Part I, Section II (Folkish Heathen Morality)
The Wolf Runs Free
For the previous article on Folkish Heathen apologetics (Part I, Section I) go here: Part I, Section I
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Today, on the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, we contemplate how zeal can be redirected by grace, and how one who once persecuted Christ’s Church and martyred its earliest members was called to proclaim the Good News and be welcomed into Heaven by those he once sought to destroy …
I.
As we saw in the prior article, the Folkish Heathen appeals to the historic, pre-Christian Germanic-Norse customs as an authoritative source of normativity. In this present article, we will look at what those customs actually entail (or more accurately: what can be known about them). We will briefly look at the Folkish Heathen moral system, followed by a more in-depth analysis of the Lore it appeals to, and conclude with the philosophical and ethical implications of their system. This article will be especially source-heavy, with those sources containing material that some readers might find disturbing.
The Folkish Heathen moral system begins from an innocuous and intuitive premise. Our obligations are not evenly distributed across every single human being. Obligations are thickest the closer someone is to us - first to those in our own home, then to kin, then to the community and tribe. Morality and ‘group membership’ are intimately linked. This is something nearly every custom encourages, including the Christian ordo amoris. Folkish Heathenry however distinguishes itself by taking this priority-structure and positing that the very existence, content, and enforceability of normativity is generated by membership itself. It is not that we ought to care for our own first, but that the only real obligations we have are to our own. In this system, the ‘folk’ is the highest possible circle of moral concern, forming a sharply defined ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ - a friend-enemy distinction and boundary. This mirrors medieval Scandinavian law, where skoggangr (“full outlawry”) formally designated a person as being an ‘outsider,’ stripping them of any ‘insider’ status-protections to the extent that they were rendered killable. If moral obligations are anchored in communal incorporation, then whatever constraints are owed to an outsider are not owed as such but are instead contingent allowances, granted or withdrawn according to the outsider’s relation to the community.
This inside-outside distinction is the conceptual hinge that enables the Folkish Heathen moral system, which is often given a ‘traditional, Germanic varnish’ through terms like innangard (‘inside the fence / ‘in-group’) and utangard (‘outside the fence’ / ‘outgroup’). These terms appear frequently across the milieu, though in varying ways. The Asatru Folk Assembly has used them to describe obligations of affective loyalty to the innangard, which are contrasted against a modern ‘individualist posture’ which is less attuned to innangard-utangard boundaries. Raven Folk United employs the same polarity in programmatic language, urging self-improvement “within the secure innungard of your folk,” which positions the term as a practical boundary for who is being formed, protected, and prioritized. In isolation, such usage can appear to be a standard political affirmation of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ But once the system is framed as an ethnic religion with prescriptive obligations received through ancestors, the moral stakes become difficult to bracket. The Bog show on the Hearthfire Radio network explicitly uses the innangard-utangard distinction in the moral sense, foregrounding the schema as the basis for morality in episodes like ‘Innangard and Utangard’ and ‘The Morality of Our Forefathers.’
At this point, then, the Folkish Heathen moral system can be stated with a bit more precision. Because normativity is treated as ancestrally-mediated and folk-bounded, it must also repudiate any account of moral obligation that binds us as ‘human’ prior to, and independently of, folk-membership. This is the distinction between ‘universalism,’ which holds that at least some moral constraints apply to all human persons as such, and ‘relativism,’ which holds that morality is authoritative only relative to a given framework or standpoint, with there being no framework-independent vantage from which one set of norms binds all human persons. Now, from the prior article, we know that Folkish Heathens reject ‘universalist religion’ and the concept of ‘universally applicable standards’ as both a “lie” and a “poison” (as the Asatru Folk Assembly states) but this approach also applies to definitions of humanity as well. Imperium Press says that “moral law is situational, not universal,” with Raven Folk United agreeing that “The Good is not a universal but rather a particularist force.” Likewise, The Norroena Society affirms for themselves that “as Sedians we reject the notion of a brotherhood of man” with ‘humanity’ being seen “not as a universal fellowship.”
But given all of this, the Folkish Heathen must take one of three unstable stances on the limits to the treatment of outsiders, balancing their committed obligations to the folk, family, and to public perception. These stances are not theoretical, but directly determine whether anything is intrinsically forbidden to do to the utangard or whether ‘wrong’ collapses into mere prudence and power. First, the Folkish Heathen can reintroduce a universal moral floor for all people, but then they have conceded precisely the kind of cross-boundary constraint their folk-bounded framework is organized to exclude, effectively becoming Inclusivist Heathens. Therefore, secondly, the Folkish Heathen can deny any moral floor for outsiders, which preserves the internal logic of bounded obligation but immediately raises the issue of the potential for atrocities (as we will see in a moment is evidenced by the Lore). Or thirdly, the Folkish Heathen can claim there are real constraints on the treatment of outsiders which are grounded in something other than universal dignity, such as law, custom, honor, reciprocity, hospitality, or something similar. But this third option still relies on ‘principled constraints’ where those constraints are ultimately binding either because of what persons are (in which case they reinstall a universal floor) or because of contingent social mechanisms (in which case they reduce to prudence, reputation, and power-management). This third option therefore offers no stable refuge. The moment its ‘constraints’ bind regardless of who the other is, it has simply smuggled universalism back in under a different name. And the moment they bind only where law, reputation, and reciprocity can be enforced, these ‘constraints’ simply function like conditional ‘if–then rules’ of self-interest that disappear when one can act with impunity. They are simply a tactic. Therefore, once the outsider lies beyond law, reciprocity, or reputation, taking this third option slides into the second option where there are no constraints on treating an outsider. Once universalism is rejected as a matter of principle, the system has only one coherent resting place: outside the folk, there is no guaranteed moral floor. So the only remaining question is how far the Lore itself carries that implication …
To restate all of this: the dispute is not about grading duties or prioritizing the innangard (which we have already said is veritably ubiquitous across cultures), but about whether the utangard has any standing that constrains what may be done to them. In other words: how ‘other’ is the outsider in this system, and where do any limits come from? If the Folkish Heathen says there are real limits on what should be done to the foreigner, enemy, or slave, then those limits must be grounded either in something about the outsider that holds regardless of folk membership, or some rule that binds the folk even when dealing with those outside the folk. If the Folkish Heathen tries to avoid that concession by grounding all outsider-protections purely in positive law or contingent status (guest, treaty-partner, hostage, slave, outlaw, and so on), then the constraint is no longer moral in the strong sense at all: it becomes an administrative switch. The outsider is protected only so long as the community chooses to confer a category, and the same community can revoke that category and thereby revoke the protection. In that frame, the question is no longer ‘do we have duties to outsiders?’ but ‘what prevents us from redefining outsiders into unprotected classes whenever it is convenient?’ If, however, the Folkish Heathen answers in the other direction and says, ‘yes, we can do anything to the other,’ then the position must face the sharper historical and evidentiary question posed by chronicles, archaeology, and the Lore itself: ‘in your reconstruction, are you willing to take tiered-morality seriously enough to condone human sacrifice, infant exposure (infanticide), polygamy, slavery of Whites, and rape?’
The following section will move through examples from the Lore to push that question. In my analysis of the record, I have attempted to use a consistent evidentiary method. I treat outsider chronicles as potentially biased, yet still relevant when they independently converge with other witnesses. I treat poetic and saga narrative primarily as evidence for moral imagination and norm-language rather than as courtroom-grade reportage. And I treat archaeology as evidence for deposition practices, though not, by itself, for motive. On that basis, the argument tests four evidentiary buckets in descending moral stakes:
Human sacrifice (ritualized killing and its theological status)
Infanticide (whether infants possess any protected standing)
Marriage and sexual order (norms of polygyny, concubinage, and sexuality)
Other practices in the record (slavery, relations with Arabs, and intra-group violence).
The point is not to cherry-pick shocking anecdotes, but to press one controlled question across each bucket: ‘for Historic Paganism, what, if anything, should restrain the strong from doing whatever they want?’
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II.
Firstly, human sacrifice. Even in ancient times, the Romans recorded the Germanic peoples performing human sacrifices. Tacitus (Annals 13.57) notes that the Hermunduri tribe “had devoted, in the event of victory, the enemy’s army to Mars and Mercury, a vow which consigns horses, men, everything indeed on the vanquished side to destruction,” which is the religiously-framed extermination of the defeated side. According to Sidonius Apollinaris, (Epistulae 8.6) when setting sail from Continental Europe, the Saxons would cast lots and “abandon every tenth captive to the slow agony of a watery end.” Later Christian chroniclers preserve similar reports. Thietmar of Merseburg (Chronicon 1.17) records human sacrifices at Lejre in Zealand where every nine years, ninety-nine people were sacrificed along with as many horses, dogs, and roosters. The Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae lawcode imposed on the Saxon by Charlemagne after their defeat prescribes the death penalty for anyone who sacrifices another person, treating the prohibition as a real deterrent against a real possibility. Perhaps the most widely-known account of Norse-Germanic human sacrifice though is from Adam of Bremen, (Gesta Hammaburgensis, bk. 4) who records that at nine year intervals, nine male victims of various species - including humans - were offered up at the Uppsala Temple, with bodies hung in the sacred grove adjacent to it.
