Asatru Folk Assembly - 5⧸13⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 201 - The Loyal Saxons

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00:01:00.000 Thank you.

00:01:30.000 Thank you.

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00:03:00.000 hello everyone and welcome to this week's edition of victory never sleeps

00:03:12.720 tonight we are joined once again by folk builder chris savage of michigan

00:03:19.040 to talk about history stuff.

00:03:25.440 Chris is our in-house historian

00:03:28.620 and is uniquely skilled at this kind of presentation.

00:03:35.960 His episodes have fast become favorites

00:03:38.400 amongst our listening audience.

00:03:41.880 And yeah, it's always a pleasure to have him on.

00:03:44.540 Tonight we're going to talk about something

00:03:46.060 very closely related to the subject we spoke about last month, but going into detail on a

00:03:54.820 specific set of events and a specific time period that's, you know, a generation or two removed from

00:04:02.760 what we spoke about previous. Tonight we'll be talking about the loyal Saxons and what's going

00:04:10.520 to be known as the Saxon Wars. A couple of notes and updates and such before we get

00:04:18.400 started and dive into the material. First, anybody who is, I mean, that's everybody if

00:04:26.760 they start now, but anybody who is in reasonable traveling distance to Njortzhoff, I would

00:04:32.640 love to see you guys this weekend. My family and I will be down there to celebrate Summer

00:04:37.300 mile and we're looking forward to it hopefully we can see all of you there if you can make it

00:04:44.740 if not go to one of our other amazing Hoffs because it is being celebrated at all of our

00:04:51.860 Hoffs on this Saturday so we would love to see you this weekend and wherever you find yourself

00:04:59.620 get out there enjoy the start to summer dance with your folk around the maypole

00:05:05.780 and celebrate. It's a really special time of year, and it's a fun time to get together with your folk.

00:05:13.760 We've got a couple of other fun things. So last week, I brought to you a fundraiser idea from

00:05:22.780 folk builder Jill Gaffney out of Pennsylvania, and she was going to do a $300 dollar for dollar

00:05:28.900 match on donations towards the Sigurheim pavilion that we're working to get um that has been met

00:05:36.740 and we're very excited about that and inspired by it another member who chose to remain anonymous

00:05:43.620 wanting to um continue with that effort and so we have an additional the double continues this

00:05:55.620 This time it is a $500 dollar for dollar match.

00:06:01.720 So every dollar you spend towards that pavilion until that $500 is met has the power of $2.

00:06:09.500 So we appreciate all of you guys who have been so generous in giving.

00:06:16.240 That is fantastic.

00:06:17.240 We're very excited about that, very appreciative.

00:06:19.400 are we at in our uh on that current or in the pavilion progress means we still need to raise

00:06:27.240 29 340 and we are 16.2 towards our goal that means um

00:06:41.000 say i was going to be smooth and have it all figured out but then i moved away from where

00:06:45.400 i have my note so 39 per member gets us pavilion today just put it in perspective and kind of break

00:06:53.400 it down amongst the assembly so thank you guys everyone who has donated towards that

00:07:00.360 also because i like to give you a weekly update on our progress paying off phrasehoff

00:07:07.400 again you guys are super generous so we have made tremendous progress we are

00:07:12.360 39.3 percent of the way of paying that off which is remarkable considering that we dedicated it

00:07:21.480 in december you guys continue to amaze um that one is looking at 102 per member gets us there

00:07:32.440 to put it in perspective so you guys are fantastic thank you i am starting off the show

00:07:37.560 So, our three champions of generosity, again, show us their nobility, and we appreciate

00:07:47.820 them.

00:07:48.820 Steven in Japan donated $5 towards that pavilion, and $10 towards paying off Frazehoff.

00:07:54.060 Thank you, Steven.

00:07:56.440 Domo Origato, GW Farnsworth donated $50 towards the pavilion.

00:08:04.100 Thank you.

00:08:05.100 We appreciate you.

00:08:06.100 I'd love to see you at the Hoff if you can make it this weekend, but that's entirely

00:08:09.820 up to you.

00:08:12.820 Cool, anyways, I have a side conversation in my little backstage chat, got confused, my

00:08:26.280 fault.

00:08:27.280 Gilbert, thank you for your $150 donation towards the Pavilion.

00:08:31.700 guys are awesome we appreciate y'all so much um and hopefully you guys can come and celebrate

00:08:40.140 under that pavilion often and as early as this uh this i'm here you vote that's the plan

00:08:48.220 if we can get our goal accomplished so thank you guys very much for that um that's what we've got

00:08:54.780 off the top i am going to well first i'm going to make this note so chris is going to present

00:09:01.660 his material then we're going to cover questions that come up uh feel free wherever you are

00:09:07.900 listening to the sound of my voice um asking questions you like we would love to answer them

00:09:15.260 this is very much question and answer driven program also if you ever have questions at any

00:09:21.020 time including now you can email those to bns at runestone.org you'd be happy to answer those

00:09:30.140 at the next available opportunity so uh yeah thank you guys all for joining us this evening

00:09:36.700 chris i will hand the talking stick over to you sure so this topic kind of as the elsewhere

00:09:46.380 really said sort of segues from the discussion we had about rad bod in that it kind of is what

00:09:55.160 comes next in the history of the period so i want to front load this one with a large amount of

00:10:05.980 historical context so as to explain what is actually going on here in a grander scale and

00:10:12.580 And in this instance, because we're not talking about the story of one specific person, sort of preface why we care about this.

00:10:22.880 What we're really trying to do here is to contextualize a very broad historical trend, because tonight we're going to look at a specific crop of men and women that were victimized by that trend.

00:10:34.560 These specific victims act as a model and archetype for all of the victims of that trend in this time period.

00:10:41.540 So the timeline is going to be a little bit quicker, and then I'm going to ramble about a historical period that most people know extremely little about.

00:10:50.660 So around 400 AD, the Franks start moving into Gaul. Around 486, the Franks win the Franco-Roman War and conquer Gaul. 507, Clovis begins the Franco-Gothic War. 767, Pepin the Short overthrows Childeric III.

00:11:10.480 9 sorry 814 Charlemagne dies and his army or his empire immediately fragments

00:11:18.300 987 Hugh of Capet overthrows the last Carolingian ruler and founds modern France

00:11:25.320 1096 the first crusade begins so we have a lot of foundational European history happening in about

00:11:35.500 600 years, but it's also a period that most people, as I said, know very little about.

00:11:44.400 So let's start with the basics of Frankish society and history. So the basic structure

00:11:54.780 of Germanic social governance was the warband. At the top was the warlord and his wife. They

00:11:59.440 were the fictive parents of the members of the warband who swore loyalty to the person of the

00:12:04.620 warlord. As these warbands gained

00:12:06.760 wealth, the members of the warband would

00:12:08.660 find themselves with their own warbands.

00:12:11.540 Pause for a minute.

00:12:12.860 Anybody who is curious to know more

00:12:14.920 about this structure,

00:12:17.320 I would suggest,

00:12:18.700 as I often do, Culture of the Teutons

00:12:21.040 and also the Lady with the Mead

00:12:23.020 Cup. It talks a

00:12:25.020 lot, not just about

00:12:27.180 the

00:12:27.860 female 0.99

00:12:29.600 interaction with this 0.91

00:12:32.080 warband culture,

00:12:33.780 but also from in doing so about the warband culture in and of itself and i think that's

00:12:40.860 really informative if anybody is not familiar wants to know more about it lady with a mead cup

00:12:46.380 is a fantastic book it's it's really it really is a wonderful academic work but um so there's the

00:12:55.360 the fictive parents of the king and the queen and then the the members of the warband are their

00:13:01.020 fictive sons, as it were. So when the members of the war band get rich enough, they become

00:13:07.940 warlords of their own, but they're still sworn to their warlord. So there's a pyramidal hierarchy

00:13:13.080 that emerges, with each member of the hierarchy swearing allegiance to some singular individual

00:13:19.240 above them. At the top of this is the figure we call the king. This term king emerges because

00:13:26.200 there's a conflict between the ethno-republican tribal sociality and the monarchic warlord

00:13:34.440 sociality. And king basically means big man of the kin, right? So in Western political theory,

00:13:44.180 we have monarchies and republics. A monarchy is such a hierarchy as this warlord structure.

00:13:49.960 It's a pyramid of personal loyalties. A republic, meanwhile, is membership in a corporate body.

00:13:56.780 This is the nation, das Volk, the people, something like that. It's a body that contains

00:14:02.660 the members of the society. The Germanic peoples were initially, in the oldest historical period,

00:14:09.240 operating under this republican form of governance via tribes, but over time this warlord sociality

00:14:15.060 leads to a monarchy. It's important to remember here when we talk about republics, we don't mean

00:14:19.880 Republican versus Democrat. We don't mean democracy. There doesn't have to be

00:14:24.680 voting in a republic. It's a structure concerning what a society is, not

00:14:30.280 necessarily how it functions. The Roman Republic was literally, for various

00:14:35.720 periods, a dictatorship while still being a republic. So these warband members 1.00

00:14:43.380 Germans come in from Francia into Gaul. Gaul is the Roman province where France is today.

00:14:52.960 So these Germanic warlords and warband members come in, they take over, and they start extracting 0.87

00:14:59.220 money and agricultural labor from the inhabitants of Gaul. And of course, they take it from each 0.91

00:15:05.960 other at first there's an expectation that each rung in the hierarchy pays the rung below it

00:15:12.520 but eventually as this system develops the assumption becomes that each rung pays the rung

00:15:17.600 above it this is an important distinction in the early germanic war bands the king is the ring

00:15:24.620 giver the the king's job is to basically pay his thanes in later feudal structures the thanes pay

00:15:34.460 the guy above them, right? So to reiterate, the dukes expect payment from the king, the counts

00:15:43.120 expect payments from the dukes, the barons expect payment from the counts, and the soldiers expect

00:15:49.360 payments from the barons. In the earliest days, this is usually in the form of booty and shared

00:15:55.080 military might to bully the inhabitants of Gaul into paying their taxes. If you've ever seen the

00:16:00.840 Sopranos, it's literally that. The DiMeo crime family is a smaller scale feudalism.

00:16:08.260 As an aside, part of what makes this operation work historically is that the inhabitants of Gaul

00:16:12.960 really seem to have preferred this to the prior Roman regime. The taxes that the Germanics levied

00:16:19.460 were honestly puny compared to the massive Roman taxes. So the people involved in this don't really

00:16:28.000 think of it as a government or a state like we do. This is really important to understand.

00:16:34.940 They are conceptualizing all of this stuff as interpersonal relations. So if you go watch

00:16:41.980 movies and you read about people in the feudal period, you hear a lot of like,

00:16:46.000 think of the realm for the good of the land. There's no, there's no, but the ideals of the

00:16:52.860 or the transcendent principles. This is all about interpersonal relations.

00:16:57.860 I'm buddies with this guy. He doesn't like that guy.

00:17:01.860 There's no grander ideological justification for a lot of it.

00:17:06.860 There's just me, the people that I pay, and the people that we extract wealth from,

00:17:11.860 and the people trying to muscle in on our turf.

00:17:14.860 And, of course, the people whose turf we're trying to muscle in on. 0.99

00:17:18.860 A running theme with these dynasties that are the first generation of apostates to Christianity is that they do not care about their families and end up getting into stupid fratricidal bloodshed because Christianity lets you murder your kin. 0.78

00:17:32.740 That comes up here in spades, and if we were actually giving you a history of the Franks, that would be a really big part of it. 0.82

00:17:42.020 so each warlord had a mayor of the palace aka major domo aka mayor domos literally big house

00:17:52.380 this was essentially the guy that was hired to run the hall of the warlord

00:17:56.760 if you follow even passingly british politics you'll hear about

00:18:01.880 de pae m the prime minister is the modern british evolution of the major domo

00:18:10.320 so this is the guy that the king pays to run his house while he's off stealing booty from people

00:18:20.080 only now the operation is much bigger so he runs the household of the king which happens to involve

00:18:25.700 managing hundreds of commanders tens of thousands of warriors huge tracts of land literally too huge

00:18:31.180 to count the fact that no one at this time knows how much land they own is actually a big problem

00:18:36.400 but stuff like that. As the kings make increasing numbers of enemies, the kings increasingly start

00:18:43.660 hiding behind the major domo, domos, domoi, domi, whatever, whenever not on campaign. But this gives

00:18:50.880 the major domo a huge amount of power to actually run things because he is literally paid to run

00:18:55.120 the show for the king on top of the king not being present. So there's a huge pressure to pick up or

00:18:59.840 to pick a good major domo so he can run the kingdom. But he also can't be too good or he'll

00:19:04.720 take power himself, because the majordomo actually runs the show. There's also

00:19:08.260 pressure to make one's children or siblings your majordomo, because they

00:19:12.640 are loyal and you want them to be useful. But because of

00:19:16.480 Christianity, there's also no reason to not just betray everyone around you if 0.98

00:19:20.020 they stop being useful to you. That includes your family. So fathers and

00:19:25.620 sons and brothers and uncles are all betraying each other throughout Frankish

00:19:28.760 history. At this time, these Germanic kings are basically military commanders 0.86

00:19:33.520 that are entirely reliant upon bribing and threatening to kill literally everyone to

00:19:38.960 stop them from rebelling. So the king constantly has to be rallying an army to go fight in order

00:19:44.100 to acquire the wealth to bribe his soldiers because they need bribes on top of their taxes

00:19:48.360 that they're already acquiring. Eventually, the king started deputizing lesser nobility and the

00:19:54.480 major domos to handle military affairs as the kingdom starts requiring multiple armies fighting

00:19:59.360 on multiple fronts at once. If you look into this period in history, the king is constantly doing

00:20:03.800 this zigzag from front to front with his army, and eventually he needs to start doing multiple

00:20:08.800 zigzags, so he has to now get commanders, and uh-oh, now there's another guy with an army.

