00:18:06Trugfasonr declares what amounts to open war against Iceland, murdering Icelanders in port, going on piratical raids, and kidnapping them, holding children in demand for apostasy, holding them in hostage in demand for apostasy, and so on.
00:18:261000 CE's June 15th, the Icelandic all-thingy, under intense pressure and the threat of civil war to avoid further punishment by Tryggvasonr, declares the state religion to be Christianity.
00:18:42Icelanders were free to practice Asatru as they wished in private, however, but they still usually had to get baptized.
00:18:491000 CE's September 9th, Olafur Tryggvasonr partakes in the Battle of the Svolder and drowns.
00:18:56So, Tryggvasoner's reign of terror is like 18 years. Important to keep in mind there.
00:19:031015 CE, after a period of globetrotting, Olafur Digri Haraldsson returns to Norway. He attempts to subjugate the various yarldoms of Norway.
00:19:16While his actual religiosity is debatable, Olafr Haraldsson here, unlike Olafr Tryggvasonr, actually had foreign Christian agents in his entourage.0.93
00:19:26This is an important point. Tryggvasonr doesn't actually know what he's doing. We'll cover that later.
00:19:3310.30 CE, the Battle of Stickelstad takes place, and Olafur Haraldsson dies. The battle is between pro-Jarl forces, and when the pro-Jarl forces win their patron, Knutr Sveinsson, assumes control of Norway on behalf of Denmark. Knutr is, of course, Knut the Great.
00:19:53Despite being buried twice, Olafur's body, the Saint Olaf, did not rot, and as such, he was declared a saint.
00:20:021035 CE, Magnus Góði Olafson assumes the throne at the age of 11.
00:20:08Born sickly, he was initially abandoned by his father, Saint Olaf, and was sent to the east to dwell with the Rus.
00:20:15Magnus is Góði, the good, with a long vowel, not Góði as in priest with a short vowel,
00:20:21Because he initially wanted to enact a widespread campaign of revenge against basically everyone but his courtiers, and they talked him out of it.
00:20:30So he's the good for not murdering everyone by a state fiat at the age of 11.
00:20:36It's around this point that Christian clerics have enough local power granted to them by the various kings of Norway, and with the help of patronage from exterior to Norway kings, that they can start affecting the law codes of the various provinces of Norway.
00:20:52So what this means is that Christian priests start going to these law speakers and importing foreign in the sense of continental European, but foreign legal principles and concepts into these law codes, and their actual inclusion in the law codes is very complicated.
00:21:11It's not necessarily forced all the time, but the point being here, we start seeing real meaningful on-the-ground effects of Christianity around this 1035 CE point.
00:21:221056 CE, the Diocese of Skalholt is established on Iceland, and Isleifelgisrason becomes its bishop, or rather, Æthelbiart, the Archbishop of Bremen, just sends this guy to Iceland and says he's the bishop.
00:21:41Could you throw up the map of Europe, Nick, as we get into this?
00:21:46So, a little bit of map nerding. Norway and Sweden share the singular large peninsula of Scandinavia. Norway is in the west. Sweden is in the east.
00:22:01At this time, Norway and Sweden are both big, complex, broken up, distributed, it's not even really polities, but they're full of provinces, and all of these provinces have their own little governments.
00:22:21Kings are trying to get the support of these little provinces to back them.
00:22:25and there's Denmark, which is the northernmost part of continental Europe there coming out of
00:22:32Germany. Germany is the Holy Roman Empire right now. It's a very complicated and messy polity.
00:22:39We don't need to go into the dynamics of it, and then we have the east. The east is Finns,0.99
00:22:45Balts, Poles, and LaRousse, right? We're going to come back to this east-west distinction,0.94
00:22:52but you can see up in the west the northwest iceland right iceland is settled by norwegians
00:22:59we'll get into that more later all right so right away you'll notice that we've got a pretty tight
00:23:04period here lasting about 150 years ago or sorry 150 years or so we're going to jump around a bit
00:23:12and mostly focus on some of the big players sweden experiences a movement towards centralization far
00:23:19far, far earlier than Norway. In the pre-Vendel period, Sweden is already several competing
00:23:26provinces led by elites. Come by the Vendel period, Sweden has one or two top-level leaders
00:23:31who unite the multitude of provinces. Come the Viking Age, Sweden is led by a singular king.
00:23:38On the map, you can see the distinction between the Sphere and the Geats. These borders of those
00:23:43two groups within sweden are not super accurate it doesn't need to be the simple point here is
00:23:49sweden is composed of three groups of people the sphere and the geats who are two separate
00:23:57i'm just going to call them tribes for ease we've talked about what they really are in previous
00:24:01episodes and then a variety of other smaller tribes composing the rest of sweden
00:24:06norway however simply does not have the people and the density of them to do that
00:24:13It isn't until well into the Viking period that Norway moves towards unification, and even then it's simply attaining the first high king, as Bloodaxe's realm does not actually rule all of Norway, despite claims otherwise.
00:24:28Iceland, meanwhile, does not even start getting settled until the Viking Age.
00:24:32Most of its inhabitants are Norwegians who are either seeking profit or safety from conflict on the continent.0.89
00:24:40the general theme of eastern scandinavia is one of buildup and centralization
00:24:47and then a conflict over that centralization meanwhile the general theme of western scandinavia
00:24:52is a conflict to fill in land you want to throw up the viking expansions map nick
00:25:00okay so if you're watching this on video pause to look at the map because it's kind of complicated
00:25:07So if you look at the map of Europe here, we see two things going on.
00:25:13So this is a map of Europe and the impacts of the Viking Age expansions into it.
00:25:18This is, simply put, the effects of Scandinavians getting in boats and sailing away.
00:25:27The first is raiding and the second is settlement.
00:25:29There's an east-west dynamic at play here.
00:25:32Raiding is largely trying to acquire silver.
00:25:36gold isn't used for money it's used for jewelry and finery silver is money we talked about why
00:25:42in another episode raiding also consists of acquiring slaves and then selling them to
00:25:48christian slave markets or dropping them off in scandinavia to basically increase the peasantry
00:25:54there norway at this time actually gets an influx of gaelic again slave doesn't really work because
00:26:02you can't own people at this time but uh they're thrallar you know people who uh league whose
00:26:09labor is owned a lot of gales just get kidnapped out of ireland and dropped off in norway or iceland
00:26:16as low-ranking individuals but you know basically free people
00:26:23uh as we've said in another episode um the slave trade at this time outside of you know
00:26:30no, re-forced resettlement, I guess you could call it, largely consists of kidnapping people
00:26:36and then selling them to Christian slave markets either on the continent
00:26:40or various Christian groups in Eastern Europe, usually Khazars or vulga Bulgarians.
00:26:48Settlement, meanwhile, is finding unoccupied land, sometimes by virtue of it having been
00:26:53raided into unoccupancy, and then occupying it. As said, there's an east-west dynamic at play here.
00:27:00I've split Europe in half by drawing a light blue line through it, showing the two portions.
00:27:07The eastern horizons were largely expanded into by Sweden, settling and raiding the Baltic coast and Finland.
00:27:16The low draft of the Norse longship allowed for these boats to go into the rivers of Eastern Europe, moving through it down to the Black Sea.
00:27:24From there, the Black Sea could be raided.
00:27:26However, the eastern Mediterranean couldn't be reached as the Bosphorus, the straits separating Thrace and Anatolia, was closed off from Norsemen by the Byzantines.
