The gruelling, Sisyphean process of looking for typos and things we decided we want to change is finally over, and the finished draft of our translation of the U-manuscript (Metal Redaction*) of Hervarar saga has been sent to the publisher, hopefully to see the light of day this year.
*"...a dismissal of the U version of the story as being artistically inferior to the others. In particular, elements such as overt Pagan worship, excessive violence, and moral ambiguities have been associated with the U redaction of the saga (Love 2013: 187-188)."
Beautifully-observed & realistic figure of a sleeping Antelope incised on rock up to 10,000 years ago at Tin Taghirt, Tassili n'Ajjer in Algeria, one of the largest & most important groupings of prehistoric cave art in the world.
The Spirit of Spongecake Day and the Passage of Time
I'm 33 now. I've got silver hair coming in my hair and what beard I've managed to grow thus far. Today I got groceries and there are strawberries in my fridge. I was maybe 19 when I made that offering and in many respects that part of my life feels like it happened to someone else.
Not in the sense that I've turned away from it, but that key choices I made in my mid-20s allowed me to grow into who I am now. (And who I suspect I would have always been, had it not be for many factors in my personal life.) My circumstances have changed, but the past housing and food insecurity is never far from my mind.
When the offering was made, I certainly never expected that anyone would remember it after so long. Nor would I have believed that some people still mark it on their calendar as a low-effort, low-cost way to honor Loki with sweets and humor. I put the photo out there, but to was the Lokean community who decided what it was. You all, still, decide what it is.
As my circumstances have changed and I'm lucky enough to be able to, I plan on making a donation to a local food bank in my area on Spongecake Day. The amount depends on how much I'm able to save, but at least a few hundred. I say this not to pat myself on the back but to consider how Spongecake Day's meaning, for me, has grown as I have.
The core of the original offering was that I didn't have a lot of fresh food and offered what I had, even though I wanted to hoard it all for myself. Times, especially in the US where I live, are such that many families are struggling to get food or other things they need. For me, as an adult with some expendable income, Spongecake Day is more about paying it forward. Helping others. I strongly believe that if I have the ability to help, I am morally and ethically obligated to do so. And I believe this is what Loki might expect as well. I am, again, speaking for myself and my practice.
I see Spongecake Day as a day of humor, silliness, taking joy in the small things we can do and that no act of devotion is too small. I also see it as a reminder to care for others in our respective communities in any way we can. Especially in this current political and social climate, when government systems are unable to care for their people as they ought to.
Ultimately, the choice is not mine to decide what Spongecake Day is or will be in the future. Or if it indeed has a future. It's up to the Lokean community at large. It doesn't belong to me. It belongs to all of us.
Even though my Debenhams barbell is the cheapest and crappiest available, it makes me feel good about myself to pick it up. Therefore I have treated myself to the real thing (plus another little credit card accident on the side).
Super excited for our next translation project: Fjósa ríma is 67 verses (pretty damn short by rímur standards) about a punch-up in a cow shed that references all manner of saga heroes.
“Musk talks about Mars as a lifeboat for humanity, which is among the very stupidest things that someone could say,” says Adam Becker, an astrophysicist and author of the book More Everything Forever, which outlines the messianic, sci-fi fantasies of the tech oligarchs. “There are so many reasons why it’s such a bad idea, and this is not about, ‘Oh, we’ll never have the technology to live on Mars.’ That’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is that Earth is always going to be a better option no matter what happens to Earth. Like, we could get hit with an asteroid the size of the one that killed off the dinosaurs, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could explode every single nuclear weapon, and Earth would still be more habitable. We could have the worst-case scenario for climate change, and Earth would still be more habitable. Any cursory examination of any of the facts about Mars makes it very clear.”
What You’ve Suspected Is True: Billionaires Are Not Like Us
I really like sci-fi stories where people have to go off and terraform a planet, or figure out how to rebuild civilization after some disaster, or ideally both. "The last ark-ship leaving Earth right before it becomes uninhabitable" sort of deal. But lately I've been coming around to this same idea, that it will always be more practical to try to save Earth than to try to start over elsewhere.
I was reading one story where the apocalypse was impossibly-rising oceans. Like, water is appearing from *waves hand* the Earth's crust or something, and literally all dry surface land on Earth is going to become underwater in X years. Part of the story was about a giant research project to invent FTL to send a few hundred humans to a nearby star which might have a habitable planet. You know what they were hoping to find? A planet with liquid water. Their plan was to descend from their starship and restart civilization using just the tools they brought with them, on a world with no life and no breathable air and the wrong gravity and the wrong temperate and the wrong sunlight and the wrong day-night cycle, just because it had liquid water. You know where else has liquid water? The flooded Earth you just abandoned. Instead of researching starship technology, you could have spent that time loading up all the same civilization-restarter tools into boats.
And this is really true of any futuristic apocalypse scenario. If you can terraform Mars to have a thick oxygen atmosphere, why not just do that to Earth? Even if you smash an ice comet into Earth and destroy basically everything, Earth will still be more habitable than Mars! It'll still have roughly the right atmospheric pressure, and magnetic field, and heat balance, and it'll still have whatever life the comet didn't kill... Same with a starshade to cool Venus. Same with excavating asteroids into city-stations. Same with abandoning Sol System entirely and heading to another star. If an ark-ship arrived in a new star system and found Earth-but-choked-by-climate-change, the crew would be ecstatic. They would never have thought to get that lucky. So why bother with the trip? Just stay and fix the damn Earth.
