Our guest this evening is Chris Savage, who is an apprentice folkbuilder in Michigan and a member of the AFA. He talks about how he got involved with the organization and how he came to know about it. We also talk about the upcoming feast of the Eherakota, as well as a couple of top of the show announcements.
00:13:30.940But Witten Erickson was talking to me about him and trying to find more because it was a standout that this is a gentleman we wanted to look into more.
00:13:42.840We were knee deep in this process of research when we had a viewer participant in this program, a gentleman named Kevin, that wanted to suggest maybe we honor him as a hero.
00:13:58.400uh kevin mentioned that when we were doing our our show on king world's fame um
00:14:05.840so yeah we're in the process of working on it there but it's digging up information and getting
00:14:12.320it figured out has been a huge challenge the break in the case came with the gentleman who
00:14:17.680was sharing the screen with me this evening um amongst folk builder stuff that chris says he
00:14:25.440does he also is tremendous at doing research for us and able to um really tease out detail
00:14:36.000and find sources and materials that the rest of us are not as able to get a hold of he's
00:14:43.920got a real knack for it he's done that on a number of projects that you'll be you know
00:14:48.800hearing about we'll be learning from in the months and years to come but one of those
00:14:55.840was finding information on this gentleman so without further ado chris would you tell us
00:15:02.320about gothy thorstein guthjansson yeah sure so um thorstein uh was born to malfrithi einars doter
00:15:12.240i'm not gonna try and pronounce these icelandic names all viking like um she was a writer
00:15:18.320uh a pretty a noted one i couldn't actually find anything that she wrote but she was active in the
00:15:26.480like the 20s um and he was the son of guthion ericsson who was a teacher in
00:15:32.400reykjavik he was born 3 112 years after the trojan war that's october 4th 1928.
00:15:41.280he caught tuberculosis as a child and that's always been one of those
00:15:45.760diseases that like usually exist as far as i've been aware he caught it and the treatment involved
00:15:53.680like sticking a like puncturing his lung through the ribs and that resulted in the lung collapsing
00:16:00.320and not working right i don't know what that what that cures but that's what the that's what i was
00:16:05.360told um he was a sickly but uh vigorous man from then on uh having i don't know if it was a conscious
00:16:15.360decision or not but chose the you know he chose that if he couldn't live a physical life he would
00:16:20.800at least continue living in the realm of the mind and he was a very intellectual man um
00:16:28.560he went to college at a time when most people did not uh he held professor professorship in
00:16:35.200multiple countries he studied in mainland scandinavia he was fluent in icelandic uh he
00:16:41.920He also learned Old Norse, and it's not that difficult if you are fluently, but whatever.
00:16:52.880He learned Latin, and perhaps fluently, he did do English, too.
00:16:58.220Chris, can you follow up for a second?
00:17:00.380We had a delay, and it's like you were silent, and then it, at chipmunk speed, tried to bring us back up to speed.
00:17:09.720so when you mentioned he had learned old norse everything from there until now was unintelligible
00:17:16.760he knew old norse because he presumably studied it but also knew icelandic and he at college learned
00:17:25.240latin and english to a degree of fluency because i'll go into that later but he knew english
00:17:32.760and it's kind of tragic that he's not better attested given that he was a very early
00:17:39.520uh participant in the broader anglo asatru kind of discourse that was going on like he wrote
00:17:47.040articles for vortru and stuff but um he was ebs was a very much a renaissance man um he was for
00:17:56.120a time the island's foremost expert on giordano bruno for example who was a very interesting but
00:18:02.740but frankly not at all related to Asatru figure from the Italian Renaissance.
00:18:09.200He also was very, did appear to have an interest in Asatru lore at one point, like relatively
00:18:48.280Up until then, ghosts were physical, like drowder.
00:18:58.380all right so chris a little bit glitchy we're going to try to get that figured out
00:19:07.560um appreciate your patience on it um yeah so we'll work on it is everything glitchy or is it just
00:19:18.240chris i believe it is just him i hear and see you fine then if the rest of us are good we can kind
00:19:26.920to keep on some stuff so while uh chris has been frozen or tricking us by being uncannily still
00:19:35.640uh different chris one from ohio has donated 40 to victory never sleeps we appreciate that a lot
00:19:44.060thank you so much um we'll get chris back as you can tell he has been able to find out quite a bit
00:19:51.880about uh thorstein which is awesome his lament that uh gothi thorstein is not
00:20:02.040better known and better celebrated amongst alsatruar
00:20:08.520we share that and it's a big part of what we're doing um
00:20:11.240it's a challenge and talking to a lot of the elders of of modern house a true
00:20:24.920we all almost all of us who are who have come home to us and sure we have a love of history
00:20:32.760be it recent history different parts of history history in general but we've done a really poor
00:20:40.840job of keeping track of our own history and one of those things is just a matter of perspective
00:20:46.680um i think very often especially at the beginning of something
00:20:51.480it's easy to not see the time that you live in as being historic we only recognize
00:20:58.920you know the historicity of something with the uh virtue of hindsight um so it's been really
00:21:07.000important to me and to the rest of the leadership of the Astro Folk Assembly to try to
00:21:11.960capture and save what history we have available to us of, you know, the modern reforging of
00:21:20.800Alcetru, and also to celebrate the heroes of our faith that have for too long gone unsung.
00:21:28.680And as much as we want to shake it, we all are infected to one degree or another with, you know, modernity and deviant.
00:21:46.680Deviant, and I don't necessarily mean that in your typical sense, but in the sense that it deviates from tradition, our way of approaching things, like having pride, like celebrating people, like celebrating and honoring heroes, we don't do enough of that.
00:22:05.820And a lot of these people have gone above and beyond for the cause of our gods, have done substantial things because of their trough to the Aesir.
00:22:18.580And our gods and our ancestors recognize that, and they celebrate these people beyond the veil.
00:22:28.260These people achieve a level of ascension, and we want to acknowledge that, and we want to spread and build their fame here in Midgard in the hopes and the, I guess, the reasonable belief that that fame carries over and is taken note of by those on the other side of the veil.
00:22:53.920So it's important to give these people their due, and that's what we're attempting to do.
00:22:58.260And we got Chris back here. Last thing I recall was your talk about him knowing English being an, oh, you were talking about spiritualism.
00:23:15.340and you mentioned that ghosts prior to that time were conceived of as like zombies as opposed to
00:23:23.740as you know ectoplasmic we're have wearing a sheep with a couple of holes and it kind of goes
00:23:32.060the ectoplasm was uh in i guess you could say invented as a what how do you know the ghost was
00:23:39.660there if you couldn't touch it well look it left the ectoplasm behind and helgi pieters had the i
00:23:45.980apologize there's like a storm or something going outside and i had to fiddle helgi pieters uh had
00:23:52.700the i guess for spiritualism innovative idea that the spirits of spiritualism were not um ghosts
00:24:01.020living in the hereafter but you know physical beings with telepathy living on other plants
00:24:08.220out in the out in the cosmos and uh helgi pieters uh passed away before uh thorstein could meet him
00:24:18.060but his ideas were very influential um and thorstein would go on to found an organization
00:24:25.180called the felag neosina that would gather a number of important and influential people to it
00:24:32.380But the felag is the same felag as in Asotrar Felagith.
00:24:37.220It means like fellowship or something like that.
00:24:41.180Someone who knows more can correct me.
00:24:44.220Nyal Sina has something to do with Nyal's saga.
00:24:47.680I couldn't find an actual explanation.
00:24:53.720So he founded this organization, the felag Nyal Sina,
00:24:57.860somewhere uh early 1960 possibly a little bit before that and he met in that organization three
00:25:06.660men who would be very important for ossature in iceland um spanjorn baintinson and jormundr ingi
00:25:13.620hansen and dagar thor leifson all four of them were members of this organization that thorstein
00:25:18.020had founded and for about 10 years they talked about the collective intellectual body of works
00:25:28.260for helgi peders was referred to as niall for some reason they talked about niall and about
00:25:34.020norse mythology and such and at some point they heard about steve mcnallan and what he was doing
00:25:42.100and that there was like these rumblings elsewhere about this like hey why can't we've been talking
00:25:49.680about thor and odin and the old gods why can't we actually do that and um on the first day of
00:26:00.560summer which is an actual holiday in iceland uh 4-27-1972 they founded the asaturar feligeth
00:26:08.120In the winter of 1972, those four men would go before the Minister of Justice, Olafur Johannes' son, to try and get the organization formalized.
00:26:19.940This is the event when the blackout happens, when the storm knocks out power across the entire island.
00:26:26.160and um i believe the ulterior ability can tell this story a little better than i can
00:26:32.500but he did the yoha what's his name sorry olafur didn't want to he thought it was like a joke at
00:26:41.120first he thought it was like that he was like being pranked and he didn't want to do it and
00:26:46.520then the power got taken out across the entire island and he got told like hey you got you got
00:26:51.960do this like it's the entire island right and so he he put his rubber stamp on it and
00:27:02.680uh there was actually a little bit of a legal uh quandary regarding can this even be done
00:27:09.400because the way the religious freedom laws were worded it implied monotheism
00:27:14.680and the problem was that like the literal letter of the law implied no you can't be a polytheist
00:27:19.880in iceland at this time but everyone in the parliament knew when they wrote the law they
00:27:26.360actually meant like yeah you can just do whatever they didn't necessarily like that though so in may
00:27:32.680of 1973 the organization was actually recognized despite technically not being legal and then in
00:27:40.6001975 they changed the law to for one allow for polytheistic religious organizations but also
00:27:47.880to put a bit more bureaucratic red tape around just making a religion and getting it recognized
00:27:55.320by the state. The bishop of Iceland, Sigur Bjorn Einarsson, he initially was pretty critical of
00:28:03.560the organization for, he thought that polytheism was too close to Nazism. He was apparently a
00:28:12.920a fiery-souled right-winger in his youth and cooled down later in age and became a good
00:28:21.300But he also perhaps made a few good points in that the Asitur-Rfelgi that might have
00:28:27.320been putting the cart before the horse, they had four people, technically no list of members,
00:28:32.600no doctrines, no dogmas, no buildings, no organization, and technically not even a leader
00:28:37.000when they came to him the first time, at least from what I've seen.
00:28:40.500Um, everything before, uh, the current, uh, all-saryrgothi of Theosaturafelgith takes over is not looked at too highly by secondary sources I've seen.
00:28:54.500Um, so on 8-5-1973, the first public legal outdoor bloat in 1,000 years was held in Iceland.
00:29:05.500I believe that's the one with the big Thor statue.
00:29:10.920They're not very high quality, though.
00:29:13.740I have to give a shout out to Thor Sanhet and his buddy William Fox.
00:29:19.360They, for a long time, if you Googled certain people,
00:29:24.920the only things that would come up were the transcribed Vortru articles that he put up.
