00:03:00.000Hello and welcome to this week's very special edition of Victory Never Sleeps.
00:03:13.000Those of you watching may notice that folk builder Chris Savage of Michigan returns tonight to give us another thorough discussion on the conversion process in Anglo-Saxon England.
00:03:42.180and the brave men that stood against it in various different ways.
00:03:49.240Anyone who saw Chris's episode on the goths will have high expectations for this program.
00:03:58.160And I have every reason to believe that you will not be disappointed.
00:04:01.820So get something to drink, tell your friends, spread the word.
00:04:07.800Because I think we're in for a treat this evening.
00:04:12.180top of the show stuff. So far, we have a very exciting and enthusiastic number of people
00:04:23.720looking to come out and celebrate the dedication of Frase Hoff. That's coming up on the 6th
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00:04:43.760to see you again and catch up anybody who is interested the mcnellens are planning on attending
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00:04:54.880it's going to be an awesome event it's literally a once once in a lifetime once ever
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00:05:09.040something that you know people put a lot of put a lot of hard work into a lot of devotion into
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00:05:18.440love to see you there if you're interested please talk to your local folk builder or any of our
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00:05:45.600paid off, uh, comes out to $115 per member. If, if that were donated today, we would pay this
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00:05:59.720generous and I'm very thankful for it. And, uh, just want to let you guys know how that effort
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00:06:11.680runestone.org slash donate and we we appreciate anything that you guys are able to contribute so
00:06:19.680thank you for that um also top of the show news just out we have our 2026 afa calendar
00:06:30.400you can get your calendar at the runestone store at runestone.org slash store
00:06:37.760um get yours today they make wonderful yule presents get yours quick they make wonderful
00:06:44.880thanksgiving presents um but yeah a number of our volunteers put in put in a lot of work making
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00:08:13.860We have a number of folks that do that pretty regularly.
00:08:17.880Your question, the next program that we have.
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00:08:51.140yeah with that uh hey first Chris how you doing tonight I am doing very well sir I'm doing very
00:09:02.440well um all things are going well lovely little daughter is doing well she is drifting off to
00:09:08.180sleep I can hear the silence out outside my office so that's good excellent
00:09:14.700all right so it's kind of your show tonight and i will in uh interject as necessary or
00:09:27.500i don't know as as a as i feel so inclined but uh take it away start wherever you would like
00:09:34.940um what kind of background tell folks where you're starting and what they need to know
00:09:41.980so to begin with the we're talking about we're we're talking about four heroes from anglo-saxon
00:09:50.620england the anglo-saxons anglo-saxon is an old term or a rather a term we use for the the english
00:10:00.220people when they were still a very young people we're talking about england which is britain
00:10:06.540sans ireland right and sans wales at this time so i just kind of wanted to start off with a
00:10:16.060brief history of britain as a place to kind of set the stage for the anglo-saxons because as you can
00:10:25.500tell from the name anglo-saxon them being in the british isles is a bit of a historical phenomena
00:10:33.580so around starting at the beginning around uh 9999 bc the british isles are inhabited by early
00:10:43.820hominids and neolithic hunter-gatherer peoples start entering when the glaciers retreat neolithic
00:10:51.100hunter-gatherers are one of the three early populations that go on to become modern white
00:10:56.620people um around 7 000 ish cheddar man lives in the british isles so at this time britain
00:11:08.220is the northwest peninsula of europe it is connected to mainland france by just solid land
00:11:15.680and there's this big stretch of chalk that connects the the what we now refer to as the
00:11:25.340British Isles to mainland Europe and glaciation, rising sea levels, a lot of complicated stuff over
00:11:33.440literal thousands of years lead to this stretch of land that connects Britain to France getting
00:11:41.180eroded away. The land that gets eroded away is referred to as Doggerland. Nick can throw up a
00:11:47.560map of that if he wants. It's not super important because by the time we care, it's all gone
00:11:53.040anyways. But Doggerland finishes sinking, or sorry, around 4,000 BC, early European farmer
00:12:00.080peoples enter Britain. These are people who come out of Anatolia. They're the second wave of
00:12:05.140population that goes on to become modern white people. So around 3,800 BC, Doggerland finishes0.96
00:12:12.660sinking. Around 3,300 BC, there's a hunter-gatherer resurgence. For a period of time, the early
00:12:21.200european farmer peoples gain predominance over the hunter-gatherer peoples of europe
00:12:25.040when we say hunter-gatherer they're not literally just surviving off of hunting deer
00:12:28.880what that means is that they don't they don't farm grain they do practice plant cultivation
00:12:34.660of various other kinds but in 3000 ish bc the hunter-gatherers experienced some kind of
00:12:42.160resurgence and gain predominance over the earlier the farmers it's not entirely clear why we don't
00:12:49.420really need to care. We're moving on. Around 2,400 or so BC, the Bell Beaker peoples, who have
00:12:58.400some degree of early European farmer and Neolithic hunter-gatherer DNA already, enter Britain.
00:13:04.900These are Indo-European speaking peoples. They speak a language that is distantly related to
00:13:10.720modern English. This is when the Bronze Age begins. Again, there's technical specifics that
00:13:16.160don't need to get into here so around 800 ish bc again give or take the celts start entering so
00:13:25.360there's this 2 000 year stretch between the first indo-european peoples and the continental celts
00:13:33.280as we understand them moving in right um the bell beakers and the celts the bronze age and iron age
00:13:41.760inter-european peoples both arrived via boat whereas the nila the country gatherer and
00:13:46.800european farmer peoples walk into britain right so in the bronze age britain was really important
00:13:55.280because it exported tin geologically tin and copper do not show up in the same places however
00:14:04.160if you combine tin and you combine copper you get bronze which is superior to both
00:14:09.440for a lot of things including weapons and this resulted in large-scale trade networks throughout
00:14:16.960europe to europe throughout europe and the mediterranean to move around people and tin
00:14:22.800and copper to these urban centers that were centered around warlords basically enslaving
00:14:30.240people to farm grain and the bronze age collapse results in these trade networks collapsing and
00:14:38.640every little warlord sitting on his hill thinks what am i going to do to get metal so they turn
00:14:44.800to iron iron is really common it's ubiquitous but at this this time we're talking about like 2000
00:14:53.920bc it's it's inferior to bronze overall and as the bronze age collapse goes on people start
00:15:03.680figuring out how to work iron how to literally work iron like the problem is that with tin and
00:15:10.640copper you mix them together you make bronze and you melt it and cast it and then you do some heat
00:15:16.000treating and if you're making a sword you like grind out a blade right but with iron it's it
00:15:21.840makes cast iron if you just let the liquid iron out of the furnace so it has to be subjected to
00:15:29.980reductive processes which require at the time borderline magic involving um calciferous
00:15:36.480minerals and the like but then you have to hit it with a hammer a lot and you have to like fold it
00:15:42.440it's kind of like working a pastry but at high temperatures on an anvil with a hammer and so
00:15:47.580figuring out how to make iron workable leads to it's leads to uh the iron age happening
00:15:58.240so from 800 bc to around 550 bc britain is run by the celts people who are related to the modern
00:16:11.000irish the modern welsh the modern uh kind of the modern cornish um brittany the northwest
00:16:18.960peninsula off of france is also um a place where celts live so the celtic world is this pretty
00:16:28.800complicated network of republican city-states with like written constitutions and not anything
00:16:37.600like we would approximate it but like democratic processes and kings and there's this complex
00:16:45.440priest caste of druids and it's a really complex network of individual nodes and
00:16:55.320the Celts were in long-term combat with their cousins the Italics to the south
00:17:02.040this is Romans perennial wars with the Gauls and eventually the Romans start to
00:17:08.100gain predominance, leading to the early imperial claimant, I guess you could call him, Julius Caesar
00:17:20.920in 55 BC, leading his first invasion of Britain. So Caesar's big gimmick was if he led an illegal
00:17:31.340bandit raid into Gaul of such size that he stole all of the gold in France, he could basically pay
00:17:38.160off his enemies in Rome to forgive him for breaking the law repeatedly. I'm really glossing
00:17:45.320this over because we don't care about Roman history for this, up to where it becomes relevant.
00:17:51.760So in 55 BC, Caesar leads his first invasion, and 54 BC, Caesar leads his second invasion.
00:17:58.820By 54 AD, everything up to the Roman city of Lindum, Lincoln in Lincolnshire today, is within the Roman sphere.
00:18:11.140So the Roman little e empire was a complex civilizational network of client-patron relations going back to the city of Rome.
00:18:24.920we have a tendency today to backport modern ideas of statehood onto the roman empire
00:18:31.960so it was more like how regarding how romans rome's client states worked it was more like how
00:18:40.140the united states federal government's international empire works germany is not a
00:18:47.100a de facto a de jure um like territorial unit within the united states federal government
00:18:56.620german lawmakers do not have to get the u.s president say so before they write a law they
00:19:03.020don't have to take it to the u.s senate but germany is still full of american military bases
00:19:08.940it's still deeply economically connected to the american economy and it's still deeply influenced
00:19:15.780by american media so it's a client to a patron but it's not outright like part of a state it
00:19:24.020doesn't take orders so when the romans move through the celtic world i will make i will
00:19:32.500distinguish uh gall i'll talk about that name a little bit later why it's a gall but the romans
00:19:38.580would call it gallia which actually has no relationship to gall but whatever um how it
00:19:44.340What would work is Caesar would enter in and he would basically say, A-O, bada-bing, bada-boom, who wants it to be my best friend?
00:19:53.440And whoever turned traitor and worked with him first got the preferential treatment when Rome inevitably conquered the area.
00:20:02.840So it's not a conquest in the sense of like walking in and killing everyone and then absorbing them and putting them into a province as much as it is a very complicated international diplomatic exercise.
00:20:18.040And so when we say that Rome owns everything up to Lindum, what we really mean is that the various Celtic city-states living in Britain, and in Gaul for that matter, have entered into the Roman economic, cultural, religious, military, etc., etc., etc., patronage network.
00:20:42.360So it's kind of like the situation that Canada and Mexico are in with the U.S.,
00:20:48.440where there's an incredible flow of goods and labor and everything across a nominal border.
00:20:57.020So Rome is the dominant power in Britain circa 54 AD.
00:21:06.020Boudicca is the queen of a Celtic tribe, and her people are on the losing side of one of those A-O, bada-bing, bada-boom, who wants it to be my best-a-friend kind of relationships, and faced with what happens when you get absorbed by a civilization on bad terms, which is slavery.
00:21:29.360her and her people lead a desperate last ditch suicide by cop at a military scale fight against
00:21:38.840Rome and lose very very badly but they do not suffer the indignity of becoming slaves
00:21:44.140and it's worth noting here that slavery in the Roman Empire meant a lot of things
00:21:49.200a lot of slaves did not lead very sucky lives there were a number large number of slaves who
00:21:56.120led incredibly terrible lives they would be worked to death and that would come very quickly like
00:22:02.880within weeks if not months of being sent to where you were going to be working as a slave um at this
00:22:09.320time also uh one of the worst things that could happen to you short of getting chucked into the
00:22:14.000coliseum to get torn apart by lions for the the cheering of the crowd was being sent to a gold
00:22:20.860a gold factory or a gold mine or worse a quick silver mine because you would be working with
00:22:28.920mercury and you would go crazy and die a very painful death due to mercury poisoning so when
00:22:37.240we see buddhika like rebelling against roman rule when we see celtic powers rebelling against roman0.98
00:22:42.520rule they're not doing this because they're dumb or because they're savages it's because they0.96
00:22:48.380understand very well that if they don't play their cards right they suffer a very bad fate1.00
00:22:54.220because the roman little e empire chews up and spits people out at this time so0.91
00:23:01.820in 6980 we have the year of the four emperors when there are four emperors do you want to say
00:23:09.180something sir i did and i forgot that i had muted myself i apologize because this is more disruptive
00:23:14.140than i meant it to be um just because of the nature of your cadence i wanted to recognize gw
00:23:20.460farnsworth for again he is he's the first one to donate every single week we appreciate him
00:23:26.540uh donating 20 to the program and 30 towards phrasehoff thank you uh also gilbert gilbert
00:23:34.940another amazing donor we appreciate you gilbert uh 150 towards baldershoff steeple thank you sir
00:23:42.620with that uh and angela donated 50 towards praise off and 25 towards baldersoft's people so thank
00:23:50.220you guys both of you very much uh continue all right so in 69 a.d there is the year of the four
00:24:01.580emperors so as i said there are four emperors in this year specifically there are four men competing
00:24:08.060and it's very gone before i do something about roman um
00:24:15.980roman interaction with quote unquote barbarian tribes
00:24:23.020i was watching it i was watching a different podcast that made this similarity i think it's
00:24:27.420true in a lot of ways uh that white folks dealt with with engines when they got to the new world
00:24:34.860i think when you want to think about britains or germans or gauls you think of them somehow
00:24:42.380as nations you think of them as germany france and england and it's very much not the case it's
00:24:49.420lots of inter-tribal politics of non-united tribes that their point of commonality may be cultural
00:24:56.860and linguistic but not governmental so it one of the things when these rebellions and things would
00:25:04.540happen is raising their stock to be able to negotiate and deal with rome because rome would
00:25:09.740choose their favorites to play one against the other and you had different um opportunities
00:25:16.220and regional power based on those kind of arrangements so that's why you see a lot of
00:25:20.380these things coming out with like all britons weren't iceni but the iceni had a prominent
00:25:27.260position amongst the britons and you see that throughout roman politics dealing with tribal
00:25:33.260groups yeah so that's a really good point because when we talked about the goths right
00:25:44.140we um i pointed out that this word tribe isn't really accurate um it comes from the latin tribus
00:25:54.160which literally means third so when rome was founded there were the latins the sabines and the
00:26:01.500uh uh the etruscans right and so these were three separate ethnic groups like
00:26:09.700polities in a certain sense like these are my people those are those people we live in the
00:26:16.300same town but we're not the same group and so they had the same government that ruled over them
00:26:22.760but they had this local polity of the tribus the third which was a sort of ethnic patronage network
00:26:32.020collective bargaining mechanism legal representative it was like if all like if
00:26:39.220white people got a senator in the u.s senate and then so did black people and so did mexicans or
00:26:44.720something like that right and this institution was supposed to take care of you because the
00:26:50.160government wasn't going to right so much later today we sort of apply this term tribe onto
00:26:58.720any sort of ethnic political group or polity without real concern for what it means to the
00:27:08.720people living there. So like, as I said, these Celtic tribes are urbanized city-states very
00:27:16.120often that have like written constitutions and democratic elections or something approximating
00:27:22.260it, right? These are not ooga-booga barbarians rolling around in the mud until men in togas come0.68
00:27:28.440along and civilize them in a lot of ways the celts saw the romans as this upstart barbarian0.86
00:27:35.400land to the south across the alps where they practiced like mass agricultural slavery
00:27:40.040so could you bring up the map i i put in the thing nick so if you want to compare
00:27:46.080a more medieval time period to this you could look at like the holy roman empire
00:27:51.580oh bear with me sorry that would not be late yeah i know you could compare it to like the
00:28:02.100holy roman empire where yes they're all germans they all speak the same language they all have
00:28:09.260the same religion or religious principles with their own local flavor and the like
00:28:13.120but this is not one unified state it is a massive amount of competing polities all of which are
00:28:23.040de facto sovereign and in competition with each other so like when caesar shows up he basically
00:28:29.780asks this mess that this is in germany not france but imagine if it's in france he basically asks
00:28:34.660this mess who wants to join with me and screw over your competition because when he gets done
00:28:41.540in gallia in gaul and gallia he doesn't like make them dependent upon the romans for like taxation
00:28:50.520or whatever rather they are ostensibly allies that are willingly contributing to roman to rome
00:28:58.360through like defensive pacts and the like as we refer to it now they're helping contribute to like
00:29:03.700the un effectively now of course we all know that's not how it works in reality past a certain
00:29:09.860point, but you get the idea here. This isn't a conquest as much as it is an integration into
00:29:18.660a civilizational sphere. So in 69 AD, there's the year of the four emperors in which Galba,
00:29:25.640Alpho, Vitellius, and Vespasian all duke it out for who gets to be in charge. And the Celts in0.70
00:29:31.620britain rebel so they could do that precisely because they are theoretically independent states
00:29:40.060that are rebelling against a civilizational complex that isn't working for them anymore
00:29:46.260so they don't have to be part of it the romans had been recruiting heavily from local celts
00:29:52.860for the legions in the province of gallia and in britain and so the entire legions just rebel they
00:30:00.760Just say, you know what, we're independent anymore.
