja is generally an animal spirit, although, every now and then, a human helping spirit is also called a flygja in Old Norse literature. The well-being of the fylgja is intimately tied to that of its owner-- for example, if the fylgja dies, its owner dies, too. Its character and form are closely connection to the character of its owner... This helping spirit can be seen as the totem of a single person rather than of a group." 
• David Abram: "Darwin had rediscovered the deep truth of totemism-- the animistic assumption, common to countless indigenous cultures but long banished from polite society, that human beings are closely kindred to other creatures... It is an inescapable implication of the evolutionary insight: we humans are corporeally related, by direct and indirect webs of evolutionary affiliation, to every other organism that we encounter." 
•  "The self is a much more complex entity. It's comprised of numerous different parts that are all semi-autonomous and can detach themselves from one another at will, and the border between the self and its 'environment' is highly porous and ambiguous. Precisely what constitutes the self at any given moment is a matter that's constantly being negotiated and re-negotiated between various factions." 
• The six selves are: "the likamr ('vital processes'), the hamr ('shape/form/appearance'), the hugr ('thought'), munr ('desire'), the fylgja ('follower'), and the hamingja ('luck')."
• "The hamr is one's form or appearance, that which others perceive through sensory observation... [it] is not absolutely and unalterably true or fixed. In fact, hamr is the most crucial word in the Old Norse lexicon of shapeshifting. The Old Norse phrase that denotes the process of shapeshifting is... 'changing hamr,' and the quality of being able to perform this feat is called hamramr, 'of strong hamr.'"
• Hugr is "the part of the self that intuits, analyzes, and plans. It takes in information and contemplates it to foster understanding. it sets goals and develops strategies to achieve them." 
• "The munr is the seat of one's likes and dislikes, love, sorrow, fear, hatred, happiness, and other emotions."
• Fylgja "is also applied to the afterbirth." It is "literally translated as 'follower,' but, as often as not, it's depicted as traveling ahead of its owner, arriving at the intended destination before its owner or appearing in the dreams of someone who will meet the owner the following day." 
• Bettina Sommer: "Luck was a quality inherent in the man and his lineage, a part of his personality similar to his strength, intelligence, or skill with weapons, at once both the cause and the expression of the success, wealth, and power of a family."
• Luck "is a personal entity in its own right, is part of the self, and can be split off from the other components of the self in certain circumstances. When a person dies, his or her hamingja is often reincarnated in one of his or her descendants, particularly if the child is given the name of the original owner... The hamingja can also be lent to others during life to assist them in particularly perilous missions where luck is needed especially badly." 
• The Norse "view[ed] spirit and matter as being intimately intertwined rather than separable into an exclusively corporeal realm and an exclusively 'incoporeal' realm. Thus it should come as no surprise that the heathen land of the dead is a literal underworld that closely corresponds to the grave, located within the ground and especially concentrated around burial sites." 
• After death the various parts of the self "go their separate ways. Part of the self lingers in the underworld and retains his or her former personality and appearance. This part of the self is venerated as an ancestor (unless the person had been especially hated or feared, or had returned to haunt the living with malicious intent), and the living can communicate with this part of the dead person indefinitely." Getting ideas now of hauntings by different parts of the self. Just because it's a ghost doesn't mean it's the same as any other kind of ghost. Some are luck-ghosts, some are desire-ghosts, &C. 
• "No surviving source tells us what happens to the fylgja after death, but-- and this is an open question-- is it far-fetched to surmise that it's reborn into its proper species?"
• "In the worldview of the pre-Christian northern Europeans, life is eternal. But not in the sense that most people today automatically think of when they hear that phrase; rather, the particular bundle of fragmentary parts that you call your 'self' dissolves into its components, who then go on to vitalize your descendants and their world, just as your rotting corpse nourishes the beings around it-- worms, bugs, trees, flowers. Death is a threshold in the wider process of life, not so much an end as a continuance and a transformation." 
• "Destiny is the often-inscrutable force that causes the past to exert its particular influences upon the present, which, in this image, necessarily also includes the influence of the present upon the past and, thereby, the potential for a new and different present." 
• "What the Norns carve into the tree is the earliest form of the destinies of the beings who inhabit the Nine Worlds, but not their only possible form. Unlike the pronouncements of the Greek Fates, the words of the Norns are not necessarily absolute... All beings who are subject to destiny have some degree of power over their own destiny and the destiny of others. Everything and everyone uses this power passively, in some small way, merely by being a stopping-point in the course the water takes as it cycles through the well and the tree, thereby exerting some measure of influence over that course." The active shaping of destiny is called magic. 
