Asatru Folk Assembly - 11⧸12⧸25 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 175 - The Loyal Anglo-Saxons

00:00:00.000 It's good.

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

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00:01:30.000 Thank you.

00:02:00.000 Thank you.

00:02:30.000 Thank you.

00:03:00.000 Hello and welcome to this week's very special edition of Victory Never Sleeps.

00:03:13.000 Those 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.

00:03:42.180 and the brave men that stood against it in various different ways.

00:03:49.240 Anyone who saw Chris's episode on the goths will have high expectations for this program.

00:03:58.160 And I have every reason to believe that you will not be disappointed.

00:04:01.820 So get something to drink, tell your friends, spread the word.

00:04:07.800 Because I think we're in for a treat this evening.

00:04:12.180 top of the show stuff. So far, we have a very exciting and enthusiastic number of people

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00:07:26.100 I think that's all the top of the program news I have for guys this week.

00:07:36.160 Yeah, so here we are.

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00:08:51.140 yeah with that uh hey first Chris how you doing tonight I am doing very well sir I'm doing very

00:09:02.440 well um all things are going well lovely little daughter is doing well she is drifting off to

00:09:08.180 sleep I can hear the silence out outside my office so that's good excellent

00:09:14.700 all right so it's kind of your show tonight and i will in uh interject as necessary or

00:09:27.500 i don't know as as a as i feel so inclined but uh take it away start wherever you would like

00:09:34.940 um what kind of background tell folks where you're starting and what they need to know

00:09:41.980 so to begin with the we're talking about we're we're talking about four heroes from anglo-saxon

00:09:50.620 england the anglo-saxons anglo-saxon is an old term or a rather a term we use for the the english

00:10:00.220 people when they were still a very young people we're talking about england which is britain

00:10:06.540 sans ireland right and sans wales at this time so i just kind of wanted to start off with a

00:10:16.060 brief history of britain as a place to kind of set the stage for the anglo-saxons because as you can

00:10:25.500 tell from the name anglo-saxon them being in the british isles is a bit of a historical phenomena

00:10:33.580 so around starting at the beginning around uh 9999 bc the british isles are inhabited by early

00:10:43.820 hominids and neolithic hunter-gatherer peoples start entering when the glaciers retreat neolithic

00:10:51.100 hunter-gatherers are one of the three early populations that go on to become modern white

00:10:56.620 people um around 7 000 ish cheddar man lives in the british isles so at this time britain

00:11:08.220 is the northwest peninsula of europe it is connected to mainland france by just solid land

00:11:15.680 and there's this big stretch of chalk that connects the the what we now refer to as the

00:11:25.340 British Isles to mainland Europe and glaciation, rising sea levels, a lot of complicated stuff over

00:11:33.440 literal thousands of years lead to this stretch of land that connects Britain to France getting

00:11:41.180 eroded away. The land that gets eroded away is referred to as Doggerland. Nick can throw up a

00:11:47.560 map of that if he wants. It's not super important because by the time we care, it's all gone

00:11:53.040 anyways. But Doggerland finishes sinking, or sorry, around 4,000 BC, early European farmer

00:12:00.080 peoples enter Britain. These are people who come out of Anatolia. They're the second wave of

00:12:05.140 population that goes on to become modern white people. So around 3,800 BC, Doggerland finishes 0.96

00:12:12.660 sinking. Around 3,300 BC, there's a hunter-gatherer resurgence. For a period of time, the early

00:12:21.200 european farmer peoples gain predominance over the hunter-gatherer peoples of europe

00:12:25.040 when we say hunter-gatherer they're not literally just surviving off of hunting deer

00:12:28.880 what that means is that they don't they don't farm grain they do practice plant cultivation

00:12:34.660 of various other kinds but in 3000 ish bc the hunter-gatherers experienced some kind of

00:12:42.160 resurgence and gain predominance over the earlier the farmers it's not entirely clear why we don't

00:12:49.420 really need to care. We're moving on. Around 2,400 or so BC, the Bell Beaker peoples, who have

00:12:58.400 some degree of early European farmer and Neolithic hunter-gatherer DNA already, enter Britain.

00:13:04.900 These are Indo-European speaking peoples. They speak a language that is distantly related to

00:13:10.720 modern English. This is when the Bronze Age begins. Again, there's technical specifics that

00:13:16.160 don't need to get into here so around 800 ish bc again give or take the celts start entering so

00:13:25.360 there's this 2 000 year stretch between the first indo-european peoples and the continental celts

00:13:33.280 as we understand them moving in right um the bell beakers and the celts the bronze age and iron age

00:13:41.760 inter-european peoples both arrived via boat whereas the nila the country gatherer and

00:13:46.800 european farmer peoples walk into britain right so in the bronze age britain was really important

00:13:55.280 because it exported tin geologically tin and copper do not show up in the same places however

00:14:04.160 if you combine tin and you combine copper you get bronze which is superior to both

00:14:09.440 for a lot of things including weapons and this resulted in large-scale trade networks throughout

00:14:16.960 europe to europe throughout europe and the mediterranean to move around people and tin

00:14:22.800 and copper to these urban centers that were centered around warlords basically enslaving

00:14:30.240 people to farm grain and the bronze age collapse results in these trade networks collapsing and

00:14:38.640 every little warlord sitting on his hill thinks what am i going to do to get metal so they turn

00:14:44.800 to iron iron is really common it's ubiquitous but at this this time we're talking about like 2000

00:14:53.920 bc it's it's inferior to bronze overall and as the bronze age collapse goes on people start

00:15:03.680 figuring out how to work iron how to literally work iron like the problem is that with tin and

00:15:10.640 copper you mix them together you make bronze and you melt it and cast it and then you do some heat

00:15:16.000 treating and if you're making a sword you like grind out a blade right but with iron it's it

00:15:21.840 makes cast iron if you just let the liquid iron out of the furnace so it has to be subjected to

00:15:29.980 reductive processes which require at the time borderline magic involving um calciferous

00:15:36.480 minerals and the like but then you have to hit it with a hammer a lot and you have to like fold it

00:15:42.440 it's kind of like working a pastry but at high temperatures on an anvil with a hammer and so

00:15:47.580 figuring out how to make iron workable leads to it's leads to uh the iron age happening

00:15:58.240 so from 800 bc to around 550 bc britain is run by the celts people who are related to the modern

00:16:11.000 irish the modern welsh the modern uh kind of the modern cornish um brittany the northwest

00:16:18.960 peninsula off of france is also um a place where celts live so the celtic world is this pretty

00:16:28.800 complicated network of republican city-states with like written constitutions and not anything

00:16:37.600 like we would approximate it but like democratic processes and kings and there's this complex

00:16:45.440 priest caste of druids and it's a really complex network of individual nodes and

00:16:55.320 the Celts were in long-term combat with their cousins the Italics to the south

00:17:02.040 this is Romans perennial wars with the Gauls and eventually the Romans start to

00:17:08.100 gain predominance, leading to the early imperial claimant, I guess you could call him, Julius Caesar

00:17:20.920 in 55 BC, leading his first invasion of Britain. So Caesar's big gimmick was if he led an illegal

00:17:31.340 bandit raid into Gaul of such size that he stole all of the gold in France, he could basically pay

00:17:38.160 off his enemies in Rome to forgive him for breaking the law repeatedly. I'm really glossing

00:17:45.320 this over because we don't care about Roman history for this, up to where it becomes relevant.

00:17:51.760 So in 55 BC, Caesar leads his first invasion, and 54 BC, Caesar leads his second invasion.

00:17:58.820 By 54 AD, everything up to the Roman city of Lindum, Lincoln in Lincolnshire today, is within the Roman sphere.

00:18:11.140 So the Roman little e empire was a complex civilizational network of client-patron relations going back to the city of Rome.

00:18:24.920 we have a tendency today to backport modern ideas of statehood onto the roman empire

00:18:31.960 so it was more like how regarding how romans rome's client states worked it was more like how

00:18:40.140 the united states federal government's international empire works germany is not a

00:18:47.100 a de facto a de jure um like territorial unit within the united states federal government

00:18:56.620 german lawmakers do not have to get the u.s president say so before they write a law they

00:19:03.020 don't have to take it to the u.s senate but germany is still full of american military bases

00:19:08.940 it's still deeply economically connected to the american economy and it's still deeply influenced

00:19:15.780 by american media so it's a client to a patron but it's not outright like part of a state it

00:19:24.020 doesn't take orders so when the romans move through the celtic world i will make i will

00:19:32.500 distinguish uh gall i'll talk about that name a little bit later why it's a gall but the romans

00:19:38.580 would call it gallia which actually has no relationship to gall but whatever um how it

00:19:44.340 What 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?

00:19:53.440 And whoever turned traitor and worked with him first got the preferential treatment when Rome inevitably conquered the area.

00:20:02.840 So 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.

00:20:18.040 And 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.

00:20:42.360 So it's kind of like the situation that Canada and Mexico are in with the U.S.,

00:20:48.440 where there's an incredible flow of goods and labor and everything across a nominal border.

00:20:57.020 So Rome is the dominant power in Britain circa 54 AD.

00:21:03.640 Boudicca's revolt is in 60 AD. 0.81

00:21:06.020 Boudicca 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.

00:21:29.360 her and her people lead a desperate last ditch suicide by cop at a military scale fight against

00:21:38.840 Rome and lose very very badly but they do not suffer the indignity of becoming slaves

00:21:44.140 and it's worth noting here that slavery in the Roman Empire meant a lot of things

00:21:49.200 a lot of slaves did not lead very sucky lives there were a number large number of slaves who

00:21:56.120 led incredibly terrible lives they would be worked to death and that would come very quickly like

00:22:02.880 within weeks if not months of being sent to where you were going to be working as a slave um at this

00:22:09.320 time also uh one of the worst things that could happen to you short of getting chucked into the

00:22:14.000 coliseum to get torn apart by lions for the the cheering of the crowd was being sent to a gold

00:22:20.860 a gold factory or a gold mine or worse a quick silver mine because you would be working with

00:22:28.920 mercury and you would go crazy and die a very painful death due to mercury poisoning so when

00:22:37.240 we see buddhika like rebelling against roman rule when we see celtic powers rebelling against roman 0.98

00:22:42.520 rule they're not doing this because they're dumb or because they're savages it's because they 0.96

00:22:48.380 understand very well that if they don't play their cards right they suffer a very bad fate 1.00

00:22:54.220 because the roman little e empire chews up and spits people out at this time so 0.91

00:23:01.820 in 6980 we have the year of the four emperors when there are four emperors do you want to say

00:23:09.180 something sir i did and i forgot that i had muted myself i apologize because this is more disruptive

00:23:14.140 than i meant it to be um just because of the nature of your cadence i wanted to recognize gw

00:23:20.460 farnsworth for again he is he's the first one to donate every single week we appreciate him

00:23:26.540 uh donating 20 to the program and 30 towards phrasehoff thank you uh also gilbert gilbert

00:23:34.940 another amazing donor we appreciate you gilbert uh 150 towards baldershoff steeple thank you sir

00:23:42.620 with that uh and angela donated 50 towards praise off and 25 towards baldersoft's people so thank

00:23:50.220 you guys both of you very much uh continue all right so in 69 a.d there is the year of the four

00:24:01.580 emperors so as i said there are four emperors in this year specifically there are four men competing

00:24:08.060 and it's very gone before i do something about roman um

00:24:15.980 roman interaction with quote unquote barbarian tribes

00:24:23.020 i was watching it i was watching a different podcast that made this similarity i think it's

00:24:27.420 true in a lot of ways uh that white folks dealt with with engines when they got to the new world

00:24:34.860 i think when you want to think about britains or germans or gauls you think of them somehow

00:24:42.380 as nations you think of them as germany france and england and it's very much not the case it's

00:24:49.420 lots of inter-tribal politics of non-united tribes that their point of commonality may be cultural

00:24:56.860 and linguistic but not governmental so it one of the things when these rebellions and things would

00:25:04.540 happen is raising their stock to be able to negotiate and deal with rome because rome would

00:25:09.740 choose their favorites to play one against the other and you had different um opportunities

00:25:16.220 and regional power based on those kind of arrangements so that's why you see a lot of

00:25:20.380 these things coming out with like all britons weren't iceni but the iceni had a prominent

00:25:27.260 position amongst the britons and you see that throughout roman politics dealing with tribal

00:25:33.260 groups yeah so that's a really good point because when we talked about the goths right

00:25:44.140 we um i pointed out that this word tribe isn't really accurate um it comes from the latin tribus

00:25:54.160 which literally means third so when rome was founded there were the latins the sabines and the

00:26:01.500 uh uh the etruscans right and so these were three separate ethnic groups like

00:26:09.700 polities in a certain sense like these are my people those are those people we live in the

00:26:16.300 same town but we're not the same group and so they had the same government that ruled over them

00:26:22.760 but they had this local polity of the tribus the third which was a sort of ethnic patronage network

00:26:32.020 collective bargaining mechanism legal representative it was like if all like if

00:26:39.220 white people got a senator in the u.s senate and then so did black people and so did mexicans or

00:26:44.720 something like that right and this institution was supposed to take care of you because the

00:26:50.160 government wasn't going to right so much later today we sort of apply this term tribe onto

00:26:58.720 any sort of ethnic political group or polity without real concern for what it means to the

00:27:08.720 people living there. So like, as I said, these Celtic tribes are urbanized city-states very

00:27:16.120 often that have like written constitutions and democratic elections or something approximating

00:27:22.260 it, right? These are not ooga-booga barbarians rolling around in the mud until men in togas come 0.68

00:27:28.440 along and civilize them in a lot of ways the celts saw the romans as this upstart barbarian 0.86

00:27:35.400 land to the south across the alps where they practiced like mass agricultural slavery

00:27:40.040 so could you bring up the map i i put in the thing nick so if you want to compare

00:27:46.080 a more medieval time period to this you could look at like the holy roman empire

00:27:51.580 oh bear with me sorry that would not be late yeah i know you could compare it to like the

00:28:02.100 holy roman empire where yes they're all germans they all speak the same language they all have

00:28:09.260 the same religion or religious principles with their own local flavor and the like

00:28:13.120 but this is not one unified state it is a massive amount of competing polities all of which are

00:28:23.040 de facto sovereign and in competition with each other so like when caesar shows up he basically

00:28:29.780 asks this mess that this is in germany not france but imagine if it's in france he basically asks

00:28:34.660 this mess who wants to join with me and screw over your competition because when he gets done

00:28:41.540 in gallia in gaul and gallia he doesn't like make them dependent upon the romans for like taxation

00:28:50.520 or whatever rather they are ostensibly allies that are willingly contributing to roman to rome

00:28:58.360 through like defensive pacts and the like as we refer to it now they're helping contribute to like

00:29:03.700 the un effectively now of course we all know that's not how it works in reality past a certain

00:29:09.860 point, but you get the idea here. This isn't a conquest as much as it is an integration into

00:29:18.660 a civilizational sphere. So in 69 AD, there's the year of the four emperors in which Galba,

00:29:25.640 Alpho, Vitellius, and Vespasian all duke it out for who gets to be in charge. And the Celts in 0.70

00:29:31.620 britain rebel so they could do that precisely because they are theoretically independent states

00:29:40.060 that are rebelling against a civilizational complex that isn't working for them anymore

00:29:46.260 so they don't have to be part of it the romans had been recruiting heavily from local celts

00:29:52.860 for the legions in the province of gallia and in britain and so the entire legions just rebel they

00:30:00.760 Just say, you know what, we're independent anymore.

00:30:02.460 We're not subject to Rome anymore.

00:30:04.460 And archaeologically, there's actually a sort of, like, you can see, like, strata where Gaul and Britain, like, re-Celtify when they go rogue.

00:30:16.700 Like, oh, we're Celts again.

00:30:18.460 And then the Romans come back, and they're Roman.

00:30:19.980 And then, oh, we're Celts again.

00:30:21.140 And the Romans come back, and we're Celts again, right?

00:30:23.180 so the romans keep pushing up north into britain and they eventually establish establish hadrian's 0.96

00:30:31.600 wall and the antonine wall as defensive measures against the picts who are for simplicity we're

00:30:39.820 just going to say they're kelts who live in scotland because it's not important where we're 0.98

00:30:43.000 going. So in 306 AD, Constantine takes power, and he is a daschen. He takes power in Rome. There's 0.97

00:30:55.480 this daschen military clique. So as the Roman Empire expands, it has to use a carrot and a stick

00:31:03.720 to get people to partake. The carrot is, if you join, you can fight in the army against other

00:31:10.860 barbarians gain status in rome and get a good position for yourself so barbarian comes from a

00:31:20.820 greek a slur i guess joke that people who are not greek speak by going bar bar bar bar bar bar 0.51

00:31:28.660 right it's like the joke about like chinamen naming their kids by throwing silverware on the

00:31:33.460 floor. Like it's actually that crude in the cultural context of the time, right? Barbarian

00:31:40.740 doesn't necessarily mean technologically or civilizationally unsophisticated. It means

00:31:48.480 un-Greek and later un-Roman, right? So as an example, at the same time that Aristotle was

00:31:54.300 talking about how Germans are dumb because they're too cold, Greece was importing surgical 0.99

00:31:59.640 tools from germany because greeks could not make surgical tools because greeks were not capable of 1.00

00:32:06.300 making tools to use for surgery chiefly because they were made out of iron and the greeks were

00:32:11.400 not as good at iron working as the germanics or the celts were so when we talk about these

00:32:17.300 barbarian peoples it does sound kind of like cocky to say it but like it is unironically a different

00:32:25.100 mindset between different civilizations that are thinking very radically differently in some time

00:32:29.620 in some ways about certain things right so like the celts don't seem to have placed as much

00:32:36.740 importance on realistic statuary because why do statues need to be religious it's not the

00:32:44.260 thing anyways right like this is a completely different mindset so constantine is a dashing

00:32:50.840 he's part of this dashing military clique he and his buddies take power in 306 and

00:32:56.940 constantine looks at that holy roman empire mess and says he wants to organize this this had been 0.57

00:33:06.820 something that had been going on in the roman empire little e and big e empire for some time

00:33:12.100 now is figuring out how to organize this massive network this massive civilizational economic

00:33:19.720 network that ran through europe and the mediterranean and there were all sorts of

00:33:24.020 schemes on how to do it. So, Constantine's predecessors had come up with the idea of

00:33:31.100 increasing control. The emperor, Imperator, was basically the chief mafioso-cum-military general

00:33:42.900 who was tasked with wrangling everything about the Roman Empire to keep it all going.

00:33:48.460 but he wasn't like the president the roman emperor was just the big man who bribed and beat up people

00:33:55.880 but he didn't necessarily have like force of law except in as much as he could levy personal

00:34:00.940 charisma so if the roman emperor said you know bread's going to cost this much theoretically

00:34:08.560 cities in iberia could just say no it's not and the roman emperor would have to trot soldiers out

00:34:14.640 or have to send a goon over to bribe people, and it was just all very complicated.

00:34:19.260 And so Constantine's predecessors had been trying to centralize things,

00:34:25.740 and Constantine was the one who kind of made it work.

00:34:28.140 He went to the Mithraic Highfather, the highest-ranking member of the cult of Mithras,

00:34:33.940 and said, hey, why don't we make a bureaucracy?

00:34:36.940 And the Mithraic Highfather told him to pound sand. 0.86

00:34:39.640 So then he goes to the Christians and says, hey, let's make a bureaucracy, 0.95

00:34:43.280 and the Christians say, go on, we're listening. 0.80

00:34:46.220 And this leads to the Council of Nicaea. 0.89

00:34:49.340 The formalization of Christian doctrine to create a bureaucracy

00:34:52.740 to act as the bureaucracy that reports to the Roman Empire.

00:34:58.780 In 314, Constantine calls the Council of Arleigh,

00:35:04.260 in which three bishops from Britain attend.

00:35:07.920 Bishop at this time just kind of means, like,

00:35:11.720 guy in charge. 0.92

00:35:13.280 So he can get three, if we were to use our AFA parlance, it's both Gothar and Folk Builders. 0.87

00:35:19.100 Like, the guy in charge of a community. 0.96

00:35:22.740 About 100 years prior, around 200-ish, Tertullian brags about how Christianity has spread so much.