00:30:04.460And archaeologically, there's actually a sort of, like, you can see, like, strata where Gaul and Britain, like, re-Celtify when they go rogue.
00:35:40.140Like Britain at this time is the distant end of the Roman Empire.0.84
00:35:45.680So Tertullian bragging about there's Christians in Britain is is a big deal because it's it's really far away from everything.0.78
00:35:54.240So it's around the time that Constantine that Constantine takes power that things also start going downhill.0.66
00:36:01.600I wonder why that could be. But in 383, the emperor, sorry, in the general Magnus Maximus rebels and he kills the emperor Gretchen.
00:36:14.880So the Roman military and non-Christian bureaucrats leave with Magnus Maximus as he rules in Gaul, Gallia, as per de excedo et conquesta Britanniae by Gildas in 540 AD.
00:36:28.940so gildas tells us that saxon raids had been ongoing by this point by 380 380 so
00:36:39.080could you bring up the first map i sent you nick so let's pause and shift to germany all right
00:36:48.320so wouldn't one uh yeah the utland one so denmark and northern germany at this time
00:36:59.240are inhabited by three tribes again what does that mean we're going to ignore what that means
00:37:07.140for now in the north half of what is now denmark you have jutland or jutland inhabited by the
00:37:15.320or the Judas then you have Anglia in the south half and then this map kind of cuts it off but
00:37:22.780in the the southernmost portions of Denmark and today Saxony is wherever you feel like being in
00:37:32.500Germany at any given time but in the ancient world Saxony was northwest-ish Germany so
00:37:40.000So the Utes, the Angles, and the Saxons start being hired to do mercenary work in Britain and Gallia. Mercenary work means I will pay you guys to go beat up my enemies, but it also means them just joining the military.0.65
00:37:57.760So the Saxons engage in raids on Britain and Gallia, and it's worth noting here, we hear a lot about barbarian raids upon the Roman Empire, but it's also worth remembering that the Romans were engaged in constant raiding into the barbarian lands.
00:38:17.120It was just constant, small-scale, low-grade warfare at the border.
00:38:23.120Large-scale incursions are not the norm, but constant violence at the border is.0.51
00:38:31.060So when these guys are moving westward and raiding shores and such, the Romans are also trying to make incursions into the forests of Germany.
00:38:41.520The borders of Germania Magna, the Romans did this thing where they would have, you know, Provincia Magna and Provincia Minima or Inferior, where province greater, greater province, province Magna means the part of that place we haven't conquered yet.
00:39:04.240And then province minor or province inferior means the part of that place we have conquered.
00:39:10.360So like Germania inferior is the part of Germania that the Romans had conquered.
00:39:16.860So Britain was always dependent upon imports.
00:39:22.280Roman Britain was always dependent upon imports.0.80
00:39:24.840The Celtic world in Britain was self-sustaining, but the Roman world wasn't.
00:39:28.420so when things start getting rough in continental europe in the roman empire there's this movement
00:39:36.340of people away from britain it gets so bad at one point that they can't make statues anymore
00:39:43.740because there are no more sculptors nor is there anyone to import marble which seems sounds kind
00:39:50.580of silly but statues were a pretty core luxury good to roman civilization so like there's no
00:39:55.980one to make statues anymore i i mean that'd be like in america like there's no one to detail0.53
00:40:01.540your hot rod yes it's a little silly but it's also a marker of like yeah but this is like a luxury
00:40:07.220thing right so the province of britain of britannia experiences a exporting of people
00:40:21.040a large-scale movement of people away from britain people don't want to farm in britain
00:40:27.280anymore and guess who starts moving in can you bring up the second map nick the the migration
00:40:33.400one so it's not entirely clear why historians agree that there was a complex confluence of
00:40:40.800factors but the angles the saxons the utes and the frisians start moving into britain the frisians
00:40:47.920are the people who are i don't know why i'm pointing the people who are in the pink area
00:40:53.380below the word saxon they are the modern uh they're the descendants of modern dutchmen the
00:40:59.800netherlands so the angles the saxons the utes and the frisians start moving into britain and
00:41:06.860settling and archaeologically there's this great downturn of roman stuff there's this loss of
00:41:14.760stratum and then there's this rise of germanic culture in the archaeology and the germanic
00:41:22.660peoples are moving in and occupying empty space because the romans had left so like roman farmers
00:41:29.860literally just packed their stuff up and got on a boat and sailed away and the fields go fallow0.76
00:41:36.740the the nature takes over but not like completely and the germanic peoples just kind of show up
00:41:43.260so they're settling the land not to the degree that the americas were where they're like
00:41:50.300clear-cutting forests to make farms people had like 50 acre farm like a 50 acre farm was small
00:41:56.800by the settlement of the americas kind of standards right but these germanic tribes are
00:42:02.620moving into these tribesmen not tribes that's an important thing to keep in mind are moving
00:42:08.440into these areas that are unoccupied in britain and it's not really quite correct to talk about
00:42:16.320it as a conquest or an invasion per se past a certain point because there's not really much
00:42:21.860to invade so in 402 ad the last roman coins are found in britain that's the last time like the
00:42:32.060last coin stamped with year that is found in britain supposedly in this year still a show
00:42:39.380the half vandal warlord in charge of rome at the time pulled last roman troops out of britain
00:42:47.460in 410 um the monk and historian bada or bead as he's called uh who lived around who was writing
00:42:56.980this text that says this around 730 80 he says that roman rule ends it's important in british
00:43:03.140historiography to figure out when does roman rule end and roman and anglo-saxon rule begin
00:43:10.600so could you bring up the the third map the one with all the states in britain nick um this here
00:43:18.740is a map of the so-called heptarchy we're going to come back to this a few times when talking
00:43:23.480about where things are but this is the established result of the anglo-saxons moving in and taking
00:43:31.480over and literally building the place back up because there just wasn't a lot of people there
00:43:38.000genetically there's not a huge there's some right don't get me wrong but there's not a huge genetic
00:43:45.720footprint left from italics and the like living in britain there is a great drain of romans and
00:43:52.640an influx of anglo-saxon utish frisians we just call them the ang the uts and the frisians were
00:43:59.940the smallest of the four hence why they're anglo-saxons the angles and the saxons were
00:44:03.940where most of these people came from right so by 430 ad anglo-saxon material culture is omnipresent
00:44:11.460and ubiquitous in archaeology celts and romans that are left behind in this area adopt anglo-saxon
00:44:20.020language, norms, customs, religion, culture, law, because this is what you had to do to get ahead.
00:44:28.980So semi-mythologically, there's the tale of Hengist and Horsa, who are these two great kings
00:44:35.620that come over either in 447 or 449, depending on whether you believe history of the Britons or the
00:44:43.160anglo-saxon chronicle uh both were made in the 800s both of them agree that a uh celtic king
00:44:50.960by the name of vortigern invites the anglo-saxons over to britain to basically press his claim and
00:44:58.240it spirals out of control from there how true that tale is is uncertain but it's not it's not
00:45:07.320really the the point isn't how true it is the point is that historians were looking back and
00:45:14.800can see a clear point 400 years prior where roman rule ends anglo-saxon rule begins
00:45:22.180now it's important to remember that there are some leftover institutions from the romans
00:45:30.320There's cities like Londonium, London. There's like Lindum, Lincoln and Lincolnshire. And of course, there's the Catholic Church.
00:45:43.680So when the Vandals invaded Carthage, the Vandal kings showed up and they were Arian Christians.
00:45:50.920um arian has no relationship to arian arian comes from the name of the bishop uh our no he
00:45:58.100wasn't a bishop um the theologian arias his name comes from a greek word arios which means he who
00:46:05.220is of aries has no relationship to arian so the vandal arian kings show up and they boot out the
00:46:15.160trinitarian bishop bishop singular of carthage because he was like the guy in carthage and he
00:46:22.880had like you know a small handful of people attending him because he was institutionalized
00:46:28.180organized trinitarian christianity at the time so when constantine takes power and organizes
00:46:35.800the catholic church what he does is he organizes the catholic church into diocese diocese are
00:46:40.960actually not originally a christian thing they are a greek unit of territorial governance so
00:46:47.160the the roman emperor empire was broken up into like secular diocese as they're called
00:46:52.880which are basically another word for province state whatever you want to call it unit of
00:46:58.280governance and he puts bishops in charge of these diocese and the bishops theoretically report to
00:47:04.280the emperor or their their clerical superior orders it's it's very complicated it's not
00:47:09.040really relevant. Notice how when I said that Stilicho pulls out the non-Christian bureaucrats,
00:47:16.080I said non-Christian. The Christian clerical establishment from Rome states, because by0.98
00:47:22.380the time the Anglo-Saxons show up, the Celts have, it's not quite correct to say that they've
00:47:29.740wholesale adopted Christianity, but Christianity is a thing in Britain, and there is a, you know,
00:47:35.900christian bureaucracy in britain when the anglo-saxons show up that stayed behind when all
00:47:42.460the other roman bureaucrats left a rough way to think of it at this of this is like all of the
00:47:48.780u.s government functionaries left but the dmv they stayed behind right so like going back to
00:47:56.940the alaska metaphor just because it's really far away from continental us like britain was
00:48:01.020all of the u.s federal government employees leave but the dmv sticks around right and then the
00:48:08.120anglo-saxons move in and the christian church is still there in this very atrophied form right
00:48:14.620so now we start getting into nearing talking about the anglo-saxons i know 48 minutes in and
00:48:22.400now we're actually talking about the anglo-saxons but it's it you have to do the prefacing because
00:48:27.620it's like why are the people from anglia and saxony in britain why why is there rome in britain
00:48:34.420what what's going where does wales fit into this so the anglo-saxons push into britain
00:48:41.340and they take everything except for wales and ireland the irish christian church had a period
00:48:50.360of localization and local syncretism not super relevant but the irish don't do what the pope
00:48:58.520says just because he said it so we'll get into papal supremacy just as a kind of showing you
00:49:07.640relative things here but at this time the pope is first among equals among bishops
00:49:12.660technically um the donation of constantine is on the timeline here so in the 400s some bishop
00:49:25.280or other sends a letter to the pope begging for help because the anglo-saxons are also true and
00:49:31.420the celts and romans who stayed behind are starting to worship thor because they are
00:49:38.080adopting anglo-saxon norms and customs so the pope doesn't listen and about a century goes by
00:49:46.640of the pope not listening so in 569 pope gregory the great establishes the gregorian mission
00:49:55.760and this is basically him going to the the uh monk augustinius who had is named after
00:50:04.340He's kind of named after Augustine Aurelius, the early Christian Berber theologian, but Augustinius is also just a name, just a normal name in Latin, right?
00:50:16.440And he says to this guy, he wants this guy to lead a mission to deconstruct Asatru and convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.