00:29:31.460And if he's listening, he should join the AFA.
00:29:34.460But they were very helpful in getting this information, and, again, I want to just thank him for that because, again, for the longest time, like, even before I joined the AFA, I'd, like, Google certain things, and it'd just be his stuff that I could see on this.
00:29:53.000One of those things was an interview that I believe her name was Shirley, a journalist from America, did.
00:30:05.000She was, I should actually get her name correct here, I couldn't find anything else on this woman, yes, Shirley Keller.
00:30:15.000I couldn't find anything else on this woman.
00:30:17.760It's these, the big Thor, there we go, statue.
00:30:23.240That's based off of the one where he's holding his hammer
00:30:26.140in the little idol, and it's kind of like,
00:30:29.360the hammer is also his beard from just how it looks.
00:30:35.700But, sorry, without going too far afield,
00:30:40.240Thorstein was the brains of the Æstarárfélgíð, if you would say that Svenjörn was the heart.
00:30:49.240He was the guy who knew how to make organizations. He was the guy who knew how to interface with the government.
00:30:55.240He was the guy who knew how to interface with people outside of Iceland.
00:31:00.240he was very important in starting the european kind of pan polytheistic community which is now
00:31:17.960characterized by like the european congress of ethnic religions he was very big on trying to get
00:31:26.040something like that started he wrote in vortru uh vortru was the ostrich reliances i mean i guess
00:31:33.080it's proper to say that the ostrich reliance was vortru's uh religious body it started as the
00:31:38.040magazine and they kind of spun off into the ostrich reliance which is a whole separate thing
00:31:44.680but they ran the publication vortru for a very long time and valgaard maria would just like let
00:31:50.680you send in letters and stuff so thorstein was a contributor to that publication and he also ran
00:31:58.680an english language publication called hugen and mugen which i have never been able to find
00:32:03.800anything on i know i've been i know it exists but i haven't been able to see any examples or
00:32:09.000digitizations or even uh paper copies not that i have scoured everywhere on the internet for that
00:32:15.000but um thorstein was uh as i said a founder of organizations um he founded in 1982 an organization
00:32:27.960called noraint mankin um which literally translates to something like northern mankin
00:32:34.360um uh the spanish translation is la raza nordica which i think is a little more apt for what they
00:32:40.680They believed it was a right-wing political, I guess you could call it a political action committee or a political advocacy group in modern American terminology.
00:32:51.680In 1975, Sveinbjorn published an article in Morgenbladiv, and that's the name of the Icelandic newspaper over there that I got a lot of this from,
00:33:04.680basically saying that the Ossetarophilie was not a political organization and that he was taking a sort of ex-Cathedra stance where, like, just because the organization proper has to say something,
00:33:17.060you can't just take something off the cuff that Thorstein or Svenjorn or anyone else was saying as doctrine for this organization.
00:33:25.000And I've looked at secondary sources, and they seem to be of the opinion that this is because Thorstein was a bit more spicy in his rhetoric than some people would have liked.
00:33:37.560which is kind of funny because Noraint Mankin and the Fela Gnausina were both apparently oddly
00:33:46.060influential. There was a bit of a scandal in the 90s where a number of Liberal Party MPs,
00:33:55.940members of parliament, were members and active participants in Noraint Mankin,
00:34:03.020and it didn't really go anywhere it didn't impact the australia from what i saw it just
00:34:09.500turned into politicians pointing fingers and he said she said about politician in internal drama
00:34:18.060um so if i can break in for a second for audience that may not be familiar um
00:34:27.100iceland has has had and continues to have
00:34:32.300And it's really cool in a lot of ways. They have done a lot culturally and legally to protect Icelandic culture and Icelandic traditions.
00:34:45.140A lot of this comes in in preservation of their language, in preservation of their traditional poetry and art forms, in naming things.
00:40:15.100it would be a detriment to humanity if the Nordic stock came to an end.0.96
00:40:18.100Their two big things that they didn't want were1.00
00:40:22.100legalization of abortion and the importation of the so-called Muslim races. We know what that1.00
00:40:28.700means, even though it's technically not correct, blah, blah, blah, blah. So again, this is an
00:40:33.280organization, nor ain't mankind, to be clear, not the Australophilogies, that was founded as a sort
00:40:39.440of, I guess you can almost call it defensive measure. They saw something they didn't like,
00:40:44.400and they didn't want that to happen. And it's important, I need to stress here, that if you
00:40:49.920look at secondary literature there is this attempt to make thorstein sound as this kind of like
00:40:55.520crazy kook who leaves the australia felgi because spain mjorn tutted him you're not allowed to be
00:41:01.120too right wing i have no evidence i have evidence that he stayed with the organization he did not
00:41:06.320leave because spain mjorn said hey don't don't this is a religious organization don't get too spicy
00:41:14.560on the church's letterhead right which i don't actually know the specific reason why spain
00:41:22.560bjorn put out the newspaper statement in 1975 for clarity they were getting criticism to my
00:41:28.800understanding from different sources people were concerned and something interesting that
00:41:33.920you made this statement earlier um about spain bjorn being the heart and thorstein being being
00:41:41.600the the brain of of that operation it's it's it's i mean i guess if you guys get the reference it's
00:41:52.800like uh you know in a way swain bjorn is the sun and uh thorstein is the lightning there's
00:42:01.760he had a very swain bjorn to my understanding and the best i've been able to to understand and i
00:42:09.280wish i i knew knew him better and knew better of him um it's a very simple farmer and poet
00:42:19.680who loved his people his tradition and his gods um he was a
00:42:29.120you know i i guess prime primarily may not be the right word he was
00:42:32.880focused more than others on uh asa thor and you know he's a simple man that wanted to see this
00:42:45.360happen and it's easy to see like you know yeah they didn't really have their stuff you know they
00:42:51.360didn't have their ducks in a row as it were when they went to the parliament and the the folks to
00:42:57.760get the stamp on on approval of their religious classification but you don't know that till you
00:43:03.200go in there and try i think it's always worth noting we live with privilege that's provided to
00:43:13.680us by those who've come before us who've taken those first steps that's why it's very important
00:43:21.440that we honor them and we acknowledge that it's so easy to look back and see all the ways you
00:43:27.280would have done it differently or you would have gamed it in a different way
00:43:32.960but up until then nobody did i'm sure a lot of people had the idea
00:43:37.520but nobody had the follow-through until that first guy steps up and makes that attempt
00:43:42.000which these gentlemen did and that's extremely important so in doing this
00:43:49.200swain bjorn is the first i was here to go the he doesn't in in the organization he doesn't
00:43:56.720know what to do or how to manage this stuff or how to all of a sudden he's getting
00:44:02.240newspaper criticism for whatever he's just out there trying to you know raise goats or whatever
00:44:10.240and make some poetry and all of a sudden people are making noise so feeling the need to like hey
00:44:16.320hey hey we're not trying to do some big political thing here we're just trying to worship the gods
00:44:21.440so dorstein can have whatever ideas he wants to have that doesn't mean that we require you to
00:44:27.840have that in the astro failure and i think that's there's a very genuine
00:44:38.560and without any of the negative connotation but a naivety
00:44:42.080to sveinbjorn in his involvement with it because he didn't seek out attention he didn't seek out
00:44:48.640grandeur he just wanted a place for the icr in his country of iceland and for the those who wanted
00:44:59.360to worship them to come home to house of truth and thorstein did what he could to to shape and to
00:45:06.400develop that vision in a secure way so uh yeah please continue chris um so just just to say
00:45:17.520sometimes people will describe sveinbjorn's religiosity as like nature worship
00:45:25.200and i think they're uh anachronistically applying snippets of things that yormander ingi said um
00:45:32.160um we'll get into him later but um regarding the the gods as natural forces in a certain sense and
00:45:40.500I think for Spain you're on a lot of that was a very genuine love of Iceland and its culture
00:45:45.240like you can go on YouTube and find him singing edic poetry of his own composition or just stuff
00:45:53.580that whoever whichever hand literally wrote down the poetic edda scribed down and he's just seeing
00:45:59.880He, his song has been sampled by numerous musicians, including Vard Vikernes, here,
00:46:06.640worstly enough, his religiosity is almost, I would describe it as like a kind of folk0.74
00:46:15.060ancestor worship, in my opinion, like, not like Chinese style, here's my complex genealogy,
00:46:23.080but like a love of Iceland and all of the people in it and its gods who they're, say
00:46:28.120who the people of iceland are descended from and all of that and it wasn't very intellectual right
00:46:35.640so as i was saying uh a journalist by the name of shirley came from america and actually stayed
00:46:42.520with thorstein's family for on two separate occasions for a few days and shirley was american
00:46:50.440so she was monolingual thorstein knew english and spain bjorn only knew icelandic as far as i'm aware
00:46:56.360And so Sveindorn would be asked questions through Thorstein, and a few of them were sent by Thor Sanhet, and Mr. Sanhet was an American, and he was keyed into the discourse in America.
00:47:14.260And here we have been subjected to like weapons grade theological assault in a way that they really weren't like, you know, you look at some of the people in non-AFA, Asatru, heathen, whatever discourse.
00:47:34.960And it's, like, the moment one of these people comes into contact with, like, one of these real hardcore evangelist apologists from Christianity or Islam, they're going to get torn apart, right?
00:47:46.560And that sort of figure just doesn't exist in Iceland.
00:47:52.140And so just to describe these two men here, at one point, Shirley asks via proxy, I can't remember if it's from Thor Sanhed or someone else,
00:48:03.400um Sveinbjorn the the seemingly perennial question of do you think that Tyr used to be the original
00:48:11.000Skyfather right because his name blah blah blah we don't need to get into this but and you know
00:48:16.720who should be in charge Odin or Tyr and Sveinbjorn says well I think Icelanders should worship Thor
00:48:22.020the most because we have a special relationship with Thor and just looking at the the you know
00:48:30.100written words of uh thorstein translating spainbjorn's speech it it feels to me he didn't
00:48:37.940even know what was really being asked like he just didn't get that this is about like in your opinion
00:48:44.100if you reconstruct the name tier going back to t vas and dios peter and he just did not he didn't
00:48:51.300if anybody is a has watched more than one or two episodes of this show
00:48:58.980this illustrates the point that i try to make a lot very well um religion isn't
00:49:09.860like scholastic nerding out it's a sincere faith between a parishioner and their gods and
00:49:22.020it can certainly be more than that and it can certainly be expressed very intellectually and
00:49:27.860very eloquently but it doesn't have to be the root of it the value of it the beauty of it
00:49:34.660starts from something that's very simple and doesn't need to be more than that there's no
00:49:40.500requirement i don't think if you went to any of the ancient gothar and ask them about
00:49:46.020you know odin or tear being the sky father and whatever and they would be baffled at your
00:49:53.520question and what you're doing they'd be like uh we are we are worshiping odin you know get in the
00:50:01.180circle we're doing bloat like what do you stop because it's it's just noise and that's kind of
00:50:08.580thing that we see a lot that's also interesting during this period but you know continuing well
00:50:17.300into the 90s and i think people do it today as well you just don't have the same organized
00:50:22.580groups of them doing it there is a there was a fetishism in the united states for icelandic things
00:50:34.820because that's kind of the land of the sagas and because early
00:50:41.380also true development in the united states is kind of
00:50:51.940it's a it's an obsession on vikings and viking stuff and how cool viking stuff is so
00:50:59.140there was some kind of an illusion that if you go look for your answers in these you know old
00:51:06.420bearded men in iceland they're going to be able to elucidate these mysteries for you
00:51:12.980when in fact i mean only by a matter of months but also true was was established
00:51:18.180here in the united states in a modern sense before it was in iceland um four years uh
00:51:26.340steve mcnalen founder mcnalen's oath is in 1968. the astra felgi is formally established in 1972.