A common Folkish Heathen response to these attestations of human sacrifice or other acts which we might now consider ‘heinous’ or ‘barbaric’ is to say that ‘these are propagandistic slanders from foreign sources.’ Yet in the Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 10) - an Icelandic record - there is a description of Thor’s stone in a cultic-legal setting where convicted criminals are sacrificed. Likewise, in Guta saga (ch. 1) there is discussion of how the island of Gotland was legally-politically divided and the manner of sacrifice offered at each division, with the ‘highest’ (the island as a whole) offering human sacrifices. Now, the Folkish Heathen is quick to accept these accounts because it allows them to say that ‘this is emblematic of how these sacrifices were perpetuated against criminals or for the good of the folk,’ yet there are many other native accounts of human sacrifices being performed without a legal context.
In Orkney saga (ch. 8), Haralds saga (ch. 13), and Reginsmal (st. 26) the infamous ‘blood eagle’ is performed - where the back is cut open and the lungs are pulled through to give the body ‘wings’ (like an eagle) - with the scene framed as an offering to Odin. There seems to be a depiction of the ‘blood eagle’ or some other form of human sacrifice on the Stora Hammars I stone, which shows a valknut symbol (often associated with Odin) above the scene of a man with a spear leaning over the back of another figure, who is laying on a table. In Styrbjarnar thattr Sviakappa, (ch. 2) Eirikr goes to an Odin temple on the night before a battle and “gives himself” to Odin for victory, bargaining for ten more years of life before Odin takes him. Soon after, a hooded figure tells him to shoot a reed over the enemy forces and say “Odin owns you all.” When Eirikr does this, his enemies are struck with blindness and a landslide destroys the force, granting victory in the story. Eirikr essentially sacrifices himself and all of his enemies to Odin in exchange for victory. In Sigurdarkvida in skamma (st. 65), the valkyrie Brynhildr instructs that “five slave women” and “eight male slaves” are to be killed to follow Sigurd in death as part of his funeral-pyre arrangements. There are also reports in Kristni saga (ch. 12) of men being sacrificed on the four corners of Iceland in the hope of invoking the gods’ favor to resist the spread of Christianity.
Now, a Folkish Heathen response to these accounts might be to say that ‘because the folk believed itself to be descended from the gods, it would not make sense to sacrifice one of their own kin and the sources are vague on who is being sacrificed here, so we can presume that this was all against the utangard, which is consistent with our morality.’ However, there are other accounts where the human sacrifice explicitly involves the jarl elite and named kin making human sacrifices to Norse deities. In Jomsvikinga saga (ch. 32) during a fierce battle, King Hakon first attempts offering ‘conventional sacrifices’ to the goddesses Thorgedr Holgabrudr and her sister, Irpa. After these sacrifices are rejected, Hakon ultimately sacrifices his own seven‑year‑old son, Erlingr, which is depicted as bringing about a sudden storm of hail and thunder that turns the tide against Hakon’s enemies, allowing him to be victorious. This sacrifice of the boy-prince by his father is therefore something which elicits the favor of the goddesses. In Ynglinga saga (ch. 18), King Domaldi’s reign is framed by “great famine and distress,” prompting the Swedes at Uppsala to escalate the ‘quality’ of the offerings until they offer up people. This still does not bring any improvement. The chiefs conclude the dire situation has been brought about on account of Domaldi himself, and so they kill the king and “sprinkle the stalle of the gods with his blood.” The saga immediately contrasts this with his successor’s reign having “good seasons and peace,” presenting the king’s death as a fertility-transaction under cultic logic. Another emblematic episode is found in Ynglinga saga (ch. 29) where King Aun performs “a great sacrifice” in which he offers up his son to Odin, receiving the stark reply that this purchase of favor will buy him sixty more years of life. The account then escalates the bargain into a grisly rhythm. Aun sacrifices son after son “every tenth year,” until he is prevented from sacrificing the final son. When the sacrifice is halted, King Aun dies. In all of these episodes, human sacrifices are performed on nobility, children, and kin which grants the gods’ favor in their obliging of the requests …
Now, the Folkish Heathen might say that ‘these texts have been corrupted or otherwise do not reflect the historic norm.’ Given the excess of prior evidence - especially when the Folkish Heathen will often use a single textual mention of something as a warrant for other more innocuous moral or liturgical acts - and the fact that these texts are how reconstruction can occur at all, this would be a very self-undermining position to take. But even granting it for the sake of argument, we can also look to archeological evidence. The historic phenomenon of ‘bog bodies’ dating from the Bronze Age to Medieval times was something which Northern European peoples performed by depositing animal and human remains in wetland areas. This phenomenon is often ‘memed’ about by Folkish Heathens in how they often presume the bodies were criminal executions, with any modern opposition to Folkish Heathens needing to be ‘bogged’. Now, due to the nature of archeological evidence, it is impossible to know if the bog body examples are criminal executions or human sacrifices in the sense of them being ‘religiously motivated liturgical killings’. However, there are numerous examples which do show indication of ritual killing immediately before deposition - and not all are adults.
One database records two-hundred sixty-six sites and over one-thousand remains stretching from Ireland to Sweden, to Germany and the Netherlands. In the Uppland region of eastern-Sweden, there is a site with fifty-two human deposits including one child. Five of these people had received cranial wounds immediately before their deposition, which led to their death. There is also evidence from bone cut-marks without any signs of healing that suggest the bodies were carved up and dismembered after death. Other individual examples like the Tollund Man, who was hanged before being carefully placed into a bog, do not give any definitive motive for why they were killed, only that it was done with great care as he was not being treated like a criminal. Those who executed him covered his eyes and closed his mouth before his deposition. The Grauballe Man is an interesting example however because it would appear that the identification of a motive is possible. His final meal “contained plants and grains from the entire agricultural year” indicating that there was some sort of association with the fertility of the land, though the true motivation is certainly lost to time. Shortly after the meal, he had his throat slit and was deposited into a bog.
The ritualism of hanging is attested to not only in its similarities with the textual record (Odin hanging himself on Yggdrasil, the Uppsala Temple’s hanged bodies, etc.) but also with the Elling Woman who was twenty-five years old when she was hanged, killed, and deposited a mere fifty-five yards away from where the Tollund Man was discovered (perhaps both were sacrificed to the same god). The Netherlands’ Yde Girl was not hanged but instead strangled and stabbed before being deposited in a bog. She was sixteen years old when she was killed. The Kayhausen Boy from Lower-Saxony is another example of a young person being executed. His arms and feet were bound and he was stabbed four times: three times in the neck and once in his left arm, with the arm wound possibly evidencing his resistance to the act. He was ten years old when he was killed. Obviously, these latter examples show the possibility that these killings were not just of people ‘hostile to the stability of the folk’ and therefore take on a much different moral character.
It is not that the data is confined to one particular site and then extrapolated across Northern Europe, but rather that these bog deposits reflect a consistent archeological grammar which is evidenced across the Germanic world, independently corroborating the textual record. Therefore, when we read accounts from eyewitnesses about the barbarity of this world, we should be hesitant to hand-wave them away. For example, at first glance, the description of a Frisian custom where lottery-selected human sacrifices - including children - were regularly hung and offered to local gods, as related in the Vita Vulframni (ch. 6-8) from the 8th Century seems to be nothing more than Christian slander against their enemies. But when we compare it with other sources and archeological evidence, the account becomes actually very likely. Therefore, we can see how Folkish Heathens must acknowledge that human sacrifice is an integral part of the pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs that they appeal to in their reconstructions. Nobody was exempt from the possibility of being sacrificed to a god, not even one’s own children.
Secondly, we move to infant exposure - that is: leaving newborn babies alone in the wild so that they die. This practice was apparently such an important aspect of Historic Paganism that during the Conversion of Iceland in 1000 AD, here it was determined that the entire island should become Christian, only two concessions were made to the Pagans: they would be allowed to continue eating horsemeat and they could maintain their practice of infant exposure [Islendingabok (ch. 7)]. This practice is evidenced in numerous other legal codes as well. In the Gragas (the early laws of Iceland) infant exposure is only treated as “murder” if the newborn has taken food, otherwise it is completely lawful. This seems to mirror practices from Continental Europe too as evidenced by a passage from Altfrid’s Vita sancti Liudgeri (bk. 1, ch. 6) which describes how the eponymous Liudgeri’s Frisian grandmother attempted to drown his mother when she was an infant because the baby had not eaten or drank any milk yet. The Lex Frisionum lawcode (tit. 5) does not itself mention infant exposure, but does grant legal leniency if the mother kills their child immediately after it is born. Another Continental source: the Visigothic Code (Forum Judicum) says in reference to infant exposure that “parents who have been guilty of such wickedness shall be condemned to perpetual exile,” showing how (like human sacrifice) it must have been common enough to warrant the threat of punishment. Therefore, we can see how this form of infanticide was a very common practice in the pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs.