00:50:27.520so in this doesn't really get underway until 580-ish when the anglo-saxon king
00:50:36.140athelbert of kent marries bertha of um paris so it's worth getting into the gaul gallia thing
00:50:47.620here just for funsies because it's it's interesting so gallia is what the romans
00:50:53.960called for what is today France. Gaul is what the Germanics called it. Gaul actually enters English
00:51:01.260from French. Gaul is cognate with Wales. So the Germanic peoples had this term, the Proto-Germanic
00:51:09.020peoples had this term, Walhas, which is actually derived from a Celtic tribal name, meaning like
00:51:16.320either the people of the eagle or the people of the wolf. It's not entirely clear and it doesn't
00:51:20.740really matter. And the Germanic peoples just use this term Walhas to refer to everyone to the
00:51:28.000southwest. Romans, Celts, everyone to the southwest. This is really common. Asia is a peninsula in
00:51:37.340Anatolia. Today we use it to refer to everywhere east of wherever Europe ends. It's kind of like
00:51:46.120how in america we use mexico to refer to everything south of texas like bolivia and brazil
00:51:54.420and argentina and places that are actually not mexico right so this term walhas is what the
00:52:03.820proto-german just the germanic peoples not proto-germanic but the germanic peoples used
00:52:07.820to refer to celts and romans it does not mean foreigner it does not refer to fins it doesn't
00:52:13.940refer to balts doesn't refer to slavs it refers to people in this civilizational horizon to the
00:52:19.740southwest it doesn't refer to greeks for example um and the germanic world was in contact with the
00:52:25.920greeks um if you want to know more read lady with a mead cup um long story short the germanic
00:52:32.700peoples exported iron and imported um drinkingware including wine so
00:52:39.800So, Gaul actually enters English from French, as I said.
00:52:45.260French undergoes this W to G transition.
00:52:50.760So, you can see this in the southwest portion of France is G or Gascony, which comes from Wasconia, which is where the Basques live.
00:53:02.500Spanish undergoes a similar transition of W to V.
00:53:07.640So, Wasconia becomes Gascony and Basquia, but in Spanish, it's El PaÃs de Basco.
00:53:18.840So, Gaul is actually what the Germanic peoples, specifically the Franks, call the province when they move into and take over Francia.
00:53:29.400the franks convert um just going to oversimplify it because we need to get back to the anglo-saxons
00:53:38.500the franks convert because clovis wanted to murder his family and take power for himself
00:53:42.420and break the law um after he had taken power the franks got in very close with the papal
00:53:50.820establishment in italy athelbert of kent was very close with the franks kent was if you want to
00:54:00.480bring that map of the the heptarchy back up nick real quick kent was where trade from um the
00:54:08.680continent typically entered into britain there was a lot of trade a lot of uh knowledge a lot
00:54:16.260of military backing. Partially that seems to be because, I mean, obviously it's really close to
00:54:23.040France, right? But the Kentish crown, the Kentish also seem to have ostensibly been subjects to the
00:54:33.380Franks. As far as the Franks and the Pope knew, there doesn't seem to be a lot of pull in that
00:54:43.140direction but the kentish kings despite being militarily not necessarily the strongest had this
00:54:49.920threat of do what i say or else i'll get the franks involved that was very important in
00:54:56.800the rest of anglo-saxon england the the kentish crown also had pull with the franks because the
00:55:03.680franks had a lot of pull with the old country militarily so kent had this kind of threat of
00:55:11.400like do what we say or the franks will bully your cousins back in denmark beowulf goes back
00:55:19.400to denmark to deal with his odal his inheritance his patrimony because there was still movement
00:55:25.840between anglo-saxon england and denmark at this time because they were like one people the germanic
00:55:32.740people spoke one single language at this time they were one people broken up into these kinship
00:55:40.140based polities right so athelbert of kent marries bertha of paris bertha is a christian and she
00:55:52.620says that she will only marry athelbert and strengthen his kingdom if she's allowed to
00:55:57.900continue practicing christianity and athelbert relents possibly because bertha's um christian0.94
00:56:03.840clergy that she brings with her as retainers are completely useless and worthless we know because
00:56:09.440the pope says so so but guess who meets up with her augustine moves to kent
00:56:19.420um athelbert of kent allows the gregorian missionaries to tend to christians in kent
00:56:28.080because there there are christians in britain when the anglo-saxons show up there's not a lot
00:56:32.740of them. They're relatively low status, but they are there. And so when Athelbert allows his wife's
00:56:41.380religion to exist, he allows a cleverer snake than the ones she brought with her to slither0.95
00:56:50.740into his garden, as it were. So 597, Athelbert allows the Gregorian missionaries to do their0.95
00:56:57.860thing in kent 601 he converts or more so he's baptized in 605 radwald of east anglia converts
00:57:07.360to christianity but ostensibly also remains loyal to osatru radwald is an interesting character he
00:57:15.400keeps an osatru hof on his uh on his property along with a christian church and in his like
00:57:23.260bedroom or whatever he has a christian shrine and an asatra shrine he seems to have wanted to
00:57:30.760have his cake and eat it too regarding being friends with kent and being friends with with
00:57:36.440frankie of kent but also maintaining if just for political reasons troth to the isere at least
00:57:44.560nominally so radwald is an interesting guy also he is the most likely candidate for being the king
00:57:51.340in the sutton who burial so this was this big burial mound that has the really cool sutton who
00:57:58.060mask if you want to pull that up you can nick if not people can google it on their own everyone
00:58:02.860knows what this thing looks like but it has um it's covered in like these odin motifs like the
00:58:09.100the nose is like a raven and all that and one of the eyes has foil encrusting around it and the
00:58:17.260other one doesn't however so if you if this thing is in low light it like glimmers and shines and
00:58:24.460the eye socket with the foil sorry if the eye socket with the foil like emits light but the
00:58:31.260one without the foil is just this like dull dark hole so some people think this is like an odin
00:58:37.660kind of thing um radwald throw up that fourth uh image the the wikipedia link uh nick so radwald
00:58:47.820is buried in a very traditional ostrich fashion and he's actually buried with a very i was hoping
00:58:53.100you can you make it bigger um if you can't it's fine he was buried with an incredibly traditional
00:59:01.500instrument so if you look at this guy here with the axe keep keep a focus on that guy but if you'll
00:59:08.780notice there's marcus aurelius wearing his toga over his head in the priestly fashion and then
00:59:13.980there's all the retainers that are around him that are helping with this this offering of a cow
00:59:19.260including the cow i've always loved how the cow is just in the picture like he's just like one of
00:59:23.980the boys even though they're gonna kill him and eat him right but you can see on aurelius's uh
00:59:30.380on his right but next to his left shoulder there's actually a roman priest wearing an apex it looks
00:59:35.900like a combination of like the world war ii amelia earhart kind of um aviator hat with a plunger stuck
00:59:43.740to it and there's this guy here with this axe that is actually an extremely old traditional instrument
00:59:54.380of indo-european sacrifice it's like a ham axe like a hammer meets an axe and it goes back to
01:00:01.740the neolithic period the the sharp end is for cutting up a corpse and then the other end is a
01:00:07.660pry bar meant to be used to deconstruct the corpse for like offerings right so it's it's basically a
01:00:16.620butcher's instrument an extremely old traditional religious instrument of cutting up meat for
01:00:22.860offerings and radwald was buried with one so i bring radwald in this up in this digression
01:00:31.660because it's worth talking about christianity and its relationship to ossaroo at some point
01:00:38.520because the pope can't really levy force here he has to basically use trickery to get people to go
01:00:47.080to apostasy um partially because anglo-saxon england is just pretty ethnically homogenous
01:00:55.820there isn't inter-ethnic strife there isn't bureaucracy that can be leveled against people
01:01:01.760it's it's a wild west kind of setting setting that is both a blessing and a curse for the
01:01:08.760anglo-saxons or nerd in christianity i said that the anglo-saxon tribesmen moved to britain not
01:01:16.480Anglo-Saxon tribes. So the people who settle Britain at this time are kind of just hardy
01:01:25.540individualist settlers. It's very similar to the early American settlement in that you have a lot
01:01:32.100of people coming over, setting up their farmstead, and banding together as free sovereign individuals
01:01:38.940and working together for their own mutual success so there's a lot of political structures in
01:01:46.700anglo-saxon england that are native and you know actually probably innovated here there in anglo-saxon
01:01:55.800england but they get like described as being clearly importations from the old testament
01:02:01.180despite obviously not coming from the old testament so like one of them is the institution of the
01:02:06.74010th so how do you enforce the law against people well you can take them to court but who brings
01:02:15.280them there if they don't want to go there's no cops so you can go to the king but the king is
01:02:21.300really busy so they had this institution of the 10th which is that basically people men would
01:02:27.040like band together in 10 man groups and if one of them broke the law or had to go to court the
01:02:33.560other nine were responsible for bringing that guy to court or they could suffer the consequences
01:02:40.260like if one guy in your tent gets accused of murder and you don't get him to court
01:02:45.500you have to pay the fee for murder right another one of these is where guild which is a a it means
01:02:54.720like man price it actually translates literally to where yield if we in modern english but it
01:02:59.580like man price if you killed someone there was literally a price on their head that you had to
01:03:04.940pay and if you didn't you were in trouble these institutions come about to solve the problem of
01:03:13.260how do you get free sovereign landowners to work together and i talked about athelfrith being
01:03:21.820under the sovereignty of the franks but also kind of not really a lot of this discussion
01:03:27.020of christianity in anglosax in england comes about due to overlordship comes about due to
01:03:35.100um christian lords telling their underlings convert or else or convert convert for me so
01:03:47.020radwald is interesting because he is a demonstration of the syncretism that goes on at this
01:03:51.980time we have a lot better documentation of what things looked like on the ground regarding the
01:03:59.180the introduction and process of christianity through anglo-saxon england than we do in the
01:04:05.500rest of europe even in a lot of ways in better than the mediterranean so one example of this is
01:04:10.860that we have a lot of poetry by anglo-saxon christians in old english translating christianity
01:04:17.900into their culture and customs and literally language so there's an example um genesis a is
01:04:25.020this poetic rendering of genesis in old english and the poet uses anglo-saxon terms like he has
01:04:32.020avraham perform bloat right like at one point avraham is going through the desert and he
01:04:39.000and in the bible story he like goes through stops sacrifices goes through stops sacrifices goes0.71
01:04:44.400there stop sacrifices and he sacrifices in the traditional jewish manner of killing an animal
01:04:49.120and then performing a the greek word is holocaustum which literally means hole burning he basically0.90
01:04:54.720chucks an animal carcass on a bonfire and burns it all up that's typically not how european animal0.71
01:05:00.720offerings were done they would only offer a part of the animal anyways holocaust obviously happened
01:05:07.920in Greece, but you know what I mean here. The Genesis A poet has it as Avraham goes, he stops,
01:05:15.520he sets up an altar, which doesn't happen in the original text. And then he, like, the poet
01:05:23.040describes building a pyre, putting an animal in it, and burning it. Because the Anglo-Saxons1.00
01:05:29.660couldn't understand what a calced hole burning was, because they didn't do that. So the Genesis0.73
01:05:36.060is a poet has a vacham performing jewish sacrifice in like an asatru manner right
01:05:43.000the gregorian mission is important because it navigates how do you take people from asatru
01:05:51.380to christianity like step by step what do you do and we can see what they're doing and kind of
01:05:59.460reverse it in a certain sense to like get a better glimpse of what anglo-saxon uh also true
01:06:06.420looked like so like one of the things that this is just an example and then i'll get back to the
01:06:12.900timeline to get to our heroes this is just an example but like one of the things that the0.63
01:06:17.600gregorian mission hammered home is that the icr are demons and they do they do bad things good
01:06:23.080things come from jesus this isn't really something that mediterranean christianity
01:06:28.580hanged up though the anglo-saxon christians were really big on jesus being a king and a warrior
01:06:35.880mediterranean christianity doesn't really have jesus as anything except
01:06:40.700which literally means like ethnic leader of the jews but he's not like the king of the roman
01:06:47.460empire right whereas anglo-saxon christians portrayed jesus as like like he's going out
01:06:56.280and getting in like sword fights with the devil you know so what we can tell from this is that
01:07:04.560anglo-saxon uh asatruar believe that good things come from the gods they believe that the gods are
01:07:11.440good the worship of them is good and that good things come from this worship so the gregorian
01:07:17.500mission has to deconstruct that idea it has to separate good things come from the gods from
01:07:23.660you know the people's minds another thing it does is it categorizes words in terms of
01:07:30.520acceptability so like an example of this is the word god the word god is not of hebrew origin
01:07:37.640the word god is not of greek origin the word god is of germanic origin and just means that which
01:07:43.380is invoked or that to which libations are poured to that to which offerings are made this term is
01:07:49.220used to refer to the ice here but so are other words like the old english one would be uh us
01:07:56.180in singular asses in plural um asses is cognate with ice here that word is totally off limits
01:08:03.780notice yahweh is not an ice here he's god he's not an ice here because us is off limits but god
01:08:13.500is acceptable there's also um words for example that are like absorbed conditionally so like uh
01:08:20.220bloat is it bloat um the old english is bloat the old norse is bloat the gothic is bloat bloat is
01:08:30.780okay when avraham does it in the torah but it's not okay when people do it now right um
01:08:38.620Um, there were also words that are scheduled for destruction, and some of these we know because they never really got finished.
01:08:46.380Like, Christian sambals are a thing that's attested, or, like, Christian drinking festivals, right?
01:08:54.600Um, but Passover takes place during Eostramonat, and it was just decided, like, yeah, you can just, as long as you're not worshipping Ostara, you can keep referring to the period as belonging to her.