00:20:14.560 Why can't he just take over? So what is this? What really is the resulting body politic that 0.91

00:20:24.120 emerges from the Frankish conquest of Gaul. This is a giant extortion racket run by glorified 0.95

00:20:30.640 bandits. There is zero separation between the administration, the military, and the personal 0.72

00:20:35.640 relationships of the individuals involved. Because the hierarchy is a pyramid of pyramids,

00:20:40.440 many of any given king's soldiers are gated by someone else. So the king has this tension between

00:20:45.760 wanting to maximize the number of men directly loyal to him so as to minimize the chance of

00:20:50.140 any one branch refusing to play ball, but he also has to have some hierarchy to parcel out

00:20:56.700 management of territory because he can't personally run it all. Additionally, the more nodes he has

00:21:02.500 under him, the harder it is to manage all of them at the interpersonal level. So he wants to make

00:21:07.500 the pyramid simultaneously very thin and very tall, but also very fat and very wide, and figuring out

00:21:13.640 the right ratio is the trick here. Over time, the Frankish kings become

00:21:19.800 increasingly reliant upon the Majordomo because the Majordomo shields them from

00:21:24.260 the commanders, but eventually the Majordomos get the upper hand and realize

00:21:28.280 they can just shield themselves from the commanders with the kings. Finally, we

00:21:32.820 have this tension present in which the commanders see that the Majordomos hold

00:21:36.520 the real power in the regime, and as such, choosing the Majordomo is of

00:21:41.020 paramount importance more so than choosing the king so they've never so they eventually start

00:21:48.620 forcing major domos upon the kings the system is that go on take a pause for the cause um

00:21:58.300 timothy in california donated a hundred dollars towards the cigarette pavilion thank you timothy

00:22:03.820 uh by the the power of our anonymous donor you have you have made that 100 into 200

00:22:11.020 Thank you. And we also have a Leroy, I believe. I've been corrected on pronunciation from your great state of Michigan. What is what is y'all's state nickname?

00:22:29.180 We have several. The Mitten Winter Wonderland. I think the state government chose Water Wonderland, too. That one's kind of lame.

00:22:38.140 Okay, those are rough.

00:22:39.580 I apologize for asking embarrassing questions.

00:22:41.780 It's the mitten.

00:22:42.500 What's wrong with the mitten? 1.00

00:22:44.220 The Michiganders. 1.00

00:22:46.000 Also, so Leroy donated $10 each towards Frazehoff, towards the Pavilion, and towards the Steeple.

00:22:54.780 Much appreciated.

00:22:55.840 Thank you very much.

00:22:56.760 You're also a frequent donor to the program, and it's much appreciated.

00:23:00.720 It's good to see you here, and thank you, Leroy.

00:23:03.000 Thank you.

00:23:04.320 As he said, Michigan, come here on vacation.

00:23:06.940 leave here on probation. All right, back to history. Just going to ignore that one.

00:23:16.160 Okay, so this system is a much rougher form of feudalism and does not yet have the peasant

00:23:25.240 aristocrat distinction ironed out. The feudalism that characterizes the medieval period really

00:23:30.860 emerges from the eventual contradictions and inefficiencies of this specific extortion racket

00:23:37.660 so as an aside at this time the frankish government conceptualizes this distinction between

00:23:47.580 franks and romans and within romans there's romans and gauls and eventually they eventually the

00:23:55.820 romans start being people that used to live there because the the french frankish government monks

00:24:03.980 people just stop calling themselves romans right the the idea of peasants and aristocracy and like

00:24:12.140 this almost caste system does not exist yet right so do you want to throw in the first image nick

00:24:20.860 Nick, this all leads us to the actual shape of the Frankish Empire.

00:24:30.700 So this is Francia.

00:24:33.240 Francia, as we know it, was started by Clovis, a.k.a. Hludwix.

00:24:39.120 He followed Frankish tradition and split his regime between his four sons,

00:24:43.680 because remember, this is all in interpersonal relations.

00:24:47.920 Keep this up for a second, Nick.

00:24:49.380 Like, Hlothar got North Neustria, then Hildeberts got West Neustria, then Chodomers got Aquitaine, and Theodorich got Austrasia, right?

00:25:03.780 So Burgundy, which shows up later on another map, ends up getting absorbed around 533, but it's actually formed out of a separate Germanic tribe, as is Alemania on this map.

00:25:17.000 Evidently, the Burgundians were important in Germanic consciousness because they show up in Norse sagas, albeit highly fictionalized.

00:25:24.000 They probably had relations with the Goths, which would make them distantly Norse-adjacent.

00:25:31.000 So, you'll see here that these are color-coded. 0.53

00:25:35.000 So what ends up happening is that Hudwix, a.k.a. Clovis, gives his territory to his sons upon his death.

00:25:43.000 This starts a repeating trend. When the Frankish king dies, he splits his land between his sons.

00:25:49.960 They then immediately start fighting for who gets to be the big king. This is important.

00:25:55.300 Primogeniture has to be invented. It was not an ancient continuous practice going back to

00:26:01.120 antiquity. It is invented, in part, because of the failures of the Frankish regime. If you've

00:26:07.900 ever played Crusader Kings II, this is where Gavelkind comes from. So there's 1.00

00:26:14.140 this massive power struggle to be on top of the extortion racket. At the same

00:26:18.900 time, there's the Trinitarian clergy who are fighting an ideological struggle

00:26:23.060 against Asatru, Greco-Roman polytheistic religion, Arianism, and, coming up, Islam.

00:26:28.420 They're also nominally concerned with the treatment of the peasantry because

00:26:32.700 they, the clergy, want to be the ones extorting the peasantry, and because they,

00:26:37.280 Today, the clergy are the ones in close contact with the peasantry due to Christian ministry,

00:26:42.760 and thus their extortion and their ideological goals of apostasy are directly impacted by

00:26:48.220 the actions of the royal administrative military hierarchy.

00:26:52.580 So they don't like the kings bullying people because they want to bully people, and they

00:26:55.780 don't want there to be too much bullying because that leads to people rejecting Christianity,

00:27:02.280 which means that priests end up dying.

00:27:05.160 As Frankish history progresses, there's an increasing buildup and sophistication of what we would today call government.

00:27:11.060 Much of this is driven by the clergy, who are essentially trying to tame the Frankish leadership.

00:27:16.680 The priests and monks say, we have to organize these Frankish warlords and warbands, or they're going to ruin everything.

00:27:25.940 You can take the map down, Nick. 0.93

00:27:27.640 so we talk about the franks but shortly after taking in power in gaul clovis essentially

00:27:35.960 dissolves the franks as a germanic tribe with a republican form of governance um there's no more

00:27:42.680 things there's no more all things there's no more law speakers everything is just about what this

00:27:48.500 guy tells you to do right we keep referring to these people as the franks um that's not really

00:27:55.360 correct, that's a misnomer. We're actually talking about several very poorly united power blocks in

00:28:00.680 Neustria, Austrasia, Burgundy, and Aquitaine that are united through bribery, threat of assassination,

00:28:06.820 military might, and marriages. Each of these power blocks has its own major domo. So there's a major

00:28:13.020 domo for Neustria, a major domo for Austrasia, a major domo for Burgundy, a major domo for

00:28:17.920 Aquitaine, because all of these are effectively semi-independent regimes that happen to be united

00:28:24.340 by personal loyalty to the main king right um over time these majordomos become increasingly

00:28:32.480 united in the same person um i did not uh so a lot of these names are really goofy because

00:28:42.740 we're looking at very old germanic names that get spliced into uh latin and then into romance and

00:28:51.160 then into modern French so hoodwix ends up becoming Louie or Lewis the name what

00:29:01.060 what it what does G come from as an aside I want to look that one up real

00:29:04.720 quick because it's funny yeah so the French name G comes from the Germanic

00:29:12.280 name we lose meaning wood the eclipsed from the the binomial compounds like we

00:29:18.420 told and we do kind this is also where the name guido comes from right there's a lot of french

00:29:26.880 italian and even spanish names that are germanic origin because what happens is these germanic

00:29:32.800 lower warlords come in and on a long enough time scale they end up speaking latinate languages

00:29:38.280 romance latin romance languages but their names begin this is why there are mexicans named

00:29:46.240 aswalt because it comes from oswald from aswalt power of the ice here i appreciate the flavor

00:29:55.120 and the gusto that you did that with it's well done thank you thank you i know

00:30:00.580 chris you are muted

00:30:07.480 okay sorry i said okay where are we here and then i found where we were

00:30:14.700 So, over time, these major domos become increasingly united, culminating in Pepin the Short being the major domo of all of these provinces.

00:30:28.920 Pepin the Short was the son of Charles Martel and the father of Charlemagne.

00:30:32.620 Pepin the Short realizes he could just simply take over by formally shaving and imprisoning

00:30:39.740 Khildarik III, the last Merovingian king, and then taking power himself as the king and major

00:30:46.540 domo of each province. He actually wrote a letter to Pope Zachary asking for permission to do this,

00:30:53.580 and Pope Zachary just tells him, it's completely licit and not a sin if you come down to Italy and 0.91

00:31:00.940 and help the lot help me not get beat up by the lombards so that shaving bit for the king of the

00:31:07.940 franks would wear an extra long un probably wasn't ugly but an untrimmed beard and very long hair

00:31:16.700 as a symbol of his power and authority and majesty and as the frankish king as the merovingian king

00:31:24.540 becomes increasingly irrelevant the hair increasingly becomes this kind of like

00:31:29.300 almost like sissy like characteristic like because it it starts out as a similar thing

00:31:37.540 to the idea of like Chinese bureaucrats not clipping their pinky finger because it's like

00:31:42.840 look at me I spend all day writing I don't have to trim my fingernails to go toil in the rice 0.99

00:31:48.120 fields like you peasants so the king starts out having these this this long hair because it's 0.99

00:31:53.200 like, I can afford to grow my hair out. I've got boys to get in between me and someone that wants

00:31:58.300 to kill me. And then by the end, it's just this kind of, look how useless he is. He can't fight. 0.99

00:32:04.860 He'll trip over his own beard kind of thing, right? So who are the Merovingians? There's two 0.99

00:32:12.260 dynasties of note in this story. There's the Merovingians and the Carolingians. The Merovingians

00:32:17.880 of the dynasty started by Clovis. They rule from 481 to 751. However, they quickly become

00:32:24.420 sidelined by the major domos. Eventually, the Carolingians take over and oust the

00:32:29.540 Marylandians formally. But I must be stressed that these dynasties are not real. The idea

00:32:36.100 that any of these people at this time care about the generation after or prior to them is a complete

00:32:41.340 fiction by later ideologues attempting to backport later medieval notions of dynastic politics

00:32:46.560 onto an earlier time. This is why the Carolingians are actually named after

00:32:50.580 Charlemagne and not Pippin or Arnulf, the nominal founders of this dynasty.

00:32:56.880 These two men found dynasties that merge and become the lineage that results in

00:33:02.340 Charlemagne, hence why they're the Carolingians. The Merovingians, however,

00:33:06.480 are actually descended from an individual named Merovach whose name

00:33:11.520 means sea bull a late christian tale tells us that this comes from when king clodio's wife

00:33:19.700 was impregnated by a half bull half shark sea beast sent by neptune

00:33:25.540 but no i was literally looking it up on the side to make sure you mention the bit of trivia because

00:33:33.260 it's important it's and i have a i have an aside once you're done with this telling but given how

00:33:42.220 germanic names work siebel here could have just been some guy and this could mean he was like a

00:33:48.060 great sailor it doesn't necessarily mean he was literally like a sea monster sent by neptune um

00:33:56.140 so this this sea monster theory could be just some crackpot monk coming it up to explain the name

00:34:03.260 but speaking of crackpot monks so my aside is this

00:34:10.780 you run into some strange types on the internet and uh you guys may have

00:34:15.740 heard me mention dr flowers on here a number of times the preeminent runologist of our day um 0.93

00:34:23.180 His ancestry links back in some way to the Merovingian line, and a criticism and grounds for a mentally deranged, pink-haired hee-shee to try to take ownership of the Rune Guild and overthrow Edred, Dr. Flowers goes by the pen name Edred Thorson, 0.92

00:34:51.020 um was that he is ineligible because he is the uh he is the offspring of a sea monster and that was

00:35:00.740 leveled against him as a charge and this was a serious discussion by a person claiming to be

00:35:06.620 serious in their charging

00:35:08.420 so just to throw in here before we move past the sea beast

00:35:18.480 greco specifically greek genealogies typically begin with an eponymous ancestor who often has

00:35:28.960 some kind of miraculous birth that then splices into the main line of humanity like zeus throws

00:35:38.480 down a lightning bolt it hits a rock this turns into a dragon the dragon takes a wife

00:35:43.100 that's where rococles and the rococletii clan comes from right and when christian monks start

00:35:53.780 writing down things for the germanic world they and this is this is hard to prove or disprove

00:36:00.680 because of the paucity of sources that we are left with but the there's an academic theory that a lot

00:36:07.180 of these strange and then this lineage was founded by a sea monster kind of stuff comes from

00:36:12.640 an attempt at

00:36:15.120 legitimizing some of these

00:36:17.500 dynastic foundings off of

00:36:19.420 Greek models, right?

00:36:21.300 So it has to be founded by a sea 1.00

00:36:23.400 monster because that's how they did it in ancient

00:36:25.260 Greece, right?

00:36:27.960 All right.

00:36:29.060 Moving on. So

00:36:30.900 did I not

00:36:33.320 tell? Before you move on,

00:36:36.080 Jeffrey, thank you.

