Stop Making Scholars Defacto Leaders
Please, for the love of fuck, stop putting scholars into defacto leadership positions within polytheist religions. Most are not even part of our religions, and even if they are, do not make them defacto leaders because of their academic work. Dr. Neil Price may have done some awesome work on seiðr and spá with The Viking Way, but that in no way makes him a seiðmann!
At the end of the day, we, the Heathens, Pagans, etc, the actual polytheists and animists, have to live our religious lives. Be sure that your religious practices can survive being found not in aligment with history, and understand that historicity is not the damn goal here.
If you are going to be any kind of Heathen, Pagan, etc you are going to need to be okay, at some point, in being without some kind of scholarly and/or historic consensus on how to do things. When it comes to seiðr we may have the understanding that the varðlokkur was sometimes used, and it would have been historically led by a singer in a group, and it would have been pretty...but the song mentioned in Eiriks saga rauða was never written down and we do not even have the melody.
If you use a varðlokkur and it is just you? No problem. It is a modern practice. You are the forefront of making new, living traditions. Maybe no one else is going to do it your way. That is fine.
I do guttural singing of Rune names and song otherwise as galdr with the Runes. The accounts of galdr, per Price:
"The most distinctive of these five is undoubtedly galdr, which seems to have been a specific form of sorcery focusing on a characteristic type of high-pitched singing. The word has a relative today in the modern Swedish verb gala, used for the crowing of a rooster and for the most piercing of birdcalls (see Raudvere 2001: 90–7 and 2002 on the importance of verbalising this kind of sorcery). The saga descriptions of galdr-songs note that they were pleasing to the ear, and there is a suggestion of a special rhythm in view of the incantation metre called galdralag, as described by Snorri in Háttatal (101–2) and used occasionally in Eddic poems such as Hávamál and Sigrdrífomál."
Does this make my galdr either wrong or irrelevant? No.
You ever hear a rooster crow? Not pretty, but it does carry a power with it. That, I think, more than how damn pretty it is, is what matters. Can your voice carry the power? Can it project it? Can you galdr with your Megin and Víli what you want to have happen?
In the end we are going to need to figure out for ourselves what is most important for us, whatever the religio-magical practice happens to be at hand. Overall I think we do ourselves, and the scholars, a disservice by making them defacto leaders in our religions. Let the scholarship be what it is, and when we choose to engage with it, or in it, let us be careful with it.