01:09:07.600we'll get rid of that eventually and they just never did right they never got rid of this
01:09:11.860do you want to opine while I take a sip from my teaser um sure
01:09:19.960so while you sip the tea I think it is valuable just to say um thank you this is awesome and
01:09:31.260we're getting a lot of insight in this amount of time and i think you're you're laying the
01:09:38.020foundations really well a question that came up that is um related to the thing that we're
01:09:47.320talking about and i don't think that there's one monolithic answer but what did our ancestors see
01:09:53.360in this semitic religion known as christianity that caused thousands of our folk to abandon
01:09:58.680their ancestral gods and i think i think it misses the point because i don't think it was presented
01:10:06.440that way i don't think there's a smorgasbord of religious choices like ah let's choose this one
01:10:13.800this sounds cool that's palm trees and cutting off foreskin that sounds awesome um i think that
01:10:31.640politics are tricky and as things come in with political benefits
01:10:41.240it makes a compelling case something that i think is really interesting and it's
01:10:45.400it's relevant to what we're talking about right now and i advise anybody to read the
01:10:50.440germanization of really medieval christianity we're going to come to a point here that i'm
01:10:56.020sure chris is going to talk about where there is a letter issued by the pope to like hey guys
01:11:00.760go easy and you can be as shady as you want to let them kind of keep the stuff they like about
01:11:08.280their old religion but just insert jesus where you can and so you have you have things like
01:11:16.420Radwald with dual altars. You've got these political marriages with princesses from the
01:11:26.340continent that are longtime Christians. And oftentimes part of the marriage agreement
01:11:31.300is conversion or at least lenience and allowing in missionaries and such.
01:11:37.460And you see this, you know, throughout, I guess, non-Mediterranean Europe in the conversion process is you see a lot of overlapping,
01:11:55.900A lot of repurposing Jesus and his apostles to be, you know, Jarl Jesus and his warrior thanes that, you know, do battle with like demons and do cool stuff.
01:12:12.120It looks further and further from biblical stories and much closer to him being recast as something that they're familiar with.
01:12:20.780but there's a tremendous amount of political and economic pressure and if your alliances are forged
01:12:28.220by common faith i think that's very tempting to noble houses so i don't think that the average
01:12:37.740person was given a lot of choice of ah you know citizen what religion do you want to follow
01:12:43.980So typically when a king or a chief or whatever they were designated as, depending on the circumstance, converts, he takes all of his people with him.
01:12:54.640And I think this comes in in a meaningful way when we talk about it works in reverse, too.0.51
01:13:03.200So when a king rejects Christianity and embraces Ausatru, then all of a sudden his kingdom is open to continuing to do that.
01:13:13.380And it's still that way now when political forces, when the winds change, you have a whole lot of people that kind of go where it's popular to go.0.75
01:13:26.740And so it takes a relatively short, certainly within a person's lifetime, but also often within a few years or a decade for the entire zeitgeist of the people to completely change direction if you get the thought leaders to incentivize something as, no, this is the cool thing that we're doing now.
01:13:51.380And I think it works in a lot more of a power dynamic than it does today.
01:13:56.900But we see that around us and we see how quickly institutions and attitudes change when, you know, a new sheriff is in town or when there's a new power structure or a new thing becomes in vogue and catches traction.
01:14:13.740So I don't think a bunch of, you know, individual farmers were just deciding to abandon the gods.
01:14:18.440And the other thing is, it's worth thinking that there's overlap during all these times.
01:14:24.760There's people out in the, you know, in the backcountry that just don't get the memo or don't care or do those, you know, have your cake and eat it two things until much later when the Christian church gets more heavy handed with the demands on it.
01:14:43.100but it's a process that happens you know over time and it's preyed on
01:14:53.340very much with converting the leadership you convert the kings you convert the princes you
01:14:57.740convert you know the people who make those decisions and they officially make the decision
01:15:04.220for their tribe and their countrymen and then gradually all of the i don't know all of the
01:15:13.100economic support from above goes to this new religion and all of it is taken away from the old
01:15:22.620and then depending on where you're at there's persecution and things so it looks different in
01:15:27.580different places but i think that's something to consider as far as you know what that looked like
01:15:33.900and i think it's the period that we're getting into right now so it's worth remembering here
01:15:42.780that at the time, Asatru is conceptualized as something that is done. For the vast majority
01:15:51.980of Anglo-Saxons, it seems that they conceptualized Asatru as loyalty to the Aesir, yes, but also
01:15:59.820a series of practices that you perform. In a certain sense, one does not believe in Asatru,
01:16:06.380they perform asatru or asatruing so like you perform the harvest festival this is just some
01:16:14.580kind of thing that you do there's not necessarily an ideological why behind it it's just part and
01:16:19.700parcel of your life christianity does not conceptualize itself as that now
01:16:26.940the the thing that the gregorian mission recognizes is that they can take a lot of these
01:16:34.500doings and then repurpose them so i'm just gonna read not the whole thing because yeah but just a
01:16:43.720portion of it um this is from gregory the first to meletus who goes on to become a character in
01:16:51.060one of our stories that we're going to tell here but he is the first first ostensibly ever bishop
01:16:56.640of london um so tell augustine that he should by no means destroy the temples of the gods but rather
01:17:05.360the idols within those temples let him after he has purified them with holy water place altars
01:17:10.960and relics of the saints in them for if those temples are well built they should be converted
01:17:15.980from the worship of demons to the service of the true lord thus seeing that their places of worship
01:17:22.000are not destroyed the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar
01:17:28.000and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true god so literally you can keep coming
01:17:34.420to the same place right furthermore he goes on to say since it has been their custom to slaughter
01:17:42.080oxen in sacrifice they should receive some solemnity in exchange let them therefore on
01:17:47.840the day of the dedication of their churches, or on the feast of the martyrs, whose relics are0.65
01:17:52.780preserved in them, build themselves huts around their one-time temples, and celebrate the occasion
01:17:58.500with religious feasting. So notice here, he's build themselves huts, what he's actually saying
01:18:03.740is build mead halls and feasting halls around the church, so as to not, in a sense, not profane it0.89
01:18:10.760with the feasting, but also to allow them to mentally separate the feasting from the Christianity0.62
01:18:16.140in a sense they will sacrifice and eat the animals not anymore as an offering to the devil0.89
01:18:22.460but for the glory of god to whom as the giver of all things they will give thanks for having been
01:18:28.020satiated so like i said the christian symbol right and this is the the the doing aspect and
01:18:36.800where the gregorian missions cleverness is and they're still doing these things in a lot of ways
01:18:43.140radwald could have two altars in his house because he could still do the thing right he
01:18:52.060can still take communion but still do some of these things um i've seen some interesting
01:18:57.920thesis uh hypothesization about radwald in particular because there is actually an older
01:19:03.400form of christianity that the um germanic peoples would have been a bit more familiar with than
01:19:09.360trinitarian christianity and that was arianism and arianism did not jettison nearly as much of
01:19:15.520germanic culture and custom as um trinitarian christianity wanted to arian christianity
01:19:23.940ostensibly seems to have been totally fine with christian symbols whereas trinitarian
01:19:27.980christianity wanted christian symbols gone it was just a matter of getting rid of the
01:19:32.200isir first and then the christian symbol right um one example going back to the genesis a uh
01:19:41.200talking about that and also what the alter ego they said about making jesus out to be a cool
01:19:45.600warrior there's actually a poem called the helion which is literally that it is telling the tale of
01:19:52.040jesus's life with him as being a warlord with his thanes going around getting into germanic warlord
01:19:59.680battles with like swords leading armies um well there's actually um sumble is mentioned in that
01:20:07.220one also um uh lazarus when he gets uh necromancy back to life he he uh dies starving outside of a
01:20:17.280another man's a jewish man's uh like he's mead hall because he's begging to come in and go to
01:20:23.540and this this rude guy won't let him in so like he's like a tent trying to attend like a mead
01:20:29.680hall's stumble in like israel right that's literally painting the the bible stories with
01:20:37.460a germanic coat of paint and so it's kind of a question of like what did our ancestors see in it
01:20:45.220well i don't think they saw it to a degree i don't think a lot of these preachers came to them and
01:20:50.500said hey jesus therefore we're going to completely change your way of life and it's worth noting i
01:20:57.680mean we we say that easter is practiced right like every language except english dutch and
01:21:05.180german calls the feast or the the festival celebrating jesus's resurrection as passover
01:21:12.840or paschal uh paschal comes from pasca which ultimately comes from pasach a hebrew word
01:21:18.180meaning passover um that's not the case in the in the continental germanic world where
01:21:24.900the holiday is called easter we we don't practice we don't call any holiday like hrethah
01:21:33.360for hrethamonet which is another one we don't call any of the months litha
01:21:38.320which was the month name for summer right um we have a historical advantage today and we can look
01:21:48.860back and be like wow anglo-saxon england it's like a totally different world but i don't think they
01:21:55.860would have seen it that way and i don't think it was being presented to them that way like let's
01:22:01.160just kind of examine that i mean i'm not presenting the claim is true i i know it's wrong and all that
01:22:07.000But like the claim I was saying they were presenting, like the Aesir are actually demons and the good things in your life don't come from them.
01:22:14.920That doesn't necessarily mean you can't have harvest festivals, though.0.82
01:32:55.880to the rising Christianity into that struggle.
01:33:01.520We have every reason to believe that Ausatru
01:33:03.940at an earlier stage had a much better unification
01:33:09.800better sense of organization better ecclesiastical structure you see remnants of that with these
01:33:18.020small kingdoms and their and their sacred kingships relying on on the the web of loyalties you
01:33:23.640mentioned but the the gothar merged with the king's administration with the king being
01:33:32.940simultaneously king and high priest, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon period. And so you have these
01:33:40.040small, not connected little kingdoms of it. And our people, through a variety of economic
01:33:49.500situations and other difficulties in living in the north, I think that the structure was far from
01:33:58.560the perfect outside true ideal of the structure was the situation they found themselves in
01:34:03.260and it's always very tempting to think what if our people had stood unified with like a unified
01:34:09.180structure and the moments that you see that occur are shocking in their efficacy and we see a lot
01:34:18.940of moments where they don't i think that's one of the struggles with why christianity takes root
01:34:25.580in england at this time as effectively as it does is there's you know all these little kingdoms and
01:34:34.940you don't it's very hard for that to stand up to opposite to an organized opposition
01:34:43.420based on an imperial structure when it's these you know very tiny kingdoms and uh we'll after
01:34:50.140we cover our heroes and finish the timeline i will do i will kind of answer the map nerd question
01:34:57.100of how does christianity actually get into and through england like geographically so
01:35:03.760the spread of agent yeah right the the box um so we've been talking about uh downer things let's
01:35:15.420talk about some good guys here. So in 626, three brothers, Saxrad, Seward, and a third brother who
01:35:24.980may have been named Sabert, we're not entirely sure what the third brother's name was, but
01:35:30.100they ruled in Essex in the wake of the death of their father.
01:35:37.580Sorry, the third brother was Sigbert, the father was Sabert. There's a lot of people with names
01:35:43.220that are really really similar at this time like um so their father apostatized in 604 but they
01:35:53.140remained true um he died the the father the traitor father did in 616 and then they took over
01:36:00.940so um uh they were old enough to remain true to the icer when he took power so he had to have
01:36:10.780he had to have taken they had to have uh been older you know um we're retail so we were we're
01:36:19.960relayed a tale uh they they show up in what is usually told is the story of meletus but he shows
01:36:26.600up in their story from rpov here um meletus the first bishop of london he was sent to the city
01:36:31.960and he refuses to give them mass and london at this time is a majority asatru city mind you it's
01:36:40.060it's mostly asatruar and this bishop is only able to get in because of the traitorous king0.94
01:36:46.700who lets him in like literally and so uh sex rat and cyward go to this guy and um they kind of like0.97
01:36:55.700bully him as saying like oh man we're so hungry can we have some of your bread you gave us you0.57
01:37:00.600give bread to our father why won't you give bread to us and meletus is like you know you have to be
01:37:05.540baptized i can't i can't do it unless you're baptized and it's not clear from the wording
01:37:11.560if they're doing this like they're coming by every day kind of bullying him for bread
01:37:15.720or if this is just like one single kind of thing but eventually um they they kick him out of london
01:37:25.000because of his refusal to to uh recognize their authority ultimately um this is a cute little
01:37:34.440story about them but they are ruling um essex in the wake of a change in overlordship from
01:37:44.960athobert the aforementioned christian trader to radwald the aforementioned lesser trader i guess
01:37:53.300i mean i don't think we can we don't we don't like what he we don't like him doing the christian
01:37:58.000thing but at the same time he like still tried to be loyal anyways you know what i mean
01:38:02.080radwall was significantly more friendly to asatru under kings even if he at some level
01:38:10.720practiced it himself and was a patron of it to a degree so melitus was known to be connected with
01:38:16.580the kentish court that letter i read with the pope in the stuffy old man voice that was to melitus
01:38:23.820this guy telling him what to do because the melitus gets to lenin and he's like what do i do
01:38:30.060now so he writes to the pope saying boss what do i do right um so yeah academics
01:38:41.820academics posit that part of the the heathen reaction as it's always called
01:38:48.060was occurring due to this larger trend of a change in the kentish court and athelbert's
01:38:56.300boot getting off their necks. Um, Athelbert was, uh, he, Athelbert died in 616 and was replaced
01:39:03.460with his son, Eadbald. Now, Eadbald was, uh, actually Asatru. Um, he was, uh, also insane,
01:39:12.460apparently. Um, Eadbald's rule in Kent for, was a very brief, uh, terrible setback for Christianity
01:39:21.040because he didn't actually patronize his father's um religion uh he also took his unnamed presumably
01:39:30.100asatru stepmother as his own wife which uh bead tells us was considered scandalous amongst
01:39:36.140asatruara at the time which is an interesting thing bead bead is an interesting guy because
01:39:41.200he's always saying things that are like oh he knows more than what he's letting on
01:39:45.220like i really wish i could ask this guy questions because he's he's clearly knows more right
01:39:50.700um again ad bold was apparently crazy and the language used to describe this man makes him
01:39:57.980seem like he was like nuts um it must have been awkward when he ditched his stepmother and married
01:40:04.880a frankish woman and uh became christian that was well after the three brothers had died however um
01:40:11.900so the three brothers uh ultimately it ended up getting into a war with um the
01:40:20.560West Saxon kings Koenigils and Quichelm, and they, along with their third brother, were defeated and
01:40:27.200died on the field of battle in 626. Koenigils may have been Quichelm's son. They also ordered
01:40:36.240the attempted execution of Edwin of Northumbria, Koenigils and Quichelm did. Edwin was Christian,
01:40:43.840according to bead but uh two years later these guys who got in who killed um our heroes
01:40:50.800they actually got in a fight with penda who similar to radwald is a guy who's like halfway
01:40:57.120to actually being like the hero right but um they appear to have lost kunigilz and quichilm did
01:41:06.180And they came under the dominion of Edwin, the guy they tried to kill earlier, and they had to pay him a ridiculously large tribute.