00:36:37.780 He donated

00:36:38.500 $20 towards our pavilion. Thank you, Jeffrey.

00:36:41.420 And due to our anonymous challenge guide, your $20 has earned us a $40.

00:36:50.480 I appreciate that.

00:36:51.460 Thank you.

00:36:52.340 Thank you for your generosity, everyone.

00:36:54.520 It really means a lot.

00:36:55.860 It's very helpful.

00:36:57.980 All right.

00:36:59.280 Nick, throw up image two here.

00:37:02.800 all right so this is a cleaner map of the frankish empire as i said burgundy starts out as an

00:37:15.360 independent germanic tribe and ends up getting absorbed in so let's look at the frontiers of

00:37:22.700 this empire to the southeast italy is run by the lombards the lombards were du jour christian

00:37:31.800 waffling between Trinitarianism and Arianism, but de facto worshipped the Aesir at all levels

00:37:37.560 of society into like the 700s, if the sources are to be believed, when public worship of the

00:37:43.940 gods began to be suppressed. Lombardy is really interesting in other stories. The Lombards here

00:37:50.820 are basically the Germanic tribe slash kingdom that holds Italy, although they do not hold the

00:37:56.720 area around rome which is run by the pope the big summation of all of this is that the romans

00:38:02.640 as in the city of roman's periphery ally with the franks against the lombards and the byzantines

00:38:08.160 both of whom whom have ideas about conquering rome and putting their puppets on the throne of saint

00:38:13.520 peter side note and point of connectivity to the lombards um who became the lombards their name was

00:38:22.720 attested to in our war as being the the chosen of frig in a competition with uh odin on who

00:38:31.480 went a battle and the trick was the women would um tie their hair in front over their face as if

00:38:41.020 they had long beards instead of long hair and it come to it came to be kind of a fanciful telling

00:38:48.700 their nomenclature but they you may hear that story in our lore and and recognize that also

00:38:55.020 when we did the uh discussions about the bolsunga saga um the burgundians are mentioned in that

00:39:04.700 cycle quite a bit a lot of people might not know where burgundy is uh modern folks and this gives

00:39:10.860 you a good good understanding of that on this map it's it's kind of southeast france right

00:39:18.060 That's Burgundy. So as I said, the Byzantines and the Lombards have their own designs about

00:39:27.100 controlling the bishopric of the city of Rome. So this conflict comes to a head in the late 700s

00:39:35.740 when in 771 Charlemagne invades Italy to keep the Pope in power. The Lombards were unable to unify.

00:39:42.460 Charlemagne defeats them in battle, ends up conquering Italy. This all results in the

00:39:47.500 Ghibelein versus Guelph conflict. I want to just kind of take a minute to talk about that,

00:39:52.780 even though it's not really relevant to this story, but it shows how important this period is

00:39:57.500 while also, you know, showing how fundamental this period is. Okay, so the Roman Empire gets

00:40:07.500 split west and east because it's really hard to manage all of this stuff and 0.80

00:40:13.120 Christianity comes along and Christianity has this this thing called

00:40:17.780 the Pentarchy which is so basically Christian Christians are led by bishops 0.55

00:40:26.740 bishops are all nominally co-equal right but there are patriarchs who are the big

00:40:34.680 bishops the five patriarchs the pentarchy are the bishops of rome jerusalem constantinople

00:40:44.280 alexandria and antioch right four of those agree that the patriarch of constantinople is uh the

00:40:56.200 first among equals the one in charge the bishop in rome starts saying no i am i'm kind of speed

00:41:03.960 running a really complicated theological and historical phenomena to get to where we care about

00:41:09.800 in this digression. But the Byzantine emperor says,

00:41:15.480 Nuh-uh, you work for me, because in Eastern Christianity, the church works for the emperor.

00:41:24.040 Is that the case in Western Christianity? Well, that's a big discussion. So the Byzantine

00:41:29.880 emperor says nah you work for me everyone works for me i'm in charge god put me in charge if you 0.99

00:41:37.320 don't like it i'm going to beat you up and kill you and so the byzantine emperor says hey king 0.99

00:41:43.960 of the lombards go to italy beat up the pope and replace him with whatever goon you feel like 0.99

00:41:52.520 the pope then turns to the franks and says hey we'll let you do whatever you want if you come 0.68

00:41:59.320 and keep the Lombards and the Byzantines from overthrowing the papal regime in Rome, right?

00:42:07.720 So what eventually ends up happening is Charlemagne just gives territory to the pope,

00:42:16.920 as if the pope were like one of his goons in the feudal regime.

00:42:21.480 And this leads to the pope being a secular monarch of the city of Rome

00:42:27.160 and an ambiguously bordered area around the city of Rome.

00:42:32.660 So this leads to the Pope not just kind of being this abstract bureaucracy,

00:42:37.160 or the papacy, not being this abstract bureaucracy,

00:42:39.160 but being an actual independent regime with an army and a tax base.

00:42:47.160 So does the king, the emperor, work for the Pope,

00:42:53.160 or does the Pope work for the king or the emperor?

00:42:57.160 That is a fundamental rift in Western political and theological history, and it's typically called the Ghibelein versus Guelph conflict, but every single country in Europe has its own little variant of it.

00:43:10.700 So like in France, this is the distinction between Ultramontanism and I think it's Febronian, no, Gallicanism. Gallicanism and Ultramontanism. Ultramontanism is the Pope runs everything, Gallicanism is the King runs everything.

00:43:26.460 And then there's Februnianism and Josephinism and all of these other silly names that basically come down to the king is in charge versus the pope is in charge.

00:43:36.800 That characterizes Western political theory to this day.

00:43:41.700 Even though the pope isn't really in charge anymore, the idea of an ideological force as opposed to, simply put, the nation state, that's still a thing we discuss in Western political theory to this day.

00:43:54.200 because of this time because of this just yeah sure just just give the pope the tether peasants

00:43:59.960 what do i care throw away gesture do you want to say something about this sir i don't but i do want

00:44:05.640 to say something about nick in ohio who donated twenty dollars to bms thank you nick i appreciate

00:44:10.360 it and while i'm on it and i got the talking stick for a sec i will say this relationship

00:44:17.720 relationship between temporal and sacral power is fundamental to a lot of the things that Julius

00:44:25.500 Evola writes about. He is very interested in the Guelph-Gibling controversy, and it's a freak,

00:44:35.780 it's a, you know, I imagine it was a very important thing growing up in early 1900s Italy,

00:44:42.560 but it's something I think that in the United States we don't hear enough about, or at least

00:44:46.520 we didn't when i was in school so extraordinarily important this is a point that is not only

00:44:54.440 relevant to our topic but helps you understand reading avala if you are so inclined to do

00:44:59.720 so just to just to say real quick here um back to the digression real quick then we'll get back

00:45:05.420 to the history i apologize so the pope is in rome right and then benito mussolini is doing

00:45:13.260 literal actual fascism does the Pope get to have his independent state or not

00:45:19.980 because that had actually been a hot-button topic in Italy for about a

00:45:24.080 century by that point and there were a lot of people who said no the Pope does

00:45:27.660 not get an independent state in Italy um Evola was actually on the side of

00:45:32.660 Benito Mussolini basically just drafting the Pope I'm being a little

00:45:37.180 flippant here because we just moving on quickly here but Benito Mussolini did

00:45:41.980 listen and gave the pope a shell country the european microstate of the vatican city the

00:45:50.700 the vatican is an independent country because of mussolini's decision there right so technically

00:45:57.500 gone i was just gonna say a side note on evola and mussolini uh il duche was genuinely afraid

00:46:05.740 that evola would put a hex on him and like yeah he didn't want to get any evil eye stuff going on

00:46:13.900 from evola so right there's that okay so back to frankia all right a thousand years prior to that

00:46:23.900 to the west was brittany which is that little peninsula coming off of france this was a romano

00:46:33.420 Celtic province that resisted Frankish rule by allying with literally anyone and anyone that

00:46:38.760 would fight the Franks slash France for literally any and every reason. At several points centuries

00:46:45.060 after this tale, Brittany actually acted as a frequent ally and patron of

00:46:52.180 Viking crews because when these Scandinavian pirates showed up, Brittany was like, oh wow,

00:46:58.800 you're gonna make things worse for France? Count us in, right? Brittany actually only joins France 1.00

00:47:06.960 in 1490, for reference. 700 years after today's tale, Brittany becomes part of France.

00:47:14.560 So further west was Britain, which was really only distantly of concern to the Franks.

00:47:21.200 The people in Britain, however, were very concerned about what was going on with the Franks.

00:47:26.240 Go see the episode that we did on the loyal Anglo-Saxons for more of what was going on on the ground at that time.

00:47:33.400 So, to the southwest was Navara and Iberia.

00:47:38.380 Iberia was inhabited by a complex combination of native Iberians, Vascognics, Celts, Romans, Greeks, North Africans, Levantines, a lot of people. 0.57

00:47:49.040 Then the Visigoths took over. 0.91

00:47:50.580 This is a Germanic tribe.

00:47:52.280 um ostensibly the visigoths were arian christians but what religion really looked like until the

00:47:58.520 muslim period starting in the 700s in post-roman iberia is really messy the muslims don't seem

00:48:05.460 particularly concerned with practitioners of shirk that is polytheism but we also don't see much

00:48:12.720 organized or really disorganized christian opposition to islam so what exactly the

00:48:20.900 Iberians practiced religiously is kind of... it's up in the air.

00:48:26.960 Alright, speaking of the southwest, 496. Clovis wages war against the Visigoths in 0.99

00:48:33.380 Gaul, essentially ridding the region of them and gathering entirely in his hands 0.71

00:48:38.240 their tax base. They remain concentrated in Septimania, southeast Gaul. So this is 0.81

00:48:43.880 when the Franks get control of Aquitaine, because they start out only with 0.95

00:48:48.120 Neustria, and Austrasia. In 500, Clovis invades Burgundy to steal its tax base 0.64

00:48:55.500 and acquire booty for his soldiers. This is when the Franks get southeast France. 0.94

00:49:00.360 507, Clovis moves to take Aquitaine to, you guessed it, steal its tax 0.88

00:49:07.380 base and get booty for his soldiers. 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad leads his Muslim 0.88

00:49:13.680 forces into iberia and basically takes it in one swoop except for um the basque country 0.96

00:49:20.480 which is very mountainous and the basques are a thorn in the side of the basques are a thorn in

00:49:27.300 the side of basically anyone who wants to march into or out of iberia to this day so

00:49:32.840 you want to throw up the third map about the umayyad caliphate nick

00:49:38.700 this is the umayyad caliphate when we talk about islam at this time this is what we mean

00:49:46.040 so they basically send a guy to march into and take iberia at the same time that they're engaging 0.94

00:49:53.100 in this large-scale conquest in persia this is this tremendous explosion of the of islam

00:50:01.340 throughout the southern and kind of southeastern roman world as you know the dar al-islam comes 0.98

00:50:10.920 to blows against rum as it's called rum being arabic the arabic word term for rome right so

00:50:18.800 it's important to understand here that these military conflicts are quite small caesar marched

00:50:23.540 into gaul with an illegal army of stragglers in 52 bc consisting of around 80 000 soldiers

00:50:29.140 excluding camp followers. He used that force to, among other things, murder essentially the entire

00:50:35.720 population of the city of Avaricum, which had around 40,000 civilian inhabitants. Around the

00:50:41.060 same time, his army did battle with a Gallic army entirely separate from the population of Avaricum,

00:50:47.080 numbering around a similar 80,000. The Battle of Tours in 732, meanwhile, involved a total of

00:50:53.920 40,000 people, 20,000 max on each side, including camp followers. Europe experiences a very drastic

00:51:03.760 population decline as Rome falls and only really starts coming out of it around 1,080.

00:51:10.160 So when we talk about battles and invasions, understand we're talking about relatively

00:51:14.100 small numbers of people here compared to the figures you might hear about if you go looking

00:51:19.580 in classical history all right 719 the muslims take septomania south gaul along the coast one

00:51:28.540 sec because it is a relevant question from the chat um is this post uh

00:51:36.860 odakar and theodoric the great time frame so it's post odoiker um

00:51:45.180 um uh sorry i'm just confirming a number here yes it is post these guys it is post odoiker

00:51:54.040 and post theodoric by how long um so odoiker died 493 and in this southwest we're talking

00:52:03.460 about the southwest of frankia which is literally the opposite direction from where our main are

00:52:09.660 the people we want to talk about are from because it's necessary to contextualize some stuff that

00:52:15.100 goes forwards in how this period is seen today right so odoiker is the uh the king of italy who

00:52:25.920 deposes um romulus augustulus the the last roman emperor uh odoiker dies 493 then we have theodoric

00:52:39.020 the great who is this uh important visigothic king he dies 451 right so at the same time that

00:52:52.800 these guys are basically ending the roman empire in italy the franks are moving in and taking over

00:53:01.460 in gaul and from the gaulish perspective the the romans living in gaul when this happened it was

00:53:09.000 kind of like oh crap italy's gone there's there's no more roman emperor empire in italy right

00:53:17.880 so the the gaulish the romans in gaul give us a perspective of people roughly equivalent in

00:53:24.140 america of like oh the east coast now belongs to france oh like the this polity is now over

00:53:32.500 we are now doing something different and they got to watch that in real time

00:53:36.420 this period where we start uh so odoiker let me get the specific date uh when did he actually

00:53:46.260 kick romulus augustulus out um so romulus augustulus was deposed in 476 tarikh ibn ziyad

00:53:57.260 conquer ziberia in 7-11 so 250 ish years later right um does that confirm does that answer the

00:54:09.980 question do you think sir it does in fact but while i have a talking stick gary in washington

00:54:15.000 donated ten dollars towards phrase hoff thank you gary we appreciate you and nick in ohio yes

00:54:21.920 the same nick in ohio uh donated again this time twenty dollars to phrase off thank you nick much

00:54:29.200 appreciated thank you thank you gentlemen so the muslims take septomania which is territory in gaul

00:54:39.200 in 719. 732 is the battle of tours abd al-raman al-kafiki moves an iberian force into gaul

00:54:49.200 Charles Martel, the grandfather of Charlemagne, works with Odo of Aquitaine

00:54:53.680 in return for total Aquitanian submission to Charles Martel to drive them out.