00:53:30.920In the Vortru article that Thor Sanhet is transcribing on amfirstbooks.com, no relation to America First's usage today, it starts out as initially Shirley is just asking questions to Spain Dioran through Thorstein, but then eventually Thorstein starts...
00:53:56.920I used the word editorializing in the paper that I wrote, but I think more so just answering is better.
00:54:03.800And it demonstrates a difference between the two men.
00:54:07.920Spainbjorn was very genuine, very down-to-earth, folksy.
00:54:13.080He's described as a sheep farmer by people and like period things, I think,
00:54:17.680because they can't really come up with anything else zany to describe him by, you know.
00:54:23.440But Thorstein was a bit more of an academic type.
00:54:26.420so like he knew about runes he knew the basics of them they're these little symbols and they have
00:54:33.700like a kind of deeper meaning and there's a sigil and you can do divination with them
00:54:38.340i don't i don't believe that svein bjorn didn't know about such a thing but i don't
00:54:44.200he doesn't strike me as the kind of person who'd be like pouring over these tomes to figure out
00:54:48.620like what's the true meaning of faku you know what i mean and um the fact that thorstein felt
00:54:57.100it appropriate to uh speak freely i guess you could say as somewhat of an authority when
00:55:05.260ostensibly there's surely the journalist is there to talk to spain jorn is a demonstration i think
00:55:11.340of lorstein's position in the asituraf elegies so by law in iceland
00:55:20.220so by by law here in the us you know you file for 501c3 and then you just have to do certain things
00:55:26.140and not do certain things and it's like all right you have your your there's the also your gothi
00:55:31.260and it's monarchy matt and it's like this top-down authority and the like or you can be like pastor
00:55:37.820bob and what do you guys want to talk about what do you want the sermon to be about or you can have
00:55:43.180all these esoteric political ecclesiastical polities is the proper word for like how do you
00:55:49.100run a church in iceland it's not necessarily that way a lot of the germanic europe countries it's
00:55:58.460not just iceland that has like a state church where it's like all right which religion do you
00:56:02.460want we're going to make you a lutheran unless you mark that you're a catholic kind of thing
00:56:05.580um i believe sweden also does that anyways so there is a board of directors who is the real
00:56:14.620power in any given um religious body in iceland they're the people who actually run the church
00:56:23.820and um that is a sort of parallel leadership to the actual
00:56:31.980also your gothi the gothar and i don't know if he was ever given this title given that it's an
00:56:38.860anglo-saxon word but i would describe thorstein guthjonsson as frankly being part of spain
00:56:44.140spainbjorn's way realistically like if we're mapping afa terms and structures onto the astro
00:56:50.300i think that was where we would put him because he was apparently a gothi despite attempts to
00:56:56.360distance him from the, uh, Asajara Felgi between, from 1975 or so onwards by secondary sources,
00:57:05.820he does appear to have been in very good standing if he was Sveinbjorn's translator, if he was
00:57:11.900housing the journalist, if Sveinbjorn was even doing this, presumably because Thorstein set it
00:57:18.820up i guess swainbjord doesn't strike me as the kind of guy to be setting up you know uh communiques
00:57:26.820with foreign journalists for this nebulous body of like steve mcnallan and garmin lord and steven
00:57:34.020flowers and all these other guys that don't know icelandic i mean maybe steven flowers did i don't
00:57:39.300whatever um and he is described as a gothy in his obituary so uh swain bjorn on december 23rd 1994
00:57:52.180spain bjorn's uh spirit journey to the halls of his ancestors and on uh i might have gotten this
00:57:58.260Yeah. On the 6th of January, 1995, they performed a joint Lutheran-Ossetru funeral for Sveinbjorn.
00:58:11.260That comes about because Sveinbjorn was, he wanted to obey a dictum in the Havamal that says that you shouldn't keep, you shouldn't separate graves.
00:58:23.260And I think he was interpreting that possibly a little over the middle. I don't know the specific stanza. I am not a Gothi, so I can't tell you how to interpret it anyways. But he wanted to literally be buried with his kinfolk, like physically, right?
00:58:36.240And so he had to have a Lutheran funeral, but he was also the Ulster Agothi, so they did an ostracized funeral alongside it.
00:58:45.400They had to come up with a regent who could administer the funeral, and I'm not entirely sure why.
00:58:54.280One thing might have been hierarchy. It seemed proper for a mere Agothi to officiate the funeral of an Ulster Agothi, but that doesn't seem their style at the time.
00:59:03.600I remember reading somewhere that it was a big deal when they got their second slot for
00:59:08.640officiants. Apparently in Iceland, you are given a number of slots that you can fill by the
00:59:15.840government. So like here, any number of our gothar, we could theoretically, we could make
00:59:22.740every member of gothar. That wouldn't be a good idea, but we could, and every one of them could
00:59:26.620legally officiate marriages. In Iceland, for a time, it seems like if you wanted to get married
00:59:33.040in an ostrich ceremony, you had to get Sveinbjorn Bainteinsson to show up, and he had to take
00:59:38.800time off from sheep farming to come down and officiate your wedding. Because at the time,
00:59:44.800this probably wasn't a full-time, like in terms of the money they had coming in, this probably
00:59:48.880wasn't a full-time job. And I know it wasn't for Jormunderingi for his term. Thorstein was an
00:59:58.640intellectual but he was not rewarded for that monetarily he was a manager of fine icelandic
01:00:06.960wholesale and retail uh outlets which is to say he was a store manager for like shops he was a
01:00:15.440merchant by like trade um which kind of puts it into perspective where like you have this guy0.73
01:00:21.920who's a gothy who knows about runes who's helping found a religion doing arguably one of the most0.99
01:00:28.560important things in his country's history in literally a thousand years but he has to sell0.93
01:00:34.000like sweaters to make ends meet um so they had a big deal when they got like a second officiant
01:00:43.840and they were also being run by this board effectively that comes into the like the board
01:00:51.440of directors comes into play when we get to yormundur ingi and the kind of uh tale of where
01:00:56.640to where the Ossetur-Raphaelgith goes after Sveinbjorn's grasp is finally released from the organization.
01:01:05.640But so, I'm sorry, Thorstein's grasp is kind of released from the organization.
01:01:12.640So Sveinbjorn had his joint Lutheran Ossetur funeral and was presided over by some kind of regent.
01:01:18.640He then led a Njall seance 17 days after Samjorn's death, three days after his
01:01:26.800unearthment, which is kind of cool on the one hand. On the other hand, it's a little...
01:01:33.600Do they still do that? I don't know, you know? But so in...
01:01:41.120So on December 24th, 1999, five years later, Thorstein would suffer a stroke, and that would hospitalize him.
01:01:54.120He would die on the 21st of January in 2000. So he made it through the new millennium. He beat Y2K.
01:02:03.640His funeral was held 10 days later on the 31st of January in 2000 in Langholt Church.
01:02:11.120Now, that's kind of odd, given that he was a gothi and the founder of the Estorafelgid.
01:02:16.920I looked into this, and Langholt Church is like a local parish church, like one of these buildings where it's like, it's not necessarily 100% denominational, per se.
01:02:27.980I mean, today it's very non-denominational.
01:02:29.820You can just rent it for whatever you want.
01:02:32.020So I'm thinking that possibly the reason his funeral was there is because they needed a building, and it was in the middle of Icelandic January.
01:02:39.400You know, it might not have been the ideal conditions to hold an outdoor funeral.
01:02:46.400Throughout his life, he was fascinated by the idea of astral projection, travel to other worlds, life out in the vast, starry, expansive space.
01:02:54.400And in his obituary, one mourner was consolatory by saying that while Thorstein had died, he had been reborn, as per any all theories, on another world with a new and beautiful body, free of the defects of the old one.
01:03:07.400And he was one of the lucky individuals who lived, if only for 21 days, through the transition of millennias.
01:03:15.360In a poetic sense, he might not have been able to contact one of the astral travelers in the far-flung reaches of space,
01:03:22.180but he himself did, in his last days, cross a great boundary of time and space with what little time he had left.
01:03:29.220Although his body was damaged by disease at both a young and old age,
01:03:32.600he carried, it carried his mind and spirit across the threshold to another world twice.
01:03:39.260One, the transition from an Iceland without Asatru to an Iceland with Asatru, and once
01:03:44.920into the new millennium. It's fitting that this is the kind of man who did that, a man0.92
01:03:51.260who was so interested in that idea of these transitions across a vast empty space that
01:04:01.360In his obituary, most of the well-wishers were family
01:04:05.020and fellow Njalla enthusiasts, except for one fellow.
01:04:09.020I believe his name also had Thor in it.
01:04:12.920But he confirmed that Thorstein was a Gothi
01:04:17.820and was a long-time aide of both Svengjorn and Jörmunder Ingi.
01:04:25.880so uh i'm trying to find if there's anything else i should talk about before going into
01:04:31.480uh they where are the ostrich the ostrich goes from here and
01:04:35.880uh why perhaps they should have listened more to thorstein um
01:04:46.840we do have some people who are trying to find out about his uh current resting place do we not sir
01:04:53.080um so we know the location we're trying to get boots on the ground to go take pictures and kind
01:05:00.280of physically establish contact with it for what it's worth um one of the once you get over the1.00
01:05:09.360initial hurdle because there's so few icelanders some things are made easier because it's not like
01:05:16.800you got to sort through millions of people you've got to sort through hundreds of thousands
01:05:21.060um the other thing is that's tricky is with their patronomic naming system
01:05:29.940you get a relatively small amount of names shared by lots and lots and lots of people so whereas
01:05:42.180i don't know it seems like in some of my looking if you're trying to find
01:05:46.980you know depends on how obscure the name is but because of how they do and because they only have
01:05:54.860a certain amount of um legally recognized names and a cert and everyone is somebody's son or
01:06:03.000somebody's daughter it means those combinations are relatively limited so there is a whole lot
01:06:09.160of Thorstein Guthiansen's fun story when I was looking him up I I was initially told like hey
01:06:17.840look into this fella Thorstein Guthiansen I'm like all right and I just google him
01:06:22.260and the first guy that comes up is actually some dude that died in the 80s on Mount Everest
01:06:26.740yep like and I'm like is this him I don't because it's not like there's pictures you know
01:06:33.580That's what makes it confusing. My understanding, looking stuff up, and again, Svon's talking about it over in the chat, but if we can mobilize some boots on the ground, it would be nice to, I don't know, see that and get a picture and kind of touch base with that literally.