Now, the Folkish Heathen might respond here that in Germania (ch. 19) Tacitus records how “to limit the increase of children, or put to death any of the later progeny, is accounted infamous.” This, however, is a weak text to use as a blanket denial of infant exposure, because the passage is embedded in Tacitus’ moralized portrait of German marriage and sexual discipline. Tacitus, who never actually witnessed Germanic tribes ‘in the wild’ himself is using second-hand accounts, angled in a certain way to invite comparison with and shame Roman decadence. It is a consciously-framed moral treatise as much as it is an anthropological record. Regardless, the line in question only says that limiting the number of children or killing “any of the later progeny” is “accounted infamous,” which reports a normative stigma, not an empirical claim that the act never occurred. The context of this line is also considering “later progeny,” signifying children born after an heir already exists. This is then a condemnation about eliminating ‘extra’ children, not a technical rule about ‘newborn personhood’ or a ‘pre-incorporation window.’ So Germania 19 may show that at least some German groups (or at least Tacitus’ ‘rhetorical Germans’) regarded certain forms of offspring-reduction as disgraceful, but it cannot, by genre, scope, or phrasing, refute more specific legal and narrative evidence showing that exposure was culturally intelligible and regulated by timing, (‘before incorporation’) especially in the Norse world.
As we noted in the prior article, the practice of ausa vatni (“sprinkling with water”) ritualistically welcomed the newborn into the kin-group. But this also functioned as the terminus for leaving the child out to be exposed, meaning that before the child was considered part of the kin-group, they could be disposed of but after that they could not. This effectively provides a ‘window’ where the infant is not yet considered part of the innangard - not yet a person. Hardar saga ok Holmverja (ch. 8) states that it was called “murder” to kill a child after water had been poured over it. Therefore, if one was going to expose the infant, it had to occur before the incorporation ritual. Usually, it seems that the father had the final say in ordering infanticide. In Thorsteins thattr tjaldstaedings (ch. 1), before leaving to take part in a raid, a husband commands his pregnant wife to expose their baby when it is born. In Thorsteins thattr uxafots (ch. 4), it is the mother’s brother who is head of the household who orders an illegitimate boy to be abandoned. However, in Vatnsdaela saga (ch. 37), a wife orders the exposure of her husband’s illegitimate child, showing the ‘right’ belonged to the household head, normally the father, but could be asserted by others in his stead.
This propensity for infant exposure seemed to be especially the case with girls (as has already been attested to above with Liudgeri’s mother) and with the poor. In Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (ch. 3) a man tells his wife to expose their newborn if it is a girl - the narrator explains that this was more common among the poor, but always considered ‘wrong’ (perhaps the Icelandic Christian author was attempting the same sort of polemics that Folkish Heathens do by caveating mention of the practice). This is also explained by Finnboga saga ramma which stresses that even though a wealthy character is attempting to have his baby killed, it was moreso only the poor who had the right. Hervarar saga ok Heidreks, (ch. 4) narrates how a girl is born to a high-status household, yet the head of the household refuses the ‘social default’ of exposing her, instead performing incorporation (notably including ausa vatni) and raising her. A similar value-scheme arguably surfaces in the social mythology of Rigsthula, where the thrall and karl households have both sons and daughters, but the noble couple Jarl and Erna are explicitly said to have only sons and no daughters. Likely an idealized pattern that coheres uncomfortably well with a world in which unwanted girls could simply be exposed.
In these narratives, the theme of exposed-infants is often countered with the theme of intervention and adoption. In Finnboga saga ramma (chs. 1–2), a newborn boy is ordered to be exposed, but the foster-mother refuses to comply and instead removes the baby and raises him. The child survives specifically because another household takes responsibility for the discarded infant. In Hardar saga ok Holmverja (ch. 8), the child’s father decides after the mother’s death that the girl should be exposed. The person tasked with this role, however, refuses to throw the child into a river and leaves her at a farm-gate, where another man takes her, sprinkles her with water and names her Thorbjorg. Ala flekks saga (chs. 1–2) makes the logic even more explicit. The king declares that if the queen bears a boy “he must be exposed.” The queen orders slaves to carry the newborn into a forest and leave him under a tree, where an elderly couple later finds him and stages a birth so they can bring him up in their cottage. In Reykdaela saga ok Viga-Skutu, (ch. 7) there is an especially harsh winter, so the people go to the Pagan priest-chieftain Ljot to see what should be done. Ljot suggests that they donate to the temple, expose children, and kill the elderly “to vow for improvement in the weather.” This is immediately contested by a character who sounds suspiciously like a Christian. And lastly, although it does not relate explicitly to infant exposure, there is a passage that shows the general Viking attitude toward children and their propensity for indiscriminate killing. In Sturlubok, (ch. 98) the text explains the name of one Viking:
“There was a famous man in Norway called Olvir the Child-Sparer, a great viking. He wouldn’t have children tossed by spear-points as was the custom of vikings at the time, and that’s why he was called the Child-Sparer.”
This Viking is singled-out by his unwillingness to toss children onto spear-points … Taken together, the repeated exposure-and-rescue pattern across different sagas strongly corroborates that infant exposure was a familiar, culturally recognized practice in the Norse world rather than a one-off literary oddity. When compared to narratives and laws originating in Continental Europe, it becomes clear that infanticide was a very important practice in the pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs.
Thirdly, marriage. In his Germania, (ch. 18) Tacitus again is often cited as praising the strictness of tribal Germanic marriage yet immediately caveats that some do practice polygamy for political or diplomatic reasons - something only a concern for the ‘upper class.’ This description functions identically to what we saw above with infant exposure. Tacitus’ moralized portrait of ‘German sexual discipline’ - where the barbarians are used as a foil to shame Roman laxity and the elite-polygyny caveat is part of that same stylized contrast, with monogamy as virtue, exceptions only for alliance politics - is polemical as much as anthropological. However, when we look at the Norse corpus, we find numerous analogs to this mention of polygamy for the elite. In Harald harfagers saga (ch. 21), the titular character is portrayed as having numerous wives and concubines and later being required to dismiss nine wives when contracting a high-status marriage. This is a narrative that only makes sense in a milieu where elite polygyny is taken for granted. Likewise, outside observers corroborate this. In Ibn Fadlan’s description of the Rus, (Scandinavians operating in eastern-Europe) in his Risala, there is an episode (§93) about a ruler who sits on a high seat surrounded by forty slave-girls “destined for his bed,” with whom he has intercourse with openly in front of his retinue. Adam of Bremen, writing about Sweden, states in Gesta Hammaburgensis (bk. 4, ch. 21) that in “intercourse with women alone they know no moderation,” and that:
“each man, according to the capacity of his means, has two or three or more [wives] at the same time, while the rich and princes [have] without number.”
There is other evidence that corroborates this note of non-monogamous mores being open to any male with enough social and economic capital “according to the capacity of his means.” In Laxdaela saga (ch. 12-13), Hoskuld, a married chieftain, buys an Irish slave-girl from a Rus trader and “makes her his concubine.” Hoskuld then brings the slave-girl home to Iceland and has a son with her who is brought into his household as a legitimate member. As noted above, in Vatnsdaela saga (ch. 37), a man’s lawful wife orders his concubine’s child to be exposed. In Njals saga, (ch. 103,105) the titular character has a long-term sexual union with Hrodny, separate from his marriage to Bergthora. Njal’s son with Hrodny, is illegitimate in law but fully acknowledged in kin-terms. Hrodny even later refers to Bergthora with a term meaning roughly “co-wife,” with legal historians classifying this as a ‘non-marital but socially recognized union’ rather than a second formal marriage. The runestone So 297 from Uppinge in Sodermanland seems to be archeological evidence of a similar practice in its commemoration of the husband of two women, Amoda and Moda, who jointly raise the stone for their mutual spouse.
Ruth Mazo Karrass observes that Scandinavian provincial law codes from the Christian period assume that rulers and wealthy landowners can and do keep concubines and, as for Sweden and Gotland, they often treat concubinage not as an unthinkable aberration but as a semi-formal status with roots in slavery. The very fact that Christian legislators repeatedly condemn and seek to regulate polygyny, concubinage, and sexual relations outside marriage across northern Europe implies that these were real, entrenched practices that had to be curtailed, not marginal deviations invented by Christian propaganda. Taken together, the sources converge on the same conclusion: Norse-Germanic societies formally centred marriage on one primary wife but permitted, and in some strata normalized, both polygyny and concubinage for men. The legal and narrative sources assume that the wife is the central, honour-bearing spouse, yet they also treat male access to additional partners - enslaved women, concubines, prostitutes - as a normal and often unproblematic part of male life. To conclude, our ancestors did not conceive of marriage as closing the male off from sexual relations with other women.