00:27:37Protecting the Muslims in the Levant from being raided by Norsemen was a conscious political goal of the Byzantine Empire.
00:27:44But the western horizons were largely expanded upon by Norwegians and Danes.
00:27:49This was the raiding of Western Europe, the British Isles, and North Africa.0.84
00:27:53It's also the settling of Iceland, Greenland, North America, the Orkneys, the Ferro Isles, etc., etc., etc.
00:28:00When people talk about Vikings, they're mostly talking about this.
00:28:04They're not really talking about Swedes raiding what is today Latvia.
00:28:10These guys, these Western Vikings, these Western Scandinavians, don't really go into the Mediterranean Sea beyond what is today Libya due to the huge distance from safe ports,
00:28:21but also due to the concentration of the Byzantine and opposite professional navies.
00:28:27But, and this is important, these are general trends.
00:28:30There's a lot of people from Norway and Denmark in the east, and there's a lot of Swedes in the west.
00:28:50The territory in white isn't uninhabited, but it's politically disorganized or not relevant to what we're talking about here.
00:28:58SvÃtiod is what we mean when we say Sweden for the most part.
00:29:02Halogaland is where Jarl Hákon Sigurdersson is from.
00:29:06Hordaland is where Harald Farhaar rules from.
00:29:11West Trogothia, meanwhile, is where Queen Sigurdersson is.
00:29:14throndheimer is a city that olaf trygglasoner rules from and then gelling down there is where
00:29:22swain forkbeard is from right so we've got a lot of places all at once right but these are the big
00:29:29locations in norway sweden and denmark that show up in this story so let's start with hakon sigurd
00:29:39Sigurdarsson, who, with his sons, eventually becomes overlord of Norway.
00:29:44Hakon Sigurdarsson was the son of Sigurdar Hakonarsson in a line that went back to the hero Samming, the son of Odin.
00:29:51This lineage is part of the Laid family, the so-called Earls of Laid, who originated in northern Norway but slowly built up power further south during the rules of Hakon Gritjordarsson and then Sigurdar Hakonarsson,
00:30:07who are Hakon Sigurdor's son's grandfather and father, respectively.
00:30:12The earls of Laid never really try for true kingship, however.
00:30:17Rather, they want to be a distributed power network throughout Norway.
00:30:21What the Laid family is trying to do is trying to insulate itself from the power of centralizing kings like Erik Bloodaxe.
00:30:28They also want to be part of the indispensable machinery of Norway.
00:30:35This makes their familial network and its patron-client relations outside of their literal family a weird sort of alternative church as a means of governing and ordering Norway, I guess you could say.
00:30:48This doesn't pan out, and we shall see why, but a theme throughout Norwegian history is a tug-of-war between aristocratic houses that sometimes cover a wide swath of territory and the central monarchy of the king.
00:31:01Sigurdr was killed by Harald Grafelder Eriksson, that is, Harald Greycloak.
00:31:07So Hakon allied with Harald Bluetooth, the king of Denmark, an enemy of Harald Greycloak.
00:31:13This assassination of Sigurdr was part of a long-term struggle between the Laid family and the Ingling family.
00:31:21The Ingling family, of course, being the lineage of Harald Greycloak.
00:31:24so you've got these powerful aristocrats in charge of much of norway that are coming to blows with
00:31:31this warlord that wants to make himself the sole king of norway so the powerful aristocrats then
00:31:39ally with the danes to create a block against the king right
00:31:46okay harald gray cloak was of course um the son of eric bloodaxe who sought to conquer all of
00:31:55norway that included trundelag where hakon was from this also included killing trugvi olafson
00:32:02who was from vikin trugvi was of course the father of olaf or trugvason so bluetooth and
00:32:09hakon set into motion a scheme to lure gray cloak to denmark by promising him land when he arrived
00:32:16his ships were assaulted, and Grape Kluge died.
00:33:10According to the Heimskringla, around 975 CE, Hakon was forcibly baptized, as were all of his men, ultimately on Otto II's orders.
00:33:19Then, priests were given to him, and he was told to baptize all of Norway.
00:33:24And so Hakon waited for a fair wind to sail away.0.50
00:33:27And then when he got it, he turned away all of the priests, leaving them in the shallows, and sailed southwest and started ravaging the Danish coast.
00:33:34So when this Danish-Norwegian alliance goes sour and the Danes turn on the Norwegians, HÃ¥kon Sigurdersson starts attacking the Danish coastline as kind of a punishment for the betrayal upon him.
00:33:48The word that Snorri uses to refer to Håkon's baptism is náðgá, which in Norse means to compel via force with the dative, but also means to violate with the accusative.
00:34:01But in Icelandic today, the term has taken on a slightly different usage, meaning to rape.
00:34:07So it's a rather grisly picture, but you can see the grievousness of how this forced baptism is perceived.
00:34:16So Haakon Sigurdsson comes home to Norway and then he rules for a while because he's the big man in Norway in absence of the England king.
00:34:24Meanwhile, in Sweden, Olafur Skoutkununger was born around 980 and he seems to have been born second.
00:34:30And so his unnamed sister that got kidnapped by Aki was born first.
00:35:24Sorry, everyone is named Haakon, Olafur, Haraldur, or Eirikar at this time.
00:35:30These people get jumbled together so easily.
00:35:34Haakon Sigurdersson is trying to ally himself with powerful men across Scandinavia.
00:35:40He's not actually trying to position himself as a king.
00:35:44He just wants to retain his position in his homeland and remain Asatru.0.87
00:35:49And he's allying himself with forces that are opposed to Christianity's advance.
00:35:54Bluetooth was at first, and that fell apart. So then he allies with Eric the Victorious, who by this time has rejected Christianity. So Harold Bluetooth, he has a son, Svein the Forkbeard, so-called because of his forked beard.
00:36:13Svein Forkbeard got kidnapped by the Jomsvikings and forced to pay an onerous ransom.