01:06:54.800I know that he also has, as far as I know they're living, he had three children, I believe, one of which preceded him in death, but two of which, to my knowledge, are still living.
01:07:08.400I don't have any idea about grandchildren he might, you know, have or, you know, at this time, great-grandchildren.
01:07:16.160But it'd be interesting to make some sort of connection there at some point.
01:07:20.900So the fellow who wrote the obituary that I was referencing was Sigurður Þórðarsson, and he – there was an issue in the printing of the Morgan Bladhith where they basically chopped his obituary in half and published it a week early and published the rest on the second anyways.
01:07:43.420so uh seeger there confirms a few things for us he says he was apparently some kind of uh
01:07:49.180australian insider i didn't i wasn't able to find much on him maybe he wasn't too big in it i don't
01:07:55.660know but um he tells us that uh thorstein was a a big aid to both um spanger and bainty's son who
01:08:06.700for clarity led the astrophilic youth from 1972 to 1993 and for his successor uh yurmundur ingi
01:08:14.220hansen whose ulterior gothic term was 1994 to 2002. i believe yurmundur ingi hansen passed away
01:08:23.100in like 2017. don't quote me on that but he he lived for a number of years after uh no longer
01:08:30.460being installed i guess you could call it so as a deviation here for a second that's kind of a point
01:08:39.260of interest um we are i mentioned earlier that chris is a huge part of our endeavor to
01:08:53.820flesh out our own history and to preserve it and
01:09:00.460I don't know, remove the fog of time of things that have been obscured.
01:09:06.880And one of those events, Yarminder Inge was brought over here for an event called the Gathering of the Gothar in 1996 in Arizona.
01:09:18.620And we're trying to find more detail on that.
01:09:21.440If any in the audience have any detail on that, want to send it our way, please do it.
01:09:27.840You can also send any questions you might have to bnseverunestone.org.
01:09:33.260That said, there was a gap between the Austro Free Assembly from 1987 until the establishment of the Austro Folk Assembly, you know, over the Yule of 94 to 95.
01:09:52.060So there was this gap there, and the Ashtu Folk Assembly didn't begin ordaining Gothar until a few years later.
01:10:01.920So within that gap, we mentioned one of our Gothar and a good friend of mine, Thorgrin Odin, who just passed away this last summer.
01:10:12.160He is the only one of our Gothar that was ordained outside of the Astru Folk Assembly or Steve McNallan's direct Gothic lineage.
01:10:24.320He was actually received his ordination from Jormundur Inge Hansen at the gathering of the Gothar in 1996.
01:10:33.440So that's just kind of an interesting overlap factoid also.
01:10:37.660And it looked like we had give you Sheila McNallan in the chat room.
01:10:41.700It's always an honor to have you here, Sheila, if you're still with us.0.97
01:10:45.560But, you know, she was telling me part of it is, you know, everybody's going, like I mentioned earlier, everybody's going to this, this old Icelander and trying to like contort him and twist his arm into validating whatever their viewpoint is on things.0.61
01:11:01.800And this guy's over there in his Icelandic like wool suit in the middle of summer in Arizona, had to be just melting so far out of his element with all these, you know, thirsty, out-to-true groupies, like trying to get some of his, you know, his Icelandic nectar for there to validate.
01:11:31.800whatever their positions were on out of his element i read in uh one publication that it
01:11:38.640was a hundred degrees it was a hundred degrees fahrenheit in arizona at the gathering of the
01:11:43.280gothar that would have been yeah that would have been nice that would have been that would have
01:11:48.700been a cool day at that time of year right like so speaking of that plug if you are in michigan
01:11:56.280and you're not a member you should get in contact with me at csavich at runestone.org
01:12:01.000c-s-a-v-i-c-h at runestone.org there's a few people who should do that but um i'm going to
01:12:09.160send out an afa-wide email one of these days um if you have copies of iduna or vortru or any of
01:12:17.400these magazines that aren't like actual books books like that aren't like you know actual book
01:12:26.840books if you have any of those please get in contact with me so we can get those like recorded
01:12:32.840you would be surprised how hard it is to find like fortrue number 59 in the runic year 2246
01:12:41.720for true for true uh did this thing called the runic year where when they started the oldest
01:12:47.480runic inscription was found in 250 bc so that they would count years by runic era which is
01:12:54.60080 plus 250. um that's about enjoy having obscure and eccentric dating methods yeah
01:13:04.360chris when he answers any of the inquiries i have always dates things to the fall of troy
01:13:09.720it's the i find it amusing but he also translates for me so i don't have to do the math as long as
01:13:17.160those are in the brackets i appreciate it runic year is a little bit trickier for me to figure
01:13:22.440out when i'm trying to place things with that particular dating system um but yeah we're
01:13:30.120cataloging those things and i think that we'd be remiss we've tried for a really long time to get
01:13:35.160copies of the very earliest rune stones and through brandy's persistent harassment of sorts
01:13:48.120amazingly because i didn't know that it could be accomplished i can only i mean if sheila's
01:13:53.560on there she may have some insight if she is sitting next to our founder he might also have
01:13:58.440some insight but i have no idea how many copies ever existed of those you know first couple of
01:14:05.720years worth of rune stones at least one of one of whenever number one is through somewhere in 1980
01:14:13.960because i got them i got them in our hand in our digital hands so yeah they so someone was able to
01:14:21.320come up with them and as according to the best of my understanding we have you know like the first
01:14:28.280i think five digitally preserved and we're working on the rest we've got quite a bit
01:14:34.840if you are interested in these things as they become preserved and we keep them we have them
01:14:39.960in our library at ringstone.org um we have quite quite a few of the latter ones from the folk
01:14:49.240assembly days we have a lot of them from the 80s and the early 90s there was a gap from i think
01:14:56.840like 87 to like 92. but we have we have a lot we have one through whatever the first one on the
01:15:06.320list is currently I got those they're in our our internal teams I got them okay so we're working
01:15:13.820on getting all that stuff uploaded to our library that we maintain at runestone.org if you haven't
01:15:19.940checked it out you should it's kind of cool it's interesting it's very informative to watch the
01:15:24.980development of this of our faith over time and it's it's fascinating this stuff is things that
01:15:35.480I really wanted access through when I first came home to Alcatru and it's hard to find it it's hard
01:15:42.020to find it digitally um a lot of our elders are you know unfortunately passing beyond the veil
01:15:50.000over time and when folks go their stories and some of our history goes with them and we want
01:15:56.240to make sure that's preserved so we can celebrate the people that have got us here um yes chris a
01:16:02.880big part of cat thank you sir yes lucat it does technically in a really altered dystopian
01:16:14.000and yeah unfortunately I I can talk about that for a while too but let's not that's yeah but
01:16:20.540yeah it's it's not we don't need and well that's the thing so we are um
01:16:27.980kind of to the end of his life talking a little bit about where stuff's gone whatever is informative
01:16:36.440um just for people's perspective and you know please continue your story of what you got
01:16:41.120but while i'm still plugging here um if you have vortru 59 or 60 those would be helpful i think
01:16:49.120that's those two have the gathering of the gofar some of this stuff just doesn't appear on the
01:16:54.340internet like i was i was talking i had to get something that was that took place at uh east
01:17:00.840coast thing 2010 i had i had to ask law speaker turnage because it's like you know what happens
01:17:08.980you google that event you get some dude's live journal article saying yeah i was there it was
01:17:14.180awesome that's it like that's it that's probably not going to be here in a decade as as ridiculous
01:17:21.300as it sounds awesome i've been able to get um i'm glad somebody decided to live journal yeah
01:17:29.860yeah it's amazing because and i you know i'm trying to remedy this
01:17:38.980it's really easy to realize what you wish you had after it's gone and so I'm we're trying our best
01:17:49.300to correct what we can to document what we can but you know a lot of a lot of folks some through
01:18:00.460just not caring enough or being negligent or being whatever didn't record things but others what I
01:18:07.240a lot some of our leaders know they're too busy doing to stop and write it down and document it
01:18:14.360and i can't fault them for that certainly but i want to know about i want to know the lessons of
01:18:19.960the past i want to know their stories i want to say and sing their songs i want to extol their
01:18:26.120fame for those that are worthy of it that's such a huge part of our faith and it uh
01:18:31.000it's very important so yeah anybody out there that has stuff to contribute please do we would
01:18:39.660love to benefit from you know the bits and pieces that maybe you've collected or know about
01:18:45.160and yeah we're always very very interested in hearing that and we would love everyone out
01:18:52.140there this is another time since we're plugging stuff if you are listening to this or if you're
01:18:57.260watching this either now or in the future which is now to you i would encourage you if you
01:19:07.740if you are you know a heterosexual white person that either has a sincere faith in the icer or
01:19:17.580sincerely wants to you should join the astro focus assembly at runestone.org we are doing amazing
01:19:25.020things we would love to have you be part of that with us we are living history each and every day
01:19:33.820and you could be a very big part of that if you want to we'd love to have you come home and help
01:19:40.780us do this more do this better or accelerate this into the future we want all our folk to
01:19:48.300come home to our rightful relationship with our gods and we would encourage you to do so
01:19:59.340but also know this you're welcome to consume this show no matter who we are if you like it
01:20:06.780we appreciate you if you don't like it but you still come here and pay attention i don't know
01:20:11.580why but i appreciate you being here and anybody who's got questions is always welcome to ask as
01:20:17.900long as they're phrased i wouldn't even say respectfully as long as they're not phrased
01:20:25.180disrespectfully i'm very happy to give you an answer to the best of my ability and we encourage
01:20:30.780everybody to to come check it out because one of the things is word of mouth is so huge for
01:20:38.620the success of this show and for bringing people home to also true our biggest hurdle and i tell
01:20:44.380our leadership this all the time and i don't really mean hurdle i guess our biggest kind of
01:20:48.620threshold issue right now is so many people don't know we exist and would be here if they did so
01:20:58.940spread the word you know if you're interested great please join maybe you're not but maybe
01:21:03.900you've got a family member who is maybe you've got a friend who is we all have so many circles
01:21:09.580in our lives that intersect with other things if you think this show is interesting or entertaining
01:21:15.900or any of the above and you're here let somebody know we'd love to have more people participate and
01:21:24.060get involved with what we're doing but we appreciate you guys being here we appreciate
01:21:28.140our regulars we appreciate our newcomers and uh appreciate you sticking through our interlude
01:21:35.660now let's get back to the narrative and uh take us home chris so real quick just to comment on
01:21:43.500something that uh mr lucat said in the chat here regarding uh rod navary in continuing with the
01:21:50.380spirit of thorstein's work as i said he was one of the founders of the well no the oscar fellow
01:21:58.380youth was one of the founding institutions of the european congress of ethnic religions um
01:22:04.060which used to be like the world congress of ethnic religions or something but then they changed it
01:22:07.820i don't know um which was created as a sort of non-anglo international ethno-pagan
01:22:17.020conference not like they're sharing theology but like you know banding together apart to work
01:22:23.100together for common goals um in the face of an opponent that doesn't doesn't like what we're
01:22:28.060doing and i really like that and it's always been very difficult to kind of gather this information
01:22:36.060up and not just in some instances literally translate it like you can occasionally find a
01:22:42.060rusky who knows english and he'll be talking about what they do over there but like sir do
01:22:48.300do you know what the term for Estonian polytheism is?