01:41:18.520Both of them ended up becoming apostates because Penda drove them out of their kingdom.
01:41:25.540So it's kind of ironic that, although he's not one of our heroes due to his grievous mistakes, Penda kind of ironically gets revenge for Sexrat and Sayward and their brother against their murderers.
01:41:43.280um sayward's son sigibert the little would take over as king uh he would rule for about 30 years
01:41:51.320remaining true to the gods he was probably an ally of pendas as like a lesser king um
01:41:57.980after sigibert the little died however saint sigibert took over um and it wasn't until saint
01:42:05.500zigebert took over that christianity came back in um that christianity came back in london namely but
01:42:14.300in uh essex essex right yeah essex um meletus returned to london after saint zigebert got in
01:42:24.180power so there's like a solid 30 years where the first christian bishop has just been ousted
01:42:51.960Which is interesting that he uses the high priests, right?
01:42:56.360Because that implies that Sexrat and Sayward
01:42:58.680and the son, Sigbert the Little, were actually patrons of organized Asatru. Granted, at the
01:43:06.200small scale that they were operating, but they were nonetheless patrons of it at a sort of
01:43:12.200ideological level. That's something that I want to reemphasize about the Sacred King. Whenever
01:43:19.880Whenever Bede talks about these situations, it's a, you know, and then his king, you know, and then the king embraced his false gods and took, you know, took his kingdom back into the ways of idolatry or something.
01:43:39.480and then whenever they come back to christianity or a new king comes it's always that king
01:43:44.440embraces the true faith and brings his people back in in i don't know under in righteous order
01:43:54.360or whatever it's always it's not just like aha we got the king to convert it's an immediate
01:44:01.640assumption that not only does the whatever the king is practicing he is still the sacred king
01:44:07.880yeah so he is the sacred king if he is practicing out the true or if he's like hey guys we're done
01:44:13.880with this we're gonna go you know we're gonna go worship jesus and they're like all right and then
01:44:18.600they go and he is like their de facto like mini pope sacred king and so it's very impactful and
01:44:28.040And one of the reasons, not just because these two gentlemen chose to go against their father's wishes and be loyal to the Aesir, but no, in doing so, they brought their people back in trough with the gods.
01:49:40.840what he's trying to do is he's trying to balance telling everything he can to people while also
01:49:47.900like crafting a narrative for political and religious reasons so ad bald is is one of
01:49:54.760these characters where the silence is deafening and so um ad bald uh as we've said is he's
01:50:03.500for a period and then um he does some kind of like purgation of kicking christian priests
01:50:10.720out of his domain and then like one of supposedly one of these priests goes to the church and he's
01:50:18.260like he prays to saint peter and he's like oh saint peter what do i do we're going to get
01:50:23.360expelled from the kingdom and so saint peter like climbs down from heaven and picks up like a whip
01:50:32.260like a scourge and just starts vigorously attacking the priest and like shredding him up and just
01:50:39.140just gnarling him up with this because a scourge isn't just a whip it's like a bundle of ropes with
01:50:45.540barbs in them it's like barbed wire that you use to wax something it's more than just a whip
01:50:51.300right so he's just going to town on this priest and this priest the next day he goes to the king
01:50:58.140and he says oh my king i don't know what to do i prayed to saint peter for deliverance from your
01:51:04.020wrath. And he came down and he beat the snot out of me. And Edbald's like, whoa, I don't want to
01:51:13.060get on this St. Peter guy's bad side. I'm going to be Christian. So he like converts to avoid
01:51:19.740St. Peter like scourging him, right? So part of the problem we run into when looking at the history
01:51:31.200of the Anglo-Saxons is we don't actually have a lot. We have a lot given the circumstances,
01:51:38.560but skipping ahead a little bit, in 1066, the Norman invasion happens and Anglo-Saxon England
01:51:45.080ends. And the frogified Vikings come along and conquer Anglo-Saxon England. And this is why0.86
01:51:57.960English has so many French words in it. There's a period of time where the official language of
01:52:02.860England is French, and everyone in the English court speaks French, and they have to use
01:52:08.780translators to speak to the peasants because they don't know English.0.50
01:52:15.700This period is the second cultural revolution that the Anglo-Saxons have inflicted upon them.
01:52:22.660It's actually it's actually the third if you count the Anglo-Saxon migration as a cultural revolution over the Roman Britons.
01:52:33.180There's the Norman invasion, which kind of on the one hand takes all of the literary body of Anglo-Saxon England and kind of like crumples it.0.52
01:52:43.480And everything that falls out of the fingers in that crumpling goes away.
01:52:47.160And that leaves this core left behind.0.66
01:52:49.120And then there's this, the next cultural revolution occurs with Protestantism, where the Protestants go through England and they loot and ransack and destroy these monasteries.0.74
01:53:02.300There's a lot of books that they just chuck in the fire.0.82
01:53:05.580We don't know what we don't know, but we do know that they chucked books in the fire.
01:53:10.100there's a book it's like uh the stripping of the altars um complaining about this from a catholic
01:53:16.700pov of all of the stuff that was lost during the the literal looting of monasteries to take
01:53:24.600gold crosses and melt them down and get rid of catholic literature and the like by protestants
01:53:29.120and there's even more stuff from this period that's lost in there so like i said at one point
01:53:35.920Kunigils and Quichilm, who may have been father and son, or they might have been brothers with
01:53:43.100a third unnamed brother. We don't know, because these guys show up like three times. This guy,
01:53:50.240Kunigils, is attested like three times, twice of which is by bead, and then there's like a charter
01:53:56.580that he signed giving some guy a cow, right? There's a lot of Anglo-Saxon history that is
01:54:03.060really murky um and it's very unfortunate because the anglo-saxon stuff we do have is often
01:54:10.640extremely illuminating so uh back to the timeline here so that was essex so
01:54:18.700you have you have kent and then what's west of kent wessex and what's north north of kent
01:54:27.540essex and then what's west of sussex or sorry sorry what's west of kent sussex what's west of
01:54:36.060sussex wessex right so we have another two set of heroes that are anglo-saxons and those are
01:54:44.540aynfrith of bernicia and osric of daira do you want to throw up the heptarchy map again nick
01:54:50.280i'm sorry like no one it's hard to know where things are in england
01:54:54.600So, Dara is the south portion of Northumbria, which is this green blob there, right?
01:55:10.980Dera is the south of Northumbria, and Bernicia is the north. Strathclyde is the west half of that neck that connects D'North to D'Souf of England, right?0.96
01:55:26.400now i've been talking about the heptarchy yes this is where germ got the seven kingdoms of
01:55:33.700westeros from at no point were there seven independent kingdoms in england however with
01:55:40.240the general flow of lordship under lordship overlordship kingship etc there are these
01:55:46.400seven vague territorial units of northumbria mercia east anglia essex kent sussex and wessex
01:55:53.120um the southwest tip of the peninsula that wessex is on is cornwall um it's called west
01:56:00.400wales on this map we'll get to the welsh in a minute here so these guys are the leaders of
01:56:08.740um northumbria which is that northeast portion of england um
01:56:14.360so in the early 600s this land was ruled by aadwine both province both bernicia and um
01:56:25.620it's very common for kings to rule two provinces or two two portions of land but then split one
01:56:33.300portion off and give it to an under king right so aadwine was challenged by athelfrith
01:56:40.520but with the aid of radwald we've already talked about um he retained power a few years after this
01:56:49.320ea the winner apostatized for a political marriage his reign was uneventful until he
01:56:54.560was eventually defeated in battle by a joint force of the christian welsh tyrant
01:56:59.420cadwallum ap cad fan i don't know if that's the way you're supposed to pronounce it i'm just
01:57:05.100going to do it um and he's still asatru penda which is really interesting here because you
01:57:10.140see here you have penda who's a crappy asatruar and you have cadwallan who is not only a christian
01:57:18.240but welsh which is which is important coming up here and they're fighting aadwina who is a
01:57:25.320an apostate to christianity from asatru there's a lot of conflict going on here the degree to which
01:57:33.640Christian or Asatru kings fought each other is a little uncertain because at this time there's
01:57:40.880always this back and forth of apostasy going on and people deciding to be loyal and then up while
01:57:47.240my king said oh he's dead I muster again and it's it's all very complicated. We don't really know
01:57:52.860how much Asatru kings fought each other however. Personally that might be because the Christian
01:57:59.660sources just weren't aware of it, but it's interesting that Bede doesn't talk about this
01:58:04.520more, right? So, Aadwina had pushed the Celtic kings out of Yorkshire, which more or less
01:58:13.780establishes the border between England and Wales today. Cadwallen was the supreme leader of the0.95
01:58:22.160military forces of Wales. Wales, as I just said, is determined by the point at which the Celts in
01:58:30.100Britain could push out the Anglo-Saxons or keep them from pushing in. At one point,0.74
01:58:37.000all of that island was Romano-Celtic. The Welsh under Cadwallon are still identifying as
01:58:44.640the Celts who converted to Christianity because Rome and had been fighting a losing battle against
01:58:51.980the anglo-saxon convert uh invaders bead is an anglo-saxon he's a christian but he's an
01:58:58.820anglo-saxon and he's very keen on navigating the careful tightrope of christianity but also
01:59:07.480the anglo-saxons aren't going to truckle to roman tyranny right but he's not trying to be in
01:59:14.220conflict with the pope or continental christianity but he doesn't want the anglo-saxons to give way
01:59:19.480to the welsh partially because cadwallin just pushes into the anglo-saxon territories and
01:59:27.560bead has described it as like the grievous mistreatment of the locals in spite of them
01:59:34.680having accepted the true faith and blah blah blah cadwallin does not care if you are a christian
01:59:42.160or not if you're an anglo-saxon you got to go um i believe it's nennius there's another important
01:59:48.180christian monk at this time who writes about um the the anglo-saxon migrations and he is just of0.99
01:59:56.480the opinion that anglo-saxons are just animals don't bother converting them just kill them just0.97
02:00:02.000get them off the island he is of course a celt um so penda is king in mercia which is the physical0.99
02:00:10.780largest kingdom of the heptarchy it's at the center of england it's below northumbria and0.99
02:00:17.600Strathclyde, it's east of Wales, it's west of East Anglia. Thank you, Nick. That's a good one.
02:00:28.500Again, despite being politically and militarily ostensibly an Ositru loyalist, he allows his son
02:00:35.240Pieda, yeah, Penda had a son named Pieda, like I said, a lot of these names are really similar,
02:00:41.960to convert to Christianity. It is because of Pieda that, of course, Christianity takes hold
02:00:48.440in Mercia. The local rulers, Osric and Einfrith, of Deira and Bernicia, Osric of Deira, the south
02:00:59.320one, and Einfrith of Bernicia, the north one, respectively, rise up when Eadwina dies. And
02:01:08.020they return to the Aesir, as they do so, to the acclaim and support of the locals. This is an
02:01:13.520important point, because while the Germanic peoples in, uh, Anglo-Saxon England have this
02:01:20.600sacred king thing going on, they also still have personal affectations, loyalties, piety, religiosity.
02:01:29.400So, we see this kind of tacit admission from Bede in these, uh, and then such and such,
02:01:36.760abandoned the true faith or worse never took it up much to the acclaim of the locals where he'll
02:01:43.960kind of admit like yeah christianity wasn't all that popular this was just something the king was
02:01:48.460doing probably because of you know the overlord telling him to so um these two guys these two
02:02:00.000heroes rise up, and immediately Cadwallon, being a bloodthirsty tyrant who is like literally raping0.95
02:02:07.640and pillaging the land, he doesn't care if he's victimizing Christians, he continues to rape and0.99
02:02:13.580pillage the land. So Eganfrith goes to Cadwallon and tries to establish a kind of diplomatic peace0.54
02:02:20.200with him, and he only goes with 12 thanes. I've seen historians speculate on why. Some historians
02:02:28.860think this was because um and frith thought he had an in with cadwallin and was basically going
02:02:36.540in good faith others think it might have been because he was doing it as a kind of ploy of
02:02:42.360like i submit to your rulership say spare my people others think it was because he just
02:02:48.800was kind of cocky and thought he could convince cadwallin surely he's not that crazy you know
02:02:55.560Um, unfortunately, Cadwallon wickedly martyred Anifrith. Osric, meanwhile, tried to besiege Cadwallon, but was defeated on the field of battle. It seems like Osric actually had a good run with the siege before something happened and it went sour. We're not, we're not really sure. But after he was done with these two guys, he would, he would rampage through Northumbria for quite a while afterwards.
02:03:23.560afterwards it should be stressed here that bead who is writing only like 200 ish years after
02:03:31.040cadwallin's rampage is really critical of them of him despite their shared christianity um
02:03:37.100it's also interesting because this guy shows up as a minor figure in the the story of anglo-saxon
02:03:44.740england coming up here in a bit but there's a like a grandson or so of cadwallin that shows up
02:03:50.700who seems to be a pretty low, I don't know if beloved is the right term,
02:03:55.740but he's liked among the Anglo-Saxons, this guy, this grandson.
02:03:59.280So there's some chatter amongst academics about why that was the case.
02:04:05.360One thesis is that pretty quickly after Cadwallon got finished with his rampage,
02:04:09.920he kind of started trying to make amends.
02:04:12.360Another thought is that his son or grandson,
02:04:14.860I can't remember the actual relation between Cadwallon, the elder, and Cadwallon, the junior.