• "All life is an interconnected web, where the slightest thrumming of one strand can cause the whole web to tremble. Even the most self-willed of actions, those that exert the most powerful influence upon destiny, are effective precisely because they are successful adaptations to the context within which they are taken."

Other

• "The more serious a student of pre-Christian Germanic/Norse mythology you are, the more useful you'll find having a solid knowledge of Old Norse to be. This is especially the case for people whose spirituality is rooted in that of the heathen Germanic peoples; Old Norse is to that spirituality what Latin is to Catholicism, what Hebrew is to Judaism, and what Arabic is to Islam." 
• "While the etymology of Mjollnir is uncertain, most scholars trace the name back to an Indo-European root that is attested in the Old Slavic word mlunuji, Russian molnija, and Welsh mellt, all of which mean 'lightning.' It may also be related to the Icelandic worlds mjoll, 'new snow,' and mjalli, 'white.'"
• "When something or someone was consecrated with Thor's hammer, it (or he or she) was taken from the realm of chaos and absorbed into the cosmos. It was protected from the ill effects of chaos and its denizens, and sanctified and sanctioned by the social order and its divine models. The profane was banished and the sacred was established." 
• "The Christians were thereby identified with the giants, forces of chaos who came to northern Europe to destroy Norse culture." 
• The swastika originally symbolized "luck,holiness, power, prosperity, and the sky."
• The swastika "was one of the central symbols of Proto-Indo-European society... The Germanic peoples were carving the swastika onto rocks as far back as the Bronze Age, before most other Germanic symbols, including the runes, had yet appeared. Its meaning for them was dynamic and hard to pin down into any simple definition, but it had much to do with luck, prosperity, power, protection, and sanctity, and was often associated with the sun and sky." 
• "The two symbols [the sunwheel and swastika] were seen to be synonymous-- and indeed, their visual forms themselves would suggest that they're simply variations on a common image." 
• "The swastika was often engraved on hammers. On runestones the swastika can often be found beside or in connection with Thor." It could also be referred to as "Thor's hammer" and the sign of it was apparently sometimes made with hand movements, at least often enough that one of King Hakon's friends explained that, when Hakon made the sign of the cross, he was really making the sign of Thor's hammer. 
• "Pagan Germanic society was permissive, individualistic, and even anarchic to a degree that's difficult for us moderns to fathom, let alone appreciate. In Viking Age Iceland, for example, there was no king, president, or executive branch of any sort, let alone a Fuhrer. While there was a nominal judiciary and body of law, disputes were ultimately resolved by the parties who were directly involved in them." 
• "Valknut is a modern Norwegian compound word that means 'knot of those fallen in battle' and was introduced by Norwegians who lived long after the Viking Age."
• "The Valknut appears only in connection with the cult of the dead." 
• "The Helm of Awe... is one of the most mysterious and powerful symbols in Norse mythology. Just looking at its form, without any prior knowledge of what that form symbolizes, is enough to inspire awe and fear: eight arms that look like spiked tridents radiate out from a central point, as if defending that central point by going on the offensive against any and all hostile forces that surround it." Sounds like a Thor-ish version of the Eight-Pointed Star of Chaos. 
• "The havoc-wreaking dragon Fafnir attributes much of his apparent invincibility to his use of the Helm of Awe." 
• Stephen Flowers: "This helm of awe was originally a kind of sphere of magical power to strike fear into the enemy. It was associated with the power of serpents to paralyze their prey before striking them (hence, the connection with Fafnir)."
• "The Svefnthorn was used to put an adversary into a deep sleep from which he or she wouldn't awaken for a long time." 
• "As powerfully as it's influenced our modern social structure and thought, there are also many ways in which the Indo-European worldview is strikingly different from our own. Studying it enables you to have that many more perspectives to draw from in creating your own worldview."
• The Wild Hunt "was recorded in folklore all through ancient, medieval, and even early modern Europe, but was especially concentrated in the Germanic lands of northern Europe... It swept through the forests in midwinter, the coldest, darkest part of the year, when ferocious winds and storms howled over the land. Anyone who found him- or herself out of doors at night during this time might spot this ghostly procession-- or be spotted by it, which might involve being carried away and dropped miles from where the unfortunate person had been taken up, or worse. Others, practitioners of various forms of magic, joined in it voluntarily, as an intangible part of them... flew with the cavalcade while their bodies lay in their beds as if sleeping normally. Sometimes, the members of the Hunt entered towns and houses, causing havoc and stealing food and drink." Seems as though they were the winter storms, and not just presaged by them. Also I want to add spiders to the Wild Hunt.