01:35:44.260and 4 000 plus and this looks fun let's do some viking stuff and I think that really0.99
01:35:54.760is a is an unfortunate reality in the development of things to bring us
01:36:01.180to where we see it at this point um but I this is a just a note when you're looking back at our
01:36:09.520history things change over time in a really dramatic way so you can't judge the positions
01:36:21.520of a for example something that anybody who's following this no matter if you're a part of our
01:36:27.040American audience or our international audience Catholicism if you've got friends and family
01:36:35.200that have been catholics since you know 1940s 50s 60s all catholicism pre the current commie pope
01:36:47.520are is real real different but now you have a pontiff in office that basically says ah just
01:36:56.360kidding on all that other stuff we're really 180 degrees different than everything the roman
01:37:03.940catholic church has believed for the last 2 000 years you can't it would be silly for you to judge
01:37:12.260medieval catholicism by um pope francis's standard because they're very different animals
01:37:22.100it would be very misleading to judge swain bjorn's aussitur feligeth by hilmar's standards
01:37:33.140and so i think that's an important thing that needs to be considered in fact
01:37:42.260so um just to put this into kind of perspective real quick um 1985 74 1992 119 um 1994 172
01:37:55.9402002, 628. So almost immediately upon taking, upon installment, Jormundr came into conflict
01:38:09.600with the board, the board of trustees that was supposed to like run the institution as
01:38:15.620a corporate body, but they don't technically have theological authority. So for the first
01:38:22.380uh period of its existence from for uh the was incredibly centralized like everything was done
01:38:33.420by spainbjorn he was the cashier he was the the marriage guy he was the funeral guy speaking of
01:38:40.860marriages there's a fun story so um spainbjorn tells the story of shirley in thor sannhet's
01:38:46.140So apparently this happened during Sveinbjorn's tenure. He was, like, jumped by this drunk couple who had heard that Asatru was, like, a thing now. You can do this.
01:39:03.120and they're like oh that sounds fun let's get married we're drunk we're in love so they they
01:39:09.380got married under i presume it had to have been under spain bjorn's hand if he was like the only
01:39:16.240one that could do this and they sobered up the next day and are like what do you mean we're married
01:39:21.420this is a legal religion um which is a funny story because it's like uh that happens in las
01:39:30.700vegas all the time but it is kind of tragic about how even then how icelanders and no offense to
01:39:38.940icelanders who are pious but like the idea of like oh there's a new religion let's get married
01:39:45.020for a lark it's like what that seems so all right so we have now ventured past uh thorstein's life
01:39:55.980and times i want to get to some of our questions in uh that have developed but i'd also like to
01:40:06.540first mary mitchell's in the audience we see over there mary hi mary um it's good to see
01:40:13.900i'm glad that you're watching tonight um but i'd also like to kind of again for perspective
01:40:22.700Um, and I know that we've got, this show is Amero-centric because, I mean, I could try
01:40:38.160to run the math, but 90% or more of our members are in the United States.
01:40:44.920But I understand, and I'm very, I don't know, honored and thankful that we've got a lot
01:40:50.560international uh folks watching so when some of this has a really heavy american context just
01:40:58.000please factor that in some folks a lot of people who listen this may not be familiar with
01:41:04.400the relative religiosity in europe compared to the united states
01:41:08.960um it sneaks up on me but uh the gray in my beard tells me i'm getting a little bit older than i
01:41:16.320feel like i am um but i was born in 1981 so for my generation of people in the united states
01:41:27.200most people quote unquote believe in god i think we're still majority of people claim
01:41:34.960to be religious in some way for whatever it's worth but in my day
01:41:40.640you knew people like either you went to church or lots of people you knew regularly went to church
01:41:49.580and you had a direct connection with religiosity now over here a lot of that was Protestantism
01:41:58.960different parts of the country had you know stronger maybe Mormon um element or Catholic
01:42:05.960element or, you know, generic American Protestantism, you know, with the Baptists or the Methodists
01:42:14.200or things of that nature. But you had, it wasn't an odd thing for people, for your friends,
01:42:22.320families to be avid churchgoers. You know, if you're spending the night Saturday night,
01:42:27.000you're going with them on Sunday morning because they're going to church. That's what's up.
01:42:31.420But that was very common. In my parents' generation, that was normal. And you were off if your family didn't do that. In my grandparents' generation, no, that was standard. You did that. And if you didn't, you were making the conscious choice because you had some personal issue with the Lord.
01:42:51.440um europe is probably two or three if not more generations different in that regard i went over
01:43:01.760on an afa trip to sweden i want to say recently but this is part of the gray in my beard recently
01:43:07.440means in 2018 um and talking to folks it was really odd because
01:43:18.080religion isn't a thing there a lot they're surrounded by beautiful expressions of religion
01:43:27.520but like people will get married in a church because you're supposed to or have a funeral that
01:43:33.360way but very it is a very pronounced minority that are you know go to mass
01:43:46.000every week that's not the norm so a lot of this when you see you know ah but swain bjorn had a
01:43:53.600funeral in a church yeah but most church funerals over there aren't particularly religious because
01:44:00.640religion is europe became very secular much sooner than the united states has
01:44:10.400so i think some of that factors in when we find things that seem odd we still have a lot of
01:44:16.240cultural points of reference and relevance to religiosity whereas in europe i think your
01:44:23.440default position is atheism that you come to house the truth from as opposed to here in the united
01:44:31.120states where you still have a very you know a very healthy percentage come to house the truth from
01:44:37.520a different faith and we see that change over time but i just think that's kind of an interesting
01:44:43.520note when you wonder like this strange overlap between the church and you know why is the church
01:44:50.480allowing these funerals for pagan clergy like on their grounds it's because religiosity has really
01:45:01.040receded into the background in europe to a much more substantial degree than i think a lot of us
01:45:06.480are readily familiar with we've got some stuff stacking up but i'm enjoying our chat room tonight
01:45:16.080quite a bit um i just want to throw in real quick um i was born in 94 and turning 30 this year
01:45:24.560for reference my parents did not want my brother and i to grow up not my parents my parents were
01:45:32.080not religious in any meaningful sense but like socially we we had to go to church we had to
01:45:37.360know what this was about we would be ostracized if we if we didn't you know just for perspective
01:57:18.040could probably pull up a recent RuneStone article
01:57:22.720that uh steve mcnallan did about yost and celebrating yost anybody who does not know
01:57:31.440uh joseph known as yost turner was a very very close friend of the founder of the astro folk
01:57:40.720assembly stephen mcnallan um he mails him ensemble to this day very regularly i've accompanied steve
01:57:50.960to yos grave once had the honor of doing that and he does that regularly
01:58:02.960to track down all of his writings is a little bit different difficult i've read
01:58:09.760and we have access to what we found available and a lot of it's very interesting
01:58:20.960Yes, he was definitely, he was a big part of the early foundation of the Austro Folk Assembly, and, you know, things directly preceding that, and was very, very influential on our founder, Stephen Allen, they're very, very close, and he left a really lasting mark on that.
02:03:19.120As we get more Hoffs, we will have more places
02:03:22.400to give special reverence to these heroes of our folk.
02:03:28.540But yes, that's exactly, you know, that is the equivalency.
02:03:36.020I've got a bunch going on in the chat room.
02:03:37.880I've got to check it out, but I'm still going at these questions.
02:03:40.220question from the wolf throne i feel that in this wolf age there's a growing pessimism and a feeling
02:03:48.460of hopelessness amongst our folk do you think also true's life-affirming optimism will remedy that
02:03:54.860as also true spreads across the west chris what do you think on that
02:04:02.540i think it absolutely will um i think we don't have a choice but to try to a certain degree
02:04:10.220Um, I know that my time in Ossetru has been nothing but good. It's been nothing but a growth, but growth and improvement for me. And I want to give that to other people. It's been, it's been great.
02:04:29.220um so all i can go off is off of this my own my own sort of uh experience with it there but uh
02:04:39.600i don't think there's many people who haven't experienced something similar
02:04:43.620that have like actually actually tried so to say
02:08:38.740So we got a couple of other questions that haven't made it over to the question queue, but I think are important.
02:08:45.360We have one about the, it's kind of a comment, but it had a question mark after it, and I think it's worth addressing, is the fact that some people complain that they allege that Snorri Sturluson's work is to Christianize.
02:09:03.540And the thought is like, well, you know, what source are we going to have that doesn't, that we can say is 100% pure of Christian impurities?
02:09:15.360And, I mean, first, to literally answer the question, going back and finding Greek and Roman sources that predate the conversion of those areas, you can find some stuff.0.80
02:22:14.160should be here might want to be here agree with us on stuff maybe even broadly speaking let's say
02:22:25.26040 million realistically how many of those people are willing to make the effort to go and click
02:22:32.220join and you know contribute by hoftoller or you know by their membership donation and actively be
02:22:41.440part of what we're doing if we're dealing with 40 million and just one percent of that 40 million
02:22:49.440wanted to join it's a massive number a massive number that would exponentially grow the ask
02:22:59.900true folk assembly just think about that it relatively when you're dealing with numbers
02:23:08.700like we are dealing with a little bit goes a long way with everyone who listened to this
02:23:15.260bro so it's hard to track on here we have so we have our youtube audience which i can kind of see
02:23:24.380how many views um this show gets we've got our twitter audience where i can see how much it goes
02:23:33.020there we're also on a bunch of different stuff and on spotify and iheart and itunes and apple
02:23:42.140podcasts and rumble and and and and and all these different places and odyssey and a million
02:23:52.060many different places tracking how far the reach goes is very hard to do but on this show
02:24:03.160within the next day or two we're going to have
02:24:07.900I don't know let's be very conservative 400 views here on YouTube this is just the next couple of
02:24:17.440probably 350 views on Twitter if all of those people liked shared subscribe talked about this
02:24:29.440went out and told somebody we would see a massive boost in membership just from people knowing we
02:24:36.460exist so getting the word out that is the biggest thing living this proudly telling the people that
02:24:43.600you and like hey what's this thing you do tell me more and then having the courage to tell them more
02:24:50.480that's what we need that's what's going to bring people home honestly that is that is the answer
02:24:55.760it's not sexy and it's not what everybody wants the answer to be but it is the answer
02:25:00.880looking at stuff on the side again we got a lot going on over here um
02:25:16.960do you want me to finish up with the asset stuff in a bit here if you have more please go ahead by
02:25:23.440all means do you do you mind if i just start going now yeah go all right so um you're wondering he
02:25:29.680He took over in 1994, and almost immediately he came into conflict with the board of directors who,
02:25:41.680from piecing together from secondary sources, they didn't like how centralized his administration was.