00:35:31.140 There's even people in Britain.

00:35:34.320 Like how we have AFA members in Alaska.

00:35:38.060 No bully on Alaskans.

00:35:39.260 But you know what I mean here.

00:35:40.140 Like Britain at this time is the distant end of the Roman Empire. 0.84

00:35:45.680 So 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

00:35:54.240 So it's around the time that Constantine that Constantine takes power that things also start going downhill. 0.66

00:36:01.600 I wonder why that could be. But in 383, the emperor, sorry, in the general Magnus Maximus rebels and he kills the emperor Gretchen.

00:36:14.880 So 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.

00:36:28.940 so gildas tells us that saxon raids had been ongoing by this point by 380 380 so

00:36:39.080 could you bring up the first map i sent you nick so let's pause and shift to germany all right

00:36:48.320 so wouldn't one uh yeah the utland one so denmark and northern germany at this time

00:36:59.240 are inhabited by three tribes again what does that mean we're going to ignore what that means

00:37:07.140 for now in the north half of what is now denmark you have jutland or jutland inhabited by the

00:37:15.320 or the Judas then you have Anglia in the south half and then this map kind of cuts it off but

00:37:22.780 in the the southernmost portions of Denmark and today Saxony is wherever you feel like being in

00:37:32.500 Germany at any given time but in the ancient world Saxony was northwest-ish Germany so

00:37:40.000 So 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

00:37:57.760 So 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.

00:38:17.120 It was just constant, small-scale, low-grade warfare at the border.

00:38:23.120 Large-scale incursions are not the norm, but constant violence at the border is. 0.51

00:38:31.060 So when these guys are moving westward and raiding shores and such, the Romans are also trying to make incursions into the forests of Germany.

00:38:41.520 The 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.

00:39:04.240 And then province minor or province inferior means the part of that place we have conquered.

00:39:10.360 So like Germania inferior is the part of Germania that the Romans had conquered.

00:39:16.860 So Britain was always dependent upon imports.

00:39:22.280 Roman Britain was always dependent upon imports. 0.80

00:39:24.840 The Celtic world in Britain was self-sustaining, but the Roman world wasn't.

00:39:28.420 so when things start getting rough in continental europe in the roman empire there's this movement

00:39:36.340 of people away from britain it gets so bad at one point that they can't make statues anymore

00:39:43.740 because there are no more sculptors nor is there anyone to import marble which seems sounds kind

00:39:50.580 of silly but statues were a pretty core luxury good to roman civilization so like there's no

00:39:55.980 one to make statues anymore i i mean that'd be like in america like there's no one to detail 0.53

00:40:01.540 your hot rod yes it's a little silly but it's also a marker of like yeah but this is like a luxury

00:40:07.220 thing right so the province of britain of britannia experiences a exporting of people

00:40:21.040 a large-scale movement of people away from britain people don't want to farm in britain

00:40:27.280 anymore and guess who starts moving in can you bring up the second map nick the the migration

00:40:33.400 one so it's not entirely clear why historians agree that there was a complex confluence of

00:40:40.800 factors but the angles the saxons the utes and the frisians start moving into britain the frisians

00:40:47.920 are the people who are i don't know why i'm pointing the people who are in the pink area

00:40:53.380 below the word saxon they are the modern uh they're the descendants of modern dutchmen the

00:40:59.800 netherlands so the angles the saxons the utes and the frisians start moving into britain and

00:41:06.860 settling and archaeologically there's this great downturn of roman stuff there's this loss of

00:41:14.760 stratum and then there's this rise of germanic culture in the archaeology and the germanic

00:41:22.660 peoples are moving in and occupying empty space because the romans had left so like roman farmers

00:41:29.860 literally just packed their stuff up and got on a boat and sailed away and the fields go fallow 0.76

00:41:36.740 the the nature takes over but not like completely and the germanic peoples just kind of show up

00:41:43.260 so they're settling the land not to the degree that the americas were where they're like

00:41:50.300 clear-cutting forests to make farms people had like 50 acre farm like a 50 acre farm was small

00:41:56.800 by the settlement of the americas kind of standards right but these germanic tribes are

00:42:02.620 moving into these tribesmen not tribes that's an important thing to keep in mind are moving

00:42:08.440 into these areas that are unoccupied in britain and it's not really quite correct to talk about

00:42:16.320 it as a conquest or an invasion per se past a certain point because there's not really much

00:42:21.860 to invade so in 402 ad the last roman coins are found in britain that's the last time like the

00:42:32.060 last coin stamped with year that is found in britain supposedly in this year still a show

00:42:39.380 the half vandal warlord in charge of rome at the time pulled last roman troops out of britain

00:42:47.460 in 410 um the monk and historian bada or bead as he's called uh who lived around who was writing

00:42:56.980 this text that says this around 730 80 he says that roman rule ends it's important in british

00:43:03.140 historiography to figure out when does roman rule end and roman and anglo-saxon rule begin

00:43:10.600 so could you bring up the the third map the one with all the states in britain nick um this here

00:43:18.740 is a map of the so-called heptarchy we're going to come back to this a few times when talking

00:43:23.480 about where things are but this is the established result of the anglo-saxons moving in and taking

00:43:31.480 over and literally building the place back up because there just wasn't a lot of people there

00:43:38.000 genetically there's not a huge there's some right don't get me wrong but there's not a huge genetic

00:43:45.720 footprint left from italics and the like living in britain there is a great drain of romans and

00:43:52.640 an influx of anglo-saxon utish frisians we just call them the ang the uts and the frisians were

00:43:59.940 the smallest of the four hence why they're anglo-saxons the angles and the saxons were

00:44:03.940 where most of these people came from right so by 430 ad anglo-saxon material culture is omnipresent

00:44:11.460 and ubiquitous in archaeology celts and romans that are left behind in this area adopt anglo-saxon

00:44:20.020 language, norms, customs, religion, culture, law, because this is what you had to do to get ahead.

00:44:28.980 So semi-mythologically, there's the tale of Hengist and Horsa, who are these two great kings

00:44:35.620 that come over either in 447 or 449, depending on whether you believe history of the Britons or the

00:44:43.160 anglo-saxon chronicle uh both were made in the 800s both of them agree that a uh celtic king

00:44:50.960 by the name of vortigern invites the anglo-saxons over to britain to basically press his claim and

00:44:58.240 it spirals out of control from there how true that tale is is uncertain but it's not it's not

00:45:07.320 really the the point isn't how true it is the point is that historians were looking back and

00:45:14.800 can see a clear point 400 years prior where roman rule ends anglo-saxon rule begins

00:45:22.180 now it's important to remember that there are some leftover institutions from the romans

00:45:30.320 There's cities like Londonium, London. There's like Lindum, Lincoln and Lincolnshire. And of course, there's the Catholic Church.

00:45:43.680 So when the Vandals invaded Carthage, the Vandal kings showed up and they were Arian Christians.

00:45:50.920 um arian has no relationship to arian arian comes from the name of the bishop uh our no he

00:45:58.100 wasn't a bishop um the theologian arias his name comes from a greek word arios which means he who

00:46:05.220 is of aries has no relationship to arian so the vandal arian kings show up and they boot out the

00:46:15.160 trinitarian bishop bishop singular of carthage because he was like the guy in carthage and he

00:46:22.880 had like you know a small handful of people attending him because he was institutionalized

00:46:28.180 organized trinitarian christianity at the time so when constantine takes power and organizes

00:46:35.800 the catholic church what he does is he organizes the catholic church into diocese diocese are

00:46:40.960 actually not originally a christian thing they are a greek unit of territorial governance so

00:46:47.160 the the roman emperor empire was broken up into like secular diocese as they're called

00:46:52.880 which are basically another word for province state whatever you want to call it unit of

00:46:58.280 governance and he puts bishops in charge of these diocese and the bishops theoretically report to

00:47:04.280 the emperor or their their clerical superior orders it's it's very complicated it's not

00:47:09.040 really relevant. Notice how when I said that Stilicho pulls out the non-Christian bureaucrats,

00:47:16.080 I said non-Christian. The Christian clerical establishment from Rome states, because by 0.98

00:47:22.380 the time the Anglo-Saxons show up, the Celts have, it's not quite correct to say that they've

00:47:29.740 wholesale adopted Christianity, but Christianity is a thing in Britain, and there is a, you know,

00:47:35.900 christian bureaucracy in britain when the anglo-saxons show up that stayed behind when all

00:47:42.460 the other roman bureaucrats left a rough way to think of it at this of this is like all of the

00:47:48.780 u.s government functionaries left but the dmv they stayed behind right so like going back to

00:47:56.940 the alaska metaphor just because it's really far away from continental us like britain was

00:48:01.020 all of the u.s federal government employees leave but the dmv sticks around right and then the

00:48:08.120 anglo-saxons move in and the christian church is still there in this very atrophied form right

00:48:14.620 so now we start getting into nearing talking about the anglo-saxons i know 48 minutes in and

00:48:22.400 now we're actually talking about the anglo-saxons but it's it you have to do the prefacing because

00:48:27.620 it's like why are the people from anglia and saxony in britain why why is there rome in britain

00:48:34.420 what what's going where does wales fit into this so the anglo-saxons push into britain

00:48:41.340 and they take everything except for wales and ireland the irish christian church had a period

00:48:50.360 of localization and local syncretism not super relevant but the irish don't do what the pope

00:48:58.520 says just because he said it so we'll get into papal supremacy just as a kind of showing you

00:49:07.640 relative things here but at this time the pope is first among equals among bishops

00:49:12.660 technically um the donation of constantine is on the timeline here so in the 400s some bishop

00:49:25.280 or other sends a letter to the pope begging for help because the anglo-saxons are also true and

00:49:31.420 the celts and romans who stayed behind are starting to worship thor because they are

00:49:38.080 adopting anglo-saxon norms and customs so the pope doesn't listen and about a century goes by

00:49:46.640 of the pope not listening so in 569 pope gregory the great establishes the gregorian mission

00:49:55.760 and this is basically him going to the the uh monk augustinius who had is named after

00:50:04.340 He'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?

00:50:16.440 And he says to this guy, he wants this guy to lead a mission to deconstruct Asatru and convert the Anglo-Saxons to Christianity.

00:50:27.520 so in this doesn't really get underway until 580-ish when the anglo-saxon king

00:50:36.140 athelbert of kent marries bertha of um paris so it's worth getting into the gaul gallia thing

00:50:47.620 here just for funsies because it's it's interesting so gallia is what the romans

00:50:53.960 called for what is today France. Gaul is what the Germanics called it. Gaul actually enters English

00:51:01.260 from French. Gaul is cognate with Wales. So the Germanic peoples had this term, the Proto-Germanic

00:51:09.020 peoples had this term, Walhas, which is actually derived from a Celtic tribal name, meaning like

00:51:16.320 either the people of the eagle or the people of the wolf. It's not entirely clear and it doesn't

00:51:20.740 really matter. And the Germanic peoples just use this term Walhas to refer to everyone to the

00:51:28.000 southwest. Romans, Celts, everyone to the southwest. This is really common. Asia is a peninsula in

00:51:37.340 Anatolia. Today we use it to refer to everywhere east of wherever Europe ends. It's kind of like

00:51:46.120 how in america we use mexico to refer to everything south of texas like bolivia and brazil

00:51:54.420 and argentina and places that are actually not mexico right so this term walhas is what the

00:52:03.820 proto-german just the germanic peoples not proto-germanic but the germanic peoples used

00:52:07.820 to refer to celts and romans it does not mean foreigner it does not refer to fins it doesn't

00:52:13.940 refer to balts doesn't refer to slavs it refers to people in this civilizational horizon to the

00:52:19.740 southwest it doesn't refer to greeks for example um and the germanic world was in contact with the

00:52:25.920 greeks um if you want to know more read lady with a mead cup um long story short the germanic

00:52:32.700 peoples exported iron and imported um drinkingware including wine so

00:52:39.800 So, Gaul actually enters English from French, as I said.

00:52:45.260 French undergoes this W to G transition.

00:52:50.760 So, you can see this in the southwest portion of France is G or Gascony, which comes from Wasconia, which is where the Basques live.

00:53:02.500 Spanish undergoes a similar transition of W to V.

00:53:07.640 So, Wasconia becomes Gascony and Basquia, but in Spanish, it's El País de Basco.

00:53:18.840 So, Gaul is actually what the Germanic peoples, specifically the Franks, call the province when they move into and take over Francia.

00:53:29.400 the franks convert um just going to oversimplify it because we need to get back to the anglo-saxons

00:53:38.500 the franks convert because clovis wanted to murder his family and take power for himself

00:53:42.420 and break the law um after he had taken power the franks got in very close with the papal

00:53:50.820 establishment in italy athelbert of kent was very close with the franks kent was if you want to

00:54:00.480 bring that map of the the heptarchy back up nick real quick kent was where trade from um the

00:54:08.680 continent typically entered into britain there was a lot of trade a lot of uh knowledge a lot

00:54:16.260 of military backing. Partially that seems to be because, I mean, obviously it's really close to

00:54:23.040 France, right? But the Kentish crown, the Kentish also seem to have ostensibly been subjects to the

00:54:33.380 Franks. As far as the Franks and the Pope knew, there doesn't seem to be a lot of pull in that

00:54:43.140 direction but the kentish kings despite being militarily not necessarily the strongest had this

00:54:49.920 threat of do what i say or else i'll get the franks involved that was very important in

00:54:56.800 the rest of anglo-saxon england the the kentish crown also had pull with the franks because the

00:55:03.680 franks had a lot of pull with the old country militarily so kent had this kind of threat of

00:55:11.400 like do what we say or the franks will bully your cousins back in denmark beowulf goes back

00:55:19.400 to denmark to deal with his odal his inheritance his patrimony because there was still movement

00:55:25.840 between anglo-saxon england and denmark at this time because they were like one people the germanic

00:55:32.740 people spoke one single language at this time they were one people broken up into these kinship

00:55:40.140 based polities right so athelbert of kent marries bertha of paris bertha is a christian and she

00:55:52.620 says that she will only marry athelbert and strengthen his kingdom if she's allowed to

00:55:57.900 continue practicing christianity and athelbert relents possibly because bertha's um christian 0.94

00:56:03.840 clergy that she brings with her as retainers are completely useless and worthless we know because

00:56:09.440 the pope says so so but guess who meets up with her augustine moves to kent

00:56:19.420 um athelbert of kent allows the gregorian missionaries to tend to christians in kent

00:56:28.080 because there there are christians in britain when the anglo-saxons show up there's not a lot

00:56:32.740 of them. They're relatively low status, but they are there. And so when Athelbert allows his wife's

00:56:41.380 religion to exist, he allows a cleverer snake than the ones she brought with her to slither 0.95

00:56:50.740 into his garden, as it were. So 597, Athelbert allows the Gregorian missionaries to do their 0.95

00:56:57.860 thing in kent 601 he converts or more so he's baptized in 605 radwald of east anglia converts

00:57:07.360 to christianity but ostensibly also remains loyal to osatru radwald is an interesting character he

00:57:15.400 keeps an osatru hof on his uh on his property along with a christian church and in his like

00:57:23.260 bedroom or whatever he has a christian shrine and an asatra shrine he seems to have wanted to

00:57:30.760 have his cake and eat it too regarding being friends with kent and being friends with with

00:57:36.440 frankie of kent but also maintaining if just for political reasons troth to the isere at least

00:57:44.560 nominally so radwald is an interesting guy also he is the most likely candidate for being the king

00:57:51.340 in the sutton who burial so this was this big burial mound that has the really cool sutton who

00:57:58.060 mask if you want to pull that up you can nick if not people can google it on their own everyone

00:58:02.860 knows what this thing looks like but it has um it's covered in like these odin motifs like the

00:58:09.100 the nose is like a raven and all that and one of the eyes has foil encrusting around it and the

00:58:17.260 other one doesn't however so if you if this thing is in low light it like glimmers and shines and

00:58:24.460 the eye socket with the foil sorry if the eye socket with the foil like emits light but the

00:58:31.260 one without the foil is just this like dull dark hole so some people think this is like an odin

00:58:37.660 kind of thing um radwald throw up that fourth uh image the the wikipedia link uh nick so radwald

00:58:47.820 is buried in a very traditional ostrich fashion and he's actually buried with a very i was hoping

00:58:53.100 you can you make it bigger um if you can't it's fine he was buried with an incredibly traditional

00:59:01.500 instrument so if you look at this guy here with the axe keep keep a focus on that guy but if you'll

00:59:08.780 notice there's marcus aurelius wearing his toga over his head in the priestly fashion and then

00:59:13.980 there's all the retainers that are around him that are helping with this this offering of a cow

00:59:19.260 including the cow i've always loved how the cow is just in the picture like he's just like one of

00:59:23.980 the boys even though they're gonna kill him and eat him right but you can see on aurelius's uh

00:59:30.380 on his right but next to his left shoulder there's actually a roman priest wearing an apex it looks

00:59:35.900 like a combination of like the world war ii amelia earhart kind of um aviator hat with a plunger stuck

00:59:43.740 to it and there's this guy here with this axe that is actually an extremely old traditional instrument

00:59:54.380 of indo-european sacrifice it's like a ham axe like a hammer meets an axe and it goes back to

01:00:01.740 the neolithic period the the sharp end is for cutting up a corpse and then the other end is a

01:00:07.660 pry bar meant to be used to deconstruct the corpse for like offerings right so it's it's basically a

01:00:16.620 butcher's instrument an extremely old traditional religious instrument of cutting up meat for

01:00:22.860 offerings and radwald was buried with one so i bring radwald in this up in this digression

01:00:31.660 because it's worth talking about christianity and its relationship to ossaroo at some point

01:00:38.520 because the pope can't really levy force here he has to basically use trickery to get people to go

01:00:47.080 to apostasy um partially because anglo-saxon england is just pretty ethnically homogenous

01:00:55.820 there isn't inter-ethnic strife there isn't bureaucracy that can be leveled against people

01:01:01.760 it's it's a wild west kind of setting setting that is both a blessing and a curse for the

01:01:08.760 anglo-saxons or nerd in christianity i said that the anglo-saxon tribesmen moved to britain not

01:01:16.480 Anglo-Saxon tribes. So the people who settle Britain at this time are kind of just hardy

01:01:25.540 individualist settlers. It's very similar to the early American settlement in that you have a lot

01:01:32.100 of people coming over, setting up their farmstead, and banding together as free sovereign individuals

01:01:38.940 and working together for their own mutual success so there's a lot of political structures in

01:01:46.700 anglo-saxon england that are native and you know actually probably innovated here there in anglo-saxon

01:01:55.800 england but they get like described as being clearly importations from the old testament

01:02:01.180 despite obviously not coming from the old testament so like one of them is the institution of the

01:02:06.740 10th so how do you enforce the law against people well you can take them to court but who brings

01:02:15.280 them there if they don't want to go there's no cops so you can go to the king but the king is

01:02:21.300 really busy so they had this institution of the 10th which is that basically people men would

01:02:27.040 like band together in 10 man groups and if one of them broke the law or had to go to court the

01:02:33.560 other nine were responsible for bringing that guy to court or they could suffer the consequences

01:02:40.260 like if one guy in your tent gets accused of murder and you don't get him to court

01:02:45.500 you have to pay the fee for murder right another one of these is where guild which is a a it means

01:02:54.720 like man price it actually translates literally to where yield if we in modern english but it

01:02:59.580 like man price if you killed someone there was literally a price on their head that you had to

01:03:04.940 pay and if you didn't you were in trouble these institutions come about to solve the problem of

01:03:13.260 how do you get free sovereign landowners to work together and i talked about athelfrith being

01:03:21.820 under the sovereignty of the franks but also kind of not really a lot of this discussion

01:03:27.020 of christianity in anglosax in england comes about due to overlordship comes about due to

01:03:35.100 um christian lords telling their underlings convert or else or convert convert for me so

01:03:47.020 radwald is interesting because he is a demonstration of the syncretism that goes on at this

01:03:51.980 time we have a lot better documentation of what things looked like on the ground regarding the

01:03:59.180 the introduction and process of christianity through anglo-saxon england than we do in the

01:04:05.500 rest of europe even in a lot of ways in better than the mediterranean so one example of this is

01:04:10.860 that we have a lot of poetry by anglo-saxon christians in old english translating christianity