00:36:19Bluetooth had tried to force Christianity upon Hakon so as to shore up his control of Norway as a way to defend against Germany.0.92
00:36:38and he subjects them to a humiliating symbol where he gets them all to hail jesus and the
00:36:45archangel michael and then he gets them to swear an oath of enmity against hakon sieger their son
00:36:51and to swear an oath they would attack him directly and the next day the yelms viking
00:36:56are sober up and realize how catastrophically bad of an idea this was but they swore an oath
00:37:02so they have to do it. The idea here being that the Jomsvikinger will defeat Haakon,0.99
00:37:09which allows Bluetooth and Svein to fill the void and get soldiers to fight Germany. The
00:37:14Jomsvikinger are also ideally positioned to do this because Haakon Sigurdersson is allied with0.89
00:37:21Erik the Victorious, and the Jomsvikinger will come to blows with him coming up in the timeline,
00:37:27but not in the story today. The result is the Battle of Hürungvarger around 986 CE. This
00:37:37actually results in a total Norwegian victory, and the Jomsvikinger are beaten back, securing0.53
00:37:42Haakon's position for about a decade. It also secures Norwegian independence from Denmark,
00:37:49which wouldn't be contested again until the Battle of the Svolder, which we get to later on in the
00:37:53story do you want to talk about anything here sir before i detour negative no i think you're doing
00:38:04i think you're doing a good job on it and we're covering a lot of material
00:38:08and we're covering a lot of people too like this is literally dozens of sagas being synthesized
00:38:18into a coherent narrative about what is happening in sweden and who is norway in addition to what's
00:38:25happening in sweden and who is doing what to who right so before we get into the battle before we
00:38:33continue i want to detour and go on go on sir so i i'm neglectful i did i should mention something
00:38:40forget at this point how many episodes we are into the story of our people
00:38:49our people had a relationship with the icier for the entirety of this for thousands of years
00:38:58what we consider the lore in aussitrew which is very often it's more than this but it is typified
00:39:07by the eddas and the sagas those events and their their writing takes place here in a couple of
00:39:17hundred years but those events and those stories and that history is a 200 year period that we're
00:39:27in the midst of here so all that huge outpouring of Scandinavian history and saga and
00:39:34where we take so much of our imagery our idea of
00:39:41the material culture that we associate with the gods and we associate with our faith
00:39:47is produced here in a very very small window of time that we're covering over these last you know
00:39:56three ish episodes of this series so it's kind of i don't know of interest to
00:40:04when we picture the gods and this isn't just something that you know silly people do
00:40:10or we're all silly when we picture our gods we have a certain0.90
00:40:14childish sounds petty but we have an innocence to where we like the comfort of a viking aged
00:40:23injury and that's what's presented to us in our lore so the material culture the weaponry the0.92
00:40:30The halls, the imagery that we have in mind when we talk about our gods and just the language we use to describe them all comes from this very, very short, but very rich period in our history.
00:40:43And it's worth just, I don't know, digesting that.
00:40:46so the battle of hirungavager is cool if you're interested in viking age battles but historically
00:41:01it's just when hakon sigurdersen attains primacy over norway i want to detour into something here
00:41:08that is very important to cover in terms of the historiography of this period
00:41:13And just kind of talking about Ossetur stuff in general, because this battle is important due to ostensibly being one of the only attestations of Norse human sacrifice. Ostensibly.
00:41:27Primsignd is the name of the island where the sacrifice takes place.
00:41:33Primsignd. Sounds a lot like Prima Signatio. Prime signed.
00:41:39Which refers to someone that is marked for baptism in the Christian faith.
00:41:42It was Catholic dogma at the time that unbaptized infants went to hell for eternal torture, so a sort of peasant folk custom was to prime sign unbaptized youths, literally marking them with the sign of the cross drawn on their head via ashes or dirt or some such, in the hopes of tricking Yahweh into letting them into heaven if they died before baptism.
00:42:03because uh an individual is on the way to baptism and dies then they get led into the good afterlife
00:42:10right so if you mark the infant as oh we're going to baptize them eventually it technically counts as
00:42:16them going to baptism get the point here so what's notable is that the island is a later
00:42:26addition to the story as is the human sacrifice as are the details of the human sacrifice
00:42:30so the basics of the human sacrifice narrative is that there's a back and forth fighting over a few
00:42:36days and hakon gets on the losing side so he seeks the supernatural aid of an entity called
00:42:43who we know basically nothing about other than that she shows up in this story and initially
00:42:52hakon tries to please her with a normal bloat of cattle so that doesn't work and she doesn't help
00:42:57them then he tries to please her with a so-called manblot which is this term that christians appear
00:43:05to have invented because there wasn't a word for human sacrifice in the norse language up until
00:43:10this point because human sacrifice just wasn't wasn't done you don't bloat with a person that
00:43:16would be cannibalism then he tells his slave to take his own son out into the woods and hakon tell
00:43:26Hakon has his son go out into the woods with a slave, and then the slave slits the son's throat.
00:43:31In return, Thorgrðr Haldabrúðr, I'm sorry, I butchered her name the first time, Thorgrðr Haldabrúðr then grants Hakon a supernatural wind,0.74
00:43:43this like magic ice storm that just wrecks the Jomsbekingar, allowing his forces to defeat them.0.85
00:43:51At least that's in the chronologically latest telling.1.00
00:43:56In the earlier ones, he just waits to fight until the weather is right.
00:44:00Like, he's just, he looks up at the sky, sees a storm of Bruins, like, nah, boys, we're just going to wait a bit.
00:44:06And then the weather does its thing, and it happens to have been positioned good, or he happens to have positioned his fleet good for the fight.
00:44:14And he wins due to meteorological cunning rather than any sort of underhanded supernatural occurrence.
00:44:20this is the exact same formula this normal sacrifice fails human sacrifice even eviler
00:44:30human sacrifice this formula also shows up in the inglinga saga with the killing of king domaldi
00:44:36first there's a normal bloat of animals then there's a bloat with humans those two don't work
00:44:40so a third type of killing which is somehow not a bloat but does involve like the killing of a
00:44:47person with a knife and there's blood, right? That does work in the story. Snorri includes the
00:44:55human sacrifice in his telling of the battle of Hirongvar, but Fagarskina excludes it. Snorri is
00:45:02also where we hear about Demaldi from, but the sagas mention increasingly more details about the
00:45:08sacrifice over time, and they increasingly judge Hakon for doing it. As time develops, the story
00:45:16increases in the gory details one tradition actually has the number of sons that hakon has
00:45:22offered to thor gerther hold the bruder increased from one to two right and makes the entities that
00:45:32hakon is sacrificing to into simple human sorceresses this actually turns um thor gerther
00:45:38hold the bruder and erpa into just humans right these developments are particularly striking0.92
00:45:44because the Yom Zvigingar aren't Christians.0.97
00:46:00a Gentile leader who opposes the wars of aggression engaged in by Israel0.99
00:46:04out of his internal cruelty and wickedness.1.00
00:46:07The fact that he defends himself is evidence of his evil.0.77
00:46:12Hakon is contrasted with Trugvasoner, who is, of course, the Christian hero, the Moses of the Norwegians, that defeats the pagan villain.
00:46:19This narrative initially develops out of a need to glorify Trugvasoner, both out of trying to shape his history so as to benefit Christianity, and also so as to smooth over the really quite bad person that Trugvasoner was.
00:46:33but these ideologues also need to explain why hakon keeps winning until he doesn't and why he
00:46:41seems to maintain power locally how do they explain this simple demons the evil of hakon's
00:46:49continued reign is demonstrated by the wickedness of the lengths that he is willing to go to to0.54
00:46:54secure his reign in these stories in this case it's killing his son or sons to appease his patroness
00:47:00or his witches this is not only explains the victory but it also contrasts him with
00:47:08Trugvasoner who can't be that bad of a guy because after all he's not murdering his own sons right
00:47:14but what's important here is that Trugvasoner is Moses for the Norwegians but remember
00:47:21the actual Christian hero of the tales of the Jomsvikinger isn't Trugvasoner it's Svein
00:47:27forkbeard. In reality, Svein wasn't really much of a Christian, but he had no problem working
00:47:33with Christians to advance his position, which allows for an ideological reconstruction of him
00:47:37as a Christian hero. He tricked the Jomsvikinger into advancing his cause, because remember,0.97
00:47:43they're Odin-worshipping pirates. Why are they attacking Hakon Sigurdsson? Well, really,1.00
00:47:47they wouldn't if he hadn't tricked them into this oath, right? So later ideologues have to downplay
00:47:53the wickedness of the Jomsvikingar in order to cast Svein's actions as those of a pious Christian.0.99
00:47:58This means de-emphasizing the Jomsvikingar as a saturar and re-emphasizing them as simple pirates.0.99
00:48:06After the battle of Huron-Navar, Hakon begins centralizing power. His sons end up going off to1.00
00:48:12Sweden due to a quarrel, which actually turns out to be brilliant given what comes next. I want to
00:48:19to talk about another thing that you'll run into if you go looking into haakon segerson
00:48:23uh but first also here with these sir do you want to add anything about
00:55:36I think you're doing a great job of not just presenting the information, but of telling the story for folks.