Fourthly, we will look at ‘other practices’ which are recorded by the historic record and which must factor into any reconstruction project. Frankish, English, and Arabic witnesses consistently portray a Viking world in which sexual violence against women and slaves were routine features rather than exceptional aberrations. The Annals of St-Bertin (s.a. 843) describe the sack of Nantes in the mid-9th Century, when Northmen “burst in” during Mass, killed the bishop, clergy and “many men and women” in and around the church, then plundered and burned the city and carried off captives. The Annals of Xanten (s.a. 845–846) likewise depict mid-9th Century raids in which Vikings devastate churches and “carried men and women away prisoners.” Later tradition around Coldingham, preserved via Roger of Wendover in his Flores historiarum (s.a. 870), has Abbess Ebbe and her nuns cutting off their own noses to render themselves sexually repellent before a Danish attack. Even if we assume hyperbole in this account, the logic presupposes that rape by raiders was expected. Finally, another account from the Risala (§87-91) of a Rus chieftain’s funeral along the Volga depicts a chosen slave girl being plied with drink, passed from tent to tent for intercourse with the dead man’s companions as a supposed ‘farewell,’ and then ritually strangled and stabbed to accompany her owner in death, embedding human sacrifice in a frame of normalized, collective sexual exploitation.
This sexual exploitation was not only isolated to women, however. Old Norse legal and narrative sources make clear that sexually abusing men - especially slaves and defeated enemies - was a recognised, if morally-asymmetrical, practice embedded in a wider system of property and honour. Norwegian provincial law (Gulathing) states that a man has the same right to compensation for “carnal intercourse” involving his male thralls as for his bondwomen. In the Icelandic Gragas, a klamhogg (“shame-stroke”) - a deep slash across the buttocks - is classed with brain, marrow, and abdominal penetrations as one of the “major wounds.” Modern interpreters argue that its location and pairing with castration show it functioned as a juridical label for male anal rape and symbolic ‘unmanning’ of captured foes. Defamation rules in Gulathing and related codes likewise make it an outlawry-level insult to call a man sannsordinn (“demonstrably penetrated”), grouping this with accusations that feminise him or liken him to female animals, which indicates that dishonour attached not to same-sex acts per se but to the loss of masculine, penetrative status. Saga narratives set in the same cultural world show these legal assumptions at work. In Gudmundar saga dyra, (ch. 20) for example, the titular Gudmundr seizes the priest Bjorn and his wife Thorunn. Gudmundr and his men explicitly discuss putting Thorunn “in bed with” a man while doing something to Bjorn that would be “no less disgraceful.” In the Viking world, victors would sometimes punish and humiliate male captives through rape. Taken together, these texts depict a milieu in which male-directed sexual violence was institutionally recognised.
But Norse-German sexuality extended to other strange practices as well. Survive the Jive, an academically-minded Folkish Heathen who also has a show on the Hearthfire Radio network called Radio North Sea, put out a video arguing that there was a “weird” Indo-European practice of prospective-kings mating with a horse. The evidence he provides is convincing. Gerald of Wales’ 12th Century account of “bestial intercourse” between the king-candidate and a white mare, immediately followed by the killing and boiling of the mare, all proceeds a ritual bath in its broth and a communal consumption sequence which collectively confers kingship and ratifies sovereignty. This account is also corroborated by the Betha Mholaise Daiminse. The mare functions as a figure of sovereignty or the land with the sexual contact being the ritual mechanism of legitimacy. It is a public ‘union’ that makes the king belong to the territory and binds the people to him through shared participation in the animal’s transformation into food. Comparative Indo-European studies point toward this practice having deep roots. In the Satapatha Brahmana’s Asvamedha sequence (a royal horse rite), the queen is made to lie down near the horse, which is explicitly framed as “the completeness of union.” High-status ritual literature possess the same conceptual grammar of horse, royalty, and sexualized union language. Hittite law includes a rule where sex with various animals is criminalized but sex with a horse or mule is treated as there being “no offence.” This mention is paired with a restriction from approaching the king or becoming a priest, which again connects royalty, horses, and sexuality. Plutarch describes Rome’s October Horse as a public rite where the right-hand trace horse of the winning team is sacrificed, its blood is hurried to the Regia, and factions fight over the head. Tacitus describes sacred white horses used for divination where leaders and priests read their neighs and snorts. Archeological evidence also points to horses being associated with nobility and royalty. Taken altogether, there does seem to be some sort of sexual horse ritual that was connected to royal status which existed at the edge of sacral kingship.
The Hearthfire Radio show The Bog once had an episode where the hosts covered this subject with the added evidence of pictograph carvings from Scandinavia that depict a figure with an erection behind a horse. There were also theories of Loki’s transformation into a horse and his impregnation with Sleipnir being a possible inverted allusion of the royal mating ritual. Regardless, the hosts agreed that “this is a practice which we in the Heathen community want to bring back.” Even though the episode is still advertised on the Hearthfire Radio Telegram page, the link takes you to a now defunct page on the Hearthfire Radio website - evidence of the episode being taken down. Whether or not this was an actual historic practice, the fact that some prominent Folkish Heathens believe that it was and further that it is something which would be part of a ‘true reconstruction’ should prompt a moment of reflection on whether or not reconstructions should venture into bestiality.
Along with these contemporarily transgressive sexual mores, Viking-Age Scandinavians were deeply enmeshed in Islamic trade networks, trafficking African and European slaves for silver. Archeological and numismatic work shows that Viking-Age Scandinavia was deeply plugged into Islamic economic circuits with ‘coin hoard’ studies now counting close to five-hundred-thousand Islamic silver dirhams in Scandinavian finds, attesting to heavily-sustained trade with the Muslim world. Arabic geographers spell out what at least part of that trade entailed. Ahmad ibn Rustah writes of the Viking Rus in his Kitab al-A laq al-Nafisa that “they attack the Slavs using ships, they capture them as slaves and sell them,” explicitly describing a Scandinavian-led group living off the seizure and sale of eastern-European captives. Ibn Fadlan’s eyewitness account of the Rus on the Volga in his Risala (§83) adds detail, depicting long-distance merchants who arrive with “beautiful slave girls, destined for sale to the merchants,” noting that a buyer might find a Rus having intercourse with a slave girl and must wait until the man “has satisfied himself” before the sale can proceed. This sort of behavior should be expected since law code provisions assume that slaves are truly property. The Frostatingslova lawcode (ch. 20) explicitly allows a master to kill his thrall, with the only constraint being that he had to publicly announce that the slave was killed.
Whereas Vikings seem to have often exported European slaves to foreign lands, there is also an account of foreign slaves flowing into Europe through Viking channels. The Fragmentary Annals of Ireland (FA 330, s.a. 867) records how a band of Norwegians found themselves in Africa, fighting hard against Mauritanians and capturing many native black Africans which the band brought to Ireland, presumably to sell as slaves:
“Then they brought a great host of them captive with them to Ireland, i.e. those are the black men. For Mauri is the same as nigri; ‘Mauritania’ is the same as nigritudo. [...] Now those black men remained in Ireland for a long time. Mauritania is located across from the Balearic Islands.”
Set against Medieval Christendom’s self-understanding as ‘resisting Islamic expansion’ through the Crusades, the above material shows how Historic Paganism deeply integrated into Islamic slave markets and were perfectly willing to sell neighbouring Europeans or even bringing Africans into Europe whenever it suited their interests. The operative ethic for Vikings was loyalty to one’s own household and warband, not any trans-tribal ‘White’ or ‘Germanic’ solidarity. Their innangard was certainly not racial or ethnic.
We might imagine what a season in this world could look like … Longships quietly slide up a river in the fog of dawn. Leather boots jump from wooden planks onto soggy soil at the river’s edge. They rush into the town, enter the church and interrupt Mass. The priest is axed down at the altar, and others of the congregation are attacked. Screaming men, women, and children are taken back to the ships. Nuns are raped in the mud and marked out as saleable spoils. From there, the band follows the sea-roads south, selling their White captives at an Islamic slave market in Spain. The warband begins their return home with the drowning of some captives as a sacrifice for safe passage. Their chieftain brings a new concubine back to his household, where his pregnant wife and their son wait. When his wife’s labors begin, she struggles for the entire day but finally gives birth to a daughter. Yet before she can nurse her newborn, the chieftain orders that the wailing infant should be quietly left out in the woods and never spoken of again. A few weeks later, a rival warband attacks the group but is beaten back and defeated. The captured enemies are impaled with spears, noosed, and hung from trees - sacrificed to Odin - while the son of their leader is held down and publicly sodomized before having his back carved open and his lungs pulled through the wound. As autumn arrives, the chieftain suddenly falls ill and slowly dies. At his fire-lit, night-time funeral, the warband takes his concubine and have their way with her one-after-another. She is then strangled to death and laid atop the chieftain’s pyre … And so the world would go on like this until Christianity overcame it.
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III.
