Hearthside

Below is the transcript for an interview with Heathen Children's Author, Joy Page. Her book would be excellent as a Halloween/Samhain gift or for someone on your Yule list this year! --- Michelle: Hi there, and welcome to Hearthside. My name is Michelle. I'm the author on the blog, and today we're doing something a little bit different. Instead of starting with our blog and making the accessible copy, what we are doing is I am interviewing Joy here, and then I will make the transcript as the blog entry. Michelle: So for those of you who don't know Joy, this is Joy Page and she's one of my Kyn. And something really cool that Joy has just done is released a children's book. The book is called The Witch’s Family. So we have hard copies and paperback editions and I'll give you all the information at the end. So this is written by Joy and the illustrator is Penny Nicoles, and yeah, so I'm really excited about breaking our routine, doing the YouTube version fi...

(left) Brooch. 9th Century. Revninge, Denmark. (center) Silver Pendant from between 800 – 1050 CE. Statens Historiska Museum, Stockholm. (right) Freyr Statue. Södermanland, Sweden. I had the unique experience of making a Heathen themed work of art to share with my tribe, and it allowed me to reflect on Heathen art as a whole. There are some interesting trends worth noting.  If we look at historical Heathen art it is difficult to know what the intent of the maker was. Was their art solely a devotional act, or was it also a way to make a profit? And are some of the things we would think of today as historical Heathen art even meant to be that at all? A good example are some of the images that we speculate are Freyja but may just have been a depiction of a woman.  Moving forward to modern Heathen art, I would say most of it is of one of two types: (left) Runestone in Täby. 1100CE. (middle) The Tjängvide stone. 8th-9th Century. (right) Modern depiction of the Allfather by Lør...

It is interesting that Winter Nights (or Vetrnætr) is probably my favourite Heathen holiday and the last one I got to writing about here. (Well, we will see what I say after a long winter, and then maybe Sigrblót will be my favourite.) The reality is that while I love this time of year and all the symbolism, the weather, everything… I am always very busy. Finding a spare moment to write this was a challenge, but it was starting to feel like an incomplete task. In a way, that is the embodiment of this holiday.  This is the celebration of the end of summer and the harvest, the preparation for the winter. We can tell by its name that it is a series of nights, rather than one. (Although it is my personal take that all of the Heathen holidays were a series of nights, probably the 3 surrounding the full moon.) If we look at the Ynglinga Saga, Winter Nights is said to be a blot at the beginning of winter for a good year. Many modern Heathens associated it with the phrase: Til árs ok friða...

I have been writing a lot about Heathenry from a female perspective, but how important is gender (and also sexual identity) to Heathenry? The answer is, not very.  I am talking about Heathenry from a female perspective mainly because when I was starting this blog I was not seeing enough women creating Heathen content even though as a religion there are actually a fairly large percentage of women in leadership roles compared to broader society. I felt a bit strange stepping into this role, while people around me seemed to think I was a good fit for it. Additionally, I have found in other Heathen circles that sometimes I am put into a position where the discussion is very male dominated, to the point that I have joked on occasion that perhaps I needed a beard to be a part of it. So I am pushing back against that, but it is really only a start. Gender is a construct from the broader over-culture. We cannot know what the elder Heathens truly thought about gender and sexual identity....