02:04:20.700it's it's thought that there might have been some attempt at kind of making good which is why the
02:04:26.980younger cadwallon is viewed better by anglo-saxons despite his grandfather being this heinous tyrant
02:04:33.320um so what happens to northumbria though oswald the son of the aforementioned athelfrith
02:04:42.660had been sent to dwell with the scots in northwest scotland after his father's defeat
02:04:47.900With Osric and Anfrith out of the picture, he returned home and rallied an army with Irish and Scottish aid that defeated Cadwallon.
02:04:57.720Christian myth says that Oswald prayed to saints, and with supernatural aid, the saints came down and helped him defeat Cadwallon, who is a Christian.
02:05:12.660Again, despite Christian kings having ruled in the area, Oswald is when Christianity actually seems to start taking root in Northumbria.
02:05:24.860Partially, that's because Oswald imported a lot of Irish clerics to do so.
02:05:30.280We'll get to the Irish in a minute here in the Scots.
02:05:32.580um osric and anfrith ruled only for a short period of time but their rules were folded into oswald's
02:05:41.700by later christian chroniclers um the opinion i saw from historians on why this is the case is
02:05:48.080that they were embarrassed about cadwallin's actions cadwallin doesn't seem to care about
02:05:53.320the anglo-saxon christians in the area he doesn't seem to care about spreading christianity or
02:05:59.080anything like that. I think there might also have been a bit of embarrassment by Christian
02:06:03.880chroniclers that, honestly, Osric and Anfrith seem to have been pretty well received by the
02:06:09.900locals who were quite happy to have Ositru kings in the region again. This is not really historical,
02:06:22.180But I have this in my notes from another thing I did with these guys about which of the nine noble virtues they most kind of represented.
02:06:33.440And I think Osric was a very courageous man, and Anfrith was a very honorable one.
02:06:39.680It had to have been going to Cadwallon and trying to make peace with him was a very honorable thing to do, even if it cost Anfrith his life.
02:06:48.920um so at this time as i said wales is an independent celtic polity so is cornwall
02:06:58.340although cornwall gets absorbed into wessex pretty quickly here um into like the 700s i think
02:07:04.660so the celts get pushed out into or rather celts get absorbed by anglo-saxons
02:07:13.060except in ireland where the anglo-saxons never really take root in wales in cornwall up to a
02:07:21.620point and in scotland now the angle the anglo-saxons move into scotland they just do so
02:07:28.460much more slowly than they move into um like britain proper so scots is a germanic language
02:07:47.300This is a complicated and thorny question.
02:07:50.400And the whole debacle with the Scots language, Wikipedia, but that's another topic entirely.
02:07:56.700But Scots Gaelic is not a Germanic language.
02:08:00.740It is a Celtic language related to Gaelic Gaelic, Irish Gaelic.
02:08:06.840um scotland is complicated but at this time there does seem to be a pretty clear separation between
02:08:14.360like scotland and england as far as which ethnicities go where um it gets into really
02:08:23.980complicated celticist questions which i'm not able to comment on so timeline wise um we get
02:08:32.320back to this so just to recap sex rod and say word and and frith and uh osric rule in 626 ad and 630
02:08:41.600ad respectively um we get hints here and there about heathen reactions at this time but they
02:08:51.340aren't attributed to individual kings um probably because some of these guys the records just don't
02:08:59.100survive about right so in 649 ad bald the aforementioned nut job outlaws uh asatru in kent
02:09:09.020this is the first time we see real um top level christian persecution of asatruar
02:09:16.420at like a an ideological level as opposed to just individuals because
02:09:20.940it there is a question of how much were an frith and osric martyrs like was
02:09:29.100was cadwallon doing this out of christian fervor or out of um celtic revanchism it's a bit of a
02:09:37.360thorny question but i had bold is absolutely doing this as a matter of trying to get rid of
02:09:43.840so then in 663 we get this figure sighera um in essex who may have been descended from sex rat
02:09:52.780in Sayward. And in 663, he's flip-flopping between Christianity and Asatru when he gets the chance.
02:10:02.700About 100 years later, in 786, there's a legatine report to Pope Hadrian that confirms that
02:10:10.320Asatru is omnipresent still. They don't know what to do. They can get the kings to convert,
02:10:16.440but they can't get the locals to do it in 865 the great heathen army which is an amazing name
02:10:23.620that'd be a great name for a band also by the way marches into england or more so sails into england
02:10:29.780from scandinavia in 871 alfred the great takes power and he's alfred the great because he he
02:10:38.880kicks out the vikings and really unifies england in a way that it hadn't been up till that point
02:10:44.840So, in 890, Pope Formosus chastises the English bishops for allowing an Asatru revival to occur that was apparently so vigorous that the Pope had heard about it in Rome.
02:10:58.360We don't really know much about what was going on in this time, but it is interesting because the great heathen army establishes the Danelaw, which is a Viking state in Northumbria, right?
02:11:11.560Right. Given that the Christian Anglo-Saxons at this time understood and didn't like the fact that they were still the same ethnicity as Scandinavians, although they were slowly diverging.
02:11:27.080And I'm willing to bet that this Ossetru revival that Pope Formosus was complaining about was in part motivated by a return of strong Ossetru leadership in the form of Scandinavians in the Danelaw.
02:11:43.840and it's worth just as an aside um there's a uh an attestation about how anglo-saxon christians
02:11:53.760conceptualize themselves in regards to heathens or danes who were just just synonymous in regards
02:12:01.900to scandinavia anglo-saxons just assumed there weren't christians in scandinavia at the time
02:12:06.640and they talk about um hair hairstyles and fashions that are different and so it's always
02:12:12.280been a question of what is this hairstyle supposed to be because it's some it's an anglo-saxon you
02:12:18.360know getting upset about like his brother or someone you know he's writing a letter and he's
02:12:22.800writing the letter to his brother and he's getting upset his brother like how can you wear a danish
02:12:26.920haircut you are a christian you should know better than to have your hair styled in the heathen
02:12:33.540fashion and it's like what does a heathen haircut look like and i've seen everything from it being
02:12:39.940like a mullet to just long long hair to like the the i don't know if there's a non-internet term
02:12:49.200for this but like the hitler youth where it's like long on the top and front short on the sides
02:12:53.260um a lot of discussion about it but it's clear there was some kind of cultural distant uh
02:12:59.400difference that was building here we don't really start seeing um meaningful breakup between the
02:13:06.940germanic peoples into separate ethnicities until well after 1080 um jackson crawford and simon
02:13:16.000roper uh jackson crawford is an an old norse academic and simon roper is an old english
02:13:21.220academic they did a video where they talked to each other in old norse and old english
02:13:28.020in the tongues circa like 1000 ish ad right and they could understand each other perfectly fine
02:13:35.960after they got past the the accent differences because it in many ways it is an accent and kind
02:13:43.720of slang distinction between old norse and old english at this time um english actually comes
02:13:54.280from like angle ish like the language of the angles old norse in norse is a dialectical form
02:14:01.960north so it's the old north tongue right um so alfred the great dies in 899 um in 1027 the
02:14:15.080north punishes bloat and idol worship i believe it uses the word bloat outright
02:14:23.360um with fines on landlords which is interesting because it's a demonstration of how this is
02:14:29.960enforced it's a punish so like if someone if someone is practicing ostrich the punishment
02:14:37.400isn't necessarily on them it's on the guy above them as a way of getting people to push this down
02:14:44.080um in 1054 AD Pope Leo IX cites the donation of Constantine for the first time and I'll come to
02:14:52.520why that's important in a moment 1066 AD the Norman conquest happens and Anglo-Saxon England
02:14:58.120ends and a lot of this stuff like fossilizes like this is why we don't use this is why bloat came
02:15:05.740back into the english language with the the reforging of osatru with steve mcnallan the
02:15:11.400herald of odin in 1969 right bloat is an old english word that's not something that the
02:15:18.780anglo-saxons got from the norse so why don't we use this word well the norman invasion
02:15:27.240forces this french cultural shift upon the english leading to a de-anglo-saxonizing of
02:15:37.100the english people in a certain in a certain sense um this is why we say bloat is a form
02:15:43.320of sacrifice rather than yeah sacrifice is the latinized frenchish word for bloat right
02:15:49.940um the donation of constantine is important because the idea of the pope as being the
02:15:56.420supreme leader of Christendom, comes about relatively late in Christian history.
02:16:01.020For a long time, the Pope is just first among equals of bishops in the Western communion.
02:16:09.480Do you know off the top of your head when the Western schism happens, sir?
02:16:20.180So this is when Catholicism, no, East-West Schism, excuse me, 1054.
02:16:27.340Yeah, 1054 is when the East-West Schism happens, and there's a separation between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.
02:16:35.560And up until that point, theoretically, the Pope, along with the other bishops of the, what is it, the Pentarchy, I think?
02:16:44.500the bishops of the uh yeah the pentarchy the bishops of rome constantinople alexandria
02:16:51.640antioch and jerusalem were primos inter pares or uh that's not the right term but uh we're co-equal
02:17:00.720right within their own domains and the pope says no i'm in charge you all have to do what i say
02:17:06.700and he produces this forged document in which Constantine basically gives the whole of the
02:17:15.100Roman Empire to the Pope. Pope Leo X didn't make the forgery, but he was the first one to deploy
02:17:23.900it at this scale. It was just kind of a weapon in the Vatican's chamber up until that point.
02:17:29.220um that's important because it's it's a setup for what was going on with christianity and to a
02:17:37.340degree why don't some of these kings just get rid of this thing right partially it's because it's
02:17:43.820just this background bureaucracy in the post-roman territory that they are governing and inhabiting
02:17:50.080and to a certain degree i don't think most of them conceptualized it as necessarily a threat
02:17:56.300until it started telling kings what to do because it's kind of like well this is some
02:18:03.500welsh celtic roman thing that is barely there we conceptualize it today as this kind of
02:18:12.200force in the new sphere but again i really don't think a lot of these guys conceptualized it as
02:18:19.020an ideology that they were necessarily in conflict with um men like sex rat and say word who took an
02:18:29.160active role against christian clergy in their domains probably were were a minority of heathen
02:18:37.580heathen reactionary opponents to christianity in as much as most of these guys probably didn't get
02:18:44.640Like, people often talk about Penda as this, you know, Asatru patriot who was heinously, heinit-treated Christianity heinous, and it's like, yeah, but he let his son apostatize.
02:18:58.820Like, that doesn't strike me as something that you would do if you were, like, you know, conceptualizing yourself in an ideological spiritual conflict, right?
02:19:11.700Do you have anything to say there, sir, while I take a drink?
02:19:19.220Sure, as a side note, during this, like, Oust-A-True revival in the Dane Law,
02:19:29.160it's interesting to note, and I was looking for the passage,
02:19:32.040and I found it in Elder Gods by Stephen Pollington.