00:55:44All right, let's get into Trugvasoner, the bad guy.0.92
00:55:49You'll notice this is a common thing that Norsemen do, so like, Bob will have a son named Steve, so Steve will name his son Bob, so Bob will name his son Steve, so Steve will name his son Bob.1.00
00:56:07Olafur Trugvasoner, born to Trugve Olafsson, was the great-grandson of Haraldur Harfavri
00:56:16Harfdansson. His early life is uncertain, but his family moved from Norway to the Orkneys
00:56:22to Kievan Rus. He eventually got involved with piracy. When Otto II made a push northwards
00:56:28into Denmark in 974, he recruited a great number of soldiers from People's Peripheral
00:56:33to Germany. Olafur was one of those soldiers. So, Trugvasoner is actually one of the people
00:56:41that is responsible for Harold Bluetooth's apostasy, albeit distant. A pretty consistent
00:56:47theme throughout Trugvasoner's life is that he has zero respect for religion or tradition,0.96
00:56:53and is a pretty brutish thug. Christian stories about him try to paint this in a positive light,
00:56:59such as by having him reject divination in prayer or steal things from temples.0.86
00:57:04This is, of course, because this is just actually him having never really been Asatru
00:57:10and always having been a Christian deep down.0.81
00:57:12But the sheer amount of bad behavior he goes around committing0.97
00:57:15makes it clear that they're just putting lipstick on the pig.
00:57:19At some point around 984, he sets out to start raiding in the North Sea,
00:57:24hitting Scotland, the Netherlands, England, and so on.
00:57:27There's various Christian ideological efforts to put his apostasy here in such a fashion as to benefit this faction or that faction, but other tellings put it earlier.
00:57:38All of them are ideologically problematic because Trugvasoner participates in the Viking raids on England that result in the Battle of Malta.
00:57:47This is a really important point to make here.
00:57:51Christianity and Vikings are not antithetical.
00:57:54In fact, there's a degree to which Christianity actually increases the degree of violence in the Viking Age by virtue of separating the Vikingar from ethnic ties.
00:58:03Christianity ideologically attacked the pan-Germanic ethos of medieval Scandinavians, directly attacked the institution of family and tribe.
00:58:12It directly tried to accelerate the breakup of Scandinavians into these distinct Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Icelandic, and so on ethnicities.
00:58:22This drastically lowered the degree of queasiness that going and raiding your distant king in England was met with.
00:58:30England is constantly being hit by Vikings at this time, as is much of coastal Europe,
00:58:35and it continues for quite a while after Christianity starts becoming dominant amongst the Norwegian,
00:58:42Norwegian, but Swedish, Danish, the Scandinavian leadership class.
00:58:47remember that the slave trade remember the slave trade that i brought up earlier today and talked
00:58:54about a few episodes ago where vikings would kidnap continental europeans and sell them to0.91
00:58:59slave markets in europe run by christians apostasy made it much easier to interface with those0.56
00:59:05networks these are benefits granted to first generation defectors mind you over time the
00:59:11deal naturally changes because scandinavians aren't in possession of the well i'll just go
00:59:16back to being Asatru threat, but that's a later problem, not important for here.
00:59:23What's really interesting here is that Trugvasoner is raiding England, and then suddenly Trugvasoner
00:59:29splits his army, leaving some of it in the employ of Athelrad Unrad, and adopts Christianity
00:59:37under Athelrad's patronage. And then Trugvasoner, who had just been fighting Athelrad and just
00:59:43left him with half his army, very quickly sails off to Norway and just starts rampaging through
00:59:48it with a ton of gold and silver. And rampage is the best way to describe it. He's just tearing
00:59:55through Norway. And importantly, he's really concerned with hampering the ability of Norwegians
01:00:00to move around by a boat. He locks down harbors. He punishes trade with Iceland. He sails the coast
01:00:07attacking random boats. Svein Forkbeard was a Viking warlord that was doing a lot of raiding
01:00:13in England. A lot of his men were recruited from Norway, and Trugvasoner was messing up that flow
01:00:20of men. Huh. Interesting. So I'm going to gloss over a lot of Trugvasoner's history here because
01:00:28it's really quite simple. He says to his men, boys, why do we have to do all of this law and
01:00:34order of nonsense, when we could just go around stealing stuff from people and murdering anyone
01:00:38that gets in our way. This results in the persecution that leads to several of our heroes.
01:00:44First, we have Oivindr Kinnrifa, who is a local leader in northern Norway.
01:00:50Trugvasoner's thugs had recently assaulted a friend of Oivindr's named Haruk. Haruk sent word
01:00:56to Oivindr to meet and discuss what should be done, but this was a ruse by Trugvasoner's men,
01:01:00and they followed Haruk and attacked the two men when they met.
01:02:22So, the second one is Jarnskegi Asbjornson, who was a chieftain in Irland.
01:02:31He had actually fought with Haakon at the Battle of Hirongavar and was something of a big deal in Haakon's regime.
01:02:40When Trugvasoner arrived at Mureh in 997, Jarnskegi and a local delegation met with him.
01:02:48They held that in order for him to accept Trugvasoner as Kunungur, go watch the episode about Eric the Victorious to see what I mean by accept him as Kunungur, accept him as king.
01:03:02So in order to be accepted as king, Trugvasoner would have to hold bloat in the hof of Thor.
01:03:07So Trugvasoner and some men went into the hof with the priest.
01:03:12The term used is not godi, it's actually bloat biskup.
01:03:15Then Trugvasonr drew his axe and attacked the statue of Thor.
01:03:21While this happened, the rest of Trugvasonr's men outside grabbed Jarnskei and killed him.
01:07:44And it's worth kind of backing up here.0.96
01:07:49Trugvasoner is just ripping through Norway, stealing stuff and murdering people and forcing them to become apostates.0.91
01:08:00The reason why we have these heroes who are martyred here is because he is just kind of going around killing people at a certain level.
01:08:09A lot of the, if you read Truvasoner's sagas, if you read between the lines, there's very, very few people that are opposing him at some macro level, right?
01:08:24Christianity, in as much as it matters, honestly is just his excuse for being a bandit and a tyrant with a lot of these people.0.79
01:08:33And I'm going somewhere with that, pointing out that he's a bandit and a tyrant.0.95
01:08:39a lot of these people that he he tortures to death he didn't have to he just did it to take0.90
01:08:46their stuff or to destroy the the the province that they were in charge of right why is he doing
01:08:56that do you think let's let's explore that in a little bit let's get into the battle of this
01:09:03folder. Erik the Victorious had married Queen Sigridður and given to her a chunk of his
01:09:10territory in Gietland, southwestern Sweden. There's some disagreement as to who exactly Sigridður was
01:09:17due to a few conflations of her with princesses from the east, but what is certain is that there
01:09:23was a queen who ruled a chunk of Sweden that was named Sigridður. She's called Sigrid the Haughty,
01:09:31but that's a weird modern convention that isn't... I don't see why they call her that.