00:54:59.600 This battle is extremely important in Western consciousness to this day

00:55:04.180 and is kind of fun and humorously very poorly documented by both sides,

00:55:08.360 in part because it really, it was a relatively minor skirmish.

00:55:12.180 um abd al-raman al-ghafiqi kind of leads this bandit incursion into gaul and is kind of like

00:55:19.620 well why don't we just keep going and charles martel is like oh crap we gotta go deal with

00:55:24.760 that neither side really intended for this to be a big big head-on fight right um so this was the

00:55:36.260 last real battle as in two armies selling out to face each other rather than a border skirmish

00:55:41.980 siege between Francia and Al-Andalus. Al-Andalus is the name for Muslim Iberia, right? So it's

00:55:52.280 important to recognize here that 7-11, the Muslims take Iberia. 20 years later, they're fighting at 0.96

00:56:00.100 the Pyrenees, at where France and Spain meet, right? This is an extremely complicated time

00:56:07.920 with constant border skirmish because there's a third party here, actually a third and a fourth

00:56:14.040 party. The third party, there's the Franks, the Muslims, the Basques, and the Visigoths,

00:56:21.760 and all four of these factions are duking it out, right? So the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates 0.98

00:56:30.580 had largely survived off of the war plunder and tax base gains that the Jihad against Rum

00:56:36.900 had granted them however when that that jihad had only really been fruitful because of how 0.87

00:56:42.400 inept and worn down roman europe was due to all of the other stuff that had been going on 0.99

00:56:49.400 before oh by the way now islam is a thing so once recovery in europe started to occur as the last 0.99

00:56:56.700 vestiges of the roman empire collapsed these gains slowed down dramatically the umayyads would

00:57:02.120 actually collapse in 751 when a result in Khorasan, northern Persia, leads to the rise of the Abbasid

00:57:09.500 Caliphate, which had a decisively less European-facing geopolitical worldview. Tours goes on to become

00:57:17.980 incredibly important in Western consciousness, but it's worth remembering that Muslims held

00:57:25.280 territory in Gaul for decades later. Additionally, the Rashidun Caliphate, uh, so the, the Rashidun

00:57:33.440 and Umayyad Caliphate was, uh, so focused on fighting room and distributing booty from said

00:57:38.500 fighting that it completely neglected the eastern frontier, allowing a rebellion to take place in

00:57:43.580 Persia. This ends up becoming a pretty big characteristic of empires in the Middle East

00:57:48.120 where they're torn between the western front and the eastern front, and they're constantly jockeying

00:57:53.640 back and forth right um i have to stress this here because as we approach talking about the

00:58:02.960 battle of tours and why we care about it today and what the west charles martell and charlemagne

00:58:08.280 are two separate people they are not the same guy internet role players in tard cath and eastern

00:58:14.660 dorkadoc circles very often merge them into this singular figure they are not they are two separate

00:58:19.880 people um you want to say something sir oh um no i'm not really sure why i unclicked my microphone

00:58:28.400 but i appreciate you being responsive other than they're both named charles and that it's a cool

00:58:32.380 note that martel means hammer charles is an awesome name that would be a cool name if you

00:58:38.240 were pro wrestling or doing a variety of things it's also a cool name if you were smiting muslims 0.95

00:58:45.000 mm-hmm so 759 pepin the short charles martel's father charlemagne's or sorry charles martel's 0.95

00:58:53.980 son charles the dynasty was actually called the the pepinos or the pepios during this this time

00:59:07.320 period because uh that's it pippin and arnold were the founders right um so 759 pepin the short

00:59:17.460 drives the muslims out of septomania which is southeast gaul um southern france excuse me

00:59:24.280 780 to 790 both al andalus and frankia spar for control over the pyrenees establishing

00:59:31.360 fortresses stealing each other's fortresses because again it's important to remember here

00:59:35.460 There's four forces fighting here, the Muslims, the Basques, the Visigoths, and the Franks, right?

00:59:42.180 So, 814, Charlemagne dies.

00:59:46.500 Basically, the entirety of the Pyrenees revolts and either turns independent or joins with Al-Andalus.

00:59:52.460 The rest of his regime completely explodes, setting up the basic three-way distinction between Italy, what becomes France, and what becomes Germany, the Holy Roman Empire.

01:00:01.980 So, I have to step aside for a minute.

01:00:04.860 do you want to handle anything in the chat while i do so sir sure um so while i'm talking about

01:00:09.900 people's awesome um monikers i don't know if he mentioned sometimes and again this is silly and

01:00:17.580 it's obvious to a lot of us but to some of us it might not be charlemagne wasn't the guy's name

01:00:22.940 it was charles the great carlos magnus or charlemagne all francais um i don't go with the

01:00:31.580 the gust of what Chris does when I'm doing my foreign languages, so you have to forgive me for

01:00:35.580 that. Looking over on the side on some questions

01:00:39.660 to hit while we wait for Chris's triumphant return,

01:00:44.540 Caleb asks, does the religion

01:00:47.720 you choose determine your afterlife, in whole or in part?

01:00:54.760 So the caveat

01:00:55.920 that we say a lot, and this isn't,

01:00:57.940 I mean, I suppose in a way it's hedging our bets, but I don't think that's the intention.

01:01:03.600 It's more out of piety.

01:01:05.740 I don't presume what the gods ultimately judge as your destination.

01:01:13.960 But I think that authentic religion is more natural and straightforward than that.

01:01:26.920 I don't think that. We have this idea in the modern West that you get to just choose your religion from a smorgasbord of religious options.

01:01:41.480 And you do in the sense that you get to choose what to practice, but you don't get to choose truth. Truth is true whether you choose it or not.

01:01:49.600 and there you know might be a great number of religions that have degrees of truth to them

01:01:55.660 but reality is reality and when you pass your afterlife is what it is and i don't think that

01:02:04.540 the gods take your religious proclivities into designing you a special afterlife or doing some

01:02:13.200 kind of, you know, sports team trade with other deities as to your immortal soul. I don't think

01:02:21.000 it works that way. I do think that your religious choices in your life factor into how the gods

01:02:28.660 might judge you. But again, that's entirely up to them. That's not my call. That's their call.

01:02:36.680 But no, I don't think objectively, like if you choose to be a Christian,

01:02:39.900 Jewish God gets your soul. I think if you choose to be a Christian, you go to white people afterlife 0.96

01:02:46.820 and our gods and your ancestors make those judgments about what happens to you in that 0.84

01:02:54.040 in that instance and in that situation. But I'd also like to say we don't think that

01:02:59.020 oftentimes we use the term afterlife and we don't really mean all that afterlife implies.

01:03:07.220 after life implies that you have life to live and challenges to face and other things to be done

01:03:14.180 beyond the veil so i don't think that your choices in this life are necessarily one and done for the

01:03:22.400 progression of your soul beyond the veil i think that's a mystery that we will find out much more

01:03:28.380 about when we find ourselves there but yeah in that sense i don't think your choice of religion

01:03:34.580 you get to like choose where you go i think your choice of religion though does affect how the gods

01:03:40.580 judge who you are as a man or a woman and chris has returned to us i hand you back the talking

01:03:49.300 stick yes all right so 814 charlemagne dies the pyrenees revolts and either turns independent

01:03:58.900 interjoins with Al-Andalus. The rest of his regime completely explodes, setting up the basic

01:04:04.840 three-way distinction between Italy, what becomes France, and what becomes Germany,

01:04:09.080 the Holy Roman Empire. So the Carolingian dynasty ends in what becomes Germany in 911,

01:04:16.300 when Louis the Child died without heirs. He was 18 and probably killed himself.

01:04:24.380 The nobility elects Conrad of Franconia as their king.

01:04:29.180 This essentially begins the Holy Roman Empire as we come to know it.

01:04:33.340 The Carolingian dynasty ends in 987 in what becomes France when Hugh of Capet dethrones

01:04:39.740 the last Carolingian king. Italy remained part of the Holy Roman Empire but was de facto composed

01:04:45.340 of independent polities that were never really under Carolingian rule, meaning that Italy

01:04:50.620 essentially leaves with Germany but is doing its own thing once they get to the car. Okay,

01:04:58.940 the Battle of Tours. This is a big deal in western consciousness anachronistically.

01:05:06.540 At the time it wasn't really that big of a deal, but it ends up being seen as one later.

01:05:14.460 The meta-historical reason why people care about the Battle of Tours is that it is part of

01:05:18.700 of attempting to craft a lineage for several feudal states going back to

01:05:23.040 Clovis, who is treated as this progenitor to Charlemagne, the ideal Christian king

01:05:30.020 leading Europe out of barbarism, but simultaneously defending it from Islam.

01:05:35.940 The Christian intellectual world really does not know what to think of Islam 0.97

01:05:40.880 for approaching 800 years. The first 400 years certainly it's seen as a very

01:05:48.240 foreign strange thing but barely understood many Christian intellectuals

01:05:53.740 up until relatively recently did not understand that Muslims were mono 0.74

01:05:58.620 theists like it's very common for many Christian intellectuals to very

01:06:04.140 earnestly believe that Muslims worshipped the evil Trinity of Baphomet 0.88

01:06:09.660 Mahomet and Apollyon Apollyon isn't Apollo Apollyon is a demon from Jewish

01:06:15.140 demonology um and you know mahomet is one of the evil gods of islam in addition to muhammad being

01:06:24.040 the evil prophet it's not it's not really well understood at the time right and they don't 0.93

01:06:31.780 really see it as anything other than a sort of opponent until the islamic world starts having 0.98

01:06:39.820 philosophy and theology leaking into the christian world you look vexed sir do you want to say

01:06:44.280 something no i just want to ask and i it'd be better for a side chat but it is what it is

01:06:49.780 are you going to talk about end times theology as relates to christian worldview in this period

01:06:57.520 i wouldn't but if i wasn't planning on it um do you have something you want to say we could

01:07:03.700 ramble about that that's just some of the some of the thoughts about the evil of islam at this time

01:07:12.340 you may have noticed some of what chris was saying christians and it's i mean it's very

01:07:18.900 relevant to our day right now with our war united states and israel's war with iran

01:07:28.420 it's very common literally since the time of christ to see the end times as right around the

01:07:37.220 bend um you start seeing that a lot very early on and then they get bored with it and they're like

01:07:44.580 all right you think it's going to happen we don't know cool we'll chill for a little bit

01:07:49.300 as you start approaching the first millennium um people start looking that at that a little

01:07:57.460 bit more the idea of some of the rise of islam and the rise of a very powerful um

01:08:02.500 non-christian force those are always cast in antichrist and so you have you know you have 0.82

01:08:13.360 the devil and his antichrist in muhammad and you have those kind of things a lot of those

01:08:19.060 come into play and crystallize around the forming of the holy roman empire with charlemagne in this

01:08:27.820 period again the christian um theologians and church fathers in these days are trying to figure

01:08:36.540 out what that looks like it's i suppose akin in my own point of reference uh coming from jehovah's

01:08:43.660 witnesses for a time i think i coined a term i don't know if it's an ism but whatever

01:08:49.900 or they would come up with calculations

01:08:53.360 and be like, aha, the end's coming in this year,

01:08:57.320 and then it doesn't.

01:08:58.360 And they're like, all right, back to the drawing board.

01:09:00.420 We did something wrong.

01:09:01.780 All right, the end's coming this time.

01:09:05.500 And so they keep having to recalculate,

01:09:07.700 but they keep recasting the characters

01:09:09.820 in a, I think what they call a millenarian framework.

01:09:19.900 to where the end is imminent and christ's return is imminent it's whatever the big bad is at the

01:09:26.140 time ah clearly that's the end of christ clearly this relates to the prophecies of daniel or

01:09:31.740 revelation and some of that goes on during this period but it's remarkable how

01:09:40.700 it flips a little bit once okay i thought it was going to happen and then it didn't happen

01:09:46.300 now we need to have geopolitical relations with the antichrist or whatever that looks like um

01:09:56.940 are you going to mention charlemagne's elephant i was not but i want to point out mil the word

01:10:03.340 millenarianism is so called because come around a thousand a.d there was this massive belief that

01:10:11.900 the end of days was like right around the corner it was just okay it's coming so the thing that is

01:10:18.380 important to say here is that the the christian religious tradition has this idea that like oh

01:10:23.340 there's going to be a parallel christianity right there's this anxiety of the fact that there was

01:10:29.980 the roman empire christianity comes along a big wig in charge sees it takes it uses it 0.59

01:10:37.580 well crap that can happen again so there's this deep theological anxiety with 0.94

01:10:44.380 the idea of an anti and when we say anti-christ we don't necessarily mean that he's 0.97

01:10:50.940 opposed to everything that jesus says anti in the sense of an anti-pope and opposing the other right

01:10:58.540 you know yes and no because a lot of the time they do take it they make it like a bizarro superman

01:11:05.260 sure sure but it's it's very strange and as you can see there's a wide variety of these things

01:11:14.620 that are conflictingly true and simultaneously true as there's a mad dash amongst theologians

01:11:23.900 to try to position themselves right for the end times and local potentates to position themselves

01:11:33.260 right to maximize the political effect of leading the armies of Christ against the Antichrist

01:11:40.960 at Har Megiddo or Armageddon.

