As a follow-up to my last question. I realized that a lot of those people are citing the same person. J.G. Harker's blog Norse Mythology and Germanic Lore. From what I understand, this person is also the host of the podcast Norse Mythology: The Unofficial Guide. I don't know if this person is really a credible source even though I have been told in those subreddits that they're credible even though they're not an academic because they cite up-to-date research on what they're talking about, but I'm skeptical, especially because the people most frequently citing this person don't like Loki or his modern-day worshipers, and they don't even seem to like Thor either, possibly. This person is supposedly not a pagan, but they use a lot of the suspicious language that these types tend to use even if they're citing scholars like Lieberman, Lindau, and Larrington.
I think I just need to look into their sources a lot more, but I just wanted to let you know that I found what I think is one of the sources of this and to know if you've heard of this person or have other places where these points could be coming from. I know I'm always cautious when it comes to lurking in those subreddits or even on Facebook and some groups because just because I know something's inner sources doesn't mean that the person talking about it is interpreting it correctly. They might not actually want to have a discussion on the merits of the argument or are particularly arguing in good faith if they're just sharing their interpretations or speculations. I don't deny that the Norse had an idea of good or bad/good or evil, but I do question if we can really know what they thought given they were not a homogeneous society but rather a group of different tribes in different places that often feuded with each other, and when it comes to the gods, the blanket statement that they say is, "Well, look, Loki was evil, so that's why he wasn't worshiped" and "If he was evil, that's why they didn't worship him," which is, to me, circular reasoning when they won't apply that to other gods who are in similar places like Heimdall or many of the goddesses, and I bring this up because I know this person argues that the gods have this paternal inheritance thing in myth, which I don't entirely disagree with, but it's like they forget or purposely choose to ignore that Heimdall and Týr either didn't have a father in the poems or their parents were both jötnar. This is not even to include the fact that scholars are equally as prone to these sorts of things as laypeople even though they try not to be because they want the gods to fit into neat categories too, more often than not because they want it to be like some taxonomical species system, like it's science rather than oral stories that were far more fluid than we often give them credit for being simply because we don't live in a world that has that level of oral transmission. Most of our stuff is written down, and so once it's written down, it becomes this concrete thing that can be checked against itself extensively, and I don't really think people, including scholars, often realize how much being able to read and write impacts storytelling when you only have your memory to rely on. especially because memory is not consistent over time for one person, but it also varies so wildly between different people even if there are constant through lines and narrative consistencies across the stories, and of course poetry tends to be a lot more rigid because of linguistic restrictions upon the medium compared to prose, but memory still impacts it, and I wish the Pagan community would actually realize that more.
Did tumblr get rid of answering privately? I did that very recently. For anyone reading, this is the previous response.
I wasn't familiar with J.G. Harker but briefly skimming his substack, he seems a lot more measured than the kinds of things you reported in that last ask. From his essay on Loki:
Most of the Æsir clan and their extended membership are individuals with deep flaws (except maybe Thor). Theyʼre guilty of incest, promiscuity, perversion, cowardice, and even having their mouths used as urinals (Lokasenna stanza 34). Unlike the gods of certain other religions, their behavior is not used as a model for proper living.
I agree with you that Harker's scope is narrow but he's clear about that, it's narrow by design, because he restricts himself to talking about things with clear evidence. From the same essay:
The Loki we see in our sources is a product of a particular time and place in Scandinavia. Surely he is different in some ways from older religious concepts that came together to form his character during the late Viking Age and he would be somewhat more different today if ancient Norse paganism had not died out in the medieval period. With regard to the way Loki is portrayed in our sources, it isn’t accurate to refer to him with any modern terminology regarding gender and sexuality, and to be clear, that includes words such as straight and cis.
I see him making the occasional disclaimer that what he says about people a thousand years dead shouldn't matter for the values of modern people; it's not a surprise to me that there are people who ignore that but I don't think there's anything he can do about that. I know I've never been able to prevent it.
To be clear I'm not endorsing or approving of him, I skimmed one site and I haven't listened to his podcast and I'm not going to, and I just found out he exists today and I'm probably going to forget he exists in about an hour.
Beyond that I don't know what to say other than to repeat either the things I said in my last response, or to repeat things you said back to you. I have extremely limited attention for these kinds of arguments among heathens.