02:19:41.700But yeah, Bishop Wolfstan was writing a, you know, chastising letter to the Christian congregation in Sermolupia de Angelos.0.75
02:19:58.120among heathen peoples no man dares to withhold neither a small nor large part of what is ordained
02:20:05.380for the worship of false gods and everywhere we withhold gods do all too often and among the0.98
02:20:13.080heathen peoples no man dares to complain about the things which are brought to the false gods0.99
02:20:18.580inside or outside and are handed over as a sacrifice and we have stripped bare god's houses0.99
02:20:26.400inside and outside of all their finery and almost everywhere God's servants are deprived of respect
02:20:33.640and protection and some men say that no man dares to dares to misuse the servants of false
02:20:39.960gods in any manner among heathen men so a lot of people have a I don't know a misguided idea about
02:20:50.540about the seriousness of religion or the, I don't know, the barbarous customs of0.99
02:21:02.780Ausatruir. And it was interesting to see as late as, you know, the, the 10 hundreds that0.99
02:21:11.000um the marked contrast of amongst alsatruar in england
02:21:22.840they were noted for freely giving to their hoffs for showing extra you know for showing respect
02:21:32.200and deference and protection for the gothar with treating you know the upkeep of hoffs
02:21:40.680and the upkeep of their faith as a serious thing they were willing to invest in whereas christians
02:21:46.360at the time in the same place you know mistreated their priests didn't you know weren't giving their
02:21:53.800their donations and their tithes were you know stripping monasteries and churches of you know
02:22:03.000sacred objects and things they can make a buck off of or repurpose to put somewhere else and it's
02:22:09.800interesting to see that in such a sharp contrast and i think it's it's informative
02:22:25.480it's also interesting and you have to wonder um
02:22:31.320what infrastructure they had because as we talked earlier most of the island like the royal houses
02:22:38.520had converted uh probably two years prior to the the viking raids and the in the situation with
02:22:46.040the danelaw two centuries uh earlier so how much did the folk remember their gods how much did the
02:22:54.840folk remember you know the gods of their fathers and the traditions and the sacred sites and the
02:23:02.280rituals and it is an interesting point that i don't think we see other places where this
02:23:09.720you know their scandinavian cousins come back and bring with them the old faith and they
02:23:16.280you know have this have this revival for however long they were able to have it
02:23:22.760i think that's that's always something that's really interested me in like what that looks like
02:23:28.360because it was a big enough deal that the pope needed to like speak on it so it could get stamped
02:23:35.000back down so their folk soul awoke at this time to one degree or another and i think it's a it's
02:23:41.400a really interesting point in history and it you know is still a still a thing or a functional
02:23:50.600deal with the dane law up until just about till till the norman conquest um we do get oh there's
02:24:00.760a lot of references to um there's a lot of christian writings about complaining about
02:24:06.200paganism still being present in anglo-saxon england there's a lot of law codes that treat
02:24:12.200paganism as like a crime that people are still doing regularly. I think the thing
02:24:19.400about the conceptualization of this religious conflict that differed between the Christians
02:24:26.520and the the et cetera is that before I forget this um I couldn't find it again but I did one
02:24:33.720time find a a some kind of writing by some monk complaining about paganism still being omnipresent
02:24:41.720within the the military and the kingship it it's not entirely clear what he means there
02:24:47.400he might have been talking about like the sacred king kind of thing but it it must have been
02:24:54.920extremely difficult for these gregorian missionary guys to do this with every aspect of a society
02:25:01.960like in this society violence and military action would have been deeply associated with the cult of
02:25:08.440odin for example at like minimum they would have to separate it from all sorts of things
02:25:16.760through a very long running process of enculturation that did not happen quickly
02:25:22.360as i was saying sorry for being jumbled here um from what i can see about how asatruara understood
02:25:30.520their religion in this period it was mostly focused on this kind of like that's just what
02:25:35.800we do around here we just do these kinds of things mindset combined with personal loyalty to the gods
02:25:43.400so when like athelbert apostatizes people do get upset there are people who are very deeply
02:25:51.380personally loyal but they're personally loyal they conceptualize it as personal loyalty to
02:25:57.120the gods so they view athelbert as disloyal he's a traitor to othin they don't view it as taking
02:26:06.420the wrong side in a an ideological struggle they don't view it as like he's on the wrong side they
02:26:16.460view it as like he has committed an error to the god and that's not wrong to do but the lack of an
02:26:24.560ideological component to anglo-sex and osatru makes it difficult for them to resist in this
02:26:32.940kind of you have to always be on way that the the christians are able to like if you just look at
02:26:41.340the timeline in abstract like i know that's really easy because i have the timeline up here
02:26:45.640but it's like the gregorian mission is established 569 the pope got a letter asking for help 100
02:26:52.940years prior the gregorian mission is established 569 it's not until 580 that gregory actually gets
02:27:00.860a chance to deploy this meaningfully with with athobert and bertha marrying that is an extreme
02:27:08.860time horizon that people who are actively looking at the world and trying to enforce an ideological
02:27:17.580vision upon it are able to do that people whose religiosity or politics i mean it's the same for
02:27:24.940both is just a kind of day-to-day lived reality just aren't really able to conceptualize defend
02:27:34.140against engage with you know it's like it's like a man without legs playing basketball against
02:27:43.340michael jordan here just in terms of sheer ability to engage with this stuff on the fly
02:27:49.660particularly because of the particular uh affectation of the germanic peoples to
02:27:58.140not have like a druid kind of class or like a brahmin class there are gothar at this time
02:28:03.820but they are local technical specialists rather than like traveling priests who are trying to
02:28:09.500ensure ideological correctness with like everyone that they meet like the druids were which is
02:28:15.260actually kind of humorous because the actual druids got exterminated by um julius caesar and
02:28:21.420the romans because they were a threat to roman rule precisely because they were a traveling priest0.50
02:28:28.060class who in enforced is a hard a harsh word here given that the celts were like willingly
02:28:34.300doing this but the druids enforced ideological and religious correctness and conformity to the
02:28:39.820celts and it's worth noting here the romans were not opposed to the celtic polytheistic religion
02:28:45.100augustus my source here as um lady with a mead cup augustus traveled to some place where uh
02:28:53.660gaul and germania met and he worshiped gallo roman germanic mercury
02:29:00.380in the traditional manner he basically performed bloat to odin or perhaps he performed a sacrifice
02:29:07.480to to lu or the dog day it's not entirely clear but like augustus went to this went into gaul
02:29:14.660and performed religion on the native people's terms there's a huge amount of romanized celtic
02:29:23.600religious archaeological stuff it's not that the romans were opposed to the celtic polytheism
02:29:30.220It's that they were opposed to the druids acting as this sort of enforcer class, if you will.
02:29:36.880And we can see why they were opposed to it, because that's the sort of thing that helps a populist resist incursion by foreign ideologies and religions.0.91
02:29:48.940In India, this is a function that the Brahmins fulfill.0.61
02:29:51.360There are functionally similar examples with the Muslim world and with China and Japan, but it's a little less clear cut because there isn't this clear like Brahmin caste.0.95
02:30:04.380You are a Brahmin, a Druid kind of thing.
02:30:08.480That's an Indo-European society kind of thing.
02:30:11.180It's not something you see in non-Indo-European societies like China.
02:36:53.780So there's a lot of early Anglo-Saxon saints.0.88
02:36:58.200They're just some Christian and they just like die in a war,
02:37:01.760another christian they're not martyred by pagans or something like that they just go off get in a0.94
02:37:06.160fight over territory while being christian with another christian and die and they get turned
02:37:10.640into a saint because the the veneration of kings was just a germanic thing that they did
02:37:20.320and it goes both ways so um a bit of an awkward one here our man osric is actually listed as a
02:37:28.320saint in an early 8th century christian calendar because he was a king who died so christians had
02:37:38.480to venerate him well of course we're going to venerate our king we have to do it it's just
02:37:43.440something that was expected of you as an anglo-saxon right so so they take this this pagan
02:37:49.520king who dies fighting christians and they make him a saint because that's just what they have to
02:37:55.760do. By comparison, when the Roman, so the Roman emperors were deified, right? The Senate would0.63
02:38:03.200declare them a god. And the precise specifics, it's more like they're declaring them an alfar,0.80
02:38:08.280but it's semantics, right? The last Roman emperor that had that done to them was Valens,
02:38:15.620who was a christian like um he was also yeah valens is the the guy who dies spectacularly
02:38:27.060uh poorly um anyways uh do you want to get to questions i don't think i have anything more in
02:38:33.680my notes no i think that's kind of takes us to where we're at we do have a few questions
02:38:39.380i can't can i just sorry i'm sorry i should have said this before you're fine um i think
02:38:44.300if you had to do like a kind of summation of this period it is a two-fold
02:38:52.720rejection of the idea of british history as an island rejecting any kind of history as an island
02:39:01.100right but especially with british history where there is so much of an attempt at separating
02:39:06.700british everything from the continent right it is literally an island yes it is literally
02:39:14.460an island but it's clearly not too much of an island for christianity to cross the channel
02:39:20.700right um the other thing is the necessity of organized ideological
02:39:29.820action and cooperation in a hierarchical fashion for anything that you care about
02:39:38.880because if you don't organize you will be organized by your enemies whether you are aware
02:39:47.440of it or not and that that seems to be a going theme throughout religious history and the degree
02:39:55.300to which you keep get to keep any of your stuff after you get organized by someone else is uh
02:40:03.060entirely up in the air you know we have
02:40:09.300if you can go find like let's just do i'm a language nerd so let's just do language real
02:40:13.860quick here go look up english and try to read english wikipedia without knowing how to read
02:40:20.340to Old English. It's a pretty different looking thing from how we write and talk and speak today.
02:40:32.100That is the result of, now granted, it's not the result of Christianity in the Anglo-Saxon period,
02:40:38.800it's the result of the Norman Conquest, but it's like part of why the Norman Conquest,
02:40:44.720and actually the Norman Conquest of Gaelic Ireland too while we're at it, was allowed to
02:40:49.660happened was because this this anglo-saxon christianity was so syncretic was because
02:40:55.360jesus being a warrior was too much jesus the apostles being thanes was too much the sacred
02:41:03.000king was too much even that was a half measure that eventually had to be corrected now granted
02:41:09.040it's not like the pope told the normans to go do the norman invasion but there was a sort of like
02:41:13.720um the chinese have a term i can't remember what it is in mandarin but it
02:41:18.740kind of means like crisis tunity there's a crisis but that's an opportunity and you always have to
02:41:25.340make the best of an opportunity and if you don't someone else is gonna so there's a reason we
02:41:35.080organize absolutely and it's important it's important that those of us that practice also
02:41:43.400true live our faith and learn lessons from the past i think there is a lot of people that
02:41:57.240want to study the history but without applying the lessons learned from that
02:42:05.480to project things into the future it's like they're
02:42:08.360um it's like they're a neutral observer and that's antithetical to what alsatru is
02:42:17.400it's living that trough to the isir which as noble arian people puts it upon us to
02:42:25.800learn lessons of the past and shape things better into the future
02:42:31.960but go ahead just to say and i i don't want anyone to think i'm
02:42:35.640I'm opposed to people having a conception of religion that is based on personal loyalty to the Aesir or on the lived day-to-day reality of the spiritual world, in a sense.
02:42:50.040But an ideological component, an intellectual component that views things in terms of principles is necessary for anything at scale.
02:43:05.640you know yeah absolutely but i don't i mean the two go hand in hand and i think that
02:43:13.640binding organizational structure gets us a lot of the way i think they did have a lot of ideological
02:43:24.120commonality i don't because you see that in the way that christianity has to contort itself
02:43:32.200in order to make it self-appealing Christianity on Jewish you know hippie rabbi terms would never
02:43:42.320have been remotely successful it had to contort their core values into you know early medieval
02:43:52.820European warrior things and not, you know, wandering desert rabbi and his Jewish friends
02:44:04.660in urban Roman Judea, it just never would have been appealing. The value systems are0.80
02:44:10.760completely askew from one another. So I think Christianity is a lot more bending early on
02:46:57.760So okay, I say that to be obnoxious, but the answer to most of those questions are yes.
02:47:08.900So the reason we didn't do a lot of comparing and contrasting is confusing enough as it
02:47:12.580is when we wanted to present the cohesive whole, and we did mention that we might do
02:47:18.000the niblungen lead by itself at some point and saying that i do think it's valuable i
02:47:24.640like the imagery a lot more i like the high medieval i suppose that's a misnomer because
02:47:32.320it was written very early on but i like the scale and the grandeur of the niblungen lead
02:47:38.640better than i like the i don't know more rustic setting of the volsung saga
02:47:47.840but i think there's stuff to be learned from both i think certainly your point is yes one is more
02:47:55.520advanced as far as all of the extras and all of the setting that our characters are placed in
02:48:04.960And it looks really different in early, very early medieval Scandinavia than it does in much more middle medieval Germany.
02:48:21.920But they are all reflections that come down to us of the same core story.
02:48:27.800i do think the christianization in the continent affects the way the story plays out and it affects
02:48:35.360the more very sharp black and white differences in the characters whereas you get a lot more of
02:48:42.700the subtlety in the norse material and it's why i think that as australia we prioritize the
02:48:51.180Volsunga saga over the Niblungen lead, because it leaves a lot of that behind. But it, I like the
02:48:59.100way it's told. I like the setting. So I think that it's certainly very valuable. And I think that
02:49:05.600either or, but ideally both are worth us looking at and comparing and contrasting, because I think
02:49:16.120there's, there's cool. I think there are valuable things about both. I also think there's cool
02:49:22.160things about both that are just presented. Depending upon the stuff that you like, or the
02:49:29.740imagery that you like, or even storytelling that you like, I think they're both really valuable
02:49:35.300things to have. Chris, do you have any thoughts? My thought is I shouldn't mute first. So I think
02:49:45.180the thing about it is that this is another one of those examples of like um the the syncretism
02:49:53.260that we were talking about right uh so we end up with the thing is that germanic society was an
02:50:06.340oral tradition or an oral culture right so you would have or we would have these like
02:50:12.780poets skulls um the old english word was like show um the celtic oguland is bards these would
02:50:20.840be traveling poets who would memorize a huge amount of poetic formulas like um achilles is
02:50:30.560always swift-footed the dawn is always rosy fingered or something like that hera is white
02:50:36.660any female character is white-armed right and they would know the gist of a story but they
02:50:43.960would piece it together basically on the fly right like nine and like the it's the same plot
02:50:49.500beats every time but it's like is Achilles swift-footed is he strong-armed does it really
02:50:55.600matter in this verse right so to a degree it's kind of just natural for an oral society which
02:51:07.280people were still doing into like the 1600s it wasn't really until the printing press came along
02:51:14.540that people stopped the europeans stopped being very oral focused because remember like yeah you
02:51:22.260could get like a book was changed to a desk in a church or a monastery if you were lucky you could
02:51:29.440pay someone to make a copy of it and in a few years you'd get your copy of the book years if
02:51:36.000you're lucky so what what scholars would do is they would read these books and they came up with
02:51:41.060these techniques to memorize enormous amounts of information if you've heard of like the method of
02:51:46.400loci or the the like theater of the mind or any of this kind of stuff these memorization techniques
02:51:53.920were used by scholars to remember books because they could not have them on hand they were lucky
02:52:00.300if they had a bible like maybe half maybe the gospels or maybe the old testament and so they
02:52:07.380would memorize this huge quantities of information and so storytelling was done in a oral tradition
02:52:17.020manner where the poet is going to depict things as he thinks is appropriate and so stories could
02:52:24.760be very ancient but would be moved forward so to a degree the story reflecting um like
02:52:34.860more uh modern values or literally society is on the one hand yes it's not accurately conveying
02:52:47.800some ancient thing but it's also not really trying to do that it's like those medieval
02:52:52.640paintings of alexander the great and his men and they're wearing like ornate plate mail and like
02:52:59.360riding horses with like lances like jousting lances and they're doing battle with like turks
02:53:05.320with like turbans and stuff yes it's not actually what the ancient thing would have looked like but
02:53:12.260it's also not trying to be it's conveying what this looks like to this society so
02:53:20.340it's very useful in as much as it conveys like things that have survived but it also does talk
02:53:28.140about the you know the the high german period because it's for the high german period it's not
02:53:35.580supposed to be a perfect rendition of ancient anything um i don't think we're necessarily like
02:53:45.180worsened by it by the the more modern one necessarily having christian stuff in it
02:53:51.940Because, again, a lot of this isn't like the Pope dictating down and then make the ring such like this because it's a reference to the tricking of Esau out of his birthright.
02:54:07.480You know, it's a poet who knows a little bit and, yeah, they get married in a church because weddings happen in churches.