01:09:36In Norse, she is Sigridr Staurada, and that epithet, Staurada, means something like hard counsel,0.99
01:09:44owing to her having been a fiery and untamable woman.0.99
01:09:48So fiery and untamable that despite having two kids with her,0.99
01:09:51Erik the Victorious actually divorced her because she was too much for him.
01:09:55So Sigurdr and Eirikr have a son, Olafer Skoutkonungur. Skoutkonungur meaning treasure king because he was quite wealthy. Skoutkonungur becomes king of Sweden after his father, Eirikr, dies.
01:10:11After this, Sigurdr seeks someone to ally with via marriage.
01:10:16Olafur Trugvasonr is the obvious choice, so they communicate and meet in person to finalize the arrangement.
01:10:23As a token of good faith, Trugvasonr sends her a large gold ring,
01:10:26but then her goldsmiths determine that it was actually just brass with a gold veneer on it.
01:10:33Gold rings were meant to be chopped up and reused, so her sending it to the goldsmiths isn't rude.
01:10:39but the ease at which this ruse would be discovered demonstrates that Trugvasoner is0.96
01:10:45not only duplicitous but also kind of dumb like you know here here have this cake to prove i'm0.99
01:10:53your friend and then the cake is like stuffed with garbage you know like did you not expect0.99
01:10:59anyone to cut open the cake right so they meet and Trugvasoner demands that Sigurður apostatize
01:11:07She says she won't, so he slaps her with a glove. She then says, you will pay for that, and the marriage alliance is just totally, totally morbid. Sigrid then returns to Svein Forkbeard, her ex-husband's Danish enemy, and marries him.
01:11:25Svein really doesn't seem to care much about religion, and so Sigridor marries him just fine because he doesn't force her to be Christian.
01:11:33Just about him ostensibly being a Christian, but he's not really a Christian.
01:11:38And actually, Svein isn't really a Christian much, as he's simply willing to engage in and with Christianity to benefit himself.
01:11:44Svein had been married to a Polish princess, an alliance that he had set up to protect himself against Germany.
01:11:50At the death of this Polish princess, he instead sought another ally, his old enemy's ex-wife, Sigurður.
01:11:57So there's this Swedish queen who is the mother of the current Swedish king.
01:12:03She initially tries to secure an alliance with Norway, led by Truglason.
01:12:10So then she secures an alliance with Denmark through Svein the Fortbeard.0.53
01:12:15and this is just a magnificent double woman scorned moment on Sigurdur's behalf as she not0.72
01:12:23only gets back at Eriker at Eriker by marrying his enemy Spain the fourth beard but she also
01:12:28gets back at Trugvasoner by marrying his enemy and getting said first enemy to not only help
01:12:35defend her son's kingdom but also to double down on fighting the second enemy because remember
01:12:39Sweden is ruled by Queen Sigridor and King Olaf Skalkenunger.
01:12:44So with Sigridor's marriage to Svein, Denmark is now allied to both Swedish monarchs against Tryggvasoner,
01:12:54who is rampaging through Norway and killing a lot of the men who used to be her ex-husband's allies, like HÃ¥kon Sigridorsen, right?
01:13:03I should interject that two days ago was the day of remembrance for Queen Sigridor.0.59
01:13:09So you can see why she's a queen hard counsel given that she pulls off schemes like this that
01:13:19work really really well. This is a really fruitful alliance because it binds Sigridhar's Geetish
01:13:27holdings, Scout Knunger's Swedish holdings, and Svein's Danish holdings into an alliance against0.99
01:13:35Trugvasoner, who has demonstrated himself to be an idiot and a mad dog, hostile to all of those factions.0.95
01:13:44And they also rope another potent leader into the mix, Eirikr Hakonarsson, the son of Hakon Sigurdersson.0.99
01:13:52After Trugvasoner's death, Eirikr takes over in northern Norway.0.50
01:13:57A number of individuals in this alliance get a Christian glossing over many centuries later,
01:14:02And while a few of them aren't feverishly anti-Christian like Errol Haakon was, none of them are actually fighting for clerical power here, which is an important point.
01:14:12Do you want to bring up the political communities map again, Nick?
01:14:18Okay, so Trugvasoner is ruling from Trondheimer, the red arrow pointing to, you can't really see it all that well if it's not zoomed in, the blue dot in kind of northern Norway.
01:14:32Sweden, the circled portion labeled Svithjod, is ruled by Olafer Skoutkenunger.
01:14:42Westergothia is ruled by Queen Sigridur. That's the kind of green portion next to Svithjod.
01:14:51Svein Forkbeard rules from yelling in Denmark, in the kind of south center of the map.
01:14:59Then we have Eirikr Hakonarsson, who's ruling in Hordaland, which is the kind of burgundy, wine-colored region there.
01:15:12So all of these groups ally against Trugvasoner in Thronheimer, right?
01:15:21But Sigridhar has managed to unite basically all of Scandinavia, really, against Trugvasoner for this one big push against him, right?
01:15:37So Trugvasoner goes on a raid somewhere around eastern Denmark due to a complex series of subtle social manipulations that are not really worth getting into.
01:15:47But to sum it up, Sigurður engineers a situation wherein Trugvasoner decides he doesn't want to just go raiding around the coast of Norway.
01:15:57He's going to go start raiding in Denmark.
01:16:01So he's raiding in Denmark, in eastern Denmark, when suddenly a massive fleet starts amassing around him.
01:16:09And then some of his own jarls break from him and start allying with the assailants.
01:16:17Trugvasoner's forces lose, and he jumps into the sea in full armor, drowning. He might also have been knocked off. It's not entirely clear.
01:16:26This is arguably the single biggest problem that Trugvasoner presents to later Christian hagiographers, as his death by drowning means that not only is he marked as implicitly a bad guy in the medieval Germanic mindset,
01:16:43Because drowning is a punishment reserved for crimes against cosmic order and natural law in ancient Germanic society.
01:16:57The Romans and the Greeks do not kill any Christian rabble-rousers and induct them into sainthood in doing so via drowning.0.86
01:17:07The only drowning hagiographies that show up are ones done by Germanics, right?1.00
01:17:15Drowning indicates that a person is a bad guy, right?0.66
01:17:19So Truvasona drowning means he's a bad guy as far as the laity are concerned, but there's no body.
01:17:27So they can't say he was a saint by talking about how his body didn't rot and could be worshipped to, like, make it exude green slime that you could drink or whatever.
01:17:37right no body no sainthood this means that his hagiographic that this hagiographic project of
01:17:46trubosoner can't really be completed but also has to happen to keep christianity from looking bad
01:17:52to compensate a narrative of his survival was invented you see he was simply such a fantastic
01:17:59swimmer that he just abandoned the battle and swam away oh but why doesn't he return well he
01:18:05joined a monastery somewhere in eastern europe and then he died and his body is not rotting there
01:18:12at that hidden monastery so there then he can become a saint and once this this idea starts
01:18:18going around about like oh he he swam away and never swam away never to return um stories about
01:18:28trooper sonar start like really emphasizing really emphasizing that he's a good swimmer
01:18:37he'll be like marching around the woods and the scald who making this the story will like
01:18:43take great pains to remind the audience that this guy can swim really good when he's like nowhere
01:18:49near the water or he's like eating dinner oh but hey he's eating dinner while being a good swimmer
01:18:54right? Because they're trying to reinforce this idea of Trugvasoner didn't drown at the Battle of
01:19:01the Spolder. When he does drown at the Battle of the Spolder, the victors split Norway, which is
01:19:08quite prosperous for a time, and there's a great resurgence of ostrich with Trugvasoner having
01:19:13been removed um hakon sigurderson did actually have um a number of sons and so the his his uh
01:19:23lineage remains in power after his death do you want to talk about the battle of the smolder at
01:19:29all sir while i get some water uh no but i will answer some of these questions so while you drink
01:19:36some water oh you just drink water there never mind i don't need to break into questions um
01:19:41Um, no, it is fascinating some of the stories and hoops that need to get jumped through.
