Hearthside

Last year I was talking a bit about Rune Hjarno Rasmussen’s Runic Animist Calendar and the companion book the Runic Animist Year. The rune for 2020 was Hail, and the rune for 2021 was Need. I talked about them here . Moving forward the Golden Number rune for 2022 is ice (Isa). This is the rune that represents where the New Moon falls on the Runic Animist Calendar and it is also linked with the Swedish Rune poem, which makes a sort of prediction for how the year will go.  Is bro bredast.   Ice is the broadest bridge.  Isköld, Winteråhr.  Ice-cold winter year. This suggests a harsh winter this year but also the bridge out of the harshness that we experienced in the previous two years.  We can compare it to the Norwegian Runic poem to gain more insights: Ís ko, llum brú bræiða; blindan þarf at læiða. Ice we call the broad bridge; the blind man must be led. Again we see the reference to the bridge but this time with a caution; an ice bridge is still slippery and dan...

(Part 2) If you made it through Part 1 and came back, congrats. It was a tough slog. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, I suggest you start there , and come back. This is the tougher of 2 parts, certainly the toughest for me to write, and reading my previous post will help lay the groundwork for understanding where I am coming from.  I want to open this part very clearly with the statement that racism is not acceptable, and we should not tolerate it in any aspects of our lives. We should definitely not tolerate it in modern inclusive Heathenry. I want to say we shouldn’t tolerate it in modern Heathenry at all, but since modern Heathenry grew out of white nationalist sentiments that ship has sailed. Rather, we must work to uplift inclusive Heathenry, because the reality is that the majority of modern Heathens today are inclusive Heathens and that number continues to grow rapidly. To me, racists aren’t Heathen. No fascism, not in my Heathenry. But ignoring history never goes well either...

(Part 1) So today is the 1st anniversary of this blog. I am going to mark it by addressing the elephant in the room. I made my first post on February 22nd last year, but this wasn’t the point of conception for it. The blog arose as an idea in my mind that was quite reactionary to the January 6th Storming of the Capital in the United States, and the ripple effect that occurred after it in the Heathen community. I gave this topic only a passing mention, and never a full blog post dedicated to it. That was very intentional. Why should I make the name of a certain questionably dressed “shaman” immortal? What deeds did he do to be worthy of living there in the collective memory? He was no hero and nor was he even Heathen. Best to forget. Here I am 1 year later, finding myself with similar sentiments about the Freedom Convoy here in Canada. I thought about writing about it here several times, but I stayed my hand. I don’t need a reactionary post or to raise up the names of people or groups w...

Image from Wikipedia and created by Bygul So I am in a bit of a mood over this... My kindred in the last 2 years has been making an extra effort to promote inclusive heathenry in our province, the reason being was that I noted that it was easier to find Folkish groups than anything else when you Googled our province and the word “heathenry.” As such we did note that the Wikipedia page for Heathenry in Canada appeared high in the search results and we were sure to link ourselves and other inclusive heathen groups locally onto that page. (As plenty of other kindreds and groups had already done.) Unfortunately, due to the nature of it being a small, decentralized religion most groups organize using Facebook, and Wikipedia is starting to take a hard line of Facebook page links as being uncredible. (Which I get for things like scientific information, but not religion…) In any case, a massive overhaul of the Heathenry in Canada page has occurred, removing a huge number of external links. In ...