Absolutely! I love talking about this stuff.
The short answer is that, the Old Norse religions were structured very differently from Greek and Roman ones.
The long answer requires a little bit more anthropological and historical context:
Religion is ultimately a product of culture. The way a given religion is structured emerges from the worldviews, sensibilities, experiences, and priorities of its people.
All of these ancient pagan religions started more or less the same way; they emerged out of people perceiving things about the world and telling stories about it. However, a religion doesn't really centralize until a society grows and develops things like agriculture and cities. Only then do we start to see a "canon" of myths and orthopraxy and orthodoxy emergeâthat is, "how to do the religion."
Regardless of any similar features they may have, all religions have their own unique architecture or "operating system" that they run on. What determines the OS of a religion, is based on what factors shaped the development of the culture it comes from.
Take Rome, for example. Rome was shaped by the environment of conflict pretty much since its conception. Rome's neighboring societies constantly threatened invasion due to Rome's coveted position in the dead-center of the Mediterranean peninsula, which meant Rome started to value control over the land as a result. Religio Romano reflects this: All of the Roman gods are characterized as lords (read: land-owners) of the different "domains" of the world (i.e. "that which you hold dominion over"). A society that did not develop conquest as a value would not have a pantheon of gods that works like this.
Now here's where it gets interesting with the Norse people: Their society never actually got to the point where their religion could centralize, before Christianity swept through. Despite having multiple named gods, its overall structure was and is still mostly animistic, because it was only just starting to develop the characteristics of polytheism by the time of the Christian conversion. However, this late conversion means what remains is not as garbled and corroded as it could have been, giving us this impression that it was more centralized than it actually was.
There's still an issue of USAmerican pagans making the mistake that we almost always make when approaching old European form of paganism: Assuming that we can restore what has been lost by modeling them after Roman/Greek polytheism.
Why we have this assumption is pretty simple: Whenever our nation doesn't know how to do something, we turn to models of antiquity to guide us. After all, our entire democratic republic is based on Ancient Greek and Rome, so the structures found in Grecco-Roman societies are what feel the most familiar and sensible for us.
Unfortunately, this unchecked assumption is the mechanism behind the Imperialization of a lot of these old pagan practices. It's not something we're intentionally doing, of course, but it's something that emerges due to lacking methodology for switching religions; we think switching religions is just a matter of switching gods, rather than a process of changing our entire patterns of thinking.
Rome was very good at giving people the impression that everything about it represents the baseline default for "how to do society," including religion. This is evidenced in the way we discuss religion as a whole, using terms that derive from Grecco-Roman models: Theology. Religion. Cosmology. Pantheon. Deity. Orthopraxy. Orthodoxy. These are all Latin words, and truthfully they only accurately apply to Latin-derived belief-systems.
Heathenry is not one of those, and let me give some examples why:
Take the Old Norse word that we commonly translate into "god" in English: Ăs. The actual implied meaning of this is "member of the Ăsir." The Ăsir are a family of people who live on the other side of the veilâin what we'd call "the Astral" or "the Otherworld" or "the Heavens", etc.âin a sphere called Asgard. But they are not the only kind of people there, for there's also the Vanir, who live in their own sphere called Vanaheim. (If you want to complicate things further, these spheres were not seen as separate from the material world, but rather nested within it, and how this works would take me too long to explain for the scope of this post.)
The names "Ăsir" and "Vanir" do not actually describe different "species" of divine powers, but describe affiliations, similar to how we say "the Bloods" or "the Crips" when identifying those gangs. As far as I'm aware, there isn't a word like "god" in Old Norse because the Norse people did not identify these beings as anything other than people. We just gloss these terms as "god" in order to make it clear what their function is to Western readers, who are coming at this from a Latin paradigm.
Same goes with the word jötun, which is often translated as "giant" in English. At first we'd assume jötnar are similar to "titans" by virtue of this descriptor, but they're not. It's more accurate to say that they are "the powers that dwell in environments human beings can potentially visit, but not stay in forever."
Jötnar live in the "countries" we can't tame, such as on the peaks of mountains, in the depths of volcanoes, in the torrential oceans, etc, but this also applies to more abstract countries: For example, the god Loki is also a jötun, but he typically dwells in the "country" of parties, mischief, and entertainment. This is a realm we adore visiting and often invite into our lives, but just like how we invite fire into our lives, it needs a specific designation and cannot engulf our entire existence without harming us.
Compare this to, perhaps, Frigg's hall, which is the "hall" we visit whenever we work on fibercrafting and textile arts. Frigg is not jötun, but she also wouldn't be one because her hall emerges from domestic life, vs. Loki's nonsense, which is a wild thing we invite into the domestic sphere.
"Giant" is typically accepted as a gloss for jötnar because it's not exactly inaccurateâjötnar have energy that feels noisy and big compared to the usual hum of our livesâbut this word is once again a gloss.
So...yeah. It's more complicated than we typically want to admit. A lot of people coming into paganism are looking to get a foundation beneath their feet as fast as possible, so they reach out for the most accessible paradigm they can find. But just because a tool is accessible doesn't automatically make it the right tool for the job. Many people end up recreating the Latin and Imperial structures of religion they were trying to get away from this way, and are left wondering why they do not feel fulfilled.
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