Hearthside

One of the groups that I am a part of challenged people to write the story of the marriage of Skaði, but wrong answers only. Naturally, many rose to the challenge. There were a number of witty results, and many that were well thought out. It was requested that I write a longer version of mine because it was quite enjoyable, so I will do that here. First, however, I wanted to talk about storytelling and how our Lore changes over time with different tellings.  Historically, there were many versions of a story. They would vary each time they were told depending on the Skald and the audience and what was being conveyed through the retelling. You could hear a story 100 times and each time it would be different. Part of this was your life experience, and part of it was what the Skald was trying to say through the story. When our Lore was written down often it was taken from multiple versions of the oral story, and mixed with the biases of the person who recorded it. Since then the bias o...

It is not uncommon for me to pull from other sources for my Heathenry, looking at Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Baltic, or Slavic traditions to see if I can fill in some of the missing gaps in the Nordic sources. My interest lately has been going into pre-history, looking at the Proto-Indo-European root myths. In this case, I want to try to flesh out the Nordic “goddess.” There is so little preserved about goddesses, because I believe the Christians tried to intentionally erase them to take power away from Nordic women. Now I cannot reconstruct every goddess this way but I feel it is a solid way to construct the mother goddess, the earth goddess. In the Hellenic tradition she is the one known as Gaia. In Nordic traditions I would see her as Nerthus, and also as Jörð. Over time they became separate deities, but I think their roots both lie in the Proto-Indo-European goddess, Dʰéǵʰōm (earth) or Pleth₂wih (broad one). There is a huge problem in the Lore with goddesses being labelled as Jötunn, in ...