01:11:46.140 And the, all right, let's back this up a minute here.

01:11:50.040 We're talking about a battle that takes place in the 700s, how it relates to Christian theology

01:11:56.600 around 1080.

01:11:57.940 What's important is that this battle becomes important 300 years later, when these millenarian end-of-the-world, the Antichrist is here, thoughts appear. 0.55

01:12:11.940 So the Franks don't really care about the Antichrist. 0.84

01:12:15.940 They don't really care about Islam except in as much as there's these guys in Iberia that are fighting us. 0.86

01:12:21.940 us. But honestly, the majority of the Muslim forces were just Iberians anyways. So it's 0.66

01:12:29.120 literally just a struggle between the Franks and the Iberians, right? So why this becomes

01:12:37.360 important is because the anti and antichrist properly means the other Christ. He leads

01:12:44.480 the parallel enemy church that is trying to found or take over a state that is in opposition to the

01:12:53.640 good Christian realm. So around 1000 AD, the Islamic world starts getting really coherent 0.92

01:13:01.000 and it starts having this tremendous philosophical and intellectual output that starts leaking into

01:13:08.360 europe thomas aquinas ends up writing all of his theological works because years after after 1080

01:13:18.160 because he and many other christians look out and see that they are completely outmatched by the

01:13:25.160 islamic intellectual world part of this is because the islamic intellectual world just had

01:13:30.920 a better relationship with philosophy greek philosophy going in it's really complicated

01:13:37.300 and not worth talking too much about the specifics

01:13:39.620 because from the Christian perspective,

01:13:41.560 this matches what they were waiting for.

01:13:43.920 The parallel religion with its parallel empire

01:13:47.820 trying to lead people away from truth

01:13:50.780 through a very similar but nonetheless

01:13:53.620 false on technicalia doctrine, right?

01:13:57.640 And so around 1000 AD,

01:14:00.580 people start looking back in history

01:14:02.960 and trying to find coherency in the Christian religious and political tradition. 0.58

01:14:09.780 How can we start opposing this stuff?

01:14:13.020 What does Christian opposition to Islam and even paganism look like?

01:14:17.360 Because remember, until Tours, really Christianity in Western Europe

01:14:24.940 did not have any kind of meaningful contact with a hostile state actor

01:14:31.960 like from constantine to the battle of tours christianity was just on this kind of role of 0.96

01:14:41.720 using state power to bully pagans into submitting because they're like rural rednecks and hicks

01:14:48.940 like pagan comes from paganos meaning people of the fields heathen comes from a term meaning 0.53

01:14:55.840 people of the heath um heaths only really survive can i just say can i just say this bit real quick

01:15:03.120 heaths only survive in the scottish set phrase heaths and the moors which refers to a heath

01:15:09.440 and a moor which is a a very wet hill or a very dry kind of trough so land you don't want to farm

01:15:16.400 on the pagans are the ones who stick with the old ways out in the boonies haven't gotten with the

01:15:22.000 picture and christianity's conception of the world was just yeah we won we just have to bully

01:15:27.820 everyone into submission and now tarik ibn ziyad comes along and is like inshallah no we're doing

01:15:34.840 it my way or you're going to die christianity just did not know how to handle that at a theological

01:15:39.560 level other than these appeals to the end times and then the end times didn't come jesus didn't

01:15:46.540 come back so what do they do go on sir um well a couple of things i wanted to point out before we

01:15:55.500 got too far away and they're a little bit of an aside but i do think they're important to not just

01:16:01.060 a i don't know a college level history course that chris is treating us to tonight but also

01:16:09.400 to relate back to our faith

01:16:11.340 explicitly

01:16:12.180 one thing that I

01:16:17.400 want all of us to kind of take

01:16:19.440 home, you don't

01:16:21.460 realize that a moment in history

01:16:23.320 is pivotal or

01:16:24.700 the stuff of legend

01:16:27.120 at the moment

01:16:29.400 it's just

01:16:30.700 the situation you're in and you're making the best

01:16:33.580 of it

01:16:34.000 it's interesting when Chris points

01:16:37.420 out that the Battle of Tours

01:16:39.300 wasn't necessarily a big deal at the time it was just another in a series of battles

01:16:48.340 but it's come down to us as one of the most heroic you know pivotal moments in history 0.66

01:16:54.900 those warriors who faced off against the muslims at the time didn't know what they didn't know what

01:17:01.540 it would become they knew in the moment they needed to rise to the occasion and what they

01:17:07.940 accomplished in that moment became legend it's important for all of us to realize some of us feel

01:17:14.660 like we live very simple lives but by doing the right thing at the right time putting yourselves

01:17:20.580 in position to do great things sometimes really important things sneak sneak up on you and you

01:17:30.500 only realize their significance you know years down the road or uh history realizes their

01:17:36.660 significance, perhaps well after you're dead and gone. They're very important. I think it's

01:17:43.800 really educational and inspiring for us to look at our life in those terms. You never know what

01:17:52.460 you do in this world, the ripples that it sets out or how celebrated it might be by those who

01:17:58.640 come after you. So it's worth taking shots because you miss out on every shot you don't take

01:18:06.240 And you never know when one of those shots ends up being something that's, you know, possibly history changing.

01:18:14.060 Other thing I wanted to mention, and again, because you guys keep it rolling in, I'm not trying to make this about that, but I appreciate it.

01:18:22.740 Sarah in Ohio also donated $20 to Frazehoff.

01:18:25.860 We appreciate you.

01:18:28.660 Nick in New Hampshire donated $20 towards the Pavilion.

01:18:33.920 That's awesome.

01:18:34.580 we're still to where that 20 makes it 40 for us thank you for that and then producer nick donated

01:18:41.060 ten dollars towards the pavilion thank you nick you will absolutely be sheltering under said

01:18:45.540 pavilion and i look forward to sheltering under there with you um another thing on the

01:18:56.500 millennia uh millenarian strain of christianity that again i think we take for granted because

01:19:03.700 we live 1,200 years further into it than these people were in.

01:19:12.280 But it wasn't understood to early Christians that Jesus was coming back in thousands of years.

01:19:23.640 There were people at the time of the apostles that were like,

01:19:27.240 okay, cool, he'll be back next week.

01:19:29.380 okay he'll be back you know in a couple of years okay maybe he'll be back in the next generation

01:19:37.780 okay a hundred's a round number maybe he'll be back a hundred years from when he died

01:19:43.680 and every time they approached a new century or a new landmark thing that they can interpret some

01:19:52.120 meaning to okay that's when jesus is coming back we're still in an age where that was a very

01:20:00.120 mainstream thing that christian theologians wrestled with whereas now i think there's a

01:20:07.560 current to where all right we have no idea and maybe it's allegorical and maybe it's this and

01:20:13.800 And maybe it's that. And I think the effect of a 2000 year wait has really changed how modern Christianity in the mainstream, like in orthodoxy or in Catholicism looks at it.

01:20:29.100 but you do in the united states still see um a lot in you know protestant baptist flavored

01:20:39.900 congregations a very imminent like the end is here we have to put things in place that was a

01:20:47.340 very motivating factor for certain elements politically at this time period and it's worth

01:20:54.700 remembering, you know, this, you don't realize what matters until much later. Little things

01:20:59.020 matter. That doesn't just, that's not just about the Franks. That's about the Al-Andalusi side here 0.66

01:21:05.080 as well. This, this guy, Ahmad, goes off in a bandit raid a little too far out. 18 years later,

01:21:13.320 the Umayyad Caliphate collapses because of a Shiite rebellion in Coruscant. Like, what? Right? 0.99

01:21:20.420 From the Muslim perspective, they've been on this glorious sprint, waving the flag forward, and then they trip and faceplant right in the dirt. 0.91

01:21:32.500 And not quickly after this, but relatively soon, all things considered after this, Iberians start retaking, Christian Iberians start retaking land from the Muslim rulers in what is really the only large scale military defeat of Islam as an intellectual force by Christians. 0.92

01:22:00.860 everywhere else it can't really be said that christianity beat back islam except in iberia 0.76

01:22:07.500 right so they have a certain consciousness on the other side about this battle of tours that

01:22:15.260 is different from how we see it it's not necessarily just the other side of the coin

01:22:21.260 right did you want to throw in something there real quick sir

01:22:24.220 no i was just that i was just going to refresh for the audience

01:22:28.300 the date on the battle of tours and its relation to the topic at hand

01:22:34.320 oh do you want me to say it um i'm sorry i don't 7 32 just in case anybody out there is

01:22:42.980 is trying to track because we're throwing a lot of things at them and i know that some of my

01:22:48.060 digressions are perhaps muddying that so so people attract it it makes sense charlemagne's grandfather

01:22:55.240 and 732 why do we care about charlemagne's grandfather in 732 there's about 1000 years

01:23:03.020 between the beginnings of christendom as it was seen in the high medieval period and the actual

01:23:09.000 beginnings of france and the papacy as we know them today france and the papacy really begin

01:23:14.800 around 1000 AD. It's not until this millenarian period that a lot of what we understand as the

01:23:22.180 medieval world really begins. Remember, Hugh of Capet only takes power and forms what we now know

01:23:28.800 as France in 987. There's 200 years between Tours and France starting, right? So why do we care about

01:23:41.760 the Battle of Tours. Why does anyone care about it? The glorification of the Carolingians is

01:23:47.700 necessary to fill in a gap between Jesus and 1080. It is necessary to construct the idea of

01:23:59.480 Clovis and Charles Martel and Charlemagne as these wonderful Christian kings that lead Europe

01:24:05.660 out of barbarism and into a glorious Christian future, in part to just figure out what a Christian 0.68

01:24:12.380 future looks like, but also to justify all of the problems that arose from Merovingian and 0.96

01:24:18.220 Carolingian rule. Remember, these people, these Carolingian and Merovingian kings are really

01:24:24.220 immoral, like murdering their sons, betraying their brothers, immoral. So there's actually,

01:24:32.620 There's an attempt to smooth over the failings, in addition to constructing what it means to be a Christian opposing Islam, 0.90

01:24:40.620 in addition to constructing what a Christian world order, independent from the assumption of universal Roman rule, looks like. 0.71

01:24:48.620 This is actually two parallel narrative strains that are being constructed here.

01:24:52.620 One is that of a single unified France, which is the sole legitimate European polity, making it as such justified in conquering all other European polities, 0.77

01:25:01.620 and that of a single unified Christendom, which is justified in offensive action against European polytheists, heretics, and Muslims. 0.93

01:25:11.620 On the French front, firstly, there's an attempt at creating a glorious and continuous past into antiquity for the very new and very young Capetian state. 0.80

01:25:23.620 state. Secondly, there's an attempt at dealing with the uncomfortable fact that despite ruling

01:25:28.400 in France, the Franks were actually Germans. Like, Clovis becomes Louis. Clovis referred to 0.71

01:25:36.600 himself as Hlobwix. Like, he didn't go by Louis, right? Thirdly, there's an attempt at smoothing

01:25:44.320 over the legitimacy problems that arose from Hugh of Capet, essentially just stealing the crown from

01:25:49.860 its rightful owner, right? On the Christian front, the Pope at this time is trying to wage several

01:25:56.100 offensive wars against the Islamic world by venting excess Germanic warriors into the 0.89

01:26:00.620 Dar al-Islam, the Dar al-Islam, the House of Submission, that's their equivalent of Christendom. 0.96

01:26:06.640 This is new for Christianity because up until this point, Christianity had just been the 0.99

01:26:10.820 spiritual bureaucracy of a vast empire that ruled the world through the fiat of Jupiter.

01:26:16.880 There weren't really ideological opponents to Christianity, they were just thought criminals

01:26:20.560 to be tried in the court of law. But now the Pope found himself arrayed by a great number of enemies.