With these accounts of pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs established, we can now return to the moral posture of Folkish Heathenry. The defining claim is not merely that the ancestral ways are historically curious or interesting, but that they carry special authority precisely because they are ancestral and ‘ours,’ and therefore, ‘reconstructing’ or ‘reviving’ them is necessary for personal, ethnic, and moral authenticity. Once that premise is granted, the historical record creates a methodological crisis. The record includes practices that are condoned and interwoven within the customs such as human sacrifice, infanticide, polygamy, slavery, and rape. The question is therefore not a cheap provocation, but a test of coherence: ‘by what principled method can a religion that treats ancestral practice as authoritative decide if these are still binding or discardable, and why?’ In other words: ‘should these practices be included in the reconstruction or not?’ …
The question forces a trilemma, and each horn carries a cost that cannot be avoided by rhetoric. The first option is ‘filtration’ - to exclude the practices as somehow not actually authoritative. This is the most attractive escape because it seems to preserve ‘ancestral authority’ while discarding inconvenient content. The Folkish Heathen says ‘these practices were not an essential part of the custom, not truly endorsed by the gods, or otherwise not truly part of a necessary tradition - they were distortions, misunderstandings, corruptions, or later accretions.’ But this move only works if one can supply a non-arbitrary criterion for filtration or some principled method for distinguishing ‘authentic’ from ‘inauthentic’ that does not simply smuggle in modern preferences. And as we shall see in Part II, hermeneutically pruning the Lore of ‘foreign,’ ‘Christian,’ or otherwise ‘unwanted’ content is fundamentally impossible because you cannot both treat the sources as your continuity-bridge and then disqualify whatever in that bridge conflicts with your desired endpoint. If the Folkish Heathen can only supply special pleading, then reconstruction collapses into ‘selective retrieval,’ where one discards what one cannot live with and labels the remainder ‘the real tradition.’ Yet that operation is functionally the same subjectivizing curation that Folkish Heathens criticize Inclusivist Heathens of. To filter responsibly, one must explain how one knows what the gods truly require and why this criterion is more than a modern moral sensibility operating behind a Pagan aesthetic.
Therefore, the Folkish Heathen might choose the second option of holding an ‘external standard’ - to reject the practice as wrong by appealing to a higher ‘moral yardstick.’ Here, the Folkish Heathen says ‘even if our ancestors did these things, they were wrong, or at least they are wrong now, and therefore we should not bring them into our reconstruction.’ This response has the advantage of clarity, but it comes with a decisive concession of admitting a moral standard that stands above the ancestors and judges them. Whether that standard is named ‘natural law,’ ‘universal human dignity,’ ‘conscience,’ ‘divine goodness,’ or ‘rational moral knowledge,’ the structure is the same - the moral yardstick is no longer ‘the folk,’ but something trans-cultural that can actually condemn ancestral custom. The moment this is granted, the foundational Folkish Heathen move is effectively abandoned, because ancestry stops being the final court of appeal. One may still practice a form of Heathenry after this concession, but it is no longer the robust Folkish claim that ‘the religion of my ancestors is correct for me,’ because one has rejected the religion of their ancestors and accepted a form of universalism similar to the Inclusivist.
So, in order to maintain themselves as such, the Folkish Heathen could choose the third option of ‘full continuity’ - affirming the ancestral practice as legitimate in principle. Taking this position, the Folkish Heathen says ‘if human sacrifice, infanticide, polygamy, and White slavery were genuinely part of the ancestral moral-religious world, then they remain legitimate because the very point of Folkish Heathenry is fidelity to that ancestral pattern.’ Now, the Folkish Heathen can caveat this by saying that modern law makes such acts impracticable, but this is only a pragmatic concession, not a moral one - indeed, it is a sort of capitulation or resigning to ‘Christian sensibilities.’ Regardless, the moment that the Folkish Heathen affirms legitimacy in principle, this simultaneously affirms that the gods’ demands can outrank the safety of the folk and its children, thus excluding the Folkish Heathen self-presentation as ‘for the family’ (as the Asatru Folk Assembly, the Irminfolk Odinist Community, and the Norroena Society do) because the family’s security becomes conditional upon what the gods or the folk may require. Likewise, they cannot maintain the posture of it being ‘for the folk’ if the folk can be offered up too, because the gods’ demands would be prior to the welfare of the group. Therefore, the cost of full continuity is not merely reputational, it is also conceptual. The Folkish Heathen’s public-facing rhetoric becomes subordinate to divine command and power.
The conclusion is, therefore, very straightforward. Folkish Heathenry cannot avoid this trilemma if it is serious about its own stated commitments. Either it filters out the dark parts of the record, but must then defend a non-arbitrary epistemology which survives collapsing into mere preference, or it repudiates those dark parts by appealing to a moral standard beyond ancestry, thereby conceding that the folk is not the final yardstick, or it embraces continuity and must defend the legitimacy of practices that conflict with other stated objectives. This effectively leaves two positions: the Reformist who is willing to ignore or edit aspects of the Lore, and the Fundamentalist who seeks to incorporate the entirety of the record. Folkish Heathen reconstructions cannot coherently treat ancestry as the supreme authority while also claiming the right to amend the tradition unless they import a higher standard. If we are to be serious about reconstructing the past, we must look at all of it, not just the parts that align with modern, Christian-derived sensibilities.
My intent here is not to berate or chide the Folkish Heathen, but ultimately to have them see that every person has a degree of human dignity, a baseline which excludes this moral relativism. Recognizing universal dignity does not dissolve tribal loyalty, it simply places limits on how we treat outsiders. Prioritizing the well-being and success of one’s ethnic, cultural, or national group is not inherently in conflict with recognizing the dignity of those outside that group. Supporting ‘us’ does not require dehumanizing ‘them.’ The assumption that in-group preference demands out-group denigration is an unwarranted conflation. All of this is basic and often acknowledged by the Folkish Heathen, yet for their reconstruction to accept it, they must ‘amend the tradition.’ This further goes to show that one cannot reconstruct without also editing, and to edit is to have a standard above, beyond, or otherwise prior to the tradition.
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IV.
But this all raises a fundamental question: if the gods issued prescriptive demands to our ancestors, what kind of authority are we actually dealing with when Folkish Heathens call those demands ‘binding?’ There are two basic ways to construe it, which are easy but incorrect to slide between.
First, the gods could be treated as ‘moral legislators’ in something like a divine command model. The gods issue binding norms, and an act is right or wrong simply because they commanded or forbade it. On this reading, a Folkish Heathen may try to locate something like a ‘Sinai moment’ in the Proto-Indo-European primordial lawgiving figure of Manu. This figure is found in the Hindu Manu, the Iranian Manuchehr, the Roman Romulus, and the Germanic Mannus. But when we attempt to locate the content of this primordial law in the Norse-Germanic lore, we find only charter-myths and late institutional origin-stories rather than something that warrants belief in a revealed custom. In Germania (ch 2), Tacitus mentions how the Germanic tribes used songs to trace their groupings back to the divine progenitor of Mannus. But Tacitus adds that “antiquity gives free rein to speculation” (something profoundly succinct in our investigation of Folkish Heathenry) and then immediately supplies competing tribal genealogies. Regardless, this mention does not note anything about the origin of tribal norms, only the genealogy of their people. The poem Rigsthula depicts Rigr founding the social castes and teaching Jarl runes. It is a legitimation narrative for hierarchy and kingship which similarly does not state anything about the origin of the customs. It is only in Ynglinga saga (ch. 8) - where Snorri has the euhemerised Odin prescribe funeral customs, memorial mounds, a three-fold sacrificial calendar, and a head-tax - where we find anything approaching a firm ‘law giving’ moment. Yet the fact that the Folkish Heathen only has a single episode written by a Christian in a fully Christianized milieu about a euhemerized Odin coming from Troy to establish certain rites (the content of which are not explicated) in order to assert a ‘revelatory inauguration of the customs’ to fulfill their perceived need for divine command makes the evidence flimsy at best. This passage also has no actionable code - for example, with the ‘three calendrical sacrifices:’ what specific days should they be performed on, what rites are entailed, what sacrificial victims are desired, who is obligated to perform or attend the rite, what counts as ‘compliance,’ are there any exceptions, what are the ‘penalties’ of non-compliance, and so on.
The underlying problem with treating the gods as ‘moral legislators’ is that none of these episodes supply what the model actually requires, namely: a fairly comprehensive, stably-transmitted code of binding norms. Therefore, treating these texts as condoning the model forces the missing breadth and clarity to be supplied by reconstructive associations and definitions rather than by the texts themselves. As we saw in the prior article, the moment you try to obey the command, you must first supply the missing content through selection, interpretation, and debate about what the binding customs actually were. This leads down an endless series of disagreements about what exactly the practice should be. So we can see how if one insists on the ‘moral legislator’ reading, the burden shifts onto the Folkish Heathen to explain where their asserted ‘binding code,’ what it contains is located and why it should be treated as anything other than the interpretive moves of their own particular reconstruction (we will investigate this further in Part II).