01:04:17.900 into their culture and customs and literally language so there's an example um genesis a is

01:04:25.020 this poetic rendering of genesis in old english and the poet uses anglo-saxon terms like he has

01:04:32.020 avraham perform bloat right like at one point avraham is going through the desert and he

01:04:39.000 and in the bible story he like goes through stops sacrifices goes through stops sacrifices goes 0.71

01:04:44.400 there stop sacrifices and he sacrifices in the traditional jewish manner of killing an animal

01:04:49.120 and then performing a the greek word is holocaustum which literally means hole burning he basically 0.90

01:04:54.720 chucks an animal carcass on a bonfire and burns it all up that's typically not how european animal 0.71

01:05:00.720 offerings were done they would only offer a part of the animal anyways holocaust obviously happened

01:05:07.920 in Greece, but you know what I mean here. The Genesis A poet has it as Avraham goes, he stops,

01:05:15.520 he sets up an altar, which doesn't happen in the original text. And then he, like, the poet

01:05:23.040 describes building a pyre, putting an animal in it, and burning it. Because the Anglo-Saxons 1.00

01:05:29.660 couldn't understand what a calced hole burning was, because they didn't do that. So the Genesis 0.73

01:05:36.060 is a poet has a vacham performing jewish sacrifice in like an asatru manner right

01:05:43.000 the gregorian mission is important because it navigates how do you take people from asatru

01:05:51.380 to christianity like step by step what do you do and we can see what they're doing and kind of

01:05:59.460 reverse it in a certain sense to like get a better glimpse of what anglo-saxon uh also true

01:06:06.420 looked like so like one of the things that this is just an example and then i'll get back to the

01:06:12.900 timeline to get to our heroes this is just an example but like one of the things that the 0.63

01:06:17.600 gregorian mission hammered home is that the icr are demons and they do they do bad things good

01:06:23.080 things come from jesus this isn't really something that mediterranean christianity

01:06:28.580 hanged up though the anglo-saxon christians were really big on jesus being a king and a warrior

01:06:35.880 mediterranean christianity doesn't really have jesus as anything except

01:06:40.700 which literally means like ethnic leader of the jews but he's not like the king of the roman

01:06:47.460 empire right whereas anglo-saxon christians portrayed jesus as like like he's going out

01:06:56.280 and getting in like sword fights with the devil you know so what we can tell from this is that

01:07:04.560 anglo-saxon uh asatruar believe that good things come from the gods they believe that the gods are

01:07:11.440 good the worship of them is good and that good things come from this worship so the gregorian

01:07:17.500 mission has to deconstruct that idea it has to separate good things come from the gods from

01:07:23.660 you know the people's minds another thing it does is it categorizes words in terms of

01:07:30.520 acceptability so like an example of this is the word god the word god is not of hebrew origin

01:07:37.640 the word god is not of greek origin the word god is of germanic origin and just means that which

01:07:43.380 is invoked or that to which libations are poured to that to which offerings are made this term is

01:07:49.220 used to refer to the ice here but so are other words like the old english one would be uh us

01:07:56.180 in singular asses in plural um asses is cognate with ice here that word is totally off limits

01:08:03.780 notice yahweh is not an ice here he's god he's not an ice here because us is off limits but god

01:08:13.500 is acceptable there's also um words for example that are like absorbed conditionally so like uh

01:08:20.220 bloat is it bloat um the old english is bloat the old norse is bloat the gothic is bloat bloat is

01:08:30.780 okay when avraham does it in the torah but it's not okay when people do it now right um

01:08:38.620 Um, there were also words that are scheduled for destruction, and some of these we know because they never really got finished.

01:08:46.380 Like, Christian sambals are a thing that's attested, or, like, Christian drinking festivals, right?

01:08:52.700 Those eventually go away.

01:08:54.600 Um, 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.

01:09:07.600 we'll get rid of that eventually and they just never did right they never got rid of this

01:09:11.860 do you want to opine while I take a sip from my teaser um sure

01:09:19.960 so while you sip the tea I think it is valuable just to say um thank you this is awesome and

01:09:31.260 we're getting a lot of insight in this amount of time and i think you're you're laying the

01:09:38.020 foundations really well a question that came up that is um related to the thing that we're

01:09:47.320 talking about and i don't think that there's one monolithic answer but what did our ancestors see

01:09:53.360 in this semitic religion known as christianity that caused thousands of our folk to abandon

01:09:58.680 their ancestral gods and i think i think it misses the point because i don't think it was presented

01:10:06.440 that way i don't think there's a smorgasbord of religious choices like ah let's choose this one

01:10:13.800 this sounds cool that's palm trees and cutting off foreskin that sounds awesome um i think that

01:10:21.880 as

01:10:31.640 politics are tricky and as things come in with political benefits

01:10:41.240 it makes a compelling case something that i think is really interesting and it's

01:10:45.400 it's relevant to what we're talking about right now and i advise anybody to read the

01:10:50.440 germanization of really medieval christianity we're going to come to a point here that i'm

01:10:56.020 sure chris is going to talk about where there is a letter issued by the pope to like hey guys

01:11:00.760 go easy and you can be as shady as you want to let them kind of keep the stuff they like about

01:11:08.280 their old religion but just insert jesus where you can and so you have you have things like

01:11:16.420 Radwald with dual altars. You've got these political marriages with princesses from the

01:11:26.340 continent that are longtime Christians. And oftentimes part of the marriage agreement

01:11:31.300 is conversion or at least lenience and allowing in missionaries and such.

01:11:37.460 And you see this, you know, throughout, I guess, non-Mediterranean Europe in the conversion process is you see a lot of overlapping,

01:11:55.900 A 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.

01:12:12.120 It looks further and further from biblical stories and much closer to him being recast as something that they're familiar with.

01:12:20.780 but there's a tremendous amount of political and economic pressure and if your alliances are forged

01:12:28.220 by common faith i think that's very tempting to noble houses so i don't think that the average

01:12:37.740 person was given a lot of choice of ah you know citizen what religion do you want to follow

01:12:43.980 So 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.

01:12:54.640 And I think this comes in in a meaningful way when we talk about it works in reverse, too. 0.51

01:13:03.200 So when a king rejects Christianity and embraces Ausatru, then all of a sudden his kingdom is open to continuing to do that.

01:13:13.380 And 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

01:13:26.740 And 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.

01:13:51.380 And I think it works in a lot more of a power dynamic than it does today.

01:13:56.900 But 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.

01:14:13.740 So I don't think a bunch of, you know, individual farmers were just deciding to abandon the gods.

01:14:18.440 And the other thing is, it's worth thinking that there's overlap during all these times.

01:14:24.760 There'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.

01:14:43.100 but it's a process that happens you know over time and it's preyed on

01:14:53.340 very much with converting the leadership you convert the kings you convert the princes you

01:14:57.740 convert you know the people who make those decisions and they officially make the decision

01:15:04.220 for their tribe and their countrymen and then gradually all of the i don't know all of the

01:15:13.100 economic support from above goes to this new religion and all of it is taken away from the old

01:15:22.620 and then depending on where you're at there's persecution and things so it looks different in

01:15:27.580 different places but i think that's something to consider as far as you know what that looked like

01:15:33.900 and i think it's the period that we're getting into right now so it's worth remembering here

01:15:42.780 that at the time, Asatru is conceptualized as something that is done. For the vast majority

01:15:51.980 of Anglo-Saxons, it seems that they conceptualized Asatru as loyalty to the Aesir, yes, but also

01:15:59.820 a series of practices that you perform. In a certain sense, one does not believe in Asatru,

01:16:06.380 they perform asatru or asatruing so like you perform the harvest festival this is just some

01:16:14.580 kind of thing that you do there's not necessarily an ideological why behind it it's just part and

01:16:19.700 parcel of your life christianity does not conceptualize itself as that now

01:16:26.940 the the thing that the gregorian mission recognizes is that they can take a lot of these

01:16:34.500 doings and then repurpose them so i'm just gonna read not the whole thing because yeah but just a

01:16:43.720 portion of it um this is from gregory the first to meletus who goes on to become a character in

01:16:51.060 one of our stories that we're going to tell here but he is the first first ostensibly ever bishop

01:16:56.640 of london um so tell augustine that he should by no means destroy the temples of the gods but rather

01:17:05.360 the idols within those temples let him after he has purified them with holy water place altars

01:17:10.960 and relics of the saints in them for if those temples are well built they should be converted

01:17:15.980 from the worship of demons to the service of the true lord thus seeing that their places of worship

01:17:22.000 are not destroyed the people will banish error from their hearts and come to places familiar

01:17:28.000 and dear to them in acknowledgement and worship of the true god so literally you can keep coming

01:17:34.420 to the same place right furthermore he goes on to say since it has been their custom to slaughter

01:17:42.080 oxen in sacrifice they should receive some solemnity in exchange let them therefore on

01:17:47.840 the day of the dedication of their churches, or on the feast of the martyrs, whose relics are 0.65

01:17:52.780 preserved in them, build themselves huts around their one-time temples, and celebrate the occasion

01:17:58.500 with religious feasting. So notice here, he's build themselves huts, what he's actually saying

01:18:03.740 is build mead halls and feasting halls around the church, so as to not, in a sense, not profane it 0.89

01:18:10.760 with the feasting, but also to allow them to mentally separate the feasting from the Christianity 0.62

01:18:16.140 in a sense they will sacrifice and eat the animals not anymore as an offering to the devil 0.89

01:18:22.460 but for the glory of god to whom as the giver of all things they will give thanks for having been

01:18:28.020 satiated so like i said the christian symbol right and this is the the the doing aspect and

01:18:36.800 where the gregorian missions cleverness is and they're still doing these things in a lot of ways

01:18:43.140 radwald could have two altars in his house because he could still do the thing right he

01:18:52.060 can still take communion but still do some of these things um i've seen some interesting

01:18:57.920 thesis uh hypothesization about radwald in particular because there is actually an older

01:19:03.400 form of christianity that the um germanic peoples would have been a bit more familiar with than

01:19:09.360 trinitarian christianity and that was arianism and arianism did not jettison nearly as much of

01:19:15.520 germanic culture and custom as um trinitarian christianity wanted to arian christianity

01:19:23.940 ostensibly seems to have been totally fine with christian symbols whereas trinitarian

01:19:27.980 christianity wanted christian symbols gone it was just a matter of getting rid of the

01:19:32.200 isir first and then the christian symbol right um one example going back to the genesis a uh

01:19:41.200 talking about that and also what the alter ego they said about making jesus out to be a cool

01:19:45.600 warrior there's actually a poem called the helion which is literally that it is telling the tale of

01:19:52.040 jesus's life with him as being a warlord with his thanes going around getting into germanic warlord

01:19:59.680 battles with like swords leading armies um well there's actually um sumble is mentioned in that

01:20:07.220 one also um uh lazarus when he gets uh necromancy back to life he he uh dies starving outside of a

01:20:17.280 another man's a jewish man's uh like he's mead hall because he's begging to come in and go to

01:20:23.540 and this this rude guy won't let him in so like he's like a tent trying to attend like a mead

01:20:29.680 hall's stumble in like israel right that's literally painting the the bible stories with

01:20:37.460 a germanic coat of paint and so it's kind of a question of like what did our ancestors see in it

01:20:45.220 well i don't think they saw it to a degree i don't think a lot of these preachers came to them and

01:20:50.500 said hey jesus therefore we're going to completely change your way of life and it's worth noting i

01:20:57.680 mean we we say that easter is practiced right like every language except english dutch and

01:21:05.180 german calls the feast or the the festival celebrating jesus's resurrection as passover

01:21:12.840 or paschal uh paschal comes from pasca which ultimately comes from pasach a hebrew word

01:21:18.180 meaning passover um that's not the case in the in the continental germanic world where

01:21:24.900 the holiday is called easter we we don't practice we don't call any holiday like hrethah

01:21:33.360 for hrethamonet which is another one we don't call any of the months litha

01:21:38.320 which was the month name for summer right um we have a historical advantage today and we can look

01:21:48.860 back and be like wow anglo-saxon england it's like a totally different world but i don't think they

01:21:55.860 would have seen it that way and i don't think it was being presented to them that way like let's

01:22:01.160 just kind of examine that i mean i'm not presenting the claim is true i i know it's wrong and all that

01:22:07.000 But 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.

01:22:14.920 That doesn't necessarily mean you can't have harvest festivals, though. 0.82

01:22:19.300 Right. Like.

01:22:21.880 I'm not I'm not defending the apostasy here, but again, I think that for most of these people, they wouldn't have seen it like this. 0.57

01:22:29.600 And as we will see when I get back to the timeline here or as we'll see when I get back to the timeline here.

01:22:35.820 we're talking about like ethel better to can't apostatizing in like 601 we're told that asatru

01:22:43.340 is still practiced for like the next 400 years getting kings and the nobility to do these things

01:22:51.920 like at all was the goal and then progressive correction over the years

01:22:57.320 remember kingship and knighthood are osatru stuff the idea of the sacred king

01:23:06.680 is an osatru thing if you went back and told like john chrysostome that like oh yeah if the king 0.77

01:23:14.740 gets if like the emperor gets a limp the crops will fail he'd look at you like you were insane

01:23:20.440 like that's not a thing in the mediterranean world it's not a pagan mediterranean thing

01:23:25.760 it's certainly not a christian thing it's because it's a germanic thing the idea of a country having

01:23:32.260 of a country being led by a sacred king is something that we still kind of hold on to i

01:23:38.400 mean americans certainly treat the president like a sacred king in a lot of ways i don't know if

01:23:42.780 europeans do necessarily but like some brits do look at the british monarchy like that

01:23:47.580 does that mean that the gregorian mission hasn't fully been completed in a certain sense i mean

01:23:55.160 obviously if we're just when it comes to just worshiping thor yes but you know what i mean here

01:23:59.880 like what caused them to abandon it well i don't think they conceptualized it as an all or nothing

01:24:08.620 abandonment i think they conceptualized it as a progressive step-by-step abandonment of specific

01:24:15.460 things because again we don't see linguistically a lot of you know like belief in asatru as this

01:24:24.860 all-encompassing packet it's it's a bunch of little singular things that they do and it's

01:24:31.760 worth noting here i'd be i just want to finish this before you go on sir the christian priests

01:24:38.660 aren't necessarily saying that the ice here don't exist devils are a very common thing at this time

01:24:47.860 And they're in many ways just the Aesir, but like evil.

01:24:51.600 The devil is used to refer to Odin.

01:24:54.600 Like, he's just the chief devil.

01:24:57.200 It's not necessarily a claim that he doesn't exist.

01:24:59.560 It's a claim that he's bad.

01:25:02.400 So, again, I don't think what was being presented to a lot of these people was as radical as we would make it seem today.

01:25:10.840 Particularly even that a lot of these kings are looking at this as a political thing.

01:25:14.700 and then people are following them because they follow their sacred king which when we get to the

01:25:19.920 hero story there's a fun little bit to to say about that go on sir I'm sorry well no I was just

01:25:24.920 going to say um so one of the things that we deal with in modern house true regularly

01:25:37.060 is a reluctance for people to want to practice with the AFA or with a group of people within a

01:25:49.120 structured religious body you get a lot of you know what what I you know disparagingly refer

01:25:58.900 to his backyard house a true and they talk about how you know way back in the day it was very

01:26:07.780 decentralized and that's one of the reasons that christianity was able to sweep through

01:26:16.900 and displace it at the time that we encounter also true in the written records

01:26:22.580 it is very decentralized it looks really different depending on where you're at

01:26:29.840 and there's not a unified religious structure and that's one of the huge advantages during

01:26:35.400 this time of christianity is there was a unified operation that had leadership and

01:26:42.660 headquarters with missionaries and priests and a mechanism to conduct the business of of religion

01:26:53.860 and that was a tremendous advantage uh it's important to note that we want to maintain values

01:27:05.540 and um religious principles of our ancestors but we also don't want to be hobbled by larping their

01:27:16.340 mistakes it's very beneficial to learn things that were effective and things that weren't

01:27:24.740 and it's in the best of australian tradition to rise up with that new knowledge to meet

01:27:32.660 future challenges by correcting and adjusting and and fixing stuff instead of letting time-honored

01:27:43.140 i don't know stubbornness and lack of organization prevent uh trough to the ice here from being

01:27:51.060 maximally successful so it's something to note yes i'm very aware that the structure of ancient

01:27:58.340 Ausatru at the time we encounter it in the historical period is not structured in the

01:28:04.980 same way that the AFA is or how we do it in that sense. That's very deliberate. It's very on purpose

01:28:11.800 to learn the lessons of the past so that we give our very best to the gods and that we fix the

01:28:18.640 holes. Did that make the image any better? I just kind of wiped the camera anyway. Not really. Yeah,

01:28:27.560 it's the it's the light it's this very anyways sorry um so it's worth pointing out here yes

01:28:35.300 also true in anglo-saxon england is very decentralized that's not necessarily the

01:28:40.280 way it is everywhere also true in much of scandinavia and particularly iceland was very

01:28:45.120 decentralized anglo-saxon england and much of scandinavia especially iceland are settler

01:28:51.240 colonial places. They're the early American frontier. They're the early American colonial

01:28:58.880 project. In more established parts in the Germanic world, there was a lot more centralization,

01:29:08.600 both of politics and of religion. And part of why that centralization breaks down is

01:29:14.240 because, frankly, it seems like the Germanic peoples just get too many Germanic peoples. 0.89

01:29:18.500 There's too many people in the Germanic peoples, and they start breaking up and fracturing internally to a degree.

01:29:23.700 If we compare this to a Thanaric, there doesn't seem to be any kind of unified ideology opposing Christianity,

01:29:32.300 but there doesn't seem to be any kind of unified political structure outside of this pyramid of men that goes on to become feudalism.

01:29:44.140 you swear your loyalty to a lord who swears his loyalty to a lord who swears his loyalty to a lord

01:29:50.380 you can look at this some guy swears loyalty to some guy who swears loyalty to athelbert who

01:29:58.620 swears loyalty to whoever was in charge of the franks who swears loyalty to the pope

01:30:02.040 and then there's a cut of agricultural produce going up the chain each person gets one percent

01:30:07.080 that's feudalism like that is feudalism of of a thousand years athelbert lives in 60180

01:30:15.360 i mean 600 years later that's feudalism right um in other parts of the germanic world

01:30:22.300 things were different which isn't necessarily to take away from the point of like

01:30:27.640 we do this today we are allowed to not make our ancestors mistakes but it's also to say that like

01:30:34.480 some of these mistakes are because we're looking at a very specific point in time if you look at

01:30:40.600 if you if you read through the incredibly dry essay um that is lady with a mead cup one thing

01:30:48.600 it's very big on pointing out is this dichotomy between it doesn't give them these names but this

01:30:54.660 is just what i called it when i was in my head when i was reading it the warlord sociality and

01:30:58.760 the tribal sociality which are these two separate conceptions of what society is anglo-saxon

01:31:05.220 england is a warlord sociality it is men and it's always men it's not women it's men swearing oaths

01:31:12.580 of loyalty to each other as brothers and to a superior man as their father in this pyramidal

01:31:18.700 chain it's not like i am a goth i work with my goths for pro-gothic goals we go to our elders

01:31:28.120 to tell us what to do it's not that kind of tribal republican sociality i i might have made

01:31:35.940 this i might have done this bit in the gothic one the goths episode but like republic comes from

01:31:42.140 res publica literally the the matter public the affair public the thing that belongs to all

01:31:50.560 the all thing right like the the anglo-saxons don't really have a conception of themselves

01:31:59.180 separate from individuals banding together through oaths of loyalty we hear about like

01:32:06.460 this tribe and that tribe and bead and other historians try to say like oh the utis is settled

01:32:13.180 on the isle of white they settled all over the place these old country allegiances and

01:32:20.860 demarcations went away pretty quickly and were reorganized along like well your king

01:32:27.760 comes from the the line of angles so you're an angle no your bloodline is saxon however but

01:32:34.720 you're still an angle you know what i mean one thing that we do see um and we talk about kings

01:32:40.040 but their kingdoms are very small at this time.

01:32:45.160 We encounter Ausatru in the historical record

01:32:49.000 at a relatively late stage in relationship

01:32:53.520 and very often in direct relationship

01:32:55.880 to the rising Christianity into that struggle.