02:54:15.380it doesn't it doesn't contaminate the story in my opinion well i also think that you know being
02:54:26.180honest characters in the story that are based on real people don't work historically so the story
02:54:35.860is a work of fiction that tells that's set in a period and it's a really cool work of fiction
02:54:44.980that's helpful to us and that teaches us you know a lot of things and it is you know seminal to so
02:54:54.180much of the development of european i don't know heroes and story arc but i think that the ousted
02:55:03.620true elements are certainly emphasized much more in the norse telling of it because it was done
02:55:09.860you know, a lot of the source material came from the Ausitru period or very shortly thereafter,
02:55:17.220whereas that link is much more distant in the Niblungenlied. But either way, I think that
02:55:26.080the nature of the narrative is going to change depending on the time that it's told in.
02:55:33.380those are you know good periods of history I think it was a modern woke version it would be
02:55:43.860terrible so I mean I think that if we were having this discussion in 1400 then we might be a little
02:55:52.560bit more picky about certain things but it's not I think there's value to each and that's why I
02:55:59.180think it's an either or proposition i think it's a both and synthesizing and learning lessons from
02:56:04.060each um it would be stupid not to treat them as connected because they clearly are but i don't
02:56:11.580think you have to force that connection i think you can treat them as two parallel stories that
02:56:18.140are both beneficial i i don't think we should be looking at these as necessarily super historical
02:56:25.740texts is kind of the thing like like attila the hun is a character but he's not a hun you know
02:56:32.940you know he's like a germanic warlord he has a yeah and there's a number of characters from that
02:56:39.420period but as we say when we're going over that swan and i this is getting written down at the
02:56:46.140earliest 600 years after it happened which is tremendous that so many of the pieces and names
02:56:53.740and places make it down to the poet at that time also from johan my second question is a bit more
02:57:00.940straightforward and answerable in a shorter context i've heard it stated uh that matt and
02:57:07.340various other afa leaders will be moving to uh sigerheim in tennessee that's all well and good
02:57:13.740but what consideration has been given to how that would impact the rest where the hoffs and
02:57:18.860leadership currently are um it was said in some episodes of vns that spawn would move
02:57:25.820and that prompted me to think what will thorshoff do will that not weaken the presence and community
02:57:32.060there uh if all of the key motivated leadership move could that lessen the afa's reach throughout
02:57:38.860the country would it be a sort of brain drain effect where the best and the brightest move
02:57:44.380and most devoted moved to tennessee and then over time the hoff districts deteriorate um
02:57:52.300so i appreciate the question and it's something that you know i think that many of us have given
02:57:58.460thought to um short answer is no i think that
02:58:06.940life doesn't work that way taking successful and motivated p and like
02:58:15.580people that have stuff to lose and have put down roots and are successful are very hard
02:58:23.060to get to pick up and move somewhere so i don't think you know under the best possible
02:58:29.620trying to get everyone to go their circumstances i don't think that's going to get everybody i do
02:58:37.780think it will get some people but i think there's a lot of people that are very rooted to where
02:58:42.640they're at so i think that all of the above is an appropriate way to think of it one of the things
02:58:51.300about um the location too that's important it's equidistant from it's like eight hours and
02:59:01.540it depends on what time of day you run it so let's say it's eight hours even from1.00
02:59:06.900frey's hof thor's hof and yord's off worst case scenario if we pulled leadership from those hofs0.52
02:59:16.340all went there we could send those people back out once a month to host the current obligations0.93
02:59:24.100they currently host at those hoffs without any effect happening so that's part of what's been
02:59:29.700thought about but also we're growing and we have to have an eye towards growth so we need to be
02:59:39.220able to sustain these places to where one gothe is not the success or failure of an entire hof
02:59:46.420and an entire district so we do have plans in place building up um more leadership over time
02:59:55.380and this is a frustrating thing to admit but you know i've wanted to go down to tennessee and
03:00:01.700we've had the property and we're you know many years into that now much more than i would have
03:00:07.620liked before i can get down there and that's just me so this is a process where over time i think
03:00:15.060people who are particularly devoted and particularly want to be involved with the day-to-day
03:00:22.740running of afa from the capital will trickle there as they can but there's plenty of people
03:00:31.780that won't and that aren't able to and we're absolutely committed once we get a hof somewhere
03:00:36.740We're committed to the success of that off in perpetuity.
03:00:41.020So it is something we've thought about.
03:00:45.480If people want to pick up and move and go somewhere, it's not right to lash our most devoted members of leadership to a physical location to where they can't move.
03:00:57.840and they can't try to structure their life around something that's more in tune with their hopes
03:01:05.360and dreams involved with the AFA and the AFA's success. So we're at a level to where we can send
03:01:12.640people out to run things at different Hoffs if we had to, if everybody went there, but it's just not
03:01:19.440going to flesh out that way. And the other thing that I think is really important is to
03:02:49.920This is something I think is really important.
03:02:53.740So everybody who's in the AFA should pick up and move to one of our Hoffs.
03:03:00.560Move as close as you can to one of our Hoffs.
03:03:04.160But I know that's not going to happen.
03:03:06.640So what I'd like to see is lots of people do that, and the ones that don't or can't, or it's not the right season of their life, we will get Hoffs closer to them.
03:03:18.980we want to consolidate people in certain areas, but we also want to expand. And I think we have
03:03:24.840enough people with different motivations in life and different circumstances where those that can
03:03:30.420should move close to a Hoff. Those that can't should work on building a community where they're
03:03:35.700at that can sustain a Hoff when it's time. And I think that'll all work out fine. And, you know,
03:03:42.520like like chris said folk building is a thing we need folk builders and here's the thing there's
03:03:50.520not a limited supply anybody that wants to serve the icer and our church the afa in that capacity
03:03:59.400can be very instant instrumental in building infrastructure and community to get a hof closer
03:04:05.560to where they're at so the answer really is all of the above on those things and i think that kind
03:04:11.000of approach is going to be the most successful in the circumstances that we're dealing with.
03:04:19.480Good evening Ozheri Gauthier Matt, folk builder Chris, and folk builder Nick. This question
03:04:25.080is about the episode about the Goths. What is the legacy of the Goth? Who, if anyone,
03:04:33.160was their inheritors? Thank you for all that you do. Chris take first swing at this.
03:04:41.000Um, I think you could unironically say like the best answer would have to be Europe as a whole, because the thing like genetically, they don't really have much continuity into the modern era, except for a little bit in Romania.0.77
03:04:57.440Their language dies out. Their religion doesn't continue all that much, at least their specific form of Asatru doesn't continue much longer after Aethanaric.0.73
03:05:10.640Um, culturally, they don't really have too long of a lasting impact, at least in Eastern Europe. Romania is a Slavo-Italic culture today, Italo-Slavic, whatever.
03:05:29.780Um, but they do have a surprisingly long reaching, um, influence throughout the rest of Europe. They were, their, their legacy was very important for the Germans who saw them as a pre-modern Germans, um, 18, 1800s and earlier,
03:05:54.300saw the goths as a kind of um heroic version of the german um gothic architecture actually
03:06:03.540originated as a slur for gothic originated as a slur for the uh the northern cathedrals in france
03:06:13.200which were unsuitably roman due to not being made of bricks and the gothic was actually a slur and
03:06:19.580it very quickly became a point of pride um even amongst the french the spanish actually have a
03:06:28.460lot of so the aristocracy of spain um one thesis for its origination is actually from visigothic
03:06:36.420warriors who moved into and conquered iberia and established themselves as the elite of it and
03:06:42.580that's true that happened um that's why you see like mexicans with names like as volto and
03:06:49.340roberto because oswald and robert come to spanish from gothic um
03:07:00.060and are we talking the mexican mexicans or the brazilian mexicans
03:07:05.980see what you did there well i'm sure there are brazilians with names like oswaldo and roberto
03:07:11.740i just don't know i can read portuguese we're talking about the hapsburg mexicans
03:07:16.540but like uh the the goths remained pretty pretty uh heavily in the minds of the spanish for a
03:07:31.820surprisingly long period of time in a lot of the conflicts in latin america between republicans
03:07:38.280and monarchists and, uh, stay loyal to Spain versus being an independent country kind of
03:07:46.320conflicts. Um, Godos, Los Godos was a slur to refer to the, uh, monarchist or, um, Spanish
03:07:59.100loyalist side um the scandinavian countries have all claimed descent from the goths the swedes uh
03:08:10.000having possibly one of the better claims there because the the goths were swedes who got up and
03:08:17.320left at one point both the danish and swedish crowns claimed descent from the goths and the
03:08:26.220Danish and Danish and Swedish kings both claimed to be the king of the Goths um the Swedish king
03:08:32.320was the king of Gotland so he was literally the king of the land of the Goths uh there's actually
03:08:39.100like a papal council where all of the kings of Europe showed up and the Spanish and Swedish
03:08:45.540kings got in a fight because they both claimed to be kings of the Goths and that meant they got to
03:08:51.740sit closer to the pope um i think the legacy of the goths is as this strong proud noble germanic
03:09:01.300people that their their extinction as a living ethnos allowed them to become a kind of universal
03:09:11.160european figure of meaning something to everyone in europe because no one really is a goth anymore
03:09:19.240so in a certain sense we all kind of are goths or like we all have been impacted by them in as much
03:09:27.440as all european countries have some kind of something to say about the goths i know that's
03:09:33.460kind of rambly but it's kind of like who are their inheritors well i don't really think anyone is
03:09:40.460You know, at least not in the, at least not in the England is Anglo-Saxia today kind of a sense.
03:09:49.980yeah I think that they become kind of a root
03:10:02.540I don't know a root population for European nobility in general and I think it's telling
03:10:13.560that numerous royal lines trace their legitimacy to being inheritors of the goths
03:10:24.600and since swedish royal family is currently installed by napoleon
03:10:31.880i'm going to say that the spanish royal house i think is the one most active that traces descent
03:10:38.440to the goths the like existent one that currently does it's strange that like
03:10:49.160I don't know the Habsburgs I guess get gothic cool points because wherever you know Charles V's
03:10:58.760empire was, there is a piece of Gothic legacy to it. But yeah, I
03:11:07.340think it's one of those shared heritages that binds European
03:11:14.020nobility. And so I think it's special when we focus on their
03:11:24.580history and their myths. And I think it's kind of a shame that
03:11:27.320they're so unsung in modern times, because that legacy was something that was valued for its
03:11:34.780legitimacy in the medieval period a lot. And I think it flows well into the question we had
03:11:40.580earlier about the Niblungenlied. Largely, you know, tribes involved in that during that period
03:11:47.940are Gothic tribes. Cool book that you guys should get is The Mysteries of the Goths by Edvard
03:11:56.420Thorson. I like that book a lot. It is obscure. I don't know that it's his best book, but it's
03:12:03.780probably my favorite of his because it was just really neat. And I hadn't read, I hadn't encountered
03:12:11.760that material before. It's been a long time since I read it. So I hope it lives up to the hype,
03:12:17.600but I thought it was really cool when I read it. I really enjoyed it.
03:12:20.200Goethe Mayo asks, Folk Builder Savage, who is the greatest Anglo-Saxon king,
03:50:48.360Okay, so yeah, no, just looking at it etymologically, and I'm not being ignorant.
03:51:17.100It absolutely became synonymous with doing a sacrifice at some point, but fundamentally, it meant to make any sort of offering.
03:51:30.120And the most fundamental offering, looking at a number of things, this came up in the goth episode too, the root word of that is like those who pour out or pour out an offering.
03:51:42.940so the idea was pouring out and so doing a liquid like our offerings of mead are closer to the
03:51:51.740original usage than a sacrifice than a blood sacrifice but i get what you're saying it's
03:52:01.660just the more we we looked in the linguistics that's not necessary it is a part of something
03:52:08.860that certainly our ancestors did but it's not fundamentally what that word means it means to
03:52:15.260pour out an offering um and we very much do that always with sacred liquid we've always done that
03:52:22.860since the beginning and it's worth noting that the the roots of ritual technical terms often do have
03:52:31.980sort of metaphorical usage like to pour out an offering well you have to remember the principal
03:52:37.260old english word for um performing religion was begangen which is cognate with um
03:52:45.660no one uses this outside of denouf but gang meaning to like walk so like you would begon
03:52:52.940like you know you'd say something like i begon bloat which literally means like i block bloat
03:52:58.540but that's not it's not as literal so it's like yes we pour out the offering that's kind of also
03:53:07.640a metaphorical term for just making the offering in general i am pouring out the offering by kill
03:53:14.940by having declared this cow to be sacred killing it butchering it and then offering the meat
03:53:19.700we're saying we pour it out but that's not that doesn't necessarily mean it always has to be a
03:53:25.800a dumping out of liquid literally right because once the term acquires the ritual technical usage
03:53:33.460it's kind of detached from what the roots literally mean like um one word in the old
03:53:40.620english corpus for prayer is worthian which literally means like to worth like how do you
03:53:48.420how do you worth something what what does that mean well it means to speak the praises of to
03:53:52.980apply value to which isn't really what you're doing when you say you worth something right
03:53:58.940because it's not it's not really a you get what i mean here like the making the word a ritual
03:54:06.380technical term unglues it from the literal definition of the word by etymology in a lot
03:54:12.000of these cases so it's it's kind of like well it doesn't necessarily make sense if you take it back
03:54:17.980to proto-indo-european why this word meaning to pour out comes to mean to declare sacred well
03:54:24.240it doesn't necessarily have to be so literal because we see this a lot like i mean this is
03:54:31.280kind of a silly modern example but like christians take communion they're eating a cracker and
03:54:36.920drinking wine you know not to be a little flippant but it's like but how is that communing well it
03:54:43.340Once it takes upon the technical usage, it doesn't necessarily literally mean to like share hands or whatever.
03:54:51.140I'm going to look up the etymology of communion from Latin real quick.
03:54:57.460And we keep talking on the word sacrifice.
03:56:56.920You know, I get that, but that's very much the reasoning for it.
03:57:01.400We're not pretending that that's how the ancestors did it.
03:57:05.320We're making our calendar function for people in 2025 using the calendar.0.99
03:57:10.400You know, I just want to say our Substack does have quite a number of articles discussing the theology of how we do bloat by overly loquacious folk builder.0.98