01:26:26.240 Firstly, again, Islam wasn't going away and it posed an intellectual and military threat to 0.99

01:26:30.800 Christianity. Secondly, Baltia and Scandinavia were both full of pagans who were actively waging 0.96

01:26:37.120 defensive wars against Christian aggression and even engaging in the occasional successful

01:26:41.760 offensive action. Thirdly, the Great Schism had happened, circa 1084, in which

01:26:47.760 the Catholic Church and the Eastern Orthodox churches formally

01:26:50.880 excommunicated each other, meaning that Eastern Europe and the Levant were now

01:26:54.900 officially full of heretics. As an aside, the Pope says that the Greek and

01:27:02.000 Russian Orthodox patriarchs are committing mortal sins, or at least he

01:27:07.620 used to back in the testicles the greek and russian orthodox patriarchs both say the other

01:27:14.260 is committing mortal sins over whether or not the ukraine is part of russia or not so there's

01:27:20.420 this 1084 thing there's a cascade a failure cascade of christians just denouncing each other

01:27:28.120 that leads to the modern pastor bob at the baptist bible preach man bible revival hour is the only

01:27:35.660 her church and everyone else is doing it wrong and going to hell kind of thing we see in American

01:27:39.880 Protestantism, right? So starting in the 11th century, there's this attempt at reconstructing 0.71

01:27:45.780 Charlemagne as not just the big thug that the Pope hired, but rather as a French Christian

01:27:52.440 emperor who was waging a preemptive defensive war against the enemies of a singular unified

01:27:58.200 Christendom. Then a few centuries later, the Germans get in on the action and instead start 0.89

01:28:04.860 reconstructing Charlemagne as a German Christian Emperor, waging defensive wars

01:28:09.120 against the satanic French regime, hence Clovis's preemptive invasion of Gaul in

01:28:13.920 the first place, and his minion, the Pope. Because remember there's this whole... the

01:28:19.440 Pope actually excommunicates a Holy Roman Emperor twice during all of this

01:28:24.600 european gibberein versus guelph saga so um the song of roland is a is composed during this 11th

01:28:37.560 century reconstruction of charlemagne make french noises

01:28:47.960 this is a lament about a failed bandit raid that charlemagne waged against the nominally christian

01:28:53.640 basques to aid his islamic allies um so uh the the i'll talk about this a little more later but

01:29:04.120 the carolingians made the ideal subject of this narrative craft as they fought against the asatruar

01:29:10.040 the muslims and heretical christians because remember clovis and really all of all of these 0.71

01:29:17.640 merovingian and carolingian kings are waging wars against arians really wacky smaller christian 0.88

01:29:25.680 heresies that we know very little about but when the pope says like go kill that guy he's not jesus 0.98

01:29:31.740 right they do it right so pagans muslims other christians the franks are the ideal subject to 0.89

01:29:41.300 glorify on those grounds because they fought those three groups. Both of these competing 0.88

01:29:47.520 narratives are not just attempting to claim Charlemagne in the name of France and Germany,

01:29:51.040 but also to interweave Charlemagne in particular, but also Charles Martel and Clovis to a lesser

01:29:57.840 degree, into a distinctly Roman inheritance. The Merovingian dynasty was established by

01:30:03.140 overthrowing rule, so Frankish patronage of the papacy is reconstructed to imply some sort of

01:30:08.340 continuity, going back to Julius Caesar, and importantly Constantine, who Charlemagne, in his

01:30:14.040 life, was compared to. Charlemagne is reconstructed as being the second coming of Constantine, of

01:30:22.380 David, of all of these great Christian and Christian kings. This in turn is spliced into

01:30:30.520 biblical narratives going back to ultimately what they're trying to do is craft a glorious

01:30:38.320 lineage to defend whatever the french german or papal governments are trying to do at a given time

01:30:45.560 we've been doing this since charlemagne we have to do this now is what they're trying to say

01:30:51.900 well and in case anybody doesn't know and i assume that a lot of us do but there are some

01:30:56.960 listening to this that don't, that legitimacy back to the Roman Empire is something that

01:31:06.680 was politically relevant up until the First World War. The Kaiser and the Tsar, both of those words

01:31:17.860 root from caesar from legitimacy from rome itself the two-headed eagle on the russian heraldry is

01:31:27.500 that um so that is it's not just like it's remarkable to think that in

01:31:36.600 my great-grandfather's time that was still a very relevant political uh football and it exuded

01:31:45.260 outwards, the Ottoman Caliph ostensibly justified his rule as being the Qasr al-Rum, the Caesar of

01:31:56.940 Rome. When Muslims talk about Rum, they're actually talking about the Byzantine Empire. They're not 0.57

01:32:01.180 really talking about, like, Italy and Julius Caesar, but it's semantics. When the Ottoman 0.93

01:32:09.460 caliph conquered constantinople he achieved a massive propaganda victory in the islamic world 0.98

01:32:17.960 the essentially almost all just nudging him up to being this like the third below the prophet

01:32:28.880 muhammad right i'm not the theology doesn't matter here but the ottoman sultanate took

01:32:36.020 out rome that means they are the legitimate islamic empire for the rest of history as far as allah is

01:32:44.620 concerned they won and kasar al-rum was one of the titles that the ottoman sultan one of the more

01:32:52.760 important titles that the ottoman sultan held and the ottoman sultan actually justified conquests

01:32:58.120 into the balkans and further deep into europe on the grounds that he's the kasar al-rum he needs to

01:33:05.080 rule in the city of rome he is the rightful successor of julius caesar and constantine and

01:33:10.580 all of that it this legitimacy of rome literally radiated outwards to competing empires that's how

01:33:21.320 important this rome stuff is right and what's going on in this millenarian period is an attempt

01:33:27.860 to construct a narrative going forwards to both justify ugly periods in the past but also construct

01:33:36.340 an idea of what the heck to do going forwards. That going forwards continues to affect us today

01:33:45.060 and part of why I think it's important for us to do these history autism deep dive episodes is for

01:33:52.900 us as a satruar to stop and analyze history a little more objectively rather than just

01:34:00.980 going forwards with well someone told me the battle of tours was important so i'm just going

01:34:06.500 to keep rolling with it that's not just your tism is celebrated amongst our audience chris

01:34:11.780 and amongst my household thank you isn't on that's not to say that tours isn't important

01:34:18.660 but we should stop and think and ask ourselves why do people say this is important and what does

01:34:25.920 it mean for us going forwards right all of this is to say as we get to the final frontier of the

01:34:33.500 frankish geopolitical world that the concoction of romanity germanity and christianity gets

01:34:42.960 extremely hard to stomach the more you spend time thinking about it. So let's

01:34:49.560 come to the fourth and final, and most important, frontier of our story. Let's

01:34:56.000 back this up and get to this final frontier. So can you throw up the

01:34:59.880 fourth image, Nick? Alright, so what what is happening here? A bandit click

01:35:08.100 manages to get a hold of a tax base and use it to fund wide-scale extortion and

01:35:12.680 marauding across Europe. This results in chains of bandit hierarchy. As the top

01:35:18.120 bandits increasingly centralize power, they become increasingly something akin

01:35:22.380 to a government. However, terror, violence, assassination, and intrigue are still

01:35:26.740 how anything gets done. Finally, they're using forced

01:35:31.040 conversion to a religious and political network as a casus belli to engage in

01:35:35.820 wanton violence and wealth extraction. They come to blows with competing

01:35:40.680 power centers in Iberia, the Visigoths and then later the Muslims, Italy, the Lombards, and Brittany, 0.77

01:35:46.600 the Gallaromans. In the east, they wage a near constant military conflict with competing bandit

01:35:53.740 cliques, many of whom are actually being funded by the Byzantine Empire that is trying to stop a

01:35:58.820 power center from forming in western Europe. In between all of this, there's the north. Gaul and

01:36:05.280 Germania were the periphery of the Roman world, and Saxony and Frisia, the northernmost parts of

01:36:11.140 Germania, was thus the periphery of the periphery. So Saxony is that area south of Denmark, and then

01:36:18.460 Frisia is that coastal area west of Saxony, right? At the same time, this super periphery was also

01:36:26.440 the surface upon which a new Europe was in contact with an old Europe. The frontiers of Britain and

01:36:32.600 Scandinavia brought their goods or trade to the river port cities of Frisia, which traded them to

01:36:39.140 Saxony, which would flow further into Europe. It was the Angles in southern Denmark, the Utes or

01:36:45.700 the Judas in northern Denmark, and the Saxons in northern Germany that formed the bulk of the

01:36:52.700 colonists of Britain. This region was also a frontier for the westward movements of Slavic

01:36:58.360 peoples and of Scandinavians. It was also the last major holdout of Asatru outside of Scandinavia.

01:37:07.000 So why does anyone care about Frisia and Saxony? Because there's a lot of people there and a lot

01:37:14.520 of people spreading out of that region into the rest of Europe and into this otherwise empty

01:37:21.320 frontier of Britain. Because remember, with the wake of the collapse, with the collapse of the

01:37:26.040 the roman empire britain is empty it's not you you typically hear like anglo-saxon invasion

01:37:33.280 by brits invasion makes it sound like a bunch of guys showed up in chain mail and started

01:37:39.480 stabbing dudes in togas when the anglo-saxons showed up to britain they found forums and

01:37:45.140 marketplaces full of overgrowth and weeds because everyone just got up and left this was

01:37:51.480 one at one of the really empty places of europe right and after britain it's like what iceland

01:37:58.620 there's nowhere else that was really empty in europe at the time so there's this massive

01:38:03.360 outflow of people there's this massive inflow of goods to continental europe and it's all

01:38:08.800 entering continental europe at these river port cities in frisia and saxony because frisia in

01:38:16.000 particular but to a lesser degree saxony doesn't really have much in terms of natural resources

01:38:21.040 because it's a very lowland river wet place the netherlands comes about because the dutch

01:38:27.760 realized that they can pump water out of dikes and levees faster than the sea can push it in

01:38:34.180 until then it's just swamps but you know what you can bring into that swamp really easily

01:38:39.440 a boat and then you take your goods off of that boat and you bring it into a city where people

01:38:46.180 in the city move it further into Europe and everyone makes a lot of money. The Franks look 1.00

01:38:52.900 north and they see that. This region had much to offer the Merovingian and Carolingian regime,

01:38:59.460 but it was also full of people who looked southwards and didn't like what they were seeing. 0.71

01:39:05.060 They saw widespread apostasy, kinslaying, treason, intrigue, lies, criminality, and tyranny.

01:39:12.220 So let's get to the, can I say martyrs?

01:39:19.580 No. 0.83

01:39:20.880 Okay, the Saxon loyalists unto death themselves.

01:39:26.200 All right, throw up the sixth image, Nick.

01:39:32.580 Okay, so one of the secondary antagonists in Radbaud's tale is Charles Martel, who we've been talking about a bit.

01:39:39.880 he had been ruling on behalf of the Merovingian kings. In 737, Theoderic IV died, and Charles

01:39:47.360 Martel simply took power. A period of civil war took place, culminating in Childeric III,

01:39:52.420 the last Merovingian king, being ritually shaved and humiliated, following by his internment in a

01:39:57.800 monastery. As an aside, internment in a monastery at this period might very often mean they drop him

01:40:04.880 off in a monastery, and then some monk kills him. So his son, Childerick's son, was similarly

01:40:10.980 imprisoned. This was all accepted because Charles Martell made a large donation to the papacy,

01:40:15.760 which ultimately results in the papal states. Charles Martell died with little fanfare in 741.

01:40:21.240 The realm was broken up between his sons, Carolman and Pepin. Charles Martell fought the Battle of

01:40:27.500 Tours, so on and so forth. The Aquitanians agreed to... we don't need to get into that.

01:40:34.880 In 748 or so, Pepin had a son, Karl. Karl would go on to rule Francia alongside his uncle, helping them to pillage and rape the Aquitanians and the Basque country.

01:40:46.880 When Karelman died, a brief civil war ensued, and Charlemagne divorced his wife to acquire a new one and take over. 0.67

01:40:52.880 After he acquired sole power, Charlemagne began a campaign against the Saxons, who had been a frequent victim of Frankish aggression up to this point.

01:41:00.880 This was necessary as Charlemagne pretty quickly needed to start bribing people to accept his legitimacy.

01:41:06.880 Much of the period literature attempts to craft Charlemagne and prior Frankish kings as Israeli-style despots

01:41:12.880 who had been given a divine mandate over their neighbors.

01:41:15.880 The Franks were religiously authorized to commit violence against the Saxon civilians.

01:41:21.880 Thus, their very existence as not being under Charlemagne's control meant that they are rebels and bandits. 0.95

01:41:29.880 So the Franks were justified in preemptively enslaving them, stealing their stuff, murdering 0.96

01:41:34.280 civilians, burning down villages and cities, etc. Starting in 772 with Charlemagne's destruction 0.98

01:41:41.240 of the Irminsule, a Saxon leader by the name of Widukind, which means like wooden child. We don't

01:41:47.640 actually have a cognitive kind in English, but it'd be something like kinth if we did. Widukind 0.93

01:41:53.560 leads numerous defensive actions against Charlemagne's commanders when Charlemagne was 0.84

01:41:58.280 personally busy helping the muslims invade gothic christian strongholds down in uh iberia

01:42:05.240 the famous chanson he's not here for me to do it chanson and 11th century ballot is about one of

01:42:12.360 charlemagne's officers being ambushed by basques after having raped and pillaged the basque

01:42:16.840 countryside specifically the events of the chanson are about a basque force ambushing the army of the

01:42:23.240 the Frankish commander Roland after the siege of Pamplona, which was specifically done to destroy

01:42:28.760 the walls of the city and end its thitherto centuries-long position as a seat of opposition

01:42:35.080 to foreign invasion in the region. Namely, importantly, in opposition to Frankish power,

01:42:41.240 but also to the Muslims. The theory was, well, if we can't have it, no one can. If we can't control 0.99

01:42:47.540 the region, then we're okay with the Muslims taking it. So this results in the destruction 1.00

01:42:54.120 of the Irminsul. As I said, in 772, Charlemagne destroys the Irminsul as punishment upon the

01:43:01.900 Saxons for them not truckling to his tyranny. So do you want to talk about Widukind real quick, 0.99

01:43:10.420 sir. Do you have anything to throw in about him? No. Okay. All right. So let's talk about the

01:43:20.000 Ehrman Sewell. Okay. So I'm not just doing that to be comical. No, carry on with your narrative.

01:43:24.840 If it becomes relevant later, we can go into it. All right. So 772 Charlemagne destroys the

01:43:33.400 what is the ehrminsule all right an ehrminsule is described as a large pillar but also an altar

01:43:44.040 there's a few of these described but the ehrminsule was at uh haasbelg now obermarsbelg

01:43:53.000 in germany um modern most pre-modern most pre-modern depictions of the ehrminsule have it

01:44:00.840 is a large log or like a greco-roman style column or like a standing but dead tree with the branches

01:44:08.680 cut off possibly with a statue atop of it um widokind of corvay describes an irman soul with

01:44:16.220 a statue atop it like a statue of a god now to clarify widokind is a normal name in saxony at

01:44:24.400 this time it means wood child child of the forest widokind of corvay is a christian writer under

01:44:30.560 unrelated to Widukind the Rebel, I guess we could call him. Widukind of Corvay may have been a

01:44:37.240 descendant of Widukind the Rebel. We don't have any firm proof of that. It doesn't really matter,

01:44:41.280 right? The modern depiction of the Ehrman Sewell, the Hymen depiction, if you will,

01:44:49.320 Hymen, ovaries, you know what I mean. You know what I'm talking about. Throw up the seventh image,

01:44:55.400 Nick. This comes from a rock carving at De Exensteine, a large sandstone formation in the

01:45:05.060 Tudelberg forest. On one of these blocks of sandstone is a relief of Yeshua's removal from

01:45:12.080 crucifixion. One of the figures, Nicodemus, appears to be standing on what came to be understood as

01:45:18.440 the Irmansul. I'll let the audience take a second. Can you see it? It's not immediately obvious.