01:33:01.520 We have every reason to believe that Ausatru

01:33:03.940 at an earlier stage had a much better unification

01:33:09.800 better sense of organization better ecclesiastical structure you see remnants of that with these

01:33:18.020 small kingdoms and their and their sacred kingships relying on on the the web of loyalties you

01:33:23.640 mentioned but the the gothar merged with the king's administration with the king being

01:33:32.940 simultaneously king and high priest, certainly in the Anglo-Saxon period. And so you have these

01:33:40.040 small, not connected little kingdoms of it. And our people, through a variety of economic

01:33:49.500 situations and other difficulties in living in the north, I think that the structure was far from

01:33:58.560 the perfect outside true ideal of the structure was the situation they found themselves in

01:34:03.260 and it's always very tempting to think what if our people had stood unified with like a unified

01:34:09.180 structure and the moments that you see that occur are shocking in their efficacy and we see a lot

01:34:18.940 of moments where they don't i think that's one of the struggles with why christianity takes root

01:34:25.580 in england at this time as effectively as it does is there's you know all these little kingdoms and

01:34:34.940 you don't it's very hard for that to stand up to opposite to an organized opposition

01:34:43.420 based on an imperial structure when it's these you know very tiny kingdoms and uh we'll after

01:34:50.140 we cover our heroes and finish the timeline i will do i will kind of answer the map nerd question

01:34:57.100 of how does christianity actually get into and through england like geographically so

01:35:03.760 the spread of agent yeah right the the box um so we've been talking about uh downer things let's

01:35:15.420 talk about some good guys here. So in 626, three brothers, Saxrad, Seward, and a third brother who

01:35:24.980 may have been named Sabert, we're not entirely sure what the third brother's name was, but

01:35:30.100 they ruled in Essex in the wake of the death of their father.

01:35:37.580 Sorry, the third brother was Sigbert, the father was Sabert. There's a lot of people with names

01:35:43.220 that are really really similar at this time like um so their father apostatized in 604 but they

01:35:53.140 remained true um he died the the father the traitor father did in 616 and then they took over

01:36:00.940 so um uh they were old enough to remain true to the icer when he took power so he had to have

01:36:10.780 he had to have taken they had to have uh been older you know um we're retail so we were we're

01:36:19.960 relayed a tale uh they they show up in what is usually told is the story of meletus but he shows

01:36:26.600 up in their story from rpov here um meletus the first bishop of london he was sent to the city

01:36:31.960 and he refuses to give them mass and london at this time is a majority asatru city mind you it's

01:36:40.060 it's mostly asatruar and this bishop is only able to get in because of the traitorous king 0.94

01:36:46.700 who lets him in like literally and so uh sex rat and cyward go to this guy and um they kind of like 0.97

01:36:55.700 bully him as saying like oh man we're so hungry can we have some of your bread you gave us you 0.57

01:37:00.600 give bread to our father why won't you give bread to us and meletus is like you know you have to be

01:37:05.540 baptized i can't i can't do it unless you're baptized and it's not clear from the wording

01:37:11.560 if they're doing this like they're coming by every day kind of bullying him for bread

01:37:15.720 or if this is just like one single kind of thing but eventually um they they kick him out of london

01:37:25.000 because of his refusal to to uh recognize their authority ultimately um this is a cute little

01:37:34.440 story about them but they are ruling um essex in the wake of a change in overlordship from

01:37:44.960 athobert the aforementioned christian trader to radwald the aforementioned lesser trader i guess

01:37:53.300 i mean i don't think we can we don't we don't like what he we don't like him doing the christian

01:37:58.000 thing but at the same time he like still tried to be loyal anyways you know what i mean

01:38:02.080 radwall was significantly more friendly to asatru under kings even if he at some level

01:38:10.720 practiced it himself and was a patron of it to a degree so melitus was known to be connected with

01:38:16.580 the kentish court that letter i read with the pope in the stuffy old man voice that was to melitus

01:38:23.820 this guy telling him what to do because the melitus gets to lenin and he's like what do i do

01:38:30.060 now so he writes to the pope saying boss what do i do right um so yeah academics

01:38:41.820 academics posit that part of the the heathen reaction as it's always called

01:38:48.060 was occurring due to this larger trend of a change in the kentish court and athelbert's

01:38:56.300 boot getting off their necks. Um, Athelbert was, uh, he, Athelbert died in 616 and was replaced

01:39:03.460 with his son, Eadbald. Now, Eadbald was, uh, actually Asatru. Um, he was, uh, also insane,

01:39:12.460 apparently. Um, Eadbald's rule in Kent for, was a very brief, uh, terrible setback for Christianity

01:39:21.040 because he didn't actually patronize his father's um religion uh he also took his unnamed presumably

01:39:30.100 asatru stepmother as his own wife which uh bead tells us was considered scandalous amongst

01:39:36.140 asatruara at the time which is an interesting thing bead bead is an interesting guy because

01:39:41.200 he's always saying things that are like oh he knows more than what he's letting on

01:39:45.220 like i really wish i could ask this guy questions because he's he's clearly knows more right

01:39:50.700 um again ad bold was apparently crazy and the language used to describe this man makes him

01:39:57.980 seem like he was like nuts um it must have been awkward when he ditched his stepmother and married

01:40:04.880 a frankish woman and uh became christian that was well after the three brothers had died however um

01:40:11.900 so the three brothers uh ultimately it ended up getting into a war with um the

01:40:20.560 West Saxon kings Koenigils and Quichelm, and they, along with their third brother, were defeated and

01:40:27.200 died on the field of battle in 626. Koenigils may have been Quichelm's son. They also ordered

01:40:36.240 the attempted execution of Edwin of Northumbria, Koenigils and Quichelm did. Edwin was Christian,

01:40:43.840 according to bead but uh two years later these guys who got in who killed um our heroes

01:40:50.800 they actually got in a fight with penda who similar to radwald is a guy who's like halfway

01:40:57.120 to actually being like the hero right but um they appear to have lost kunigilz and quichilm did

01:41:06.180 And they came under the dominion of Edwin, the guy they tried to kill earlier, and they had to pay him a ridiculously large tribute.

01:41:18.520 Both of them ended up becoming apostates because Penda drove them out of their kingdom.

01:41:25.540 So 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.

01:41:43.280 um sayward's son sigibert the little would take over as king uh he would rule for about 30 years

01:41:51.320 remaining true to the gods he was probably an ally of pendas as like a lesser king um

01:41:57.980 after sigibert the little died however saint sigibert took over um and it wasn't until saint

01:42:05.500 zigebert took over that christianity came back in um that christianity came back in london namely but

01:42:14.300 in uh essex essex right yeah essex um meletus returned to london after saint zigebert got in

01:42:24.180 power so there's like a solid 30 years where the first christian bishop has just been ousted

01:42:29.960 due to Sexrat and Sayward's efforts.

01:42:34.800 And Bede tells us that when Meletus comes back,

01:42:40.340 the Londoners actually kicked Meletus out.

01:42:43.760 Like the people of the city forced him out.

01:42:46.220 Instead preferring to be, and I'm quoting Bede here, 0.73

01:42:48.760 under their idolatrous high priests.

01:42:51.960 Which is interesting that he uses the high priests, right?

01:42:56.360 Because that implies that Sexrat and Sayward

01:42:58.680 and the son, Sigbert the Little, were actually patrons of organized Asatru. Granted, at the

01:43:06.200 small scale that they were operating, but they were nonetheless patrons of it at a sort of

01:43:12.200 ideological level. That's something that I want to reemphasize about the Sacred King. Whenever

01:43:19.880 Whenever 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.

01:43:39.480 and then whenever they come back to christianity or a new king comes it's always that king

01:43:44.440 embraces the true faith and brings his people back in in i don't know under in righteous order

01:43:54.360 or whatever it's always it's not just like aha we got the king to convert it's an immediate

01:44:01.640 assumption that not only does the whatever the king is practicing he is still the sacred king

01:44:07.880 yeah so he is the sacred king if he is practicing out the true or if he's like hey guys we're done

01:44:13.880 with this we're gonna go you know we're gonna go worship jesus and they're like all right and then

01:44:18.600 they go and he is like their de facto like mini pope sacred king and so it's very impactful and

01:44:28.040 And 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.

01:44:48.080 And that's really important.

01:44:50.080 as soon as there's some kind of an official baptism or rejection of Christianity it's like

01:45:00.320 all of a sudden you got to change all the change all the stuff change all the accoutrements change

01:45:08.000 all the ceremony all of the traditional trappings of state that have traditionally been so important

01:45:15.780 to people it's like during the french revolution as soon as it was revolution time okay king's dead

01:45:23.480 now we're going to change everything we're going to renumber our calendar and how we calculate the

01:45:29.420 year we're going to turn all the churches into temples of reason we're going to completely do

01:45:35.740 away with all the other stuff that you've done for a thousand years and do this new thing

01:45:41.240 and everybody had to deal with the social change of that for decades and then you know as soon as

01:45:48.720 i remember you know napoleon gets gets imprisoned all of a sudden they've got to replace all the

01:45:58.220 napoleonic stuff with bourbon monarchy things and then he comes back to power for you know that

01:46:04.900 brief amount of time before waterloo and like oh quick go find the emperor's old stuff we've got

01:46:10.200 to completely redo all of the way we conduct state so you know on in a smaller scale but

01:46:17.520 every time these things happen it is monumental for the life of certainly the people in these

01:46:26.280 major communities and close to these centers of power it completely changes their world

01:46:31.020 overnight and so these two heroes brought all their kingdom back in trough with the

01:46:37.520 god for the remainder or with their gods for the remainder of of their reign um and something just

01:46:44.140 as kind of a side note the third brother is alleged yeah yeah well because i think the

01:46:52.080 question comes up well then why are we honoring these two and not the third one it's because

01:46:56.700 we're not quite confident the third one exists or not yet and if more information becomes available

01:47:01.820 will hold that out for making that decision but i just want to kind of know um it's also worth

01:47:09.060 you know you talk about napoleon we can do this on the same island that we're talking about

01:47:14.160 there's a point during like the protestant reformation period in england where like a

01:47:18.880 different king or queen is on the throne every like 10 years and like suddenly there's this

01:47:25.040 big movement from catholicism to this form of protestantism to that form of protestantism

01:47:30.420 we're back to catholicism oh now we got the fun protestantism now we're doing like the tame

01:47:36.340 protestantism this sort of very vigorous back and forth regarding religion doesn't really go away

01:47:44.360 there's like a lull when after christianity christianity comes along secures control and

01:47:52.300 then there's a period of centuries before protestantism happens but when protestantism

01:47:56.220 happens this whole dynamic comes back and it ultimately leads to the peace of west failure

01:48:00.820 where it's basically decided whatever the king does that's just what everyone else does and what

01:48:07.720 actually makes england interesting here is that this doesn't really happen in england england

01:48:13.340 still kind of has this internal cold civil war really into the present day and still kind of

01:48:19.820 continues in the u.s regarding religion and ideology and the like um i had another thing i

01:48:26.560 was gonna say here um oh let's let's real talk about real quick talk about ad bald so after

01:48:33.720 athelbert uh dies ad bald takes power in kent and he's crazy and he marries his stepmom which

01:48:40.740 is apparently something that us after our in anglo-saxon england didn't like i mean i don't 0.88

01:48:45.700 like it today but you know i don't know but um he he is a nut job apparently and you have to read

01:48:56.720 between the lines because because bead is always saying just a little less than he knows but he's

01:49:05.300 always playing incredibly carefully with what he says so like you know he'll be talking about kings

01:49:12.880 like converting to

01:49:14.760 Christianity or not and he'll be talking

01:49:16.820 about two guys and then all of a sudden he'll just start

01:49:18.820 talking about the virtues of one of them

01:49:20.840 or he'll be talking about like a

01:49:22.760 war and then he'll be talking

01:49:24.660 about like such and such guy and such

01:49:26.880 and such guy

01:49:27.620 and the good king such and such fought

01:49:30.700 anyways we're moving on

01:49:32.560 it's like oh you didn't talk about

01:49:34.800 who won that fight right

01:49:36.740 he is trying

01:49:38.740 really hard to

01:49:40.840 what he's trying to do is he's trying to balance telling everything he can to people while also

01:49:47.900 like crafting a narrative for political and religious reasons so ad bald is is one of

01:49:54.760 these characters where the silence is deafening and so um ad bald uh as we've said is he's

01:50:03.500 for a period and then um he does some kind of like purgation of kicking christian priests

01:50:10.720 out of his domain and then like one of supposedly one of these priests goes to the church and he's

01:50:18.260 like he prays to saint peter and he's like oh saint peter what do i do we're going to get

01:50:23.360 expelled from the kingdom and so saint peter like climbs down from heaven and picks up like a whip

01:50:32.260 like a scourge and just starts vigorously attacking the priest and like shredding him up and just

01:50:39.140 just gnarling him up with this because a scourge isn't just a whip it's like a bundle of ropes with

01:50:45.540 barbs in them it's like barbed wire that you use to wax something it's more than just a whip

01:50:51.300 right so he's just going to town on this priest and this priest the next day he goes to the king

01:50:58.140 and he says oh my king i don't know what to do i prayed to saint peter for deliverance from your

01:51:04.020 wrath. And he came down and he beat the snot out of me. And Edbald's like, whoa, I don't want to

01:51:13.060 get on this St. Peter guy's bad side. I'm going to be Christian. So he like converts to avoid

01:51:19.740 St. Peter like scourging him, right? So part of the problem we run into when looking at the history

01:51:31.200 of the Anglo-Saxons is we don't actually have a lot. We have a lot given the circumstances,

01:51:38.560 but skipping ahead a little bit, in 1066, the Norman invasion happens and Anglo-Saxon England

01:51:45.080 ends. And the frogified Vikings come along and conquer Anglo-Saxon England. And this is why 0.86

01:51:57.960 English has so many French words in it. There's a period of time where the official language of

01:52:02.860 England is French, and everyone in the English court speaks French, and they have to use

01:52:08.780 translators to speak to the peasants because they don't know English. 0.50

01:52:15.700 This period is the second cultural revolution that the Anglo-Saxons have inflicted upon them.

01:52:22.660 It's actually it's actually the third if you count the Anglo-Saxon migration as a cultural revolution over the Roman Britons.

01:52:33.180 There'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

01:52:43.480 And everything that falls out of the fingers in that crumpling goes away.

01:52:47.160 And that leaves this core left behind. 0.66

01:52:49.120 And 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

01:53:02.300 There's a lot of books that they just chuck in the fire. 0.82

01:53:05.580 We don't know what we don't know, but we do know that they chucked books in the fire.

01:53:10.100 there's a book it's like uh the stripping of the altars um complaining about this from a catholic

01:53:16.700 pov of all of the stuff that was lost during the the literal looting of monasteries to take

01:53:24.600 gold crosses and melt them down and get rid of catholic literature and the like by protestants

01:53:29.120 and there's even more stuff from this period that's lost in there so like i said at one point

01:53:35.920 Kunigils and Quichilm, who may have been father and son, or they might have been brothers with

01:53:43.100 a third unnamed brother. We don't know, because these guys show up like three times. This guy,

01:53:50.240 Kunigils, is attested like three times, twice of which is by bead, and then there's like a charter

01:53:56.580 that he signed giving some guy a cow, right? There's a lot of Anglo-Saxon history that is

01:54:03.060 really murky um and it's very unfortunate because the anglo-saxon stuff we do have is often

01:54:10.640 extremely illuminating so uh back to the timeline here so that was essex so

01:54:18.700 you have you have kent and then what's west of kent wessex and what's north north of kent

01:54:27.540 essex and then what's west of sussex or sorry sorry what's west of kent sussex what's west of

01:54:36.060 sussex wessex right so we have another two set of heroes that are anglo-saxons and those are

01:54:44.540 aynfrith of bernicia and osric of daira do you want to throw up the heptarchy map again nick

01:54:50.280 i'm sorry like no one it's hard to know where things are in england

01:54:54.600 So, Dara is the south portion of Northumbria, which is this green blob there, right?

01:55:10.980 Dera 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

01:55:26.400 now i've been talking about the heptarchy yes this is where germ got the seven kingdoms of

01:55:33.700 westeros from at no point were there seven independent kingdoms in england however with

01:55:40.240 the general flow of lordship under lordship overlordship kingship etc there are these

01:55:46.400 seven vague territorial units of northumbria mercia east anglia essex kent sussex and wessex

01:55:53.120 um the southwest tip of the peninsula that wessex is on is cornwall um it's called west

01:56:00.400 wales on this map we'll get to the welsh in a minute here so these guys are the leaders of

01:56:08.740 um northumbria which is that northeast portion of england um

01:56:14.360 so in the early 600s this land was ruled by aadwine both province both bernicia and um

01:56:25.620 it's very common for kings to rule two provinces or two two portions of land but then split one

01:56:33.300 portion off and give it to an under king right so aadwine was challenged by athelfrith

01:56:40.520 but with the aid of radwald we've already talked about um he retained power a few years after this

01:56:49.320 ea the winner apostatized for a political marriage his reign was uneventful until he

01:56:54.560 was eventually defeated in battle by a joint force of the christian welsh tyrant

01:56:59.420 cadwallum ap cad fan i don't know if that's the way you're supposed to pronounce it i'm just

01:57:05.100 going to do it um and he's still asatru penda which is really interesting here because you

01:57:10.140 see here you have penda who's a crappy asatruar and you have cadwallan who is not only a christian

01:57:18.240 but welsh which is which is important coming up here and they're fighting aadwina who is a

01:57:25.320 an apostate to christianity from asatru there's a lot of conflict going on here the degree to which

01:57:33.640 Christian or Asatru kings fought each other is a little uncertain because at this time there's

01:57:40.880 always this back and forth of apostasy going on and people deciding to be loyal and then up while

01:57:47.240 my king said oh he's dead I muster again and it's it's all very complicated. We don't really know

01:57:52.860 how much Asatru kings fought each other however. Personally that might be because the Christian

01:57:59.660 sources just weren't aware of it, but it's interesting that Bede doesn't talk about this

01:58:04.520 more, right? So, Aadwina had pushed the Celtic kings out of Yorkshire, which more or less

01:58:13.780 establishes the border between England and Wales today. Cadwallen was the supreme leader of the 0.95

01:58:22.160 military forces of Wales. Wales, as I just said, is determined by the point at which the Celts in

01:58:30.100 Britain could push out the Anglo-Saxons or keep them from pushing in. At one point, 0.74

01:58:37.000 all of that island was Romano-Celtic. The Welsh under Cadwallon are still identifying as

01:58:44.640 the Celts who converted to Christianity because Rome and had been fighting a losing battle against

01:58:51.980 the anglo-saxon convert uh invaders bead is an anglo-saxon he's a christian but he's an

01:58:58.820 anglo-saxon and he's very keen on navigating the careful tightrope of christianity but also

01:59:07.480 the anglo-saxons aren't going to truckle to roman tyranny right but he's not trying to be in

01:59:14.220 conflict with the pope or continental christianity but he doesn't want the anglo-saxons to give way

01:59:19.480 to the welsh partially because cadwallin just pushes into the anglo-saxon territories and

01:59:27.560 bead has described it as like the grievous mistreatment of the locals in spite of them

01:59:34.680 having accepted the true faith and blah blah blah cadwallin does not care if you are a christian

01:59:42.160 or not if you're an anglo-saxon you got to go um i believe it's nennius there's another important

01:59:48.180 christian monk at this time who writes about um the the anglo-saxon migrations and he is just of 0.99

01:59:56.480 the opinion that anglo-saxons are just animals don't bother converting them just kill them just 0.97

02:00:02.000 get them off the island he is of course a celt um so penda is king in mercia which is the physical 0.99

02:00:10.780 largest kingdom of the heptarchy it's at the center of england it's below northumbria and 0.99

02:00:17.600 Strathclyde, it's east of Wales, it's west of East Anglia. Thank you, Nick. That's a good one.