Second, the gods could be treated less as legislators and more as ‘powerful patrons,’ who are sources of favor and exemplars of prudential wisdom. In this model, the point of divine speech is not to promulgate a codified statute-book, but to form a kind of ‘workable sagacity’ that preserves honor, secures the folk, and teaches a person how to move between guests, neighbors, and enemies in a way that ultimately tends to succeed. This picture aligns more naturally with the genre and tone of Havamal, where the repeated skal/skaltu (“you shall / must”) formulas function as hard counsel and character-shaping maxims, closer to the prudential advice of wisdom literature like Proverbs than to the codified divine statutes of lawcodes like Leviticus. Yet this model too has its own problem. As we will see momentarily, Havamal does not present Odin as a simple moral ideal whose counsel is self-authenticating. He is also a trickster and, at times, an oath-breaker. If Odin’s counsel includes trickery and calculated breach of trust, then the move from ‘Odin says it’ to ‘therefore it binds us’ must now also account for why counsel from a powerful patron is automatically normative for the folk when the tradition itself foregrounds the patron’s capacity for deceit.
Whether the Folkish Heathen ascribes to the ‘moral legislator’ or the ‘powerful patron’ model, both have implications that can be found in the Euthyphro Dilemma. The Dilemma is located in Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue where, outside the Athenian court, Socrates (who is being prosecuted for impiety) meets Euthyphro (who is prosecuting his own father for impiety). Because both characters are there for reasons relating to piety, Socrates begins his trademark questioning, pressing Euthyphro to define the idea of piety in a world where many gods exist and disagree. Over the course of their dialogue, (or: Socrates’ interrogation) facts are established through a refining series of questions. For example: the gods don’t argue about things that could be measured or counted because they could just remeasure or recount until everyone is in agreement. Instead, they argue about qualitative concerns. Therefore if piety is ‘what the gods love,’ then piety is going to be something that is prone to change due to the multiplicity of gods. Piety must be, then, what ‘all the gods love.’ But the central question that emerges from that - which is the dilemma - is: ‘do the gods love it because it is pious or is it pious because the gods love it?’ … If the gods love something because it is pious, then piety is what is independent of the gods’ love and is effectively a truth operating above and prior to their will. But if that same thing is pious only because the gods love it, then piety is arbitrary and could change with their whims, leaving us without any foundation for coherent moral determinations. In the polytheist schema: either the gods themselves are subject to a universalizing morality or the morality that emerges from the commands of the gods is effectively arbitrary.
If the Folkish Heathen takes the ‘powerful patron’ model or would consider themselves a ‘Reformist’ from the above definitions, then they are likely to hold that ‘what is good’ is logically prior to and independent of the gods’ preferences - it is that the gods are adept (but not perfect) at securing the good. But this would make the Aesir answerable to their actual securement of the good such that by it they can succeed or fail as patrons. Perhaps there are other gods who are better at securing the good? Regardless, if goodness does not come from ‘whatever our gods and ancestors did,’ then ancestral practice and divine behaviour are no longer self-validating - their aptness is contingent upon their alignment with ‘actual morality.’ So if the Aesir love the good because it is good, the real moral authority is not ‘the gods’ or ‘the folk,’ but ‘the good’ itself, and the entire Folkish Heathen project of making ancestral practice the final standard quietly gives way to a higher ‘court of appeal’ - the same court that Christianity operates in. Therefore, in order to maintain their system, the Folkish Heathen would more likely take the ‘moral legislator’ model and consider themselves a ‘fundamentalist’ from the above definitions, holding that ‘an action is right or wrong because Thor, Freyr, the Aesir, and especially Odin (as the high-god) commands so.’ Indeed, this is the foundation of Imperium Press’ Ancestral Principle.
But the implications of this are highly unsavory because there are numerous episodes in which Odin’s will is tactical, reversible, and predatory. In Volsunga saga (ch. 11) Odin gives Sigmund the sword Gram as a gift. Decades later, while Sigmund is in battle, Odin strides up to him, smashes Gram with his spear, and leaves Sigmund to die. In Lokasenna, (st. 22–23) Loki taunts Odin for “often giving victory to those who least deserved it,” a critique that Odin does not deny, showing how the gods themselves recognised his preferences in patronage. One of Odin’s heiti (that is: one of his titles or names used in poetry) is attested in Grimnismal (st. 47), thul Odins nofn (st. 3), and Gylfaginning (ch 20), as being Glapsvidr - that is: “swift in deceit” or “quick in treachery.”
In Gautreks saga (ch. 7), Odin’s patronage is portrayed as a form of strategic indebtedness that culminates in a deliberately-engineered betrayal. After King Vikarr’s long run of successes, his fleet is unable to move due to the lack of winds. Divination indicates that for the winds to return, a life must be given to Odin, and the lots repeatedly fall on King Vikarr as the desired victim. Everyone naturally wants to evade this high cost and so the decision is put off until the following day. But that night, one of the men and the king’s advisor, Starkad, is called to a secret council of the gods where Odin and Thor are present. After blessing Starkad, Odin tells him that he wants Vikarr to be sacrificed, giving Starkad a spear which Odin says will turn into a reed at the critical moment. With the understanding that the sacrifice will be symbolic, Starkad convinces the others and the king that Vikarr should stand on a stump, wrap a ‘noose’ around his neck made from calf-guts, (which will easily break) and then he will plunge the reed into King Vikarr. When the critical moment comes, however, and Starkad says “Now I give you to Odin,” the stump slips away, the calf-guts turn into a real rope, and the reed turns into a spear. King Vikarr is actually sacrificed. Odin’s deceit in this story is not incidental but structural. Odin demands the sacrifice, engineers the outcome by disguising the weapon, letting men believe they are performing a harmless sign, and then converts the signs into the reality they were meant to evade. In this story, Odin’s patronage functions as a predatory contract based on deception.
In Helgakvitha Hundingsbana II, the story similarly shows Odin as the active author of a kin-slaying rather than a neutral onlooker. Helgi has killed Hunding and his sons in a feud, but he spares their kinsman Dag and takes him into his service, binding Dag by oath as brother-in-law and retainer. Dag then goes to Odin and offers sacrifice, explicitly asking for vengeance on Helgi despite their new relationship. Odin accepts the offering and responds by lending him his own spear, the weapon that guarantees victory to the one who wields it. Armed with this divine weapon, Dag lies in wait at Fjoturlund, ambushes Helgi, and kills him. When Dag brings the news to his sister, she curses him, and Dag answers with this crucial line (st. 34):
“Mad art thou, sister, and wild of mind,
Such a curse on thy brother to cast;
Odin is ruler of every ill,
Who sunders kin with runes of spite.”
Dag is shifting the blame from himself to Odin. But in the logic of the poem, Odin really does accept a sacrifice specifically aimed at vengeance, equips Dag with a special weapon, and thereby becomes the proximate cause of the treacherous killing of a man who was both Dag’s lord and in-law. Rather than reorienting Dag’s desire for revenge against his oath, Odin allows and even encourages the endeavor.
But this behavior is something that should be expected of Odin, who Havamal presents as himself breaking oaths. In the mead-of-poetry story, Odin gains access to Suttung’s daughter Gunnlod, (who protects the mead) sleeps in her bed for three nights in exchange for three draughts of the mead, then takes all the mead, flies away, and leaves her behind in grief. In the reflective line (st. 108) the poet comments that:
“A ring-oath, I think, Odin once had taken – how shall one trust his troth?
He left Suttung cheated of the drink, and Gunnlod made to weep.”
This explicitly uses Odin’s conduct as proof that even a sacred oath from Odin cannot be relied on and his favor is never safe. Yet within the Norse religious frame this does not lead to a call to abandon Odin; instead it reflects a worldview in which even gods can deceive, and piety means negotiating with powerful, morally ambivalent beings rather than trusting a just or faithful deity. That said, if a Folkish Heathen wants to relativise the story on the grounds that Gunnlod is a jotunn and therefore outside the moral concern of the Aesir, the internal framing is still starkly critical: Odin himself is the one whose broken ring-oath leaves a woman betrayed and weeping, and the text directly poses the question, “how shall one trust his troth?” …
This question is especially relevant for women. In Gesta Danorum (bk. 3), Saxo Grammaticus tells a euhemerized version of Odin needing to generate an avenger after Baldr’s death. In this account, he sets his sight on the princess Rindr who denies him in multiple disguises. Finally though, by disguising himself as a female healer, Odin convinces Rindr’s father, the king, to tie her to her bed. With Rindr bound, Odin rapes her. This episode is also alluded to in the Skaldic poem Sigurdardrapa (st. 3) which only mentions how Odin “seidr-enchanted Rindr” - that is: used magic against her (likely alluding to a variant telling). Therefore, we see how Odin somehow tricked a woman into bearing him a child even though she did not want to. Likewise, in the poem Harbardsljod (st. 32-33) the figure of Harbarth (identified as Odin) tells Thor that he needed Thor’s help to “hold the white maid fast,” and Thor replies that he would gladly have helped had he been there. This is an allusion to physically restraining a beautiful woman, which, in context, is an episode of one god confessing his attempted rape and another god (his son) stating his willingness to assist in rape. Overall, this non-morality of Odin can be summarized by Havamal (st. 58):
“Rise early if you would have another man’s life or money;
The drowsy wolf takes no lamb, the lying warrior wins no fight.”