01:45:25.400 All right, so, or rather, one guy thought it was the Ermenssoul.

01:45:35.380 German archaeologist Wilhelm Toit, who would later go on to lead the Annanerba, saw it

01:45:40.160 as the Ermenssoul bent over, so this thing.

01:45:43.360 There's that lady, and then on her left, there's that thing that Nicodemus is just floating

01:45:48.240 over top of, right?

01:45:50.880 Toit thought that was the Ehrminsule.

01:45:55.800 All right. 0.99

01:45:57.020 Bent over as a triumph of Christianity over Osseturus. 0.89

01:46:02.240 So here's Jesus being removed from the cross.

01:46:04.420 Jesus' crucifixion makes him a massively oversimplifying Christian theology, but this just makes it easier to explain.

01:46:12.360 Jesus gets crucified.

01:46:13.560 That turns him into a god. 0.95

01:46:15.220 Jesus defeats other religions by doing, by virtue of this. 0.63

01:46:19.320 Again, massive oversimplification, but it works. The Ehrminsule in Toit's idea was thus bent over

01:46:25.380 to symbolize the defeat of Asatru. Opponents pretty quickly in Toit's time started saying,

01:46:34.000 no, it's not the Ehrminsule, it's some kind of chair or something. Personally, while I neither

01:46:40.080 agree or disagree with Toit's, this is the Ehrminsule theory because there are several

01:46:45.520 Ermansuls, and the sculptor can't be viewed as a reliable source on what all of them look like,

01:46:50.480 even if this was actually supposed to be an Ermansul. The it's a chair theory seems pretty

01:46:55.760 zany. If it's not the Ermansul, it could be basically anything, and Nicodemus isn't actually

01:47:02.400 standing on it, you'll note. He's sort of just floating above it unless he had really, really

01:47:07.280 long legs, right? Toit's thesis in part comes from Goethe's hypothesis that it comes from

01:47:15.460 the Exit and Steiner, the entire relief Goethe thought came from Carolingian times.

01:47:22.960 Academics posit that it comes from a later period, which doesn't necessarily mean that

01:47:27.420 it couldn't be the Ermansoul, but again, who knows what the sculptor thought the Ermansoul

01:47:32.380 was supposed to look like um toit's claim is thus a little specious he didn't really provide much

01:47:39.200 proof that this is the ermine sull it being chair is pretty silly but that doesn't mean it's the

01:47:43.560 ermine sull so toit had the symbol straightened you want to throw up the eighth image nick

01:47:49.080 so then if you take it and you you know it was kind of bent over like this straighten it out

01:47:56.940 gets you this shape right which to be fair i don't know why he would what kind of chair is this

01:48:05.660 what you know like so the most compelling thing i've heard and i've heard this argument 0.99

01:48:12.060 over a long period of time the chair thing's stupid it's not a chair that's obvious 0.98

01:48:17.660 but it being some kind of a palm tree bent over is the one that I've run into most awful 0.95

01:48:28.660 and I was trying to look up something for this conversation and I don't know what the piece is

01:48:35.920 called because my I don't know ship craft knowledge is not there but there's a piece on a long ship

01:48:43.780 where you rest the sails that looks remarkably similar to this piece which is worth noting

01:48:50.600 i don't really have a dog in the fight it being an upright it being some sort of tree

01:48:57.980 i think makes a lot of sense it being chair i think is is nonsense out of hand do you mean the

01:49:07.280 boom is that what it's called like the the image is getting in the way but you know how the sail

01:49:14.640 connects this part of the sail in a boat that can it can rotate like we're getting into nautical

01:49:21.120 nonsense i'm sorry um no because i do think it is it's really relevant this is a

01:49:27.680 uh this is a subject that has come up in modern house to true more often than you might think

01:49:36.640 we also have somebody in the chat i'm not for sure if we were able to uh if they were able to

01:49:40.400 find what we were talking about so i didn't outline it thank you nick yeah uh that's how

01:49:45.760 this that is uh what we're talking about here and versus and you can see how that's what they

01:49:52.480 think it could have been toy thought they did this like this it's it's it was like this jesus

01:50:00.640 knocks it over so he straightens it back up right yeah so i'm not run yeah i'm not i'm not married

01:50:11.600 to one thing or another it's something that i've contemplated a lot because it's become

01:50:16.560 you know you mentioned that um the anna nerba decided to adopt it as the you know

01:50:25.360 the exemplar of what the ermine soul was throw up the the ninth image real quick nick sorry continue

01:50:31.440 sir no i was just saying because that has become the tradition many of us have kind of run with it

01:50:38.720 i'm not opposed or anything um spawn is in the chat trying to tell us various

01:50:46.640 names for what it might be called on the ship he pointed it out to me and it does look remarkably

01:50:52.420 similar um the idea though of it being the the pole that separates space between midgard and asgard

01:51:06.120 is a relevant thing the idea that it holds up the heavens um on top of it and is the axis mundi

01:51:16.620 um for the cosmos in the earthly realm is meaningful in this context it's also something

01:51:26.600 that i always like to point out because it's really cool and i got to go to the

01:51:30.140 Ekstrom Steiner with our founder, Steve McNallan. It's really, it's really special

01:51:38.740 to go there. Now that's in Westphalia and the events that we're talking about are in

01:51:46.160 Lower Saxony, but they're very close together and it's a really special place because a lot of things

01:51:56.120 in our history and the history of our faith

01:52:01.960 and its opposition to Christianity

01:52:04.840 go on in a very small kind of area.

01:52:09.400 And opposition to Christianity may be overstating it,

01:52:13.040 but we did an episode on the battle of the Tudernberger Wald,

01:52:20.960 and that goes on right around where the Eksternsteina is

01:52:25.260 and where the assumed location of the Hermansoul is

01:52:28.740 and certainly where this relief is.

01:52:33.560 But yeah, carry on.

01:52:34.700 That's all I had on it.

01:52:35.840 So before I talk about Toit a little bit,

01:52:37.860 because he shows up further in this story again,

01:52:42.080 complaining about what did the Hermansoul look like 0.95

01:52:46.480 is, in my opinion, a bit silly

01:52:49.240 because there was not a the Hermansoul.

01:52:53.080 There were Hermansouls.

01:52:54.240 they are a ritual pillar meets an altar right like this kind of structure shows up in indo-european

01:53:03.480 religions a lot the importance of the pillar holding up the heavens dividing the lower from

01:53:10.480 the higher has meaning independent of like what you put on top of the pillar like oh it's got a

01:53:17.880 statue of thor maybe it's got a statue of odin oh it's got like little wings or maybe it's just

01:53:23.840 literally it's got the heavens that's what's on top of it but the point being here no it's at the

01:53:31.800 base of the pillar this rock not this one because i took it from germany but similar ones to this

01:53:40.100 as just kind of a fun show and tell when we went there literally from the parking area i got this

01:53:47.460 stone and it sits on my altar that's cool um but past a certain point it doesn't really matter and

01:53:56.980 i'll give you an example what did jesus's cross look like the cross that jesus got crucified upon

01:54:02.820 that is a huge debate because there are people that you can make pretty good arguments that he

01:54:08.420 did not get cross crucified on a thing like this he got nailed to a post like this like like this

01:54:14.900 That's what the Jehovah's Witnesses believe, as kind of a side note.

01:54:19.080 And this is a rather minority position within non-JW Christianity, but it's not like they made it up.

01:54:25.520 Like, church fathers pointed this out.

01:54:29.400 And, okay, let's suppose it is a cruciform shape.

01:54:33.500 What were the precise proportions of it?

01:54:35.500 Did he have a footrest?

01:54:36.960 He had a nameplate, but how far above his head was it?

01:54:40.200 These questions don't matter because the symbol is a symbol, the specific shape.

01:54:47.660 If there was an Inquisitor around, it would matter a lot to the inch.

01:54:54.640 If there was an Inquisitor around, I have a feeling they would care about other things in my life more than what I think Jesus's cross looks like.

01:55:03.480 But this is a good example. What does Thor's hammer look like?

01:55:07.000 Oh, well, that's not exactly what Mjolnir looks like. It's a symbol. The Ehrminsule is a symbol. It is a ritual pillar that holds up the heavens. Charlemagne had one of them torn down.

01:55:21.680 What precise thing we use to represent the pillar that Charlemagne tore down is less important than the ritual significance of the pillar that upholds the heavens, right?

01:55:37.000 I think there's a modern reluctance of, we live in a time where there's so much cynicism

01:55:47.740 and so much just critique all the time on social media.

01:55:52.560 People don't want to choose the wrong thing.

01:55:55.320 Well, actually, that's a stylized palm tree. 1.00

01:55:58.920 You're foolish. 1.00

01:56:00.580 Gotcha. 1.00

01:56:00.920 People don't want to get mugged on the X.

01:56:06.380 And I think that's ultimate, and it sounds silly, and my grandfather would have laughed at us, but it's the world we live in, and social media and the nonsense bickering that goes on there is a relevant thing.

01:56:27.620 So I think in modern Ausatru, people want to celebrate this symbol that traditionally has been very important to us, but they don't want to face the scrutiny of the well-actually crowd criticizing them.

01:56:44.240 And I get that.

01:56:45.540 I absolutely understand the reticence.

01:56:50.740 But it do.

01:56:53.660 Charlemagne and his minions toppled a sacred pillar of our folk

01:56:59.580 that was a grievous offense against the Aesir,

01:57:06.020 and events ensued because of it. 0.99

01:57:08.780 And Christian chroniclers note this, Charlemagne topples this pillar because he's a big mean bully, therefore Widukin gets off his butt and says, all right, I'm going off to war. 0.91

01:57:20.640 Christian chroniclers note that chain of causality, knocking over the Irminsoul, whatever was on top of that pillar, caused Widukin to get mad and go lead an army.

01:57:33.000 I want to throw in one more thing about the symbol before we move on to Toit, because he's a character that's important in this tale.

01:57:38.780 people also expect a higher standard of truth with us like you'll know i've noticed this about

01:57:45.900 the pagan sphere not just we internally but people looking at us expect us to be right

01:57:52.700 like if you're a christian you can just make up whatever you want like you can just say whatever

01:57:59.560 and people are like okay whatever but then if you worship thor it's like oh you're expected to

01:58:05.920 actually tell the truth and i it's it's annoying to deal with like well actually on the internet

01:58:13.520 and all that but i do kind of like the internal and external assumption that like no we are correct

01:58:19.760 it's a problem if we're wrong we have to have our ducks in a row because truth matters

01:58:24.880 it is an interesting sort of enforcement upon an enforcement of virtue whether we like it or not

01:58:31.300 right? All right, Toit, Wilhelm Toit. Toit shows up in a lot of stuff in the early 1900s because

01:58:42.080 he was an early modern scholar of Germany's ancient history. Germany's history was extremely

01:58:47.720 poorly documented to the degree that the Germans simply had no idea how many castles there were in

01:58:53.640 Germany. So Toit was doing literally anything and that set a massive precedent. He wrote a book

01:59:01.000 THE GERMANISCH HEILIGER THUME

01:59:03.100 something like Germanish holiedom

01:59:05.960 if you translate it literally

01:59:07.300 that attempted to chart out

01:59:09.540 all of the Asatru holy places in Germany.

01:59:13.180 Honestly, much of the book is nonsense.

01:59:15.260 But

01:59:15.400 Oh yeah, ich bin going to liste out

01:59:17.960 all of the places in Germany

01:59:19.300 that we used for seeing praying to Donna

01:59:21.740 in the olden days.

01:59:22.820 Yeah, was massive at the time

01:59:24.760 because no one had thitherto tried to do that.

01:59:27.640 No one had said

01:59:28.500 what if we just listed out 0.81

01:59:30.160 all the places we used to worship thora that was huge that twight was even just trying this right

01:59:36.120 he actually ended up getting kicked out of the annanerbe in 1938 because he his myer uh his 0.97

01:59:43.500 myers-briggs personality type was quarrelsome jerk and he was apparently physically incapable 0.95

01:59:48.940 of not arguing with heimerick himmler about literally anything and everything he could get 0.98

01:59:53.920 is apparently this guy it's not good for career advancement to argue with rights career ss

02:00:02.160 yeah so here's kind of a note for anybody who's

02:00:06.720 we got a lot we got all sorts listen to the the broadcast so for what it is

02:00:13.280 it is always an uncomfortable balance for a lot of people to acknowledge that there was

02:00:24.640 a renaissance of things in the 1930s in germany that coincided with other events including

02:00:34.400 the second world war including um race relations that are unfavorable to certain peoples

02:00:46.480 that doesn't mean that everyone who lived in the german reich was you know a terrible human being

02:00:57.040 there was a lot of really um innovative things done in studying about history and studying about

02:01:04.560 pre-germanic religion you know people make note that we share a lot of symbology

02:01:11.520 what we do because at this time we were uncovering archaeology about our shared ancestry

02:01:18.160 and sacred symbols from our past to unfairly loop everything in with um political narratives about

02:01:28.080 second world war or about events related to it does a disservice to a lot of very very serious

02:01:35.520 academics and good-hearted germans that spent time trying to understand our history understand

02:01:47.120 forgotten pieces of that history that have been lost to us and understanding the elder faith

02:01:53.600 and the elder period that way and we do you know we do all our folk a disservice

02:02:00.960 by discounting things out of hand because nazis are scary or whatever it's worthwhile as noble

02:02:09.360 people for us to take a critical eye to look at things and examine scholarship fairly even if it

02:02:16.080 occurred during that period so just to give an example of the massive importance of we can look

02:02:24.880 at people like wilhelm twight and say that they were silly and wrong about this and that and how

02:02:28.960 they should have known better and did they not consider consider that for that less than 200

02:02:37.360 years before toit's birth germans did not know where uh tudorberg was like the tudorberg site

02:02:46.560 the mountain of the folk the fortress of the race the place where germany beat back rome

02:02:55.840 the founding spot of the german germanic even to a degree people germans didn't know where that was

02:03:04.000 was in their country it's it was where their country began they could not tell you where it

02:03:08.640 was they didn't know it took people like toit trying a lot of things and looking around to

02:03:17.120 find it and right we only really succeeded due to modern archaeological techniques nowadays but

02:03:24.800 people like toit were setting a massive precedent imagine if we don't we didn't know where the

02:03:29.760 declaration of independence was signed where was our country started we don't know so this is a

02:03:37.040 this is a crisp flex i'm i'm down to ride we're gonna ride this till the wheels fall off we have

02:03:44.400 not substantially talked about the loyal saxons we're two hours in tonight folks

02:03:52.960 i genuinely think this should entitle you to a certain amount of college credits

02:03:58.240 um this has been a master class on the politics of the carolingian empire and on the birth of

02:04:12.040 medieval europe and we still have a lot to go and like i said i'm here for the duration

02:04:19.080 This is an awesome episode. Chris, seriously, hats off to you. This is amazing. And anybody listening, the amount of time and research and carefully creating this kind of a presentation, it's truly astounding.