02:00:28.500 Again, despite being politically and militarily ostensibly an Ositru loyalist, he allows his son

02:00:35.240 Pieda, yeah, Penda had a son named Pieda, like I said, a lot of these names are really similar,

02:00:41.960 to convert to Christianity. It is because of Pieda that, of course, Christianity takes hold

02:00:48.440 in Mercia. The local rulers, Osric and Einfrith, of Deira and Bernicia, Osric of Deira, the south

02:00:59.320 one, and Einfrith of Bernicia, the north one, respectively, rise up when Eadwina dies. And

02:01:08.020 they return to the Aesir, as they do so, to the acclaim and support of the locals. This is an

02:01:13.520 important point, because while the Germanic peoples in, uh, Anglo-Saxon England have this

02:01:20.600 sacred king thing going on, they also still have personal affectations, loyalties, piety, religiosity.

02:01:29.400 So, we see this kind of tacit admission from Bede in these, uh, and then such and such,

02:01:36.760 abandoned the true faith or worse never took it up much to the acclaim of the locals where he'll

02:01:43.960 kind of admit like yeah christianity wasn't all that popular this was just something the king was

02:01:48.460 doing probably because of you know the overlord telling him to so um these two guys these two

02:02:00.000 heroes rise up, and immediately Cadwallon, being a bloodthirsty tyrant who is like literally raping 0.95

02:02:07.640 and pillaging the land, he doesn't care if he's victimizing Christians, he continues to rape and 0.99

02:02:13.580 pillage the land. So Eganfrith goes to Cadwallon and tries to establish a kind of diplomatic peace 0.54

02:02:20.200 with him, and he only goes with 12 thanes. I've seen historians speculate on why. Some historians

02:02:28.860 think this was because um and frith thought he had an in with cadwallin and was basically going

02:02:36.540 in good faith others think it might have been because he was doing it as a kind of ploy of

02:02:42.360 like i submit to your rulership say spare my people others think it was because he just

02:02:48.800 was kind of cocky and thought he could convince cadwallin surely he's not that crazy you know

02:02:55.560 Um, 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.

02:03:23.560 afterwards it should be stressed here that bead who is writing only like 200 ish years after

02:03:31.040 cadwallin's rampage is really critical of them of him despite their shared christianity um

02:03:37.100 it's also interesting because this guy shows up as a minor figure in the the story of anglo-saxon

02:03:44.740 england coming up here in a bit but there's a like a grandson or so of cadwallin that shows up

02:03:50.700 who seems to be a pretty low, I don't know if beloved is the right term,

02:03:55.740 but he's liked among the Anglo-Saxons, this guy, this grandson.

02:03:59.280 So there's some chatter amongst academics about why that was the case.

02:04:05.360 One thesis is that pretty quickly after Cadwallon got finished with his rampage,

02:04:09.920 he kind of started trying to make amends.

02:04:12.360 Another thought is that his son or grandson,

02:04:14.860 I can't remember the actual relation between Cadwallon, the elder, and Cadwallon, the junior.

02:04:19.820 It doesn't really matter.

02:04:20.700 it's it's thought that there might have been some attempt at kind of making good which is why the

02:04:26.980 younger cadwallon is viewed better by anglo-saxons despite his grandfather being this heinous tyrant

02:04:33.320 um so what happens to northumbria though oswald the son of the aforementioned athelfrith

02:04:42.660 had been sent to dwell with the scots in northwest scotland after his father's defeat

02:04:47.900 With Osric and Anfrith out of the picture, he returned home and rallied an army with Irish and Scottish aid that defeated Cadwallon.

02:04:57.720 Christian myth says that Oswald prayed to saints, and with supernatural aid, the saints came down and helped him defeat Cadwallon, who is a Christian.

02:05:12.660 Again, despite Christian kings having ruled in the area, Oswald is when Christianity actually seems to start taking root in Northumbria.

02:05:24.860 Partially, that's because Oswald imported a lot of Irish clerics to do so.

02:05:30.280 We'll get to the Irish in a minute here in the Scots.

02:05:32.580 um osric and anfrith ruled only for a short period of time but their rules were folded into oswald's

02:05:41.700 by later christian chroniclers um the opinion i saw from historians on why this is the case is

02:05:48.080 that they were embarrassed about cadwallin's actions cadwallin doesn't seem to care about

02:05:53.320 the anglo-saxon christians in the area he doesn't seem to care about spreading christianity or

02:05:59.080 anything like that. I think there might also have been a bit of embarrassment by Christian

02:06:03.880 chroniclers that, honestly, Osric and Anfrith seem to have been pretty well received by the

02:06:09.900 locals who were quite happy to have Ositru kings in the region again. This is not really historical,

02:06:22.180 But 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.

02:06:33.440 And I think Osric was a very courageous man, and Anfrith was a very honorable one.

02:06:39.680 It 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.

02:06:48.920 um so at this time as i said wales is an independent celtic polity so is cornwall

02:06:58.340 although cornwall gets absorbed into wessex pretty quickly here um into like the 700s i think

02:07:04.660 so the celts get pushed out into or rather celts get absorbed by anglo-saxons

02:07:13.060 except in ireland where the anglo-saxons never really take root in wales in cornwall up to a

02:07:21.620 point and in scotland now the angle the anglo-saxons move into scotland they just do so

02:07:28.460 much more slowly than they move into um like britain proper so scots is a germanic language

02:07:38.960 It's related to English.

02:07:44.260 Is Scots a language?

02:07:45.900 Is it a dialect?

02:07:47.300 This is a complicated and thorny question.

02:07:50.400 And the whole debacle with the Scots language, Wikipedia, but that's another topic entirely.

02:07:56.700 But Scots Gaelic is not a Germanic language.

02:08:00.740 It is a Celtic language related to Gaelic Gaelic, Irish Gaelic.

02:08:06.840 um scotland is complicated but at this time there does seem to be a pretty clear separation between

02:08:14.360 like scotland and england as far as which ethnicities go where um it gets into really

02:08:23.980 complicated celticist questions which i'm not able to comment on so timeline wise um we get

02:08:32.320 back to this so just to recap sex rod and say word and and frith and uh osric rule in 626 ad and 630

02:08:41.600 ad respectively um we get hints here and there about heathen reactions at this time but they

02:08:51.340 aren't attributed to individual kings um probably because some of these guys the records just don't

02:08:59.100 survive about right so in 649 ad bald the aforementioned nut job outlaws uh asatru in kent

02:09:09.020 this is the first time we see real um top level christian persecution of asatruar

02:09:16.420 at like a an ideological level as opposed to just individuals because

02:09:20.940 it there is a question of how much were an frith and osric martyrs like was

02:09:29.100 was cadwallon doing this out of christian fervor or out of um celtic revanchism it's a bit of a

02:09:37.360 thorny question but i had bold is absolutely doing this as a matter of trying to get rid of

02:09:43.840 so then in 663 we get this figure sighera um in essex who may have been descended from sex rat

02:09:52.780 in Sayward. And in 663, he's flip-flopping between Christianity and Asatru when he gets the chance.

02:10:02.700 About 100 years later, in 786, there's a legatine report to Pope Hadrian that confirms that

02:10:10.320 Asatru is omnipresent still. They don't know what to do. They can get the kings to convert,

02:10:16.440 but they can't get the locals to do it in 865 the great heathen army which is an amazing name

02:10:23.620 that'd be a great name for a band also by the way marches into england or more so sails into england

02:10:29.780 from scandinavia in 871 alfred the great takes power and he's alfred the great because he he

02:10:38.880 kicks out the vikings and really unifies england in a way that it hadn't been up till that point

02:10:44.840 So, 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.

02:10:58.360 We 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?

02:11:11.560 Right. 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.

02:11:27.080 And 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.

02:11:43.840 and it's worth just as an aside um there's a uh an attestation about how anglo-saxon christians

02:11:53.760 conceptualize themselves in regards to heathens or danes who were just just synonymous in regards

02:12:01.900 to scandinavia anglo-saxons just assumed there weren't christians in scandinavia at the time

02:12:06.640 and they talk about um hair hairstyles and fashions that are different and so it's always

02:12:12.280 been a question of what is this hairstyle supposed to be because it's some it's an anglo-saxon you

02:12:18.360 know getting upset about like his brother or someone you know he's writing a letter and he's

02:12:22.800 writing the letter to his brother and he's getting upset his brother like how can you wear a danish

02:12:26.920 haircut you are a christian you should know better than to have your hair styled in the heathen

02:12:33.540 fashion and it's like what does a heathen haircut look like and i've seen everything from it being

02:12:39.940 like a mullet to just long long hair to like the the i don't know if there's a non-internet term

02:12:49.200 for this but like the hitler youth where it's like long on the top and front short on the sides

02:12:53.260 um a lot of discussion about it but it's clear there was some kind of cultural distant uh

02:12:59.400 difference that was building here we don't really start seeing um meaningful breakup between the

02:13:06.940 germanic peoples into separate ethnicities until well after 1080 um jackson crawford and simon

02:13:16.000 roper uh jackson crawford is an an old norse academic and simon roper is an old english

02:13:21.220 academic they did a video where they talked to each other in old norse and old english

02:13:28.020 in the tongues circa like 1000 ish ad right and they could understand each other perfectly fine

02:13:35.960 after they got past the the accent differences because it in many ways it is an accent and kind

02:13:43.720 of slang distinction between old norse and old english at this time um english actually comes

02:13:54.280 from like angle ish like the language of the angles old norse in norse is a dialectical form

02:14:01.960 north so it's the old north tongue right um so alfred the great dies in 899 um in 1027 the

02:14:15.080 north punishes bloat and idol worship i believe it uses the word bloat outright

02:14:23.360 um with fines on landlords which is interesting because it's a demonstration of how this is

02:14:29.960 enforced it's a punish so like if someone if someone is practicing ostrich the punishment

02:14:37.400 isn't necessarily on them it's on the guy above them as a way of getting people to push this down

02:14:44.080 um in 1054 AD Pope Leo IX cites the donation of Constantine for the first time and I'll come to

02:14:52.520 why that's important in a moment 1066 AD the Norman conquest happens and Anglo-Saxon England

02:14:58.120 ends and a lot of this stuff like fossilizes like this is why we don't use this is why bloat came

02:15:05.740 back into the english language with the the reforging of osatru with steve mcnallan the

02:15:11.400 herald of odin in 1969 right bloat is an old english word that's not something that the

02:15:18.780 anglo-saxons got from the norse so why don't we use this word well the norman invasion

02:15:27.240 forces this french cultural shift upon the english leading to a de-anglo-saxonizing of

02:15:37.100 the english people in a certain in a certain sense um this is why we say bloat is a form

02:15:43.320 of sacrifice rather than yeah sacrifice is the latinized frenchish word for bloat right

02:15:49.940 um the donation of constantine is important because the idea of the pope as being the

02:15:56.420 supreme leader of Christendom, comes about relatively late in Christian history.

02:16:01.020 For a long time, the Pope is just first among equals of bishops in the Western communion.

02:16:09.480 Do you know off the top of your head when the Western schism happens, sir?

02:16:13.640 I can look it up if you don't.

02:16:15.320 Yeah, exactly. 0.74

02:16:17.040 Yeah, or the schism, yeah.

02:16:20.180 So this is when Catholicism, no, East-West Schism, excuse me, 1054.

02:16:27.340 Yeah, 1054 is when the East-West Schism happens, and there's a separation between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy.

02:16:35.560 And up until that point, theoretically, the Pope, along with the other bishops of the, what is it, the Pentarchy, I think?

02:16:44.500 the bishops of the uh yeah the pentarchy the bishops of rome constantinople alexandria

02:16:51.640 antioch and jerusalem were primos inter pares or uh that's not the right term but uh we're co-equal

02:17:00.720 right within their own domains and the pope says no i'm in charge you all have to do what i say

02:17:06.700 and he produces this forged document in which Constantine basically gives the whole of the

02:17:15.100 Roman Empire to the Pope. Pope Leo X didn't make the forgery, but he was the first one to deploy

02:17:23.900 it at this scale. It was just kind of a weapon in the Vatican's chamber up until that point.

02:17:29.220 um that's important because it's it's a setup for what was going on with christianity and to a

02:17:37.340 degree why don't some of these kings just get rid of this thing right partially it's because it's

02:17:43.820 just this background bureaucracy in the post-roman territory that they are governing and inhabiting

02:17:50.080 and to a certain degree i don't think most of them conceptualized it as necessarily a threat

02:17:56.300 until it started telling kings what to do because it's kind of like well this is some

02:18:03.500 welsh celtic roman thing that is barely there we conceptualize it today as this kind of

02:18:12.200 force in the new sphere but again i really don't think a lot of these guys conceptualized it as

02:18:19.020 an ideology that they were necessarily in conflict with um men like sex rat and say word who took an

02:18:29.160 active role against christian clergy in their domains probably were were a minority of heathen

02:18:37.580 heathen reactionary opponents to christianity in as much as most of these guys probably didn't get

02:18:44.640 Like, 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.

02:18:58.820 Like, 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?

02:19:11.700 Do you have anything to say there, sir, while I take a drink?

02:19:19.220 Sure, as a side note, during this, like, Oust-A-True revival in the Dane Law,

02:19:29.160 it's interesting to note, and I was looking for the passage,

02:19:32.040 and I found it in Elder Gods by Stephen Pollington.

02:19:37.700 It's a wonderful book.

02:19:39.220 Get it if you can.

02:19:41.700 But yeah, Bishop Wolfstan was writing a, you know, chastising letter to the Christian congregation in Sermolupia de Angelos. 0.75

02:19:58.120 among heathen peoples no man dares to withhold neither a small nor large part of what is ordained

02:20:05.380 for the worship of false gods and everywhere we withhold gods do all too often and among the 0.98

02:20:13.080 heathen peoples no man dares to complain about the things which are brought to the false gods 0.99

02:20:18.580 inside or outside and are handed over as a sacrifice and we have stripped bare god's houses 0.99

02:20:26.400 inside and outside of all their finery and almost everywhere God's servants are deprived of respect

02:20:33.640 and protection and some men say that no man dares to dares to misuse the servants of false

02:20:39.960 gods in any manner among heathen men so a lot of people have a I don't know a misguided idea about

02:20:50.540 about the seriousness of religion or the, I don't know, the barbarous customs of 0.99

02:21:02.780 Ausatruir. And it was interesting to see as late as, you know, the, the 10 hundreds that 0.99

02:21:11.000 um the marked contrast of amongst alsatruar in england

02:21:22.840 they were noted for freely giving to their hoffs for showing extra you know for showing respect

02:21:32.200 and deference and protection for the gothar with treating you know the upkeep of hoffs

02:21:40.680 and the upkeep of their faith as a serious thing they were willing to invest in whereas christians

02:21:46.360 at the time in the same place you know mistreated their priests didn't you know weren't giving their

02:21:53.800 their donations and their tithes were you know stripping monasteries and churches of you know

02:22:03.000 sacred objects and things they can make a buck off of or repurpose to put somewhere else and it's

02:22:09.800 interesting to see that in such a sharp contrast and i think it's it's informative

02:22:25.480 it's also interesting and you have to wonder um

02:22:31.320 what infrastructure they had because as we talked earlier most of the island like the royal houses

02:22:38.520 had converted uh probably two years prior to the the viking raids and the in the situation with

02:22:46.040 the danelaw two centuries uh earlier so how much did the folk remember their gods how much did the

02:22:54.840 folk remember you know the gods of their fathers and the traditions and the sacred sites and the

02:23:02.280 rituals and it is an interesting point that i don't think we see other places where this

02:23:09.720 you know their scandinavian cousins come back and bring with them the old faith and they

02:23:16.280 you know have this have this revival for however long they were able to have it

02:23:22.760 i think that's that's always something that's really interested me in like what that looks like

02:23:28.360 because it was a big enough deal that the pope needed to like speak on it so it could get stamped

02:23:35.000 back down so their folk soul awoke at this time to one degree or another and i think it's a it's

02:23:41.400 a really interesting point in history and it you know is still a still a thing or a functional

02:23:50.600 deal with the dane law up until just about till till the norman conquest um we do get oh there's

02:24:00.760 a lot of references to um there's a lot of christian writings about complaining about

02:24:06.200 paganism still being present in anglo-saxon england there's a lot of law codes that treat

02:24:12.200 paganism as like a crime that people are still doing regularly. I think the thing

02:24:19.400 about the conceptualization of this religious conflict that differed between the Christians

02:24:26.520 and the the et cetera is that before I forget this um I couldn't find it again but I did one

02:24:33.720 time find a a some kind of writing by some monk complaining about paganism still being omnipresent

02:24:41.720 within the the military and the kingship it it's not entirely clear what he means there

02:24:47.400 he might have been talking about like the sacred king kind of thing but it it must have been

02:24:54.920 extremely difficult for these gregorian missionary guys to do this with every aspect of a society

02:25:01.960 like in this society violence and military action would have been deeply associated with the cult of

02:25:08.440 odin for example at like minimum they would have to separate it from all sorts of things

02:25:16.760 through a very long running process of enculturation that did not happen quickly

02:25:22.360 as i was saying sorry for being jumbled here um from what i can see about how asatruara understood

02:25:30.520 their religion in this period it was mostly focused on this kind of like that's just what

02:25:35.800 we do around here we just do these kinds of things mindset combined with personal loyalty to the gods

02:25:43.400 so when like athelbert apostatizes people do get upset there are people who are very deeply

02:25:51.380 personally loyal but they're personally loyal they conceptualize it as personal loyalty to

02:25:57.120 the gods so they view athelbert as disloyal he's a traitor to othin they don't view it as taking

02:26:06.420 the wrong side in a an ideological struggle they don't view it as like he's on the wrong side they

02:26:16.460 view it as like he has committed an error to the god and that's not wrong to do but the lack of an

02:26:24.560 ideological component to anglo-sex and osatru makes it difficult for them to resist in this

02:26:32.940 kind of you have to always be on way that the the christians are able to like if you just look at

02:26:41.340 the timeline in abstract like i know that's really easy because i have the timeline up here

02:26:45.640 but it's like the gregorian mission is established 569 the pope got a letter asking for help 100

02:26:52.940 years prior the gregorian mission is established 569 it's not until 580 that gregory actually gets

02:27:00.860 a chance to deploy this meaningfully with with athobert and bertha marrying that is an extreme

02:27:08.860 time horizon that people who are actively looking at the world and trying to enforce an ideological

02:27:17.580 vision upon it are able to do that people whose religiosity or politics i mean it's the same for

02:27:24.940 both is just a kind of day-to-day lived reality just aren't really able to conceptualize defend

02:27:34.140 against engage with you know it's like it's like a man without legs playing basketball against

02:27:43.340 michael jordan here just in terms of sheer ability to engage with this stuff on the fly

02:27:49.660 particularly because of the particular uh affectation of the germanic peoples to

02:27:58.140 not have like a druid kind of class or like a brahmin class there are gothar at this time

02:28:03.820 but they are local technical specialists rather than like traveling priests who are trying to

02:28:09.500 ensure ideological correctness with like everyone that they meet like the druids were which is

02:28:15.260 actually kind of humorous because the actual druids got exterminated by um julius caesar and

02:28:21.420 the romans because they were a threat to roman rule precisely because they were a traveling priest 0.50

02:28:28.060 class who in enforced is a hard a harsh word here given that the celts were like willingly

02:28:34.300 doing this but the druids enforced ideological and religious correctness and conformity to the

02:28:39.820 celts and it's worth noting here the romans were not opposed to the celtic polytheistic religion

02:28:45.100 augustus my source here as um lady with a mead cup augustus traveled to some place where uh

02:28:53.660 gaul and germania met and he worshiped gallo roman germanic mercury

02:29:00.380 in the traditional manner he basically performed bloat to odin or perhaps he performed a sacrifice

02:29:07.480 to to lu or the dog day it's not entirely clear but like augustus went to this went into gaul

02:29:14.660 and performed religion on the native people's terms there's a huge amount of romanized celtic

02:29:23.600 religious archaeological stuff it's not that the romans were opposed to the celtic polytheism

02:29:30.220 It's that they were opposed to the druids acting as this sort of enforcer class, if you will.

02:29:36.880 And 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

02:29:48.940 In India, this is a function that the Brahmins fulfill. 0.61

02:29:51.360 There 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

02:30:04.380 You are a Brahmin, a Druid kind of thing.

02:30:08.480 That's an Indo-European society kind of thing.

02:30:11.180 It's not something you see in non-Indo-European societies like China.

