Hearthside

The 2025 New Moon rune according to The Nordic Animist Year by Rune Rasmussen is Tyr/Tiwaz. In these posts I examine the prediction for the year based on the Swedish rune poem in Rune’s book. I then compare the Swedish rune poem to other rune poems to try to gain more insights. After that I examine historical data on weather/climate, as well as politics, to try to predict what to expect in this year. This is all speculative. I want to see if the 19 year cycle can predict world events, specifically in Scandinavia and circumpolar regions.  We start with the Swedish Rune poem as that is in Rune Rasmussen’s book. Swedish Rune Poem: Tyr i Vatŭm ledast.  Tyri brinner bäst i.e.. dyrast. Tyr (bull) is badly off in water/Tyr (bull) is meanest of spirits. Resinous wood is best for burning, i.e. hardest. The strangest part of this poem to me was how Rune was translating Tyr as a bull. I am not sure what his reasoning for this was. Since it doesn’t seem to actually say that in the Swedis...

These posts are sometimes the hardest to keep up with, since it is a long-term project that may or may not yield anything interesting. In addition, I have found this year particularly difficult, at first due to personal time constraints, but also because this year has been surprising me! Rune Rasmussen talks of a 19 year cycle which he associates each year with a rune in the Swedish rune poem. What I am doing each year is looking at the rune poems, plus historical data, to see if I can predict trends for the year. Think of it as a Heathen Farmer’s Almanac or something.  I had initial thoughts based on the rune Sol as to what that might mean for 2024, and went to historical data to see if I might be correct. The year 2005 was marked by drought and wildfires across much of Canada and Northwestern Europe. There was also a tendency towards large winter storms in Eastern Canada. Similarly, in 1986 Winnipeg was hit by a massive blizzard and in 1967 New Brunswick was hit by a huge winter ...

So it is 10:30pm on a Sunday night. I am halfway through dishes in an attempt to make room in the kitchen to rack my mead… but instead I find myself at the kitchen table pounding out words at the keyboard. It doesn’t matter who it was this time out there is the broader sphere of online Heathenry. It doesn’t matter who got the gears turning. It wasn’t the first time. It won’t be the last. That is the point of this really… Sometimes we disagree with other Heathens. Sometimes we disagree with other Heathens who are in our own tribes, kindreds, or close-knit communities. Sometimes those disagreements are beyond reparations and lead to a rift, or splitting off into separate groups. Sometimes tempers just flare, and Heathens are too proud to do the work to reestablish common ground. Either way unless it is my group, it is none of my concern… at least it shouldn’t be. The problem is that in this fast-paced modern world, when tempers flare we often turn to posting online to rant. (Ranting on i...

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...