Because Odin is demonstrably capricious, he could tell a Heathen to make an oath today, break it tomorrow, and reinstate it the following day. And because Odin is demonstrably licentious, he could decide that he wants to have his way with your daughter and regardless of anyone’s concern, he will try to rape her. There is no limit on what Odin could command you to do or what he will not just do himself. And as we saw above with human sacrifices, Odin is willing to make bargains with you, but at the cost of your own life and the life of others, including that of your own children.
Now, a Folkish Heathen might respond that ‘Odin is operating on a higher tier of concern than human fairness - his task is to prepare for Ragnarok.’ In this view, what looks like betrayal or injustice to us is actually part of a wider, divine strategy. In the same way that parents give rules to their children that the parents themselves cannot always abide by in order to protect the home, so too do the gods give us standards which they themselves must often ignore. But if Odin demands loyalty, oath-keeping, and courage, yet openly breaks oaths (Gunnlod), engineers kin-slaying (Helgi), uses trickery generally (Vikarr) and specifically to rape women (Rindr) and gives victory “to those who least deserve it” (Lokasenna), then he is acting more like an abusive or negligent parent than a nurturing one. A parent who forbids a child ice-cream at breakfast but openly eats from the tub themselves is already sending a mixed message. And what is the child supposed to take away from the authority-figure example who they will naturally imitate when instead of ice-cream the analogy involves dishonor and sexual exploitation? We rightly expect more responsibility and restraint from those with greater power, which means that when the Aesir - especially their leader, Odin - break the very norms that Norse society prized, then the gods function as bad examples even by ancestral standards. At that point, the question is unavoidable: why should we obey a commander whose orders can run directly against the welfare of our communities?
The ‘Ragnarok justification’ of the Folkish Heathen likewise fails for two reasons. First, in Eddic eschatology, Ragnarok is not a victory-myth. It is literally “when the gods go to destruction” or when they “meet their end” (Vafthrudnismal st. 52). Odin is devoured by Fenrir the wolf. Thor kills the Midgard Serpent but then collapses from its venom. The weaponless Freyr is cut down by Surtr. Tyr and Garm tear each other apart. And Heimdall dies slaying Loki. My rebuttal here is not that the gods should passively submit to this fate, but that ‘Odin’s higher plan,’ on the myths’ own terms, is an expedient war-craft under the threat of doom, not the establishment of some sort of long-term standard of conduct. But even if the Folkish Heathen retreats to a softer version of the position - ‘Odin is merely preparing, mitigating, or meeting doom honorably’ - the moral problem does not disappear. What kinds of acts are permitted in that preparation? Are there any actions that remain forbidden even under doom? If the answer is ‘whatever helps preparedness is allowed,’ then what is ‘right’ has simply been reduced to ‘tactical usefulness’ by another name. If the answer is ‘some things remain forbidden,’ then they have admitted a moral floor that does not originate in Odin’s planning, because it constrains him even while he prepares. Second, the moment that the Folkish Heathen say that ‘Ragnarok leads to renewal’ or that ‘the strategy of the Aesir serves the greater good of the post-Ragnarok world,’ they re-open the Euthyphro dilemma because goodness stops being identical with what Odin says. Instead, Odin is being evaluated by a higher standard, namely how well his conduct serves that telos. If, instead, they insist that whatever advances Odin’s Ragnarok plans is ipso facto right, then the ends simply justify the means, full-stop. Anything becomes permissible whenever it is believed to serve a ‘higher end.’ Either way, the reconstruction loses moral stability. The Aesir cease to be legislators or the ground of any definition for ‘the good’ and instead become patrons whose power must be managed. The folk is left without a principled reason to avoid imitating the same suspension of norms whenever it claims group-survival as the higher aim, which is precisely how the moral floor for the utangard becomes thin enough to vanish.
To summarize thus far: either the Folkish Heathen amends and edits the content of the pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs or they embrace it. By editing it, they are implicitly denying the authority of their ancestors. By embracing it, they are incorporating human sacrifice, infanticide, slavery, and rape into their reconstructions. Likewise, if they hold that right things are right regardless of if their ancestors and the gods say so, then they deny their binding authority. If they hold that right things are right because the gods say so, then they are enshrining the predatory whims of a capricious, doomed, and desperate pantheon as the ultimate moral standard.
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V.
But there is another aspect of this religion’s ethics which we must address before concluding this article because it is - in many ways - a core attraction for many Folkish Heathens. The ‘combative ethos’ of Historic Paganism is something that Folkish Heathenry is very much keen to adopt because out of all the ‘spiritual options’ present today, it is the only one viewed as being able to allow the necessary degree of self-preservation given that those of European descent are being globally persecuted and delegitimized. However, the moral architecture of pre-Christian Norse-Germanic customs (tiered personhood, feud-based honour, and gods who themselves foster strife) has predictable failure-points. There is a tendency toward the escalation of violence and a difficulty in de-escalating it due to the reification of aggression and honor. These play out within the folk too, not just against ‘outsiders.’ I want to walk through these movements from the Lore and then show modern examples of these failure-points, not to argue that the Folkish Heathenry endorses or entails criminality, but to argue that it makes serious, destabilizing harm more likely rather than less, even when no one explicitly wills that outcome. This, again, conflicts with the self-presentation of Folkish Heathenry as being
As we mentioned in the prior article, according to the Lore, the cosmos itself is a permanent field of conflict. After all, it is not just murder that constitutes creation, but the veritable ‘kin-slaying’ of Ymir. This is likely why the Aesir are constantly feuding with the jotunn, whose progenitor was Ymir, with there being no end to the feud without one side’s capitulation at Ragnarok. In the logic of the mythos, Odin is incentivized to create conflict because he is trying to ‘harvest’ the best warriors to himself to increase the ranks of his Einherjar who will aid in his resistance to Ragnarok. Indeed, Odin is known as the “battle promoter,” (‘a poem by Hofgarda-Refr Gestsson about Thorsteinn,’ st. 2) the “instigator of discord,” (Lausavisur, st. 17) and “the stirrer of strife” (Harbardsljod st. 22). Grimnismal (st. 18, 23-24) and Gylfaginning (ch. 38) relate that the Eninherjar battle every day in Valhalla and are healed in the evening - an afterlife of fighting and feasting. There is likewise a ‘forever feud’ called Hjadningavig where two sides fight every day, are resurrected at night, then fight again the next day. If the highest end value is attaining the ‘best’ afterlife of Valhalla, (which is deeply related to another goal of ‘leaving a legacy of great deeds’) then you should always run into fight - combat should never be avoided. It is an interesting aside that the Heathen will assert that their moral relativity allows for numerous views, thus allowing for many ‘separate but equal’ spaces, when it is that very stance that Postmodernism acknowledges must reduce to violence.
Saga conflict showcases socially-structured responses to how this ethos played-out in history. Feuds typically progress through direct negotiation, arbitration, or legal adjudication with violence most often following when a party refuses to negotiate, rejects an arbitrated settlement, or later repudiates an agreement that had been publicly accepted (usually for reasons relating to their honor). Settlements are frequent and meaningful, but their durability depends on whether all parties - and the surrounding community - regard the outcome as honorable and satisfactory. When that acceptability fails, feud reopens. This pattern appears across the major feud narratives. In Brennu-Njals saga (ch. 35-45, 123-128), early insults and household quarrels do not immediately lead to violence but to repeated legal and arbitrated settlements at the Althing. Only when a final arbitrated resolution is rejected does the feud collapse into catastrophic violence and the burning of Njal’s household. In Gunnlaugs saga ormstungu (ch. 18), a poetic rivalry over a woman develops into formal duels. After temporary settlements fail to restore mutual satisfaction, kin groups adopt the quarrel and sustain the feud even beyond the poets’ deaths. In Vapnfirdinga saga (ch. 3, 5, 13–15), sworn-brothers drift into enmity through a sequence of broken agreements, with later generations inheriting and perpetuating their unresolved claims. In Heidarviga saga (ch. 1, 12–13), vengeance chains persist for decades precisely because no settlement achieves durable communal acceptance. In Eyrbyggja saga (ch. 37–46), Snorri godi repeatedly negotiates legal and extra-legal settlements with rival kin-groups - each agreement temporarily halts violence, yet renewed provocations or rejected terms reopen the feud until eventual exhaustion brings stability. In Volsunga saga (ch. 6), the extremity of the honor imperative is dramatized when Signy demands the death of her own sons rather than allow their perceived weakness to undermine the family’s vengeance-claim. And in Laxdaela saga (ch. 12), a dispute involving three individuals expands into three generations of reciprocal killings, finally closed only when a Christian priest brokers a settlement recognized as binding by all parties. Across these narratives, arbitration and compensation are neither illusory nor irrelevant but instead are the primary means by which violence is delayed and often prevented. Yet because honor remains the ultimate metric of acceptability, settlements that fail to secure recognized satisfaction or impede the party’s ability to ‘save face’ leave latent claims unresolved.