02:30:16.620 So just kind of tracing this out.

02:30:18.700 so how does christianity actually move through england at like a top level like what does this

02:30:25.180 look like because we talk about kings converting right so athelbert of kent marries bertha of

02:30:31.720 paris bertha was a christian and would only marry athelbert for his political gain if she could

02:30:36.300 practice christianity and bring her useless christian clerics with her however she was the 1.00

02:30:43.060 the patient negative one the the viral infectious agent that allowed christianity to enter because 0.95

02:30:50.980 the gregorian mission linked up with her so um athelbert's successor aya the bald became christian

02:31:01.700 seemingly due to him being insane aya the bald's sister was married to aya the winner of daira

02:31:08.500 That's the guy that Osric and Aenferth succeeded. 0.88

02:31:11.960 So Christianity spread from Kent to Northumbria. 0.83

02:31:15.680 Then Seibert, the father of Sexrath and Seibert, converted due to being Athelbert's thane. 0.83

02:31:22.320 So from Kent into Essex.

02:31:24.380 Radwald becomes Christian due to Athelbert's lordship.

02:31:28.100 So Kent in East Anglia.

02:31:30.220 Penda lets his son Paeda marry Eilflad of Bermesia, who is a Christian.

02:31:36.340 some of these names like i don't know if i can get my daughter my wife to let us name our next

02:31:41.820 daughter aelflaad um but uh aelflaad was a christian so she gets piada to become a christian

02:31:50.480 so kent into northumbria into mercia missionaries from mercia then went to sussex this seems to

02:31:58.060 have actually been a bottom up in the sense of it's not a king kind of um conversion the

02:32:05.400 the nobility of Sussex tried to curry favor with Mercia, which was their overlord, but they didn't

02:32:11.520 have a central kind of under king governing them. So the nobility of Sussex take of Christianity

02:32:16.660 to get in good with Mercia. So Kent to Northumbria to Mercia to Sussex. Repeated invasions by Mercia

02:32:24.440 result in Wessex converting. So Kent to Northumbria to Mercia to Wessex. Cadwalla of Wessex. Cadwalla

02:32:32.500 is the the descendant of Cadwallan um Cadwallan invades the Isle of Wight that's the the big

02:32:40.240 island uh kind of at like England's butt at the south um Cadwallan of Wessex invades the Isle of

02:32:49.140 Wight supposedly he murders everyone on the island and replaces them with West Saxons it's not

02:32:54.720 entirely clear if the Huitwara were Germanics or not some people think they might have been Celts

02:33:01.540 it's not clear and it doesn't really matter um so there is a question here of like why support

02:33:09.820 the church and not just convert right and there's a few reasons one these foreign clerics were the

02:33:18.120 king's man they were loyal to the king they were there on the king's good wishes the king could

02:33:23.500 write to the pope and say rid me of this turbulent priest no send me another one and the pope would

02:33:31.460 right so they were replaceable agents they were loyal to the king they weren't loyal to the locals

02:33:36.540 um christianity support for the vatican clergy enabled support from frankia and rome hosting

02:33:47.160 clerics became part of the requirements attached to being athelbert's thane directly or indirectly

02:33:52.920 because this is all downhill from kentish loyalty to france to frankia right

02:34:00.320 there appears to have been little organized ideological reaction to christianity it's

02:34:06.700 mostly conservative nobles compare the goths who under a thaner do appear to have somewhat of an

02:34:12.820 ideology opposing christianity maybe partially just because the byzantine empire is so deeply

02:34:19.820 attached to christianity at the time because again it's like if you look at the chain of

02:34:27.060 conversion, a big thing that happens is that Pieta converts, which leads to mercy and power

02:34:34.080 going to Christianity. So whatever Mercia does from then on, even if they're not directly trying 0.52

02:34:40.040 to spread Christianity, conquest by and fealty to Mercia results in a necessity of hosting and

02:34:50.760 supporting christian clergymen who are working to apostatize the locals at minimum so had pia

02:35:00.840 did not apostatized i i don't know what would have happened but it wouldn't have occurred as

02:35:06.680 quickly because mercy and power wouldn't have had conversion to christianity attached to it in this

02:35:12.680 manner and you again i i feel bad for kind of harping on penda so much because who cares about

02:35:19.060 penda past a certain point but it's like the man is supposed to be a diehard osatru patriot

02:35:24.940 but he lets his son marry a christian woman you'd think her apostasy her return to the gods

02:35:32.220 or like would be a necessary condition for her marriage or he'd just say no we can't trust him

02:35:38.960 so you can't do it you know like it's your son bro you're the king you know do you have anything

02:35:46.160 you want to throw in here sir um not really i mean i think it's i think it's interesting i think that

02:36:01.680 you're connecting it to the continent in the way that you are is something that a lot of people

02:36:07.420 don't talk about that I don't think is very widely known. But yeah, the tie ins with all

02:36:18.100 the interconnected systems, people, when they look back at history, they don't, I don't

02:36:25.660 know, I think they often overly compartmentalize and don't recognize the interconnectedness

02:36:31.760 of a lot of the webs of things.

02:36:35.820 Before I lose this thought,

02:36:37.460 I just want to point out,

02:36:38.360 we were talking about the sacred King and the,

02:36:40.160 the near,

02:36:41.940 I'm just gonna say near deification of the sacred King at times.

02:36:45.720 That is something that came with that, 1.00

02:36:49.120 like was just taken by Christians past a certain point because they didn't 0.88

02:36:52.620 have a choice.

02:36:53.780 So there's a lot of early Anglo-Saxon saints. 0.88

02:36:58.200 They're just some Christian and they just like die in a war,

02:37:01.760 another christian they're not martyred by pagans or something like that they just go off get in a 0.94

02:37:06.160 fight over territory while being christian with another christian and die and they get turned

02:37:10.640 into a saint because the the veneration of kings was just a germanic thing that they did

02:37:20.320 and it goes both ways so um a bit of an awkward one here our man osric is actually listed as a

02:37:28.320 saint in an early 8th century christian calendar because he was a king who died so christians had

02:37:38.480 to venerate him well of course we're going to venerate our king we have to do it it's just

02:37:43.440 something that was expected of you as an anglo-saxon right so so they take this this pagan

02:37:49.520 king who dies fighting christians and they make him a saint because that's just what they have to

02:37:55.760 do. By comparison, when the Roman, so the Roman emperors were deified, right? The Senate would 0.63

02:38:03.200 declare them a god. And the precise specifics, it's more like they're declaring them an alfar, 0.80

02:38:08.280 but it's semantics, right? The last Roman emperor that had that done to them was Valens,

02:38:15.620 who was a christian like um he was also yeah valens is the the guy who dies spectacularly

02:38:27.060 uh poorly um anyways uh do you want to get to questions i don't think i have anything more in

02:38:33.680 my notes no i think that's kind of takes us to where we're at we do have a few questions

02:38:39.380 i can't can i just sorry i'm sorry i should have said this before you're fine um i think

02:38:44.300 if you had to do like a kind of summation of this period it is a two-fold

02:38:52.720 rejection of the idea of british history as an island rejecting any kind of history as an island

02:39:01.100 right but especially with british history where there is so much of an attempt at separating

02:39:06.700 british everything from the continent right it is literally an island yes it is literally

02:39:14.460 an island but it's clearly not too much of an island for christianity to cross the channel

02:39:20.700 right um the other thing is the necessity of organized ideological

02:39:29.820 action and cooperation in a hierarchical fashion for anything that you care about

02:39:38.880 because if you don't organize you will be organized by your enemies whether you are aware

02:39:47.440 of it or not and that that seems to be a going theme throughout religious history and the degree

02:39:55.300 to which you keep get to keep any of your stuff after you get organized by someone else is uh

02:40:03.060 entirely up in the air you know we have

02:40:09.300 if you can go find like let's just do i'm a language nerd so let's just do language real

02:40:13.860 quick here go look up english and try to read english wikipedia without knowing how to read

02:40:20.340 to Old English. It's a pretty different looking thing from how we write and talk and speak today.

02:40:32.100 That is the result of, now granted, it's not the result of Christianity in the Anglo-Saxon period,

02:40:38.800 it's the result of the Norman Conquest, but it's like part of why the Norman Conquest,

02:40:44.720 and actually the Norman Conquest of Gaelic Ireland too while we're at it, was allowed to

02:40:49.660 happened was because this this anglo-saxon christianity was so syncretic was because

02:40:55.360 jesus being a warrior was too much jesus the apostles being thanes was too much the sacred

02:41:03.000 king was too much even that was a half measure that eventually had to be corrected now granted

02:41:09.040 it's not like the pope told the normans to go do the norman invasion but there was a sort of like

02:41:13.720 um the chinese have a term i can't remember what it is in mandarin but it

02:41:18.740 kind of means like crisis tunity there's a crisis but that's an opportunity and you always have to

02:41:25.340 make the best of an opportunity and if you don't someone else is gonna so there's a reason we

02:41:35.080 organize absolutely and it's important it's important that those of us that practice also

02:41:43.400 true live our faith and learn lessons from the past i think there is a lot of people that

02:41:57.240 want to study the history but without applying the lessons learned from that

02:42:05.480 to project things into the future it's like they're

02:42:08.360 um it's like they're a neutral observer and that's antithetical to what alsatru is

02:42:17.400 it's living that trough to the isir which as noble arian people puts it upon us to

02:42:25.800 learn lessons of the past and shape things better into the future

02:42:31.960 but go ahead just to say and i i don't want anyone to think i'm

02:42:35.640 I'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.

02:42:50.040 But an ideological component, an intellectual component that views things in terms of principles is necessary for anything at scale.

02:43:05.640 you know yeah absolutely but i don't i mean the two go hand in hand and i think that

02:43:13.640 binding organizational structure gets us a lot of the way i think they did have a lot of ideological

02:43:24.120 commonality i don't because you see that in the way that christianity has to contort itself

02:43:32.200 in order to make it self-appealing Christianity on Jewish you know hippie rabbi terms would never

02:43:42.320 have been remotely successful it had to contort their core values into you know early medieval

02:43:52.820 European warrior things and not, you know, wandering desert rabbi and his Jewish friends

02:44:04.660 in urban Roman Judea, it just never would have been appealing. The value systems are 0.80

02:44:10.760 completely askew from one another. So I think Christianity is a lot more bending early on

02:44:18.800 than otherwise.

02:44:22.640 So the questions we got kind of harken back to Svon and I are stuck in all the little

02:44:29.640 poems in the Eddas about that relate to the Volsung cycle.

02:44:34.340 But there's questions from Johan.

02:44:36.340 I finished the seven episodes about the saga of the Volsungs.

02:44:40.640 I'd gotten a copy of the Niblungenlied as a gif recently and noticed it was a remarkably

02:44:48.520 similar story to that story. I didn't realize that they were essentially two recountings of

02:44:53.560 the same story. I read the book, went back and read the saga, then watched the episodes pertaining

02:44:59.960 to that. It briefly mentioned that the two stories are related and cover the same story more or less.

02:45:05.720 I was a little surprised that the correlations are not talked about in more detail other than

02:45:13.340 a couple sentences. There are several key differences. One, notably, the saga is firmly

02:45:21.920 set in Ausatru, and the Neblungenlied has Christianity. Another difference I saw was

02:45:28.480 the character of Brunhild, or Brynhild. She is portrayed very differently in the two stories.

02:45:35.040 uh there are other differences in the way the story plays out creates a lot of moral differences

02:45:44.020 in characters between the stories in the niblungen lead it seems uh to be more black and white

02:45:52.720 where siegfried and krimhild are the ideal and moral couple and their foil gunther and brunhild

02:46:02.060 are more set up as a type

02:46:04.140 of man and woman people ought 0.96

02:46:06.040 not to be. The saga is a lot more 0.99

02:46:08.120 mixed messaging, with all parties

02:46:10.080 being noble and

02:46:11.980 ignoble.

02:46:13.580 It's a multi-part question,

02:46:16.020 but is the Nibblumenleid still

02:46:18.060 a valued source of

02:46:19.660 Nordic morality?

02:46:26.020 The next part...

02:46:27.420 There's another

02:46:29.960 chunk. Is it a slightly modernized version of the saga of the Volsungs that reflects more

02:46:37.240 high-slash-late medieval culture versus early medieval culture? Do you think it's a comparison

02:46:43.300 of continental morality versus Icelandic morality? Is it tainted due to Christian influence? Should

02:46:49.440 Should we even compare the two or use both and or use both?

02:46:54.440 Yes.

02:46:57.760 So okay, I say that to be obnoxious, but the answer to most of those questions are yes.

02:47:08.900 So the reason we didn't do a lot of comparing and contrasting is confusing enough as it

02:47:12.580 is when we wanted to present the cohesive whole, and we did mention that we might do

02:47:18.000 the niblungen lead by itself at some point and saying that i do think it's valuable i

02:47:24.640 like the imagery a lot more i like the high medieval i suppose that's a misnomer because

02:47:32.320 it was written very early on but i like the scale and the grandeur of the niblungen lead

02:47:38.640 better than i like the i don't know more rustic setting of the volsung saga

02:47:47.840 but i think there's stuff to be learned from both i think certainly your point is yes one is more

02:47:55.520 advanced as far as all of the extras and all of the setting that our characters are placed in

02:48:04.960 And it looks really different in early, very early medieval Scandinavia than it does in much more middle medieval Germany.

02:48:21.920 But they are all reflections that come down to us of the same core story.

02:48:27.800 i do think the christianization in the continent affects the way the story plays out and it affects

02:48:35.360 the more very sharp black and white differences in the characters whereas you get a lot more of

02:48:42.700 the subtlety in the norse material and it's why i think that as australia we prioritize the

02:48:51.180 Volsunga saga over the Niblungen lead, because it leaves a lot of that behind. But it, I like the

02:48:59.100 way it's told. I like the setting. So I think that it's certainly very valuable. And I think that

02:49:05.600 either or, but ideally both are worth us looking at and comparing and contrasting, because I think

02:49:16.120 there's, there's cool. I think there are valuable things about both. I also think there's cool

02:49:22.160 things about both that are just presented. Depending upon the stuff that you like, or the

02:49:29.740 imagery that you like, or even storytelling that you like, I think they're both really valuable

02:49:35.300 things to have. Chris, do you have any thoughts? My thought is I shouldn't mute first. So I think

02:49:45.180 the thing about it is that this is another one of those examples of like um the the syncretism

02:49:53.260 that we were talking about right uh so we end up with the thing is that germanic society was an

02:50:06.340 oral tradition or an oral culture right so you would have or we would have these like

02:50:12.780 poets skulls um the old english word was like show um the celtic oguland is bards these would

02:50:20.840 be traveling poets who would memorize a huge amount of poetic formulas like um achilles is

02:50:30.560 always swift-footed the dawn is always rosy fingered or something like that hera is white

02:50:36.660 any female character is white-armed right and they would know the gist of a story but they

02:50:43.960 would piece it together basically on the fly right like nine and like the it's the same plot

02:50:49.500 beats every time but it's like is Achilles swift-footed is he strong-armed does it really

02:50:55.600 matter in this verse right so to a degree it's kind of just natural for an oral society which

02:51:07.280 people were still doing into like the 1600s it wasn't really until the printing press came along

02:51:14.540 that people stopped the europeans stopped being very oral focused because remember like yeah you

02:51:22.260 could get like a book was changed to a desk in a church or a monastery if you were lucky you could

02:51:29.440 pay someone to make a copy of it and in a few years you'd get your copy of the book years if

02:51:36.000 you're lucky so what what scholars would do is they would read these books and they came up with

02:51:41.060 these techniques to memorize enormous amounts of information if you've heard of like the method of

02:51:46.400 loci or the the like theater of the mind or any of this kind of stuff these memorization techniques

02:51:53.920 were used by scholars to remember books because they could not have them on hand they were lucky

02:52:00.300 if they had a bible like maybe half maybe the gospels or maybe the old testament and so they

02:52:07.380 would memorize this huge quantities of information and so storytelling was done in a oral tradition

02:52:17.020 manner where the poet is going to depict things as he thinks is appropriate and so stories could

02:52:24.760 be very ancient but would be moved forward so to a degree the story reflecting um like

02:52:34.860 more uh modern values or literally society is on the one hand yes it's not accurately conveying

02:52:47.800 some ancient thing but it's also not really trying to do that it's like those medieval

02:52:52.640 paintings of alexander the great and his men and they're wearing like ornate plate mail and like

02:52:59.360 riding horses with like lances like jousting lances and they're doing battle with like turks

02:53:05.320 with like turbans and stuff yes it's not actually what the ancient thing would have looked like but

02:53:12.260 it's also not trying to be it's conveying what this looks like to this society so

02:53:20.340 it's very useful in as much as it conveys like things that have survived but it also does talk

02:53:28.140 about the you know the the high german period because it's for the high german period it's not

02:53:35.580 supposed to be a perfect rendition of ancient anything um i don't think we're necessarily like

02:53:45.180 worsened by it by the the more modern one necessarily having christian stuff in it

02:53:51.940 Because, 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.

02:54:07.480 You know, it's a poet who knows a little bit and, yeah, they get married in a church because weddings happen in churches.

02:54:15.380 it doesn't it doesn't contaminate the story in my opinion well i also think that you know being

02:54:26.180 honest characters in the story that are based on real people don't work historically so the story

02:54:35.860 is a work of fiction that tells that's set in a period and it's a really cool work of fiction

02:54:44.980 that's helpful to us and that teaches us you know a lot of things and it is you know seminal to so

02:54:54.180 much of the development of european i don't know heroes and story arc but i think that the ousted

02:55:03.620 true elements are certainly emphasized much more in the norse telling of it because it was done

02:55:09.860 you know, a lot of the source material came from the Ausitru period or very shortly thereafter,

02:55:17.220 whereas that link is much more distant in the Niblungenlied. But either way, I think that

02:55:26.080 the nature of the narrative is going to change depending on the time that it's told in.

02:55:33.380 those are you know good periods of history I think it was a modern woke version it would be

02:55:43.860 terrible so I mean I think that if we were having this discussion in 1400 then we might be a little

02:55:52.560 bit more picky about certain things but it's not I think there's value to each and that's why I

02:55:59.180 think it's an either or proposition i think it's a both and synthesizing and learning lessons from

02:56:04.060 each um it would be stupid not to treat them as connected because they clearly are but i don't

02:56:11.580 think you have to force that connection i think you can treat them as two parallel stories that

02:56:18.140 are both beneficial i i don't think we should be looking at these as necessarily super historical

02:56:25.740 texts is kind of the thing like like attila the hun is a character but he's not a hun you know

02:56:32.940 you know he's like a germanic warlord he has a yeah and there's a number of characters from that

02:56:39.420 period but as we say when we're going over that swan and i this is getting written down at the

02:56:46.140 earliest 600 years after it happened which is tremendous that so many of the pieces and names

02:56:53.740 and places make it down to the poet at that time also from johan my second question is a bit more

02:57:00.940 straightforward and answerable in a shorter context i've heard it stated uh that matt and

02:57:07.340 various other afa leaders will be moving to uh sigerheim in tennessee that's all well and good

02:57:13.740 but what consideration has been given to how that would impact the rest where the hoffs and

02:57:18.860 leadership currently are um it was said in some episodes of vns that spawn would move

02:57:25.820 and that prompted me to think what will thorshoff do will that not weaken the presence and community

02:57:32.060 there uh if all of the key motivated leadership move could that lessen the afa's reach throughout

02:57:38.860 the country would it be a sort of brain drain effect where the best and the brightest move

02:57:44.380 and most devoted moved to tennessee and then over time the hoff districts deteriorate um

02:57:52.300 so i appreciate the question and it's something that you know i think that many of us have given

02:57:58.460 thought to um short answer is no i think that

02:58:06.940 life doesn't work that way taking successful and motivated p and like

02:58:15.580 people that have stuff to lose and have put down roots and are successful are very hard

02:58:23.060 to get to pick up and move somewhere so i don't think you know under the best possible

02:58:29.620 trying to get everyone to go their circumstances i don't think that's going to get everybody i do

02:58:37.780 think it will get some people but i think there's a lot of people that are very rooted to where

02:58:42.640 they're at so i think that all of the above is an appropriate way to think of it one of the things

02:58:51.300 about um the location too that's important it's equidistant from it's like eight hours and

02:59:01.540 it depends on what time of day you run it so let's say it's eight hours even from 1.00

02:59:06.900 frey's hof thor's hof and yord's off worst case scenario if we pulled leadership from those hofs 0.52

02:59:16.340 all went there we could send those people back out once a month to host the current obligations 0.93

02:59:24.100 they currently host at those hoffs without any effect happening so that's part of what's been

02:59:29.700 thought about but also we're growing and we have to have an eye towards growth so we need to be

02:59:39.220 able to sustain these places to where one gothe is not the success or failure of an entire hof

02:59:46.420 and an entire district so we do have plans in place building up um more leadership over time

02:59:55.380 and this is a frustrating thing to admit but you know i've wanted to go down to tennessee and

03:00:01.700 we've had the property and we're you know many years into that now much more than i would have

03:00:07.620 liked before i can get down there and that's just me so this is a process where over time i think

03:00:15.060 people who are particularly devoted and particularly want to be involved with the day-to-day

03:00:22.740 running of afa from the capital will trickle there as they can but there's plenty of people

03:00:31.780 that won't and that aren't able to and we're absolutely committed once we get a hof somewhere

03:00:36.740 We're committed to the success of that off in perpetuity.