01:19:51One thing that people may note with, um, executions for people who are bad people in
01:20:00out the true culture of our ancestors day when we talk about in tacitus how the germanic tribes
01:20:11would punish criminals like you stole stuff if you're a murderer if you broke you know the piece
01:20:17if you did those things then hanging would make sense and was a was a way of being executed but
01:20:24Capital punishment for, like, things that were detestable
01:20:29or things that people ought not be reminded of
01:20:56we've been talking a lot about like source material and narratives and the development
01:21:05of narratives we see this very clearly in norway this stuff is happening everywhere else
01:21:14as christianity moves in barring an extremely small number of places like
01:21:19like armenia right most all of europe has this kind of negotiated figuring out how christianity
01:21:32even is supposed to work in the context of of the the place going on we just don't have a good
01:21:40demonstration of it happening live as it were like we do with norway here right
01:21:47So I wanted to return to Haakon Sigurdersson for just a moment here and make a point that is easily missed. Under Haakon's reign, Norway prospers. He defends the realm. He benefits basically everyone economically. He unites the populace. He brings peace. He brings law. Under Trugvasoner, everyone suffers. He wrecks the peace. He smashes the law. He tyrannizes the populace. He ruins the economy.
01:22:09And in his wake, Christian kings start bringing in these onerous churchmen who start levying additional taxes and introducing these weird foreign laws.0.95
01:22:17People start grumbling that they were better off under Odin than under Yahweh.0.51
01:22:21Christian ideologues thus faced are thus faced with a problem.
01:22:25How do they defend Christianity when it actually is factually the worst option in every way for the laity?
01:22:31This is at a meta level the case with the two sea battles that Haakon and Trigvason are fighting.0.86
01:22:38Hakon wins his defensive war through great wisdom, the battle with the Yomsbeking Ark.
01:22:45Fagurskina tells us that he basically chose to strike when the weather was right.0.99
01:22:50Trugvasoner loses his offensive war through great stupidity.0.95
01:22:53Thus, there is an ideologically necessary campaign to rehabilitate Trugvasoner in light of Hakon simply being the better king and not actually being a king at all.0.93
01:23:04Hakon Sigurdersen does not claim to be Konungur, which is interesting.
01:23:08It's for this reason why many have noted that Truglasoner seems to just kind of bumble through kingship in a lot of the stories about him.
01:23:15There's a conscious attempt at de-emphasizing his culpability in a lot of things that make him look bad.
01:54:13So, again, it's always important to note the gods can take an interest and care about whatever they choose to take an interest in and care about.
02:02:00so the first one um does olin ever communicate directly with the ulcerative
02:02:09i want to well because i want to take a step back on that because it didn't just say does
02:02:14the odin communicated matt so let's talk about the position of ulcerative um
02:02:23yes the all-father absolutely communicated with steve mcnalen through inspiration through
02:02:36miraculous intervention in his life and through a steady a steady whisper of inspiration
02:02:44Um, he, if he were here can describe what that felt like or what that was like, I'll
02:02:53relate the, uh, you know, he initiated Steve with his ordination and his being set on the
02:03:03course to build this in 1968 um again it's imprecise to describe those kinds of things
02:03:17uh very seldom did the gods speak to us in a you know the god appears before you and
02:03:24clearly says in an audible tone you know do this thing um it's more often through
02:03:30a more subtle inspiration and communication. I'll say with Steve, he was in Africa and
02:03:43there was violent revolution going on at the time, I believe in the Congo. While he was
02:03:52on his trip, governments changed hands. He found himself on the wrong team at the wrong
02:04:00time with the wrong kind of passport and the wrong kind of visas for a country that did not
02:04:05exist so when he found himself on the tarmac with armed african revolutionary militants
02:04:14and they were checking passports of all the foreigners off this plane
02:04:20they were meticulously checking everyone's papers and there were newspaper reports where just
02:04:26recently um americans with the wrong papers and you know other whites with the wrong papers have
02:04:32been taken off and shot they checked the guy in front of them and as steve described to me
02:04:39the guard looked directly through steve as if he were not there and went straight to the guy
02:04:45behind steve and again meticulously checked the guy's papers um to this day steve speaks
02:04:53of that in completely you know honest terms that that was miraculous and that the all-father
02:05:01turned him invisible or you know however that looked towards the african gentleman that was
02:05:09checking papers that day a miraculous thing occurred that allowed him to go on found the
02:05:14else true focus um does odin speak to me i don't want to be this is something strange because
02:05:23we're in a time where it sounds presumptuous to say yes but it also would be
02:05:34cowardly and inappropriate not to say the truth as i know it which is yes
02:05:39um does he speak to me with clear directives no i wish they would do i ask for his you know guidance
02:05:50and his wisdom all of the time i absolutely do um but he does bless me with inspiration
02:05:58some of that comes through um dream some of that comes through um
02:06:04a intense and furious drive or push to do certain things that's inescapable that
02:06:16keeps me up at night that's just frantic and hard to describe
02:06:23um the one time in a physical sense uh was at austra of 2017
02:06:34at um an event we held at a camp in georgia it was a year after i had functionally been in control of
02:06:44the austral folk assembly as australia i was um officially elevated at midsummer but i had been
02:06:54running things and kind of establishing how it was going to look starting the transition
02:06:59at austra of 2016. so i'd been doing this for a year at the time almost a year exactly and the
02:07:09weight of it was on my shoulders you know i had very big shoes to fill and i was trying the best
02:07:14i could to get this right and to do it the best way i knew how and i was you know again i was
02:07:22wondering i was so desperately wanted the approval of the icer i still do and you know just trying
02:07:29as best i could to get it right to try to make the right decisions to try to build in the right way
02:07:36try to not mess it up and i was thinking about all this i was about to stand up for our
02:07:44high sum and as i stood up to bless the horn someone put a hand on my shoulder reassuring
02:07:52you know, grabbing my shoulder and putting the weight on it to, you know, attaboy, like you got
02:08:00this. And it was a really nice gesture at the right time. And it was just kind of a beautiful
02:08:05thing. So before I was going to bless me, I turned around to thank whoever had done that. I assumed
02:08:12it was, it was Alan or it was one of, you know, one of my friends who were there who were helping
02:08:17me in leadership or something and there was no one there was no one anywhere within arm's reach
02:08:23no one could have sat down before i turned around i don't mean it was as if there was a hand on my
02:08:29shoulder no there was a hand upon my shoulder and that was the hand of the icr it was the hand of
02:08:35the all father um but no i don't get regular marching orders from from the all father wish
02:08:42that it did uh but i do get inspiration and i do get um like very intense uh very intense drives to
02:08:55certain things uh it is something that's very often when i go before my altar especially when
02:09:03there's decisions to be made or questions about the right way to go on something i always ask for
02:09:10god see of grant me their wisdom and to uh to help me to make the right calls and do the right things
02:09:16and i do believe i receive inspiration from that um
02:09:27oh so also other because because it was opened up with also your new
02:09:33chris do you want to tell them the story about oscargo the uh spain and his
02:09:40Thor's interaction with him when they went to, I don't know, it wasn't actually parliament, but whatever, the Icelandic government office to get House of True recognized.