02:25:52.680like they wanted to do what happened with the troth after uh prudent's priest left or got
02:25:59.580kicked out of camera which was it doesn't matter where it kind of turns into like a sort of uh
02:26:05.580feudal oligarchy almost where like you have like you know a bunch of little a little bunch of
02:26:10.400little fiefdoms within the organization and your munders hyper centralization got in the way of
02:26:17.680Another problem with that, however, was that the organization had increased in size like 3.6 times.
02:26:27.680In 1994, they had 172 members. In 2002, they had 628, and that's a pretty big jump.
02:26:36.680Jormundr was, however, a pious man, and I hope my comment about the Icelanders getting drunkenly married did not seem to imply I was benighting or insulting Icelanders, I was not.
02:26:54.680There are Icelanders who are very pious, and our also has talked about one of the signs of pious Asatrar is worshiping Balder.
02:27:03.680And in 2000, the Icelandic state was going to celebrate the 1000th year anniversary of the Christianization of Iceland,
02:27:16.680which is kind of an odd thing to do if you're a Lutheran, given that that's a Catholic accomplishment, I guess, but whatever.
02:27:23.680And they were going to hold it at Thingvellir. Thingvellir is the site of the old Icelandic althing, the big field where they'd gather.
02:27:32.380And Thorstein wrote a book about this place. He seemed to have been a bit of an aficionado of it.
02:27:38.260I found a used copy at some Icelandic internet bookseller and I was thinking about buying it.
02:27:47.620And anyways, so the Icelandic state was going to have this celebration, and Jörmunder Ingi, presumably with Thorstein's backing, is like, well, we're going to do our own thing.
02:28:06.640Tragically, Thorstein did not live to see this come to fruition, but Jörmunder did go through with it.
02:28:13.700um and so they were going to set up a bunch of bonfires along the coast of the island and then
02:28:21.540set a big one up in the center at thingville as like a uh a ritual to sort of as if balder were
02:28:32.020coming back through this empire he left in and as i understand it the ritual did go off they did do
02:28:38.260this um the icelandic state was not the biggest proponent of this uh technically they did allow
02:28:46.660it in a legal sense in practice they pretty clearly didn't want this to happen so they
02:28:53.620had a bunch of public taxpayer funded uh services like food and bathrooms and stuff
02:29:00.260at thingvalir and they didn't let the uh asatrar use them um which is a really zany thing to say
02:29:08.420out loud like the icelandic government not letting pagans use the bathroom in 2002 it's like
02:29:14.740what a strange kind of persecution but um and so there was a bit of a stink over that uh
02:29:21.300And Hilmar Oren Hilmarsson, the third ulterior gothe of the Asatora Felagith, he was a musician.
02:29:31.200His stuff's on YouTube, it's not bad, very European atmospheric, not really headbanging metal or anything.
02:29:40.340Not headbanging metal, not etic chants or anything like that.
02:29:44.560But he was going to do some concert at this gathering, and he wasn't able to because the state didn't set up the music apparatus that it was supposed to.
02:29:56.840And there's some quote for him where he's like, phew, maybe I've spent too much time on the continent.
02:30:03.360But last I knew, it doesn't take six weeks to set up a soundstage, which I guess is kind of pretentious.
02:30:10.220but at the same time he does have a point of like how hard is it to plug in the amps you know
02:30:15.960um so there was a minor stink about this and it turned out that the state wasn't letting anyone
02:30:22.560in to that wasn't a lutheran use these facilities despite them being taxpayer funded
02:30:27.620and uh six they were there were 600 members in the country when this event occurred but there
02:30:37.820There were over 1,000 attendees, and there were actually a painfully less than expected number of Lutheran attendees at the Lutheran one, which I guess was a dent in the pocketbook, probably.
02:31:01.120So that's an interesting point, that there were only about 600 members, but there were about 1,000 attendees.
02:31:09.840There were people who were interested in this in Iceland that weren't members.
02:31:15.320We don't really have a good term for these people.
02:31:17.060I guess you could call them like casuals, like kind of peripheral, around-the-edges people.
02:31:22.520So this wouldn't necessarily be viewed as a win for Jormundr, even though I personally view it as a great thing for the Icelandic people.
02:31:37.400It's a great victory for Icelandic Asatrar, but as said, Jormundur Ingi was more of a centralizer than the board would like.
02:31:54.240One thing that he did was he, they wanted to have a burial ground.
02:31:58.560They wanted to have a burial ground for the members of their church because they didn't have one.
02:32:04.400they didn't have a place to put their dead.
02:32:09.480I mean, you know, Spam Dorm was buried in a Lutheran cemetery, right?
02:32:14.540Like, so getting a burial ground was a big goal for the early Asatruphelagith.
02:32:25.540And remember, in 2000, this organization was only 28 years old.
02:32:30.600um 28 years old with like 600 members your wonder did pull it off he did manage to get the
02:32:38.960a burial ground um there was some kind of problem with the uh with the financing of it what there's
02:32:51.260and you know what there's not a problem with is getting a burial at a hall for sigerheim if you
02:32:56.200a member um i don't know the full details but i do know that um there are burial services that are
02:33:03.860free for um burial services at hoffs and sigerheim they are free correct sir if you're a member yes
02:33:12.460yes internment yes um and i yeah and do your will i i mean so everybody do your will
02:33:21.300So what's wrong with you people? And I say this to literally everybody. We find ourselves putting that off. But here's something that I've seen as far as AFA members who've passed.
02:33:38.820um we've got young people who didn't think that you know they were going to need it anytime soon
02:33:49.760and didn't get one done that's understandable but tragic and easily avoidable
02:33:55.720but i've seen it with elderly people with terminal diseases that still didn't get it done
02:34:03.320and i don't know why so you know one of the reasons is maybe your will's expensive
02:34:10.680or maybe you don't want to get a lawyer and find this whole process
02:34:15.880i too am cheap and i too don't like to do a bunch of leg work on stuff like that
02:34:24.300So I found doyourownwill.com. It is really that simple. Now, international members, this may not apply, but in the United States, and I believe in parts of Canada, this is completely legal and binding.
02:34:40.700I've talked to our law speaker who is a, you know, a practicing Florida attorney and says completely legit.
02:34:48.920It takes 10 minutes. It's very easy to do.
02:34:52.560If you want to do a better one down the road, when you get to it, fine.
02:34:57.220Do your will. Get a original copy, which means with the signatures on each on each of the copies and notarized if you need to in your state.
02:35:08.840keep one whatever you want to do but send one to our law speaker address is on the screen
02:35:17.160do that doesn't matter what you know there's no doesn't matter what's there what matters is we
02:35:29.100want to make sure that you that you get what you want in terms of your final affairs and the
02:35:37.320distribution of your property um if you send it to our law speaker then when we find out you have
02:35:45.840passed we can advocate legally for what you want done with your remains with your funeral and with
02:35:55.800your things if we don't have that we can't help and i don't want anyone to not get what they want
02:36:06.060in their passing so please remember that it's very important i don't know the original question
02:36:14.040but um what does worth putting out there we have places to enter ashes at odenshof at thor's hall
02:36:26.060we have um we have three uh we have three people interred at odenshof we have one person interred
02:36:40.940at thor's off we have plans in place we just do not have a need for it yet at baldershof but you
02:36:47.100can absolutely get your ashes interred there we have two people interred at njordshof and we have
02:37:01.020wish we knew exactly how many we have at sigerheim we when we got sigerheim we it came with a
02:37:09.820very old and unfortunately not well taken care of graveyard we've done what we can we continue to
02:37:16.860restore the gravestones that we have access to to try to do the best we can to learn about the
02:37:22.140people who are interred there my mom's ashes are interred there there's place for you and your
02:37:29.260loved ones when you pass um and it's not i mean as far as cost we'll make something happen if we
02:37:42.300got to we would like you and your family to provide you know whatever kind of marker you want
02:37:48.860and that can be as simple as you'd like or as elaborate if you want one of those big mausoleums
02:37:54.940cool let's do that but i mean those are a lot and if you can afford that or your family can by all
02:38:00.060means but yeah we we don't want cost to be something that prevents you being celebrated
02:38:09.260with a with a place with a grave with a marker when you pass and we don't want that for those
02:38:15.020that you care about either i appreciate you covering while i took a tuck my daughter in
02:38:22.860slash bathroom break um and i'll cut in and say there was no question he was just talking and it
02:38:30.380felt like a really good plug cool it's just a rhythm that's good slide that in i appreciate
02:38:37.500wait till the guest is talking and then i just clear um unless you wanted to say something more
02:38:44.940i was gonna go to the burial and then yeah okay so um they wanted to get a burial ground before
02:38:51.820they're dead in iceland and that was something that your mother worked hard to get um and i have
02:38:57.820to imagine it was something that morstein also won so this turned into a bit of a boondoggle
02:39:04.700apparently um it was costlier than they would like that turns out to be um a herald in a certain
02:39:12.300sense there was some kind of venture involving the sale of icelandic horses outside of the country
02:39:20.060that was seen as a faux pas somehow and i remember i read about this months before i was actually
02:39:27.980looking into this guy so i i apologize for not having more information on this but it was
02:39:32.780It was something like, how, these are Icelandic horses, how dare you sell them to Americans, or something kind of silly like that.
02:39:40.780The burial ground was more expensive than a plot of dirt to bury dead bodies in.
02:39:48.780That's a very crude way of putting it, but it was perceived as more expensive than it should have been.
02:39:53.780Now, there is a conscious effort in secondary literature on the Oster of Elgith to paint Thorstein as this crazed lunatic ideologue and Yermunder Ingi as this, like, mad monarch.
02:40:11.780That seems to have been a result of the attempt at getting rid of Yermunder by the Borg.
02:40:19.780So just for clarity here, there's the actual religious structure of clergy in Iceland, and then there's the board of directors, which is elected by members of the church.