So when Folkish Heathenry appeals to Historic Paganism in their reconstructions, what is being idealised is precisely this system of mythological violence, intra-ethnic vendettas, and Valhalla-oriented aspirations. These narratives show that conflict in this world tends toward escalation rather than resolution because it lacks any robust internal mechanism for subordinating violence or honor to a higher ethic of cooperation or peace. And even if one seeks to adopt this framework as a means of ‘freeing those of European descent,’ it does so by valorising a morality that turns other even allied Whites into potential feud-targets, rendering any putative ‘racial solidarity’ structurally precarious (more will be said on this in the following article). Against that backdrop, it becomes a reasonable, if uncomfortable, question whether a movement that idealises this combative ethos will tend to draw a disproportionate share of those already inclined toward aggression and boundary-breaking, and whether the pathologies visible in the sources appear in present-day Folkish Heathen milieus.
Using federal Bureau of Prisons religious-preference totals alongside large-scale U.S. survey data, one Commission on Civil Rights table reported in 2007 that ‘Pagan’ identifiers are 0.4% of U.S. adults but 1.4% of inmates in all federal prisons. This is a 3.5x overrepresentation. The same table showed that only Muslims (0.6% of population, 9.3% of inmates) and Native American religions (0.1% of population, 3.8% of inmates) held a worse ratio of ‘more in prison, less in general public.’ A similar report from 2025 notes how Pagans are <1% of the population but comprise 1%-8% of the prison population, depending on the given prison. Now, as we saw in the introductory article, ‘Pagan’ can encompass many different spiritualities, including those which Folkish Heathenry would oppose. However, since Folkish Heathenry is a self-consciously ‘warrior-minded,’ ethnocentric strand within the wider Pagan field, it is not ‘special pleading’ to suggest that this Pagan prison population has a significant presence from Folkish Heathens.
Indeed, their emphasis on prison-outreach is striking. Wotansvolk - a Folkish Heathen ‘Odinist’ network - organized ‘kindreds’ of White inmates behind bars such that by 2001, the network was communicating with more than five-thousand prisoners and had ‘prison kindreds’ in every state, effectively converting whole gangs into adopting the religion. Wotansvolk activists would also help launch the ‘National Prison Kindred Alliance,’ a coordinating body of Folkish Heathen prison kindreds. However, the texts they would give to inmates would be banned from state prisons in Wisconsin due to their tendency to incite agitation. The Asatru Folk Assembly maintains a dedicated ‘prison ministry’, which “benefits not only [inmates] as followers of Asatru but their families and loved ones.” The Odinic Right’s ‘Prison Affairs Bureau’ likewise supports incarcerated Odinists. The Asatru Alliance publishes a thirty-five-page booklet titled Our Sacred Land, “written specifically to aid inmates in establishing their own sacred land in a prison environment.” So, far from those inmates who self-identify as ‘Pagan’ diluting the possibility of Folkish Heathens contributing to that population, we might be more correct in saying that the population of incarcerated Pagans it is predominantly Folkish in character.
There are many cases of individuals having their religious views prior to their incarceration as well - including some prominent leaders in the sphere. A member of the Wolves of Vinland (whose founder has a show called ‘Right Action’ on the Hearthfire Network streaming service) pled guilty in 2013 to felony arson and related charges involving the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church in Virginia, serving two-and-a-half years in prison. This member had ‘666’ prominently marked on their right-wrist while in prison. Ironically, after their release, they would be brought back into the organization and help construct a hof (essentially a ‘Heathen church’ or ‘temple’). Else Christensen - whose gravestone bears the title “Folk Mother and Founder of the Odinist Fellowship” - was sentenced to five years in prison in 1993 for a drug-trafficking case involving marijuana and heroin. She claimed to be reciprocating favors for a young couple who asked her to drive the car across state lines, which she apparently did not know had drugs in it. The Asatru Folk Assembly has a hof in Minnesota with a shrine set up to Else, and the Asatru Folk Assembly website says:
“Hail the Folkmother!
Hail Else Christensen!
Hail the Asatru Folk Assembly!”
A member of the Asatru Folk Assembly - previously described by the group as “the newest apprentice Folkbuilder for the Odinshof District” - is still awaiting trial for a 2024 incident in New Mexico reported to have involved carjacking resulting in death and using a firearm during a crime. This member had ‘1488’ tattooed on his finger.
In 2014, a New York City Councilman – once a founding member of an Anglo-Saxon Heathen (‘Theodish’) group – was convicted of two overlapping bribery and fraud schemes and in 2015 was sentenced to ten years in federal prison. In 2020 he was released amid COVID-19 measures. But then, in March 2025, after returning from Cuba, he was arrested in Florida on federal charges of possession and transportation of child pornography. A different Theodish leader and author who helped found the Angelseaxisce Ealdriht organization was accused of making overt sexual advances on a member.
And lastly, the ‘President of the Irminfolk Community.’ Before his time in organized Folkish Heathenry, this person was involved in a 1995 incident involving explosives and vandalism with wind-reporting transmitters (aviation safety infrastructure). In 2000, while still on federal probation, police searched his apartment and found an AK-47 with hundreds of rounds of ammunition, silencers, a home-made gun, and neo-Nazi paraphernalia, which would lead to him being sentenced to twenty-seven months in prison, also barring him from any future possession of firearms whatsoever. After re-entering public life, he repositioned himself as a ‘Folkish religious organizer,’ working closely for several years with the Asatru Folk Assembly who would call him a “good friend.” He would build up the Irminfolk Odinist Community as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that organized the multi-day Folkish Summer Hallowing gathering in Pennsylvania. Survive the Jive would give a talk at the 2023 Folkish Summer Hallowing. Imperium Press and The Bog host brought the leader on to talk about the growth of Heathenry. And the Norroena Society credits the Irminfolk with an image on their page describing their Smrja ritual. But in July, 2025, federal agents would search this person’s home and discover weaponry which broke their prohibition on possession, and would lead to their detainment awaiting a new trial. Shortly afterward, the Irminfolk Odinist Community cancelled the 2025 Folkish Summer Hallowing. …
The anticipated Folkish Heathen response that ‘every religion has people involved who commit bad deeds’ does not really address what is at issue here. The concern is not that any one crime automatically falsifies the religion, but that the Folkish Heathen milieu shows a cluster of serious criminal cases tightly entangled with their religious leadership in a way that goes well beyond the ordinary expectation of ‘some adherents do bad things,’ especially for such a niche organizational network. The pattern documented above does not prove that Folkish Heathenry causes crime in any simple way, nor does imprisonment automatically discredit a person or a belief system, but it is reasonable to infer that this particular style of religion tends to attract and retain asocial personality types who use the mythology and the sagas as a warrant for this sort of behavior.
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VI.
To recap: A reconstructionist ethic that treats ancestral custom as authoritative must treat at least some ancestral practices as normative for adherents now. The historical record depicts practices which contemporaries reject as morally impermissible, such as human sacrifice, infanticide, polygamy, slavery of Europeans, and rape. Therefore, reconstructionists must either affirm those practices, or filter them by a moral standard which is by necessity outside of the ancestral customs. If they affirm them, they embrace a conclusion that conflicts with their own rhetorical commitments to ‘family,’ ‘the folk,’ and ‘appealing to high-quality, demanding people.’ If they filter them, the Folkish Heathen implicitly appeals to a trans-ancestral moral standard. This is similar to the Euthyphro Dillimea where if the gods command the good because it is good, then goodness is prior to and above the gods. If the good is good only because the gods command it, then morality becomes contingent on divine will in ways that conflict with the rhetorical commitments. Either divine authority collapses into a higher standard, or it becomes morally arbitrary - so it cannot stabilize the moral theory Folkish Heathen apologetics needs. The heroic warrior ethos of Heathen Lore - prizing honor, vengeance, and endless feuds - further highlights these flaws. Such a code historically led to cycles of violence and revenge that only ceased when a Christian peace-ethic was imposed. Today this combative, in‑group mindset appears to attract a disproportionate number of asocial individuals. In short, a moral system that rejects universal values in favor of ancestral or tribal dictates is either forced to defend indefensible cruelties or else smuggles in the very universal principles it claims to reject. Both are untenable positions for the Folkish Heathen to maintain their identity as such.
This should cause us to pause for a moment, reflect on everything we’ve seen in Part I and ask: who would be attracted to this system and why? … Which will be the subject of the following article.
Let us close in prayer:
“O God, who taught the whole world through the preaching of the blessed Apostle Paul, draw us, we pray, nearer to you through the example of him whose conversion we celebrate today, and so make us witnesses to your truth in the world. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.”