I am pretty sure that the idea of terraforming Mars is total bullshit from the get go. There's a reason why it doesn't have much of an atmosphere, and that is because it doesn't have enough gravity to hold onto one.
If a fantasy world has an ancient tree of wisdom, that means it must also have young trees that are dumb as shit. Just giving terrible advice like, "the evil wizard is kinda hot"'
I've noticed a trend on Reddit where people claim that Odin isn't fighting his fate; I'd like to know if you've seen any similar comments and what you think. This idea is frequently accompanied by the claim that the Norse people saw their gods as entirely good and the jötnar as entirely evil. I feel like this take lacks nuance on how the gods were actually seen, seeing as we don’t really have much in general, let alone about how the Norse viewed good and bad. Never mind the questionable use of etymology in terms of the words “good” and “evil,” because just because Old Norse had words that roughly translate to that doesn’t mean the underlying conceptual framework is the same, and the words in English are heavily influenced by Christianity, but this seems to be ignored in terms of the fact that the Christian view on good and evil has changed significantly over the last 1,000 years.
I know I’m essentially asking two different questions, but the reason these two things seem to be intertwined is because these people are trying to justify everything the gods did as being viewed as good simply because they protected humans, and even though they did things like chaining Fenrisúlfr and raping women, it wouldn’t have been viewed as wrong but simply as something that Odin had to do because of fate. I see a problem with this because I don't think we'll ever really know whether the Norse people would have seen their gods' actions as purely good and treated them as benevolent deities simply because they protected them. I suspect that this idea is heavily influenced by Christian dualism, which is not being acknowledged, and I recall instances in the sagas where the gods were not viewed favorably, despite being worshiped. This doesn’t even include local beliefs in spirits who definitely weren’t viewed as purely good and who are mostly ignored in contemporary paganism in my experience. Hopefully, this makes sense.
I've had a hard time responding to this because it seems inadequate to just call it incorrect and move on. It's incorrect in a way that I think can give us some insight into the risks of reconstructed religion and the responsibilities that come with taking them on. I have a lot more to say about this, and have repeatedly started and stopped trying to say it in the drafts of this post, but that isn't what you're asking me to do, and I should save it for another time.
What I'll say briefly is that I've long had concerns that, as a modern religion still in an early development stage (if we're optimistic about its future), the foundation of heathenry is being formed in the context of social media that hijacks our need for community and redirects it to serve corporate interests to our detriment. I think the arguments you're seeing rise to the surface, not necessarily by anyone's conscious choice, for their fitness in an argumentative social media environment. They're not only good at shutting down arguments because of the asymmetry involved (it takes a lot more work for me to make the claims I did in my bullet points below), they also maintain an amount of exclusivity because few people would want to take these positions because they suck (if you think this is what heathenry is, the obvious choice is to just not be heathen… nobody is making you). I really do not have the capacity to believe that someone else believes the meanings of the words "good" and "evil" have been exactly consistent for their entire existence and someone who says they believe that is lying, possibly including to themselves.
I already linked it below but I'm gonna highlight a recommendation for the paper "De Natura Deorum: A Few Theses on Gods and Pantheons" by Jan A. Kozák.
Anyway here's my bullet-pointed actual response:
There was never a single, cohesive "Old Norse religion," but a broad spectrum of beliefs that differed regionally and probably along gender and economic lines, so at best any blanket statements about Norse religion generally are limited in scope. Clearly certain features would have been common throughout, but that has to be argued for and not assumed.
sub-point to the previous: the preservation of the myths that we still have record of was influenced by a Norwegian warrior aristocracy that we shouldn't assume to be representative of the entire medieval Nordic world.
sub-sub-point: the only place other than Saxo (who I'll remind you was not even attempting to relay mythology accurately, and who hated the gods almost as much as he hated women) that we get any reference to an abusive relationship between Óðinn and Rindr is in a praise poem for either Sigurðr jarl or Hákon jarl, the latter of whom was in fact a mass rapist as he believed he was entitled to be by his office of king, so this claim of an ontological buffer between the world of myth and the actual real world falls pretty fucking flat. Heathens like Hákon jarl because he was the last bastion of heathenry in Norway and don't have the guts to face the fact that because of him it died without honor. Sorry if that's cheesy but I don't know how else to say it.
We have basically no idea what people thought about the myths. There is good reason to doubt that the mythic genre approach to the gods was how they thought of them in other contexts.
The gods disagree with each other in myths all the time so I don't know how anyone squares that with the idea that they are all only capable of good. How were Óðinn and Þórr both doing good when they went tit-for-tat alternately blessing and cursing Starkaðr?
We have only a kind of weak idea of what anyone thought about the gods at all, and then nearly only for the land-owning elite, and all of this needs to be taken critically due to the time between the events described and their recording.
Norse people were capable of recognizing things as "good" and "evil" (or maybe we should just say "bad") but it's extremely doubtful that these were fundamental and unchangeable principles, and if we're to take seriously the claim that Norse religion was animistic then we should understand good and evil as emerging from negotiable relationalities rather than prior to it.
I know this is beating a dead horse but Þorvaldr holbarki worshiped Surtr. The recon crisis-avoidance response is that it was propitiation rather than worship but if we're "orthoprax not orthodox" (which might not be a given, but I'm used to people treating it like it is) then there's no real difference that matters.
The theme of unintentionally bringing about prophecy in the attempt to avoid it recurs throughout Norse literature and there's no reason to doubt that it's exactly what it looks like.
Rape is always wrong with no exceptions and a religion that says otherwise is a bad religion that you shouldn't practice.
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