03:00:41.020 So it is something we've thought about.

03:00:42.780 The other thing is, that's not fair.

03:00:45.480 If 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.

03:00:57.840 and they can't try to structure their life around something that's more in tune with their hopes

03:01:05.360 and dreams involved with the AFA and the AFA's success. So we're at a level to where we can send

03:01:12.640 people out to run things at different Hoffs if we had to, if everybody went there, but it's just not

03:01:19.440 going to flesh out that way. And the other thing that I think is really important is to

03:01:25.520 is to have faith and follow

03:01:29.720 the ways we believe we are directed by the

03:01:33.840 ICR. I believe that

03:01:37.260 Sigurheim and Tiershoff and moving a number

03:01:41.940 of us to an AFA capital is in keeping with

03:01:45.980 the will and the plans of the ICR.

03:01:50.060 That being said, I trust that they will help things work out

03:01:53.740 to the best as long as we are trying to do our best and trying to align ourselves at their will

03:02:00.220 as best as we can so i think things will work out fine and we try to stack contingencies to make

03:02:08.380 sure we can farm people out to you know travel places to make things happen if necessary so

03:02:16.700 you know i want to plan for those contingencies but i do have a trust that things work out fine on it

03:02:23.740 Um, I don't mean to be like, going back to opportunities in crisis, be a good time to

03:02:32.500 step up and be a full builder.

03:02:34.240 I don't know where I don't know where you are.

03:02:36.140 So I don't know if you could actually be the guy at Thor's Hoff.

03:02:40.280 But you know what I mean here?

03:02:42.120 It's always a good time.

03:02:43.160 You know, and that's another.

03:02:45.480 So on the answer is all of the above.

03:02:49.920 This is something I think is really important.

03:02:53.740 So everybody who's in the AFA should pick up and move to one of our Hoffs.

03:03:00.560 Move as close as you can to one of our Hoffs.

03:03:04.160 But I know that's not going to happen.

03:03:06.640 So 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.

03:03:17.780 The answer is both.

03:03:18.980 we want to consolidate people in certain areas, but we also want to expand. And I think we have

03:03:24.840 enough people with different motivations in life and different circumstances where those that can

03:03:30.420 should move close to a Hoff. Those that can't should work on building a community where they're

03:03:35.700 at that can sustain a Hoff when it's time. And I think that'll all work out fine. And, you know,

03:03:42.520 like like chris said folk building is a thing we need folk builders and here's the thing there's

03:03:50.520 not a limited supply anybody that wants to serve the icer and our church the afa in that capacity

03:03:59.400 can be very instant instrumental in building infrastructure and community to get a hof closer

03:04:05.560 to where they're at so the answer really is all of the above on those things and i think that kind

03:04:11.000 of approach is going to be the most successful in the circumstances that we're dealing with.

03:04:19.480 Good evening Ozheri Gauthier Matt, folk builder Chris, and folk builder Nick. This question

03:04:25.080 is about the episode about the Goths. What is the legacy of the Goth? Who, if anyone,

03:04:33.160 was their inheritors? Thank you for all that you do. Chris take first swing at this.

03:04:41.000 Um, 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

03:04:57.440 Their 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

03:05:10.640 Um, 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.

03:05:29.780 Um, 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,

03:05:54.300 saw the goths as a kind of um heroic version of the german um gothic architecture actually

03:06:03.540 originated as a slur for gothic originated as a slur for the uh the northern cathedrals in france

03:06:13.200 which were unsuitably roman due to not being made of bricks and the gothic was actually a slur and

03:06:19.580 it very quickly became a point of pride um even amongst the french the spanish actually have a

03:06:28.460 lot of so the aristocracy of spain um one thesis for its origination is actually from visigothic

03:06:36.420 warriors who moved into and conquered iberia and established themselves as the elite of it and

03:06:42.580 that's true that happened um that's why you see like mexicans with names like as volto and

03:06:49.340 roberto because oswald and robert come to spanish from gothic um

03:07:00.060 and are we talking the mexican mexicans or the brazilian mexicans

03:07:05.980 see what you did there well i'm sure there are brazilians with names like oswaldo and roberto

03:07:11.740 i just don't know i can read portuguese we're talking about the hapsburg mexicans

03:07:16.540 but like uh the the goths remained pretty pretty uh heavily in the minds of the spanish for a

03:07:31.820 surprisingly long period of time in a lot of the conflicts in latin america between republicans

03:07:38.280 and monarchists and, uh, stay loyal to Spain versus being an independent country kind of

03:07:46.320 conflicts. Um, Godos, Los Godos was a slur to refer to the, uh, monarchist or, um, Spanish

03:07:59.100 loyalist side um the scandinavian countries have all claimed descent from the goths the swedes uh

03:08:10.000 having possibly one of the better claims there because the the goths were swedes who got up and

03:08:17.320 left at one point both the danish and swedish crowns claimed descent from the goths and the

03:08:26.220 Danish and Danish and Swedish kings both claimed to be the king of the Goths um the Swedish king

03:08:32.320 was the king of Gotland so he was literally the king of the land of the Goths uh there's actually

03:08:39.100 like a papal council where all of the kings of Europe showed up and the Spanish and Swedish

03:08:45.540 kings got in a fight because they both claimed to be kings of the Goths and that meant they got to

03:08:51.740 sit closer to the pope um i think the legacy of the goths is as this strong proud noble germanic

03:09:01.300 people that their their extinction as a living ethnos allowed them to become a kind of universal

03:09:11.160 european figure of meaning something to everyone in europe because no one really is a goth anymore

03:09:19.240 so in a certain sense we all kind of are goths or like we all have been impacted by them in as much

03:09:27.440 as all european countries have some kind of something to say about the goths i know that's

03:09:33.460 kind of rambly but it's kind of like who are their inheritors well i don't really think anyone is

03:09:40.460 You know, at least not in the, at least not in the England is Anglo-Saxia today kind of a sense.

03:09:49.980 yeah I think that they become kind of a root

03:10:02.540 I don't know a root population for European nobility in general and I think it's telling

03:10:13.560 that numerous royal lines trace their legitimacy to being inheritors of the goths

03:10:24.600 and since swedish royal family is currently installed by napoleon

03:10:31.880 i'm going to say that the spanish royal house i think is the one most active that traces descent

03:10:38.440 to the goths the like existent one that currently does it's strange that like

03:10:49.160 I don't know the Habsburgs I guess get gothic cool points because wherever you know Charles V's

03:10:58.760 empire was, there is a piece of Gothic legacy to it. But yeah, I

03:11:07.340 think it's one of those shared heritages that binds European

03:11:14.020 nobility. And so I think it's special when we focus on their

03:11:24.580 history and their myths. And I think it's kind of a shame that

03:11:27.320 they're so unsung in modern times, because that legacy was something that was valued for its

03:11:34.780 legitimacy in the medieval period a lot. And I think it flows well into the question we had

03:11:40.580 earlier about the Niblungenlied. Largely, you know, tribes involved in that during that period

03:11:47.940 are Gothic tribes. Cool book that you guys should get is The Mysteries of the Goths by Edvard

03:11:56.420 Thorson. I like that book a lot. It is obscure. I don't know that it's his best book, but it's

03:12:03.780 probably my favorite of his because it was just really neat. And I hadn't read, I hadn't encountered

03:12:11.760 that material before. It's been a long time since I read it. So I hope it lives up to the hype,

03:12:17.600 but I thought it was really cool when I read it. I really enjoyed it.

03:12:20.200 Goethe Mayo asks, Folk Builder Savage, who is the greatest Anglo-Saxon king,

03:12:30.720 Ousitre-wise?

03:12:34.800 Oh, I'm not a Goethe. I don't get to decide.

03:12:37.820 No, you do, because Goethe empowered you to.

03:12:42.100 Honestly, my first thought is, I don't know if it's, I can't really pick between the two of them.

03:12:47.400 I don't know which one lasted longer, but Hengist and Horsa, I think.

03:12:52.360 I know that's kind of cheap because they're the ones who start the whole thing, at least in the mythos around them.

03:13:00.360 I don't know if we have any Anglo-Saxon kings listed that were particularly of a priestly disposition.

03:13:08.740 But I have seen a lot of people speculate about, you know, demigod status regarding Hengist and Horsa.

03:13:17.400 I can't really. I don't know. It's an interesting question. I'll have to think more on it honestly.

03:13:29.940 So Croatian War Master. Penda was, but he converted. Late in his life, Penda converted

03:13:38.820 to Christianity. That is unfortunate because had he not, we would probably celebrate him 1.00

03:13:46.780 him a lot more that pragmatic decision at the end of his life was unfortunate and tarnishes 0.66

03:13:55.840 his legacy sadly I think there I think there is an attempt at making Penda into being like

03:14:03.280 some kind of arch heathen though they like academically if people do that a lot with him

03:14:11.920 with um all right name will hit me in uh when i don't inconveniently uh later down the line uh

03:14:31.760 now it's gonna bother me um what did he do uh

03:14:37.360 frisian resistor of the widokind yeah widokind there you go also converted at the last at

03:14:50.320 the last moment um and he was a huge champion for house of tru and until he wasn't

03:14:59.040 uh no because bloatswain and uh radbod are both celebrated because they did not convert

03:15:05.280 um so it's funny because when we look at celebrating our heroes um but that's the

03:15:16.800 thing he didn't he dipped his telly and he was about to receive baptism and then he decided 0.57

03:15:20.640 i'm sorry anyone who can't read in the comments a rad bod would accept a baptismal font

03:15:26.360 but he didn't receive baptism you know when he got the shock of the water he's like hey but wait 0.89

03:15:33.560 do i want to go through with this where are my ancestors well they're burning in hell and he's 0.73

03:15:39.060 like ah i'd rather be in hell with my noble ancestors than having a parcel of beggars 0.50

03:15:44.380 so he didn't go through with it um i just to say real quick i think the thing about it isn't

03:15:52.000 necessarily it's like it's one thing if they apostatize and then return it's another thing

03:16:00.440 that is how you finish the game yeah it's another thing if it's like oh i'm i'm done

03:16:07.160 i'm done with this whole thor thing i'm on team jesus now and then you die you know what i mean

03:16:14.680 like you can fix a mistake yep it matters it matters where you end up at the end um

03:16:23.640 besides this time now in the world matt would you say that the last time there was the largest

03:16:36.660 resurgence of norse paganism was during the time of the third reich it's an interesting question

03:16:44.000 Um, sort of, um, I think had the second world war not have happened, it could have been

03:17:09.000 much more confident yes i think a lot of things were being explored and thought about and considered

03:17:18.440 i think christianity was being rejected by

03:17:23.960 the vanguard of that movement but i don't think that had a chance to develop into an actual

03:17:30.040 resurgent aussitrew practice um i think the understanding of people at that time you saw

03:17:39.080 a runic revival but you saw that going back into the german german romantic period a little bit

03:17:45.720 earlier you saw it carried on up in and up until the war but i think those currents were percolating

03:17:55.320 and weren't allowed to come to fruition so i mean kind of like yes with an asterisk because i think

03:18:04.760 where it was wasn't a developed uh how did you how'd you put it norse paganism i don't think

03:18:12.120 that was there i think they were i think elements of german society at the time were

03:18:18.680 aiming for something like that but i don't think that had been fleshed out enough for it to take

03:18:26.120 hold outside of a very very small few i think you saw something similar as i mentioned in

03:18:32.360 the romantic period with people like maestro von list i think a version of a form of norse

03:18:39.320 paganism was developed under list for a time but I don't it doesn't look like what we're doing now

03:18:49.560 and I don't think there was masses I think there were people at that time who were open to exploring

03:18:55.240 that but I don't think you had large numbers of of Alcetruar I think you had people that were

03:19:03.080 really curious yeah i think i think that there was the uh you know divulgish the focus whatever you

03:19:14.120 want to call it movement that predates the third reich by like a century if you go looking into it

03:19:19.800 you know and that movement was uh patronized by people of power in the third reich because

03:19:28.600 it was drawing upon an older germanic um mindset ethos drawing upon germanic culture

03:19:36.520 and you know like a resurgent german insert thing here was like a big deal for the third

03:19:44.120 reich so naturally they patronized it but i don't think there were as many religious as such who are

03:19:50.940 or whatever term they would call themselves germanic faithists or something sure as we

03:19:58.040 the as people sometimes backport onto that period I don't think there were nearly as many people

03:20:07.340 doing bloat or something equivalent or even like praying to Odin or Thor or something as we as we

03:20:14.120 have now um Croatian War Master points out there were societies with a few thousand members I think

03:20:20.480 was an esoteric yeah non-christianity but there wasn't devoted to odin or thor or freya it was very

03:20:34.240 much esoterically hearkening back to a vague and very seldom defined i guess pagan as how not

03:20:47.700 christian it was yeah they're trying to figure that out and i will tell you this i guarantee

03:20:52.820 you there were you know more than a few people who who did have a sincere religious practice

03:21:00.100 but i don't think it was formalized that way so you said like between

03:21:06.420 the conversion and now was that the biggest awakening probably but i don't think they

03:21:12.980 got all the way awake if you're gonna if we're gonna call it an awakening

03:21:17.700 there's that period when you kind of wake up and you're groggy and you don't

03:21:22.080 really know where you are. You're not still asleep,

03:21:25.560 but you're not really all the way awake yet.

03:21:27.520 And I don't think it got to the point of fully.

03:21:32.160 Unfortunately it hits snooze on the alarm.

03:21:35.460 Yeah. I don't, so I don't think that ended up happening,

03:21:38.300 but I do think a lot of that awakening occurred and went towards stuff.

03:21:45.000 i i think hitting the snooze on the alarm is a good as a good metaphor there because it's like

03:21:50.920 there's the folkish movement the volkish movement and it's going for a while and then it gets like

03:21:57.660 state attention during the third reich period and then world war ii happens and like

03:22:02.740 freezes it up and i well so that's interesting because even you know at the time uh carl young

03:22:12.100 writes uh in his votan essay about odin being you know the the god of the germanic people in their

03:22:20.420 deep um ancestral folk soul waking up but he doesn't write about it religiously he writes

03:22:28.180 about it typically and conceptually and yet later in his life he comes to be in a much more spiritual

03:22:35.380 place but i don't think that like i said i don't think it got the opportunity to come to fruition

03:22:44.580 in a way that was overtly religious more than ceremonial and esoteric i i think to kind of

03:22:52.340 like sum it up it's like there were a lot of people who wanted this to be a thing but they

03:22:58.340 didn't necessarily want to do it and they didn't know what that thing was yeah but they were they

03:23:04.900 were reforging this and there were a lot of people who wanted this to be a thing but they didn't

03:23:10.580 really know what it was they didn't know what to do and they didn't a lot of them wanted people to

03:23:16.020 like care about runes and care about germanic heroic literature but they weren't really super

03:23:21.780 interested in the devotional worship of the icer and like world war ii and the resulting crash

03:23:32.100 after that kind of arrested the development of you know steve mcdallan is the herald of

03:23:39.380 odin in 1969 if we're just kind of spitballing we might have seen someone taking up that mantle

03:23:45.380 or something equivalent earlier but you know what i mean well so what you see right around that time

03:23:54.580 so during during the third reich but before world war ii you see people elsewhere in the world that

03:24:03.620 are trying to do devotional religion that way you see alexander rudd mills um doing that in australia

03:24:13.700 and you you see him conferring with people pre-war and trying to make connections but he

03:24:20.660 was actually doing like religious practice and those connections just never really got to uh

03:24:28.500 got to solidify i think i think just to kind of end my comments on it there is there is something

03:24:35.780 to be said about the i guess purifying effect that world war ii had in that if you go looking

03:24:42.820 at what a lot of this germanic faith revival stuff in germany at the time entailed there's

03:24:47.700 a lot of nonsense involved like uh world war ii saved us from having debate to debate about whether

03:24:56.020 or not the aware linda book is legit you know like or uh like villa good like are we too should we

03:25:01.860 view villa good as a prophet no one no one argues about that you know like so all right

03:25:17.700 Thoughts on Anglo-Saxon Pagan Reconstructionism, a.k.a. Theodism?

03:25:28.100 Chris, go ahead and take the first swing at that.

03:25:30.480 I don't think they're the same thing. 0.69

03:25:34.700 I think that Anglo-Saxon Pagan Reconstructionism is an intellectual exercise,

03:25:41.360 which isn't, this isn't a judgment.