02:40:32.060so you can see a conflict of interest there between the ulcerer goethe who has long-term
02:40:38.080interests we can take out a loan for a graveyard and pay it off in 10 years and then there's the
02:40:44.600board who are interested in making decisions for getting elected and getting re-elected
02:40:50.380and there was an effort the first time he came around uh yormunder the first time this came up
02:40:59.060Jormundr was just chosen because he was Svenjorn's buddy.
02:41:10.280In 2002, the board managed to get enough votes to give him the boot.
02:41:17.800They've been trying to do that for about eight years by that point.
02:41:22.220Citing the two, the three big things that I see as having been their reasons were,
02:41:27.400One, his refusal to decentralize. Two, this thing with the Icelandic horses and the expensive graveyard. And three, perceived right-wing influence from the international ventures, like the international inter-ethnic pagan kind of unification ideas.
02:41:49.240unification is not the right word, but you know what I mean, of Thorstein, they didn't like that
02:41:54.360that was perceived as right wing, which is kind of odd when you think about it, but whatever.
02:42:00.060And they put in Hilmar Orn Hilmarson, who, as the Ulster Eugothi said, from what I can see,
02:42:06.700is basically an atheist. I mean, I reserve the right to be wrong, but I haven't seen much to
02:42:16.000say otherwise um he was a musician uh i i said this while you were gone sir i've listened to
02:42:22.880his stuff on youtube i mean it's ambient euro it's not bad but it's not it's not like head
02:42:30.640banging metal or uh icelandic sagas you know um he was uh focused on an end to international
02:42:41.040cooperation uh decentralization which basically means giving positions to toadies and uh an
02:42:48.720emphasis on ensuring that ossature was seen as counterculture in iceland so again you know making
02:42:56.640your parents mad by worshiping up uh which is really sad um yormundr decided not to fraction
02:43:04.240the organization and left gracefully because he believed that what they were doing was important
02:43:08.880And in 2004, he and a small group of people formed the Reykjavik Vikur Govordh.
02:43:19.240I believe they're allowed to marry, if I recall.
02:43:23.400So to kind of cap this discussion off, let's talk about the Hof.
02:43:29.640The Asatürk Arfellegid has wanted a Hof, because everyone wants a Hof.
02:43:33.400We wanted a Hof when we were the Asatürk Free Assembly.
02:43:36.940I say we, I wasn't born yet at the time.
02:43:38.880um we wanted to hoff when we were the astro folk assembly before we had one and we have them and we0.97
02:43:46.560want more of them um so the ostrichur wanted a hoff and they started a project to build one in
02:43:54.9602005 when they had um somewhere around uh like i'm gonna say 700 to a thousand members
02:44:03.120So it's worth noting that Hilmar took over in 2002, and in 2004 he came out with the
02:44:12.020organization's open acceptance of homosexual marriage.
02:44:17.320So 2002 when he takes over, 628, 2022, 5,770, excuse me.0.67
02:44:31.380So they went off in 2005, they're getting this increase in membership, which of course
02:44:36.260means more money, so they go about doing it.
02:44:42.440We Americans are often perplexed by the difficulties that non-Americans have with getting land,0.97
02:44:50.660because in America you can theoretically just go buy land.
02:44:54.120Like there's a website, Zillow, you can look for vacant land, you can look for houses.
02:44:59.280if you google churches for sale in state you'll get a website at least one that lists churches
02:45:05.080for sale in state um so they started looking they started this project in 2005 they ended
02:45:13.080up getting a land for it near Reykjavik in 2008 um construction was supposed to start
02:45:20.340in 2015 you know seven years later then in 2016 then in 2017 apparently they got something done
02:45:30.660in 2018 through 2019 maybe i guess um in 2019 they wanted to spend 270 million cronus on a dome
02:45:43.380In today's Cronus, that's $371 million. That is $2,703,101.79 USD. That is 10.8 Njordshofs, if we assume Njordshofs was just an even $250,000.
02:46:03.380Work has apparently been done since, but the dome is still unbuilt and thus the building is unusable.0.68
02:46:13.380And I've seen plans for like a building that's shaped like a Mjolnir, right?
02:46:19.380Like it's a Mjolnir from the sky, right? And there's like an office in the, I'm not sure, in like the hammer part.
02:46:26.380And then this is like the hall that people come in with the pews.
02:46:30.380know if it's that because i look at that and i'm like but where does the where does the expensive
02:46:34.780dome go right like this is a two million dollar dome where are you putting it is this like a like
02:46:41.020a geodesic dome that encapsulates the entire temple um over covid they wanted to into in 2020
02:46:49.820they wanted to buy a bunch of chinese steel but covid put an end to that which is a kind of
02:46:55.260humorous turn because apparently this building was supposed to be made entirely of local wood and
02:46:59.420concrete um i don't know if they've had any advances with it since uh everything i've seen
02:47:09.020regarding what they do is outside and that makes sense iceland's a beautiful country right but i
02:47:15.580think it's telling that i mean 2005 to now that's uh what eight 16 years ish whatever i mean we've
02:47:27.580gotten four hoffs and land that we could theoretically build a fifth on if we were
02:47:31.660financially irresponsible or had access to 2.7 million dollars just on whim you know um
02:47:40.300i don't want to editorialize too much but i think it displays a bit of an unseriousness frankly like
02:47:48.060there are and let's be clear here there are buildings that are said to be temples to the
02:47:52.220the Aesir in Iceland. There's at least two of them. Because some guy is like, all right, I'm
02:47:57.760going to take my barn and make it as a place worthy of praying to the Aesir if just without
02:48:04.720central air or central heating. I don't see why they couldn't have done that with 2.7 million
02:48:12.6402022 or 2024 USD on hand. Do you have something you want to say here, sir?
02:48:22.220Yeah. I mean, they got a lot of media attention for it. And we still, you know, get people that, trying to think of where the, where the idea is, but perception in a lot of ways is reality for people until they know better.
02:48:47.420and one of the unfortunate things is the media extolling like ah the icelanders have this
02:48:53.980this off it's the first half ever and all this time and they did that when they first got the
02:49:01.880uh got the idea or got the funding or got it planned or whatever and they didn't do a whole
02:49:08.200a lot else and I know they got a lot of attention for it it's interesting to note the lack of
02:49:18.280progress on it but as I've said before um I I want to be careful because again I don't
02:49:30.760not being an Icelander and not being there I don't know what
02:49:34.600like it's hard if we were to judge all Catholics by the current
02:49:42.720very not Catholic Pope it'd be really you'd get really askew answers because there's a lot of
02:49:53.080variety of what that means so in Iceland I don't know if there's a substantial
02:49:58.780portion of the Ausatruir phalegith that may be, you know, serious Ausatruir, and maybe it's just
02:50:06.360their leadership that's not, or their organization that's not, it's hard to tell, and I don't want to
02:50:12.480unfairly categorize people as being unfaithful who are, if that's your option, I mean, maybe
02:50:21.680that's what it is, but as a church, and under their leadership, they're illegitimate at this point,
02:52:34.280yes that's one of the things that I think it's true there are lots of right ways to do things in a
02:52:52.700I mean actions are dictated by circumstance and by what you have available in an ideal
02:53:01.280situation, if you have the ability to, yes, the most magnificent grand temple to our gods
02:53:08.040is absolutely the way to go. But any temple to our gods is better than no temple to our gods.
02:53:19.320And so you have to judge what you would ideally do if you had unlimited resources and unlimited
02:53:27.020the ability with what you have at hand and what you're able to actually accomplish
02:53:33.180but the thing is you can do all of those things
02:53:37.580you can start with what's within your means to do that's within your budgetary abilities
02:53:46.220within the scope of what you have power to do and you can improve upon it over time or you can build
02:53:51.740more um you know it was really important for the astro folk assembly when we got hoffs to get0.76
02:54:04.220so one of the early ideas for hoffs was to build kind of an anachronistic
02:54:10.220i don't know um interpretation of a viking turf hall or whatever and i think that that was an
02:54:23.240interesting idea i think a lot of people wanted to build their own hoffs and realize that's a
02:54:28.880really difficult thing to do one of the things that i think is very important for a hoff
02:54:35.320first i'll take it back what's important is to worship the gods if you're doing that
02:54:42.780cool to elevate that it's important to worship them in a nice space to where you and your
02:54:49.440fellow worshipers can get together and worship the gods once you're able to do that what's
02:54:55.900Better is to have a place that's large enough and looks and gives the feel to everyone who sees it, everyone who encounters it as this is a, you know, in the public eye.
02:55:11.860This is a house of worship that is recognizable to anyone who passes it as, oh, okay, this is an Ausitruhof.
02:55:19.920And that's what we've strove very hard to do with the Ausitru Folk Assembly.
02:55:24.440is to when people pass by that they know it is a house of worship if they look at the sign it
02:55:33.820looks odd it's not talking about Jesus we don't see crosses places like what is this hopefully
02:55:39.620they look further within the nomenclature of the Hoffs or the names of our gods hopefully
02:55:46.320that strikes a chord yeah if we could you know if somebody handed me you know whatever 2.5 million
02:55:54.380we have existing obligations that we pay off first there's places that need Hoffs that it's
02:56:02.420so you have to deal with could you put all your eggs in one basket and build a magnificent Hoff
02:56:08.140or could you have less magnificent Hoffs but Hoffs more places and it depends on where the
02:56:16.280need is and where your availability is but the answer to your question is both given the right
02:56:21.920opportunity if you win the lotto and you got 10 million dollars to build the hoff build something
02:56:26.880amazing if you don't and you come upon something like balder's hoff that we were able to find for
02:56:33.360forty five thousand dollars cool we got it and then we've spent you know past four years
02:56:44.160taking care of it and beautifying it and making it better all of the time and making it you know
02:56:49.920grander all of the time you do what you're able to do um and again that that scales up depending
02:56:57.120on how many members you have and how much those members are willing to donate and able to donate
02:57:02.800in iceland if they're able to you know we have to do a tur a church tax no matter what so ah let's0.96
02:57:10.480give it to these icelanders so then we can have gay marriages and stuff there then all of a sudden0.92
02:57:16.880they find themselves with a lot of money they wouldn't otherwise have they can do something1.00
02:57:22.000really amazing with it or they could just kind of sit on it and do whatever they're doing um
02:57:30.560again it's it it all depends on your on your circumstance but the idea of you know is it
02:57:36.400better to build big and make an impression or to build small but usable and within your means and
02:57:43.040maybe a few of them yes depending on your scenario all of those things re there's something very
02:57:50.880important about tangibility and that goes to big and impressive yeah if something is grand
02:57:58.240it literally is awesome it invokes awe towards the divine and that's fantastic we would love to have
02:58:06.400that but you got to find the grandeur that you can afford because imaginary grandeur is worthless
02:58:16.000it's less than worthless it's of counter worth because it prevents you from appreciating real
02:58:23.520things that you could be doing because you're wasting your time on things that don't exist
02:58:30.560instead of with the reality of what what you can accomplish so i don't know that that cleanly
02:58:37.520answers your question but i think it's important just to clarify one of the two buildings in iceland
02:58:43.680that the icr are worshipped in um i don't know if it's proper column hofs it doesn't really matter
02:58:49.040at this point uh was uh acquired by a member of the astra fellagith because he wanted a place for
02:58:56.000for him and his buddies to worship the gods in and quite frankly some goat herders far like barn
02:59:03.760is for more close is closer to the piety of swain jordan van pinson and thorstein guthenson ben
02:59:11.860whatever the people trying to get the big dome are trying to do or whatever they would call that
02:59:20.280because it's something it's it's anything you know well and it's done out of piety that's the
02:59:28.840thing a humble offering that's done out of piety is more valuable than a lavish offering that's
02:59:35.600done as a joke or as a show that's not serious um you know reading again reading in the chat room
02:59:44.680And, you know, everybody's going to have a different aesthetic to what they like.