02:09:51yeah so um you're wondering he hansen uh spain you're in bain tanzen um daguer thorleifson and
02:10:01thorstein gudgensen all went to the icelandic i think it's like minister of religion or something
02:10:09like that who i can't remember if he was he wasn't a catholic priest no he was not he was a devout
02:10:16lutheran and they were like hey we want you to approve our religion we've got all the paperwork
02:10:25like legally speaking so they could do stuff with taxes and like and he didn't buy it he thought it
02:10:31was a joke at first and when he realized they were serious he got upset at them and then like his
02:10:41wedding band slipped off his finger or something and um sveimjorn points out like he uses something
02:10:51to the tune of like minister your ring has fallen off your finger and the guy picks up his ring
02:10:56you know puts it back on tells these these weirdos to scram and then shortly after they walked out
02:11:04like all power on the island of iceland because it was just one big power grid
02:11:11got taken out by this massive thunderstorm this massive thunderstorm and they turn like the
02:11:21backup generators on or something and i can't remember how exactly it got heard about but
02:11:31But, you know, the minister of religion got a call and he was told, you know, hey, go approve those pagans.
02:11:41And so he signed their paperwork and the Astrofagis was newly recognized.
02:11:49And there was actually a little bit of a constitutional question there because the Icelandic constitution guaranteed freedom of religion for everyone to worship God in singular as they saw fit.
02:12:00and so like like technically polytheism was unconstitutional um they changed the law
02:12:09you know pretty based off this incident they're like yeah we're just gonna change that law so
02:15:38um the place you're talking about matters in terms of the is christianity subversive question
02:15:48like past a certain point if everyone is a sincere believing christian it's hard to
02:15:54look at as look at it as subversive it's just the norm what are they subverting if
02:16:00that's the thing right but again that that's just a request for more clarity on what and
02:16:08when you're talking about you know oh there's a lot of people who are christians today where
02:16:15it's just another religion they don't a lot of the criticisms that we would levy against it
02:16:21might honestly not even apply to them if we're being you know honest in good faith some would
02:16:27But, you know, not everyone who is a Christian, like, believes that destroying, you know, I use the phrase like, you know, active attack on the family and tribe or something earlier today.
02:16:40There's a lot of people who are Christians today who, you know, whether they're right or wrong, would not describe their religion as an active attack on the family and tribe.
02:16:50Again, whether they're right or wrong is less relevant to the fact that they would say that.
02:16:54the fact that they can say it even if they're wrong kind of moves it towards just another
02:17:00religion territory but again you know who are you talking about when what specifically etc etc etc
02:17:10so i mentioned that uh adrian in california donated 600 to phrase off he also had a message
02:17:17with it that for whatever reason i space reading so i'm going to go ahead and read it now and just
02:17:21again give you another thank you uh adrian we appreciate your contribution he said here is good
02:17:27news for our people after a terrible election year the biggest hoff phrase hoff is now closer
02:17:33to being paid off in full i hope to see a hoff built in idaho in the future as my family plan
02:17:38to move there at some point hail the gods i would love to have a hoff in idaho i would love to uh
02:17:45increase our membership in that part of the world it is beautiful and i think there's a lot of great
02:17:50opportunity there i'd love to see that happen and we appreciate your contribution and just a random
02:17:57thing you mentioned he mentioned it as the biggest off and it is the biggest off but it just you know
02:18:03lord fred blessed us with i don't know some version of prosperity and that it definitely
02:18:09wasn't the most expensive off it was a no yeah it was a very good deal on an amazing amazing place
02:18:16anybody you have the opportunity go to phrase off and check it out it's fantastic and wonderful
02:18:24things are happening there it's in austintown ohio that is in far eastern ohio and if you
02:18:33don't have the opportunity i would suggest you create the opportunity when you can it's well worth
02:18:39it um where are we at all right ah matt does the afa own the cemetery across the street from
02:18:54thorshoff called pars grove we do not um originally that was all the same problem
02:19:01that was originally parker's grove methodist church and they owned what is now thorshoff
02:19:07property and the cemetery across the road the first grave that was part of that cemetery is
02:19:15actually on the other side of the road on the side with thor's off the side of thor's off
02:19:22and for whatever reason they decided to build the rest of the graveyard on the other side
02:19:26of the road the very first grave the first grave ever according to their records was
02:19:32man named philip a thing and his stone was broken into five pieces and completely neglected when we
02:19:40got the hoff and at the same time the graveyard across the street is just meticulously maintained
02:19:47so i don't know why they forgot about philip and did not take care of his grave but when we got
02:19:55possession of the property that became a very top priority for us
02:20:00uh we've made it nice we put a decorative little fence around it and we've got him a new headstone
02:20:07that's nice and pretty we've collected the pieces we could find of the original headstone and
02:20:12preserved those but we also have them a nice new headstone with information you were able to gather
02:20:17on in there but yeah when they sold the property they ended up splitting it and maintained ownership
02:32:56doubling down on your worth in traditional american white male value is going to be
02:33:07appealing to that lady in a way that's more so than the you know i don't know0.99
02:33:15goth chick at the crystal store or whatever um
02:33:23has anyone ever thought about door-to-door knocking like the jehovah's witnesses
02:33:27direct ways of reaching out to folks uh yes absolutely people have thought about that
02:33:34um are you volunteering to do that if you are we'll get you set up we'll get you a script
02:33:42and i don't say that facetiously matter of fact i was talking about that
02:33:48literally yesterday with someone that would be very effective it works it is very effective
02:33:57both door-to-door ministry but also posting up in town square with a magazine stand with
02:34:05literature and asking people you know everybody who comes by you know hey we have time to talk
02:34:12about the good news about odin or whatever people are very uncomfortable doing that
02:34:20i think our people more so than others tend to be uncomfortable doing that
02:34:26the other thing that we often lack is a place to do that that's going to be effective
02:34:36what you want to do if you do that is say okay cool so you might you're interested come on out
02:34:44on sunday and go to our kingdom hall but we don't have that place so in a perfect world if i can get
02:34:52people and i wouldn't have them go to order but if i could get people to go be at public spaces
02:34:58and events and talk to people about house i would want it to be in counties where we have a hof
02:35:05and directed towards that so this isn't quite that but we are in process of producing um
02:35:15just some little you know three-fold brochures to hand out to people
02:35:21in counties where we have hoffs to try to get them um you know an idea hey this is what this
02:35:30is this is what it's about come check it out and i think we're also trying to get a generic
02:35:36just afa in general one but also specific ones geared towards each of the hops
02:35:40took a little bit of a setback with our payment processor but once we get back evened out from
02:35:47that that's something that we are going to try to do to one degree or another i would like to be able
02:35:53to mobilize members that would like to do something like that so that they're able to
02:35:59i do think it's going to be so you use the joe's witness as an example and i don't know what the
02:36:05the breakdown is of percentages but serious jehovah's witnesses every one of them is expected
02:36:11to turn in a report about the door-to-door ministry now a lot of them have jobs and can't
02:36:20do that or whatever but the ones that don't there's an expectation that everybody does a certain
02:36:27degree of that i don't think that our people are primed to do that but i think if we had a small
