Vikinging for vikings who want to show how vikingey they are

This is another post inspired by threads and conversations on various heathen and pagan fora that I've frequented through the years.

Seeing as most heathens - at least those of my age - were born and raised in an ostensibly christian nation to parents of varying degrees of christian piety, we have all been required to build our heathen lifestyles from scratch, so to speak.

For better or worse, the viking age ended and heathen society gave way completely to christianity. What I mean by that is that there was a long period of history during which heathenry no longer existed. For the UK, that is pretty much from about 1000AD until, at the very earliest, the revival in interest of all things Teutonic and mythological in the nineteenth century.

All contemporary heathens are working paths that either they created for themselves probably sometime in the last 50 years or so, or they have been given their path by someone who did so. Some of these paths have been based purely on the historical and archaeological record, some have been influenced by personal gnosis (UPG) and I imagine some have even been influenced (consciously or unconsciously) by fiction (films, literature and, perhaps others).

A part of that establishment of a heathen path is deciding what values, beliefs and activities are intrinsically heathen or what such things are required to make the practitioner heathen, rather than simply spiritual, pagan or, indeed, any other denomination.

One of the traps that we, as heathens, can fall foul of during this process is falsely attributing values, beliefs or activities as "heathen" purely because they were prevalent around the time period known as "the Viking age". One example of this is people who use Old Norse or Anglo Saxon as a liturgical language. There is no evidence that the original heathens used any special language or turn of phrase when referring to or dealing with their deities, ancestors, wights or any other aspect of their heathenry. They used the same everyday language that today for us, would be English. A better modern interpretation might be to use poetry as a form of heathen spiritual language - as we know that the composition of poetry was highly regarded in the age of our heathen forefathers.

Some might argue that speaking Anglo Saxon or Old Norse might help those involved get into the right frame of mind for dealing with their heathen faith. Much in the way that many people take to dressing up in period garb. I think with both these cases, though, that the danger is that the ancient/dead language and/or the anachronistic clothing draws the focus away from more important matters. It also delineates the time in ritual or when speaking of heathen concepts as being separate to the comparative mundanity of daily life. This is something which wouldn't have been obvious originally. The gods, ancestors, wights and worldview were all a part and parcel of daily life.

I think it is important for me and my heathen path, that rather than trying to mindlessly replicate the actions of my heathen forebearers, I instead need to understand their values and worldview. This will allow me to understand the reasons why they did what they did. Why they saw the world the way they did. Why they valued certain traits and disapproved of others. Then I can take this knowledge and attempt to construct my own, contemporary version of heathenry for application within the modern world.

I hope that the following posts in this blog will help clarify my train of thought as I try to evaluate which aspects of heathenry can be successfully and meaningfully adapted to the modern world.