03:25:43.140 That's not a pejorative, but it's an intellectual exercise

03:25:45.940 on trying to piece together what people a long time ago did and theodism is a modern

03:25:53.720 i'm just going to call it religious movement because i don't think it's a church

03:25:57.720 it's like a modern kind of uh subculture in a sense or maybe even a secret society i guess you

03:26:05.660 could say um i don't think that theodism is trying to accurately reconstruct or necessarily do

03:26:14.840 anglo-saxon polytheism um like take what they were doing circa 580 and do it today i don't

03:26:24.000 think theodism is necessarily trying to do that i think it's a very specialized uh social formation

03:26:30.560 um as to just what they are not thoughts on it i mean

03:26:38.320 i don't i don't see much of theodism as being super useful today it produced a few people of

03:26:48.260 scholarly bent but the whole uh because it like it's it comes out of um like sax wicca

03:26:57.740 so it has the whole like pledging yourself into the sorority kind of thing to it which i just

03:27:03.660 don't see any utility in because it's like the whole reason why you create mechanisms to test

03:27:12.780 people to see if they can do a thing is because you can't just make them do the thing and see if

03:27:19.900 they if they like pass or fail you know um i don't i don't see the utility of the

03:27:29.160 like fraternal structure of it in bringing people home to the worship of the gods or

03:27:36.440 encouraging sincere piety to the ice here i'm sorry i'm a little long day and i'm kind of

03:27:42.400 up late so i'm rambling you're fine it's late where you're at theodism i

03:27:46.620 i really like the idea of theodism there's things about it that i really like but the

03:27:55.560 execution i think was really really poor um i don't think that

03:28:07.960 so in circles that we run in the accusation of larp is in cautiously thrown around over much

03:28:17.560 and i don't think it's always fair i do think in some ways it's fair on theodism because

03:28:34.360 it's ill-advised to try to take

03:28:39.720 something from the past and

03:28:42.840 overlay it in whole into a modern circumstance without adjusting it to the facts on the ground

03:28:54.360 in the world that you live in it's very easy to see why that doesn't make sense it has to it has

03:29:03.320 to conform to the reality that you live in and i don't think it was executed well in the 20th

03:29:09.800 century in a way that made sense and was useful i think taking language and names and dress like

03:29:21.720 the like the smurf hat thing from the past and then trying to um like awkwardly and very dogmatically

03:29:33.240 enforce it on modern people out of context it's it becomes really self-serving and not um

03:29:48.440 and inauthentic and so comment on the side it's only larp if you don't believe in it

03:29:53.000 and that's the thing though i think that there's a difference in believing it and saying that you

03:29:59.320 believe it and i don't want to overstep i think there was a lot of very sincere theods men but

03:30:04.680 i think there were a lot of people that weren't i think it was very very easy um to

03:30:14.440 for unworthy people to take oaths like they're the king or the you know

03:30:21.000 thane or whatever rank that they're claiming they are it very much was five fat guys arguing over

03:30:33.160 the big piece of chicken in around the backyard fire in the camp chairs it was literally that

03:30:40.700 a lot of the time everybody had this big title but you'd put one of the things that makes certain

03:30:49.000 things work is having a social institution that kind of all of the pieces of society help it flow

03:30:55.320 together and make it make sense i think they focused way too much on the

03:31:05.240 i don't know hyper obedience and it became almost not almost in a number of cases it became a strange

03:31:13.400 strange bds and m thing and not a religious thing like their insistence on you going through a stage

03:31:24.360 where you start out as a thrall and i don't think that is historically accurate to our ancestors

03:31:31.420 time i don't think free people had their kids have to go start out enthralled them somewhere

03:31:37.340 in order to get to a place i think it was a very awkward thing that the the thrall concept

03:31:46.360 played into strange bdsm scenarios and it also played into

03:31:55.060 abuse physically sexually emotionally and was kind of it didn't work out well i think having a more

03:32:07.340 practical approach that planned for long-term success is a much better way to go and I don't

03:32:15.900 think theodism had that and I say that I say that talking to a lot of people that are former

03:32:22.860 you know theods men I say that because their current king

03:32:28.020 I had an encounter with a little bit that was not impressive

03:32:35.240 um their stuff but i having never been in a failed or involved in that process you know i'm i'm

03:32:48.700 speculating and i'm going on what a lot of people you know what i've been able to learn in my time

03:32:53.060 in house of truth so i think execution was really poor just to kind of go to the larp thing

03:33:00.940 i think the term gets thrown around actually what i was doing some research into like why do

03:33:07.820 why do people use this as a pejorative like where did this start who had this idea of using that

03:33:13.000 term because larping is actually an extremely niche hobby but uh like actual live action role

03:33:20.140 play um but i i was doing a lot of research on sumble and one thing that struck me about um

03:33:33.140 the theods the theod guys is they put a lot of spirit of emphasis on mimicking beowulf

03:33:45.820 of mimicking these ancient things and i guess the kind of question i want to i have to ask is

03:33:54.740 and granted i'm looking at this however many years down the line reading texts and not like

03:33:59.700 talking to people in the 90s or whatever but my thought regarding a lot of this like rigid

03:34:06.840 replication of beowulf like like i've seen criticisms of how we do some bullworths

03:34:12.180 you're using a single horn don't you know in beowulf they each have their own cup full of beer

03:34:18.660 it's like well who cares how they do it in beowulf right like like why do we have to replicate

03:34:26.560 the way they do it in beowulf it's one thing if it's like well you got to do it this way in the

03:34:32.500 torah because yahweh like commanded that you have to keep your sideburns a certain way that makes

03:34:37.700 sense you can quibble about whether or not the rule makes sense but it's like yeah no the creator

03:34:42.900 of the universe gave you a bunch of rules here's a list of rules okay but with like the theod stuff

03:34:48.200 it's like okay but why like why mimic beowulf why do it this way why not it's it's kind of the

03:34:57.320 problem of like like this is the kind of anglish problem where it's fun to talk about like casting

03:35:03.980 out the unwholesome uh outlandish speech and renewing the the well of the tongue and all that

03:35:10.880 but then you look at like okay well what's the modern english word for treasure and the word

03:35:14.740 is pronounced shit in every english dialect like it's just it's like an intellectual exercise that

03:35:21.240 doesn't come up to reality because you eventually run into someone who says like okay but why but 0.96

03:35:26.780 why you know why really why really matters yeah and i guess that's that's the thing so i i get it

03:35:37.260 in uh pan fusa i was drinking a uh electric torpedo ipa from sierra nevada also a question that's in

03:35:46.860 the queue that's why i was answering it but what i wanted to um what i wanted to say is you said

03:35:51.260 what's wrong with larping as your ancestors because it's inauthentic and your ancestors

03:35:57.900 you know grandpa didn't larp that he was your fourth great grandfather and the guy you know

03:36:03.500 in your fourth great grandfather from revolutionary times didn't larp that he was

03:36:09.340 you know living in medieval times and people back you know the anglo-saxons didn't larp that they

03:36:14.780 were cavemen because it's silly and inauthentic the things there's nothing wrong with celebrating

03:36:23.900 the values of your ancestors and practicing them authentically in the world that you live in

03:36:31.580 there's nothing wrong with that at all but that's about the why they did things they did and not the

03:36:38.380 what they did at some point wearing the same clothes well why did they wear that because

03:36:44.780 it's the best they've figured out at that point because that's the materials they had available

03:36:50.060 because that's what they could afford because they lived in a place that was really cold

03:36:55.020 because they lived in a place that was really hot a lot of those things aren't the situation that

03:37:00.620 you're in so you know maybe you don't wear a loincloth to harken back to the days of your

03:37:07.180 ancestors we've advanced you you can see that with hinduism where there's like certain sects

03:37:13.820 within hinduism where it's like they're they're carrying on some tradition that's like 4 000

03:37:21.580 years old going to proto-indo-ironic step herders and they're not proto-indo-ironic step herders

03:37:28.380 like religion is just arbitrary repetition for no reason that's dead at that point and it's a

03:37:36.140 a hobby and it's a fun exercise in history, but it has to live and be relevant to the

03:37:43.080 world that you live in. And that's why your ancestors did what they did and not what,

03:37:49.360 you know, again, not what the cavemen did. You honor your ancestors by continuing the

03:37:57.420 line of your faith forward. And again, there's, it's a fine line. History is awesome.

03:38:04.160 linguistics is awesome but have a reason why you do the things that you do and I don't think that

03:38:11.920 they're I don't think they had answers to the why question nearly enough and I don't think that was

03:38:18.940 thought out or the modern living their faith in the real world I think that that's lacking in 0.59

03:38:27.120 that context and uh you know i know a lot of people have grown out of that if like theodish

03:38:34.120 theodiciary theodishism or larping or whatever is where you start if like repeating i i don't know

03:38:43.100 saying like the the acre boat charm is where you start because you don't know where to begin and

03:38:47.800 you just need to do something or like repeating what your grandparents did because you don't

03:38:52.740 know where to begin i think that's fine but it's like you begin and then you find the principles

03:38:59.280 and then you move on because if you don't have the principles who cares and going back to the

03:39:06.700 anglo-saxons it's like arbitrary repetition didn't work back then you have to have the principles

03:39:16.600 Yeah, exactly. Exactly. What is the stance on bloat with animals? So the stance is that

03:39:37.600 the Ask True Focus Assembly wants you to abide by the local laws and regulations in the place that

03:39:46.500 you live. The question is a hot button one because it is so strange to modern people

03:39:56.340 and because the understanding of how that's done looks really different in different cultural

03:40:04.740 context and the context that we know of are very often um not

03:40:15.360 humane in treatment of the animal and are often 0.73

03:40:23.760 just done really differently um Jewish animal sacrifice is very off-putting 0.97

03:40:34.740 Hindu animal sacrifice is very off-putting a number of like halal killing is very off-putting 0.69

03:40:47.980 the context brings up a lot of strange ideas amongst people and a lot of things that make

03:40:55.940 people really uncomfortable there's no specific stance on responsible animal sacrifice that's in

03:41:03.540 keeping with the laws of the place that you live but i think it's beneficial for our people to

03:41:10.840 conceive of it not as quote unquote animal sacrifice because that sounds scary but the

03:41:18.840 slaughter the slaughtering of animals um in a sacred context in a sacred way and again a lot

03:41:29.700 of people today don't have a touchstone with that. They're not hunters. They're not involved

03:41:34.120 in herding and farm life. So they're very far away from, you know, killing what you eat.

03:41:44.460 Fundamentally, there is something to be said to where an animal bloat is similar to any other

03:41:51.680 dispatching of livestock for food consumption but it's done in a sacred and special way to

03:42:00.120 where it is shared with the gods and the folk in a communal meal honoring the gods

03:42:07.260 you know slaughtering your your livestock and providing a meal for your friends and family

03:42:15.920 is not concerning and that's much closer to I think what the understanding is but you

03:42:25.040 know take that as guidance on that and then Chris your surname sounds similar to mine

03:42:30.560 says correlation war master are your ancestors from these parts of Europe my patcher line

03:42:38.160 is um so my uh my great-grandfather stojan savage um came over from uh serbia i've been told that

03:42:48.280 the village he came from was boscar i might be mispronouncing that um i don't i really don't know

03:42:54.600 much about my uh patcher line beyond him just due to circumstances i mean i guess i could go into

03:43:01.460 if anyone cares but um yeah serbia so um close enough to croatia um yeah the the name savage is

03:43:15.460 a relatively common one um the itch is a relatively generic pan-slavic suffix just meaning of

03:43:24.260 related to you know but um the sav in savage relates to the sava river which is a uh so i

03:43:32.680 didn't the the celts i mentioned how they had like a huge civilization in continental europe

03:43:37.600 um and it actually stretched from like portugal to eastern europe at its heyday the the name of

03:43:44.440 the sava river comes from a celtic word that means something like it flows it's it the sava river

03:43:49.940 that name is pre-greek and pre-slavic it's of celtic origin um so my great-grandfather's uh

03:43:58.660 my father's father's father's name is was stojan savage and stojan is related to um stand it's

03:44:06.180 cognate with the english stand so it's it's like the man who stands at the river that flows which

03:44:11.620 is kind of just a cute little poetic i guess thing all right well that's our last question

03:44:20.820 we've got this evening chris thank you so much for coming on um pleasure we've already gotten

03:44:28.020 a lot of good comments tonight people really like your episodes your eye for detail and ability to

03:44:34.980 bring those to us is much appreciated these are some of my favorite episodes and we've heard that

03:44:41.460 from a lot of folks so bring you on for some more i'd be glad to thank you for what you do

03:44:49.700 nick thank you for your assistance with producing this program um there's a from panfusa there's a

03:44:56.740 little etymology but um can i jump on that run real quick since we're doing goodbyes

03:45:01.140 maybe let me see um it is so bloat does not actually prob

03:45:12.580 so reconstructing the etymology of bloat there's a theory that it comes from the

03:45:17.700 word from the the ancestor of the word blood i do not believe that to be the case it doesn't

03:45:23.540 seem to have anything to do with blood in its usage from the earliest um attestations it means

03:45:30.660 to to uh offer to pour out um ritually uh bloat the alls carrier go the can speak more on the

03:45:42.280 specifics here than i can but ritually the the bloat is actually when the offering transitions

03:45:48.660 from the profane to the sacred so the reconstruction from proto-indo-european

03:45:54.680 blad instead of from um proto-germanic bload like blood is more apt because it doesn't have

03:46:04.140 anything necessarily to do with blood like you can perform bloat with a live animal you just let

03:46:10.400 the animal go right like this is um this is like what happens with freyfaxi like he declares the

03:46:17.800 horse sacred and he doesn't kill it because it's he's given frere a live horse right um this is

03:46:27.100 also the case with bless actually there's an etymological theory that it descends from blood

03:46:32.520 meaning to like smear blood on something that doesn't seem to be the case because um it wouldn't

03:46:38.940 it wouldn't form old english bletsian um there wouldn't be an s if that were the case it would

03:46:44.580 be bletian but it's bletsian so the the the more proper i'm sorry i'm rambling at the end here

03:46:52.000 because i'm really tired more proper theory is that it actually descends from blotes which

03:46:57.280 kind of means something like bloatment right um referring to the the words said during uh bloat

03:47:06.740 during the speech act that makes something transition from profane to sacred um so there's

03:47:13.940 no blood necessary the the blood is just an artifact of how do you get meat you kill an

03:47:22.580 animal what is the best food that you can offer someone in the pre-modern world it's meat you're

03:47:29.840 going to give the gods the best food that you can give them so if some godly wants to correct me on

03:47:36.300 this they can but there's no blood necessary because it's not it's not about killing the

03:47:42.120 animal. It's about offering something to the gods. Anything to answer? No. Yeah. That was

03:47:53.260 something interesting. The more we started to run down linguistics, because I'd always thought that

03:47:57.900 too, that it came from the word blood, as in the blood of the sacrifice. But it doesn't. It just

03:48:05.480 means to make the offering and the pouring out the libation is the fundamental offering in that

03:48:12.020 sense um purely just as an aside regarding if that's the case if blood if bless bless from

03:48:21.380 bletsian bletsian comes from blood or to say the blood root that doesn't explain why grime refers

03:48:29.300 to fat so like um greek christos um means the anointed one it's a it's a trend the the 0.93

03:48:37.160 translation of mashiach because the jews and the greeks would like dab someone with oil to mark

03:48:44.260 them as sacred right in in the germanic world grime appears to refer to fat using that so if

03:48:51.680 it was supposed to be blood that marked things as sacred why did they use fat right like why have

03:48:59.440 two words and why does one of them refer to something else how do you get fat from blood

03:49:04.420 it's a it's an odd sort of particularly because we're talking about old technical terms you know

03:49:11.420 these words have very precise meanings had in the context of when we're talking about they have them

03:49:17.800 now you know what i mean so it's kind of like how would this change happen and why doesn't the word

03:49:22.780 mean what it means right like because like in in the havamal just to end this my rambling um

03:49:30.560 odin gives like an eight line verse and it's like uh it's like do you know or like you know

03:49:38.200 how to x right you know how to y right you know how to z right and it's like the first four are

03:49:43.620 about runes and then it's like um you know how to pray right you know how to bloat right you know

03:49:50.500 how to soa right you know how to slay right or something i might be getting the order mixed up

03:49:55.360 But he makes a clear separation between bloat and killing the animal and then disposing of it, putting the offering in the fire.

03:50:04.940 So it's kind of like if bloat is about blood and killing, why isn't it about blood and killing?

03:50:13.040 You know, why is it this technical procedure rather than the killing?

03:50:18.260 right the usage doesn't pan out the blood root and the etymology is already arguable so it's

03:50:28.020 kind of like why are we you know what i mean like this blood thing seems more like

03:50:33.100 trying to to fit a square peg in a round hole

03:50:36.640 i'm done yeah no you're fine i'm trying to find um

03:50:42.780 All right. Hold on a sec.

03:50:48.360 Okay, so yeah, no, just looking at it etymologically, and I'm not being ignorant.

03:51:17.100 It absolutely became synonymous with doing a sacrifice at some point, but fundamentally, it meant to make any sort of offering.

03:51:30.120 And 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.

03:51:42.940 so the idea was pouring out and so doing a liquid like our offerings of mead are closer to the

03:51:51.740 original usage than a sacrifice than a blood sacrifice but i get what you're saying it's

03:52:01.660 just the more we we looked in the linguistics that's not necessary it is a part of something

03:52:08.860 that certainly our ancestors did but it's not fundamentally what that word means it means to

03:52:15.260 pour out an offering um and we very much do that always with sacred liquid we've always done that

03:52:22.860 since the beginning and it's worth noting that the the roots of ritual technical terms often do have

03:52:31.980 sort of metaphorical usage like to pour out an offering well you have to remember the principal

03:52:37.260 old english word for um performing religion was begangen which is cognate with um

03:52:45.660 no one uses this outside of denouf but gang meaning to like walk so like you would begon

03:52:52.940 like you know you'd say something like i begon bloat which literally means like i block bloat

03:52:58.540 but that's not it's not as literal so it's like yes we pour out the offering that's kind of also

03:53:07.640 a metaphorical term for just making the offering in general i am pouring out the offering by kill

03:53:14.940 by having declared this cow to be sacred killing it butchering it and then offering the meat

03:53:19.700 we're saying we pour it out but that's not that doesn't necessarily mean it always has to be a

03:53:25.800 a dumping out of liquid literally right because once the term acquires the ritual technical usage

03:53:33.460 it's kind of detached from what the roots literally mean like um one word in the old

03:53:40.620 english corpus for prayer is worthian which literally means like to worth like how do you

03:53:48.420 how do you worth something what what does that mean well it means to speak the praises of to

03:53:52.980 apply value to which isn't really what you're doing when you say you worth something right

03:53:58.940 because it's not it's not really a you get what i mean here like the making the word a ritual

03:54:06.380 technical term unglues it from the literal definition of the word by etymology in a lot

03:54:12.000 of these cases so it's it's kind of like well it doesn't necessarily make sense if you take it back

03:54:17.980 to proto-indo-european why this word meaning to pour out comes to mean to declare sacred well

03:54:24.240 it doesn't necessarily have to be so literal because we see this a lot like i mean this is

03:54:31.280 kind of a silly modern example but like christians take communion they're eating a cracker and

03:54:36.920 drinking wine you know not to be a little flippant but it's like but how is that communing well it

03:54:43.340 Once it takes upon the technical usage, it doesn't necessarily literally mean to like share hands or whatever.

03:54:51.140 I'm going to look up the etymology of communion from Latin real quick.

03:54:57.460 And we keep talking on the word sacrifice.

03:55:00.480 Sacrifice just means to make sacred.

03:55:02.980 It doesn't mean to destroy or to cut or to kill.

03:55:08.280 Yeah.

03:55:08.620 It just means to make it sacred.

03:55:10.660 when we sacrifice our time for work in the afa we're just saying this amount this time i'm using

03:55:17.620 for something sacred now we use it right modern context in not in non-sacral senses but that's

03:55:26.940 just erroneous to be fair but it's modern part yeah well that's even kind of the thing going

03:55:32.900 back to animal sacrifice like every maybe there's a vegan or a vegetarian watching this program but

03:55:38.480 Like, everyone here eats meat, but animal sacrifice has become profane.

03:55:44.340 So is the word sacrifice in a certain sense.

03:55:46.580 To sacrifice just means to give up now.

03:55:49.800 Whereas in, like, Latin, if you use the word sacrifice to just mean, yeah, I'm sacrificing my time by doing this,

03:55:56.620 it'd almost be kind of like cussing in a certain sense.

03:56:00.740 Like, you're not supposed to use that term that way, you know.

03:56:02.820 the etymology of communion means um like to guard together so like to take communion

03:56:12.080 to perform guarding together what does that have to do with

03:56:15.280 consuming the body and blood of the messiah like

03:56:19.400 sorry

03:56:21.900 are you on to something sir

03:56:32.620 Yeah, no, I just see Panfusa talking about reasons that they were on the fence about possibly joining the AFA because of what a bloat is.

03:56:45.020 What's wrong with our calendar?

03:56:47.580 No, that's fine. I assume that that's because we don't focus on a lunar calendar.

03:56:53.680 Yeah. 2025, bud.

03:56:56.920 You know, I get that, but that's very much the reasoning for it.

03:57:01.400 We're not pretending that that's how the ancestors did it.

03:57:05.320 We're making our calendar function for people in 2025 using the calendar. 0.99

03:57:10.400 You 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

03:57:22.560 Well, there you go.

03:57:23.780 so but also thank you for giving it consideration and for reconsidering and honestly for asking the

03:57:34.340 question um all too often people won't ask questions they just make assumptions and

03:57:43.620 that's really unfortunate and yeah it's it's nobody wants to like trick somebody or take

03:57:55.640 advantage of impulsiveness it's very much appreciated if somebody gives joining the

03:58:02.820 afa a serious thought and serious you know contemplation because it also tends to mean

03:58:09.160 that when they do join it's a serious commitment for them so i respect that i'm glad you came

03:58:13.500 on and asked a question. That said, it's late and we're going to go to bed. I appreciate it,

03:58:20.460 guys. I appreciate all the questions. Chris, certainly appreciate all you brought to the

03:58:24.860 table tonight. Next week, Svon will be out of the country on a journey. So I've got to figure out

03:58:34.420 what we're doing. But rest assured, I will be here and I will talk to you guys. We will have

03:58:40.140 program for you. Until then, hail the Iseer, hail the folk, hail the AFA, and remember,

03:58:46.800 victory never sleeps.

03:58:47.820 Hail.

03:59:10.140 We'll be right back.

03:59:40.140 Thank you.

04:00:10.140 Thank you.

04:00:40.140 Thank you.

04:01:10.140 Thank you.

04:01:40.140 We'll be right back.

Asatru Folk Assembly - November 13, 2025

11⧸12⧸25 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 175 - The Loyal Anglo-Saxons

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