02:59:49.500And I don't, a lot of people have leveled criticism that the Icelandic Hoff plans are like super modern and ugly and don't capture the aesthetic they like.
03:00:01.880And I don't want to do that because, again, I think everybody's got a different vision and plenty of people criticize what, you know, visions I have for Hoffs.
03:00:12.120but the sincerity the piety is is really important and i don't
03:00:21.400i so one of the comments and i've got to disagree is you know they say it's
03:00:25.960odd looking it's something based on what we know of actual hoffs would be better
03:00:29.960in what sense trying to in 2024 make a ninth century building is silly and anachronistic and
03:00:42.140not worthy of our gods we should make something that's worthwhile with all of the advancements
03:00:49.580that we've made in the last thousand years instead of you know making something that's
03:00:56.380intentionally primitive there's no reason to do that and our ancestors always used the best
03:01:03.020available technology to them um but that said we have certain aesthetics we have in our mind you
03:01:10.820know there's a lot of things i think the closest aesthetic we have to what a
03:01:17.620i don't know a a pre-conversion house of true hoff was was the evolution into stave churches
03:01:27.720the stave church is very interesting because it's like uh it's like that missing link between
03:01:38.880the cathedral of the catholic church of the time and the hoff that predated it
03:01:45.160You still see a crossover of imagery. You see a crossover of design. And I think that the stave churches are probably the entry level Christian church and the highest evolution of Hoff. It's like right at that point where the two met.
03:02:07.940and so i think that imagery is appealing to a lot of us myself included um but i think we all have
03:02:14.360there's ways to do it differently and i don't want to penalize them from having a different
03:02:18.260aesthetic to what they want if it's done with sincerity and it's done with the idea of elevating
03:02:24.180and worshiping the isere then fantastic but when you take that on you have a mission to accomplish0.98
03:02:30.140to make sure these hofs happen and things happen all the time so i also don't want to be overly0.53
03:02:36.960critical i have no idea what obstacles they faced when accomplishing it but when you take on a half
03:02:43.200and you make a commitment it's very important that you you do the best you can to fulfill that
03:02:49.120and it does not appear from the outside like they've done that
03:02:58.960i am just looking at any other stuff to kind of
03:03:02.080can i just answer otherwise his comment on this real quick um yeah i didn't see what his comment
03:03:10.900is but feel free uh yeah he just asked uh about my hammer so i got this from uh grim frost i did
03:03:17.960some googling around to make sure they weren't uh openly uh against our values and i didn't find
03:03:24.920anything and you know the all father says to be middling wise i actually was going to get a
03:03:29.280different get myself and my wife two two like one for each of us and i get an email and they're like
03:03:35.220hey we're sorry but we're out of the hammer you ordered and we're also out of all of the hammers
03:03:40.520at that price point we can give you a credit and i'm like but i don't want like a credit at i don't
03:03:47.240know if i'm gonna buy anything from these people again and i'm looking for the amount i got and
03:03:51.940they were selling this which is they this is referred to as they're huge and i didn't necessarily
03:03:58.120say how big it was when i was looking and i was like oh man it's gonna be like a flavor
03:04:01.000flavor clock or something but no it turned out pretty nice uh the first picture that went up on
03:04:07.640twitter of of me um i was like oh man i'm gonna see myself on there i'm gonna be so nervous i'm
03:04:14.680gonna throw up and i looked at the picture and the first comment was some dude saying
03:04:19.080that is a dope hammer and i felt really good i mean that is like three times bigger than most
03:04:26.040people's hammer it my i asked githya katie hey where do you get a lady-sized mule there because0.99
03:04:32.360i've seen women complain about like they're all built for men right and she recommended this gal1.00
03:04:39.000guy i don't i don't know on uh pinterest barber barbarian spelled like barbarian with both two
03:04:46.200ends at the end and there there's a really small one that i got for her that she likes a lot it's
03:04:53.240like a 30th the size of this so there's a bajillion places to get him um
03:05:04.920i see folks in the chat talked a little bit about whirling sun
03:05:10.840i don't believe in the integrity of the people that run whirling sun1.00
03:05:17.560that's the outfit of the ermine folk that make hammers they make good stuff they make nice stuff
03:05:23.880they're very quality craftsmen um but i think that the person involved and some of the people
03:05:29.800directly involved in that are very bad people um but there's a lot of really good places to get
03:05:36.920hammers get them from a lot of places um
03:05:39.880so yeah i think there's there's a lot of really cool options i've seen a lot of little feminine1.00
03:05:49.300ones i don't want to go disrupt her now because i put her to bed but aubrey's got a cool like little1.00
03:05:55.840little tiny one um that's that's feminine i think ladies might like it but it's also
03:06:01.220you know doesn't look ridiculous on a small child um no mandy's got some cool one i got a uh from
03:06:08.780man i forget the name of this place it was in germany and the shipping was stupid but i got
03:06:14.220a hammer from that was made out of mammoth ivory that was really cool um so there's a lot of really
03:06:21.100good places to get hammers somebody mentioned etsy on etsy you can get a lot of really cool stuff
03:06:26.060especially stuff from eastern europe on there that's just amazing so there's a lot of good
03:06:31.340answers. We've got people out at Odenshof that make hammers that are really cool. I'm probably
03:06:38.740going to get that guy to make my next one. So there's a lot of places and a lot of options.
03:06:47.940Question we have, do the Hoffs attract members? I look for where the Hoffs are when I consider
03:06:55.120moving and i'm not even a member um it would be good to know they were close first morris you
03:07:02.240should join you should become a member you should become a member today um yeah they absolutely do
03:07:09.760it's it's hard because when we look for a placement of a hof we want a place that has
03:07:15.040thriving membership but having a hof in a location draws members every single one of them does
03:07:23.600how much and how fast is always an x factor that there's no accurate way to calculate
03:07:30.800but yes when we have a hof somewhere people drive like i said we don't getting the message
03:07:37.200out is tricky but i am always surprised where we have hoffs how many people who are local
03:07:43.600come out of the woodwork and you know have been asked true for years and there was nothing near
03:07:49.120them and then they join up and they're all about it people just out of nowhere so yes every time
03:07:56.560we get a hoff members develop you know close to it what does close mean it depends on where it's0.95
03:08:05.600at and what the population density is around it how fast there's no way to tell but every hoff
03:08:11.440generates members because it's real they're on google maps you can find them you can see them
03:08:17.760you drive by you see their signs you can reach out and touch them and that makes a huge difference1.00
03:08:22.080for folks so we definitely have members around all the hoffs if you're looking at places to
03:08:28.320move around the hoffs california is unattractive for all of the reasons that california is
03:08:36.480unattractive but odenshoff gets our biggest number of regular attendees and people that
03:08:43.120live relatively close we odin's hof has always got you know a good number of folks that come
03:08:49.520out there for any hof event which is fantastic and that's in brownsville california um but yeah
03:08:56.800our hops all have members around them we grow membership around each of these hofs it's hard
03:09:04.560to pick the times that the most people are going to show up where you got the most tight packed0.87
03:09:09.360membership around a hoff um i would say i'm referencing something here quickly
03:09:22.160just from having looked at the map baldur's hoff has a pretty a lot of people like right near the
03:09:29.600building relatively you know it's yeah they do if you look at the map thor's hoff has a bunch
03:09:37.520of people really close to it um there's a bunch like again you can see the cluster of membership
03:09:45.040around each of the hoffs and it's noticeable so that's absolutely a thing um but yeah think about
03:09:52.560those things and hoffs absolutely draw members because they take something that to a lot of
03:09:58.160people is still in the realm of thought and ideas and they make it very real and very tangible and
03:10:03.520And not just me saying it's tangible, but them going out and walking through a door and standing in a temple to our gods.
03:10:14.460And that is very visceral and very real.
03:10:19.040So, I don't know if we still have Svon over in the chat room.
03:10:36.320I don't think that we do, but the next question is, sorry, I've got to go back and forth between things.
03:10:46.200Where does soul and mani fit into the hierarchy of gods and goddesses?
03:10:57.800I think that soul is worshipped around Midsommar a lot because it's such an obvious solar thing.
03:11:06.680Heavenly wardens would be where they are in the hierarchy of things.
03:11:11.640They're not really within the core body of Iser that we devote a lot of particular worship to,
03:11:23.260but they're in the periphery of spiritual beings that we certainly acknowledge and are situational in the worship.
03:11:35.980And they come in what Svan is kind of labeled as the heavenly wardens, gods and goddesses of celestial things, of timekeeping, of seasons, of things like that.
03:11:53.840And you see that in a little bit different category than the Aesir, you know, of like the All Fathers Council of the Twelve that we talk about.
03:12:04.260So it's a little bit different, but they're definitely acknowledged, and certainly soul is worshipped at Midsummer often, sometimes at Yule as well, for the same reason, but in a different context.
03:12:34.260awesome um so we're coming to the end of our evening here chris do you have anything that
03:12:43.460you want to you want to say or you want to put out there for folks
03:12:50.260um i already plugged the the magazines um if you're in michigan you should get in contact with
03:12:58.660me uh csavage at runestone.org my there's my email or you can see it on uh thorsoff.com um
03:13:08.900yeah uh hail thorstein yeah chris thank you so much for being on the program tonight and so much
03:13:15.380for all your research into this we will absolutely have you back on um to note uh gothy thorstein
03:13:26.500guthiansen's uh day of remembrance will be observed on october the fourth um from you know
03:13:37.220every year from henceforth uh so you know we got about a year to to think about it or plan up but
03:13:45.060it's long past time that we acknowledged and celebrated this hero of aussitrew and
03:13:52.980And we are honored to, in some way, carry on his legacy and to benefit from the endeavor that, you know, that he put forth at a time when others weren't.