02:36:34number of people who were very committed to doing that it could only help and i'm certainly not
02:36:38opposed to the idea i think the going door to door is obnoxious and i don't want us to be an
02:36:45irritant but i think standing in public spaces and telling people about our faith and who we are
02:36:53i think that is a very effective tool i just think that most of our people currently are
02:36:58uncomfortable doing that do you have any thoughts on that chris no nothing i don't really have
02:37:05anything to add honestly and to address the chat room we can we can save the goth girls too no we
02:37:14absolutely can it's just a different tactic and different things would appeal to different kinds
02:37:18of people i think that the goth the goth lady and the mennonite lady probably have a different initial
02:37:25start point all right next up i'm curious as to whether or not indiana has any former
02:37:41hiles anderson people join them or show interest i have no idea what that is
02:37:47and i didn't see it before so i haven't looked into it nick has a note here
02:37:50um yeah it's some kind of uh like uh theological like a baptist school for women i would have to
02:38:04okay so i would have to query our indiana people um gothi john rock is in indiana and folk builder
02:38:12aiden mcmillan is there so i would have to ask them and get back to you but nick if you would
02:38:18make a note and let's ask them because i'm now curious so hopefully we'll find an answer for
02:38:23you and maybe we'll mention it on the next show um with that that is the questions that we have this
02:38:32evening thanks uh so yeah thank you chris for coming and sharing your your knowledge with us
02:38:42and teaching folks about our history in a way that is so engaging your episodes are
02:38:53i think we recently your episodes are the one that we get i'd say the most positive feedback
02:38:59on uh you're kind of a celebrity coming on here people appreciate your wit your funny voices and
02:39:07the depth that you bring to such a wide breadth of subjects so we really appreciate it i thank
02:39:14you for taking the time thank you thank you all right well nick thanks for all that you do
02:39:22and everybody oh we have one last one one's coming in uh one more question got in just0.84
02:39:32under the buzzer all right are white muslims too far gone for them to come to austria0.89
02:39:45well no chris do you have any thoughts on this before i expand no i mean0.99
02:39:55in as much as it's just another religion you know it's not like it1.00
02:40:06deforms your dna or your soul or something yeah i think that white muslims are a better option1.00
02:40:16to come back to us i think being a white muslim is just as odd and odious in western countries0.99
02:40:25as being also true is so i think you're already over the fear of being different gap0.95
02:40:31and i think because it is not a spiritual truth that resonate that resonates i think often it is a
02:40:38rejection of christianity but knowing that sincere piety is really important well what group of
02:40:45people are really pious but aren't christians and again depending of where you are and what
02:40:51your influences are that might be your option but you know i think that that is i think it is a0.61
02:41:00easier jump for a white muslim to come to house true than it is for a white christian in a way
02:41:06because the muslims in western countries don't have that built-in social acceptance they don't1.00
02:41:14have all of the comfort that society provides for remaining christian they've already breached that0.99
02:41:22they've already transgressed on that so realizing that islam is also not for you and coming back0.93
02:41:29home to house true is uh i think that's would be an easier transition so um you know house of pain0.93
02:41:38like everlast should come back home to australia uh you know there's there's variety of white muslims0.65
02:41:44out there in the united states and in europe that should you know come home to australia you've0.99
02:41:50already you know you've you've already crossed the the rubicon so to speak you got you took a detour
02:41:59in the wrong direction but you've already you've already broke with christianity you should open
02:42:05your mind to come home now and i also think there is a distinction even amongst the white muslims
02:42:11of those that personally converted from christianity to muslim to islam versus the
02:42:18ones that were born and raised for generations as muslim like in bosnia herzgavena and the like0.96
02:42:24um i mean for both cases no there's no reason they can't come home but that's the only thing0.94
02:42:33i can think of is for somebody to think they're too far gone i mean if they've done it for
02:42:36generations it's no different than if they were a christian if they were a recent convert yeah
02:42:41they're probably a little their judgment's probably not too great but come home anyway
02:42:46so this is a phenomenon though that people have and again most of my commentary was not talking about
02:42:56serbs and bosnians and croatians and people in that part of europe where there is
02:43:03that kind of generational thing it was towards englishmen and irishmen and americans um
02:43:15you find a thing where you realize that the christianity that culturally surrounds you
02:43:21is not appropriate for your soul and it's not right oh and i forgot to answer one of
02:43:29the questions earlier because it was a two-part question so i'll hit that too this speaks to that
02:43:35so you know it's not right and you want to break away from that and you don't know what to do
02:43:41and sometimes people go on a roundabout journey sometimes they realize christianity is not the
02:43:47right way to go so they become buddhist or they become hindu and then they that doesn't work and
02:43:55maybe they you know if if they're racially aware maybe they try hinduism and try to ah but it goes
02:44:03back to ancient arianism so whatever and they try that maybe they're not racially aware and so they
02:44:10try you know native american religion or they try whatever they feel as a an air of authenticity to
02:44:18it and it doesn't work so they try the next thing you know we have a lot of people announced a true
02:44:24especially people say in their 30s and 40s and 50s that tried to do the native american thing
02:44:31but realized they're white and then came home to like okay well what what did my people have
02:44:36before christianity and then they came to austria there's people that were wiccans or were like
02:44:44thelamites or you know satanists or um you know any number of things that they tried and it wasn't
02:44:53the right things they kept trying until they found people come to us true from a lot of different
02:44:58places but i think breaking that initial surface tension of being christian is the biggest step
02:45:06and once you're outside of that at least in the west i think that is a much easier path home to
02:45:13house so that's my thoughts on that the other thing that i forgot to ask was what or to answer
02:45:19is what is soul sickness is an individual or is it communal.
02:45:27Soul sickness is, I think, fundamentally the best way I could say it.
02:45:33It is a disharmony between different pieces of yourself.
02:45:40It is a separation between the individual and their native gods, or the community and their native gods.
02:45:56I think it is communal as our folk, but it is also individual as us as people.
02:46:03And it is where different parts of our lives don't harmonize with one another.
02:46:08specifically to where we are built for a proper religious relationship with our gods.
02:46:17And, you know, hundreds of years ago, our ancestors forsook our gods
02:46:23and chose to follow this desert god in this desert faith.0.98
02:46:31That is a disharmony that has created a generational sickness in our soul.
02:46:38So the more we make our life authentic and make the pieces of it match, and the more we connect those pieces to faith in our gods, that's what heals that soul sickness.
02:46:53But the separation of the soul of our folk and the soul of us as individuals from our gods is the soul sickness that our founders speak now and talk about.
02:47:05and so that's what we mean we say that it is communal and it is individual
02:47:09with that i bid you adieu for the evening if you can make it to jackson county to sigerhane
02:47:18this weekend to celebrate i'm here you brought with us please do
02:47:23um just a couple of days we would love to see you friday saturday and sunday if you can't or even if
02:47:32you can go to any of our five Hoffs the very next weekend to celebrate Einherjablot at our
02:47:43Hoffs. So we are doing it this weekend at Sigurheim in Jackson County and the following weekend at
02:47:50each of our five Hoffs. Come on out, honor the heroes, celebrate the heroes, gather with your