02:04:44.980 and uh you know i've talked to the speckinger uh the gothar any number of afa members

02:04:54.740 chris you are awesome and we appreciate you and these episodes are fantastic thank you so much

02:05:01.620 for what you bring to us thank you sir thank you that that means a lot i'm glad that my efforts are

02:05:10.100 all i want to do is help

02:05:13.860 i feel bad going back to toy to say something because i just want to throw in my two cents

02:05:18.820 you mentioned about the another thing chris don't be aware of the time or whatever

02:05:24.180 you go i don't care i'm here till 3 a.m it's whatever most of our audience consumes this

02:05:30.820 later after the fact don't edit yourself for time and even if you needed to if you were at a point

02:05:39.540 where for you and your family and whatever you've got going on tomorrow you had to tap

02:05:44.260 we bring you back on next week or whatever don't ever worry about that but do what you do because

02:05:51.300 it is a moment of excellence and i've noticed the chat tonight a lot of our audience

02:05:55.300 listens to this on road trips or consumes this over time so this isn't about the live audience

02:06:05.260 tonight this is about the totality of what you're presenting for us so please you know

02:06:10.460 you know we're just going to let you cook as the kids say so i just want to comment about

02:06:17.920 But if you go looking into Wilhelm Toit, you'll find a lot of people who say, oh, but he was a Nazi.

02:06:26.560 But no, he wasn't.

02:06:27.540 He got kicked out of the Ananerbe because he couldn't stop while actually Heinrich Himmler.

02:06:33.240 Like, there are few people Nazi-er than Heinrich Himmler.

02:06:37.660 this period and a lot of the people in it are a lot more the the turn of the 20th century period

02:06:45.840 in germany are a lot more complicated than a lot of people are willing to admit because again

02:06:53.140 you're not you're not supposed to cite toit in an academic work probably shouldn't because a lot of

02:06:58.860 what he thought was wrong as it turns out but he was trying you're not supposed to cite toit

02:07:03.260 because he was a nazi he literally got kicked out of the on and air bay for disagreeing with

02:07:08.540 one of the top dog nazis so you know a full stop on whatever

02:07:17.580 we honor patriotism

02:07:21.500 and if you have a specific gripe about a person and an alleged war crime or whatever i get that

02:07:28.380 But to talk about people, especially in the pre-war period, if we're doing academic research, it's very hard when the official party that is the governing structure of an empire, like the Reich,

02:07:47.880 Like, to say that, you know, pre-war, we understood that the Germans were leading a lot of academic fields in a very significant way.

02:08:02.300 to delegitimize them because of alleged things that are very far outside of their area of

02:08:13.700 expertise of their involvement of their anything they had to do with is grossly unfair to an entire

02:08:22.200 generation of people that were loyal to their fatherland and that were very innovative and

02:08:33.380 fully committed academics to their chosen field or to their military service or to whatever their

02:08:41.020 vocation in life was. There's a lot of time to dissect politics or other things.

02:08:52.200 But it's grossly unfair to demonize an entire nation's, you know, citizenry for being loyal to their nation.

02:09:00.960 And I think that's something we would extend to all peoples and fair-minded people would tend to do that generally.

02:09:08.820 And I think it's really important when examining the scholarship of this period. 0.63

02:09:15.960 So, 772, Charlemagne destroys the Irwin-Soul.

02:09:21.760 This starts a three-decade-or-so period called the Saxon Wars.

02:09:27.000 In 782, a Frankish raid goes poorly and over 60 of Charlemagne's top officers die.

02:09:35.300 Charlemagne is personally enraged by this, because these men were his friends and loyal things.

02:09:41.620 So he personally turns his army to Saxony.

02:09:45.300 their stubborn refusal to kneel to him and his bad behavior has now come to a boiling point

02:09:54.880 our sources frankish annals then say that charlemagne entered into saxony and declared

02:10:00.200 that anyone who turned over the soldiers that had defended saxony against the literal frankish

02:10:05.060 bandit raid would be spared uh implying mass violence was occurring that people would be

02:10:12.120 spared from. The result was the so-called massacre at Verdun, or Verdun. In a single day, Charlemagne

02:10:19.200 had 4,500 Saxons beheaded, we are told, and had their bodies hacked apart and strewn throughout

02:10:25.780 the forests. Given the timing of the event, the fact that the conflict between the Saxons and the

02:10:31.120 Franks would go on to last another 20 years, and that Charlemagne's authority over Saxony was

02:10:35.380 something that his regime said that the Saxons owed him, not that he actually had, it's likely

02:10:41.740 that what had been actually happening was that Charlemagne simply gathered up a large amount of

02:10:46.320 people and had them massacred. We're not told about a specific battle or anything similar,

02:10:51.820 and the chronicles are very terse and administrative and get tercer over time.

02:10:56.980 It probably wasn't seen as a glorious victory internally or even a fight, as those chronicles

02:11:03.320 detail military conflicts pretty openly. It also seems unlikely to have actually been done in this

02:11:09.900 the Saxons hand over their own men manner because the Saxons more or less uniformly seem to be

02:11:15.320 opposed to the Carolingians. We're told that up to this point and after it, the Saxons would

02:11:19.540 actually execute apostates and traitors left behind in the wake of Frankish raids and invasions.

02:11:26.740 These people are also just de facto and de jure not under Charlemagne's kingship, so they'd have

02:11:31.880 no reason to willingly hand over their own men to him because said men defended their homeland

02:11:38.560 against an invading

02:11:40.300 bandit army? What?

02:11:42.860 What is notable here is that

02:11:44.640 all 4,500 of them were beheaded. 0.92

02:11:47.440 The Carolingians did

02:11:48.740 massacres pretty frequently,

02:11:50.620 but they also did resettlements.

02:11:53.360 This has led some

02:11:54.720 historical revisionists to argue that

02:11:56.540 any attestations of murders in

02:11:58.600 Charlemagne's regime, or prior

02:12:00.380 Frankish kings, Carolingian

02:12:02.660 or Merovingian,

02:12:04.120 were actually resettlements,

02:12:06.880 despite what the sources

02:12:08.120 i just want to say they are incorrect in their apologetics for uh charles and butcher

02:12:16.700 so the despite what the sources actually tell us because the these christian chroniclers they're

02:12:24.480 trying to smooth over charlemagne and clovis and all these guys bad behavior but also they

02:12:29.320 sometimes just write down oh yeah and then he had then he had his brother murdered by an assassin

02:12:33.420 he just paid some guy to kill him right like what do you want me to write down boss we all saw it

02:12:39.480 happen you know so the carolingian court was rife with frequent purges of courtiers wives

02:12:48.380 mistresses officers and clergymen disappearing people was just the norm of this society and

02:12:56.200 the primary sources tell us frequently that disappearing meant murder not the convent on

02:13:02.460 the farm upstate. Historians have, as I said, tried to downplay these, but it has to be stressed

02:13:09.760 that these were really common in Charlemagne and Carolingian and Merovingian regimes. The Council

02:13:17.200 of Constatte, for example, was enacted by Charlemagne's father against the leaders of the

02:13:22.180 Alemanni, who were, as far as we know, entirely Christian and ostensibly loyal to the Frankish

02:13:31.000 regime. Notably, a large number of Charlemagne's friends and cronies died in the Frankish attack

02:13:38.460 on Saxony that the 4,500 oil-to-the-end Saxons defended against. So the Saxons didn't just defend

02:13:46.040 against an incursion, they actually did some damage to Charlemagne's court and his regime.

02:13:51.340 A frequent theme in Carolingian attacks on other Germanic groups is an apostatize or die pattern.

02:13:59.040 While the Carolingians had no problem massacring Christians, as they're working with Muslims against Baskin, Visigothic Christians, and Aquitanians, attests to, their wars against the Bavari and the Alemanni also attest to this, and so on, when it comes to Asatrara, we're told that they were given a choice.

02:14:16.940 The fact that later chroniclers get increasingly terse about a vent, and no one talks about a choice to convert, just this odd hand over the perpetrators and we'll spare you, demonstrates that internally this was a pretty big propaganda failure.

02:14:33.940 failure. It indicates that the victims were Asaterer who went to their deaths 0.89

02:14:40.960 without apostasy. That's actually a really big ideological failure, as 0.94

02:14:47.560 ostensibly it's not supposed to happen. Dumb pagans are supposed to simply cave 0.99

02:14:52.780 the moment someone with a Bible shows up. 4,500 men and women, I presume, at that 0.99

02:14:59.800 scale and number, I presume they were just murdering everyone, either having to 1.00

02:15:04.480 be butchered in the name of Christianity or simply choosing death before 0.56

02:15:08.440 disloyalty is quite literally not supposed to happen. It was a massive

02:15:13.600 refutation not only of the religion's metaphysical claims, but also the

02:15:17.740 legitimacy of Charlemagne as a king. The 4,500 heroes of Verdun here chose death

02:15:24.060 before sullying themselves by swearing loyalty to a false king, and remember,

02:15:31.080 the power of the king cuts both ways here. Charlemagne is a king, so you're

02:15:38.120 supposed to be loyal to him. If he's not a king, you're not supposed to be loyal

02:15:42.780 to him, so these people saying they would rather die than declare loyalty to him

02:15:48.600 is a massive refutation of his kingship,

02:15:52.720 and it's a massive refutation of the evangelical claims of Christianity,

02:15:58.780 that people would rather die than choose this.

02:16:03.140 Three years later, in 785,

02:16:05.660 Charlemagne established the death penalty for not being Christian.

02:16:09.940 Like, officially, that was just, 0.99

02:16:11.440 okay, going forward, if you aren't Christian, you just die.

02:16:14.740 However, he backed off of it in 797,

02:16:18.600 ostensibly under the guidance of Bishop Alcuin. There's a lot of ink spilled in Charlemagne's day

02:16:26.760 and going forward, comparing Charlemagne to an Israeli despot from the Bible, talking about the

02:16:31.940 Amalekites, partly because this idea shows up in Frankish state documents. There's this idea that

02:16:39.620 Francia was this new Israel and various competing Germanic peoples were the Amalekites, the Moabites,

02:16:46.120 and other such Canaanite, I guess you call them, Jew-adjacent peoples that were scheduled for eradication in the Torah.

02:16:54.760 But Alcuin's intervention seems to indicate a displeasure with the Carolingian court's actions by someone within the Christian clergy, which is interesting.

02:17:04.680 Remember earlier, last episode I was on, when we were talking about men like Winfrith and Willigrord and Wulfram who wanted to make the Frisians apostatize?

02:17:15.560 They didn't actually want to exterminate them or just let other peoples bully them into genocide and enslave them. 0.61

02:17:23.240 Almost immediately after Widukind is defeated, Catholic clerics actually start organizing the Saxons against the Franks. 0.68

02:17:31.680 So I'm willing to bet that what was actually going on, which I've alluded to throughout this lecture, 0.90

02:17:36.780 was that Christianity was used to justify bad behavior by the Merovingians and the Carolingians, 0.71

02:17:41.720 but that this behavior was viewed as more or less a necessity to tolerate

02:17:46.920 in order to establish a power center in Western Europe.

02:17:50.680 As at the time in the West, Christianity barely had Italy,

02:17:54.840 which remember, Italy at this time is still full of pagans into the 600s.

02:17:59.160 It's not until the 600s that the city of Rome stops being like

02:18:02.840 51% or greater people who worship Minerva, right?

02:18:08.520 this is happening at the tail end of the 800s. Europe is only a century or two away from

02:18:15.720 polytheism being the default European position here, right?

02:18:22.440 As an aside, Widukind, we are told, ends up converting, and the only source on the matter

02:18:27.640 says that he did so willingly to join the Frankish nobility. However, we know from elsewhere that

02:18:32.840 when this happened, Charlemagne would immediately chuck converts into the dungeon or to a monastery

02:18:37.560 or whatever. It's possible that Widukin was just killed and that this narrative was invented,

02:18:43.480 but we don't have any evidence for that. Just reason to cast doubt on certain Frankish narratives

02:18:48.080 in an abstract sense. It was such a propaganda victory that the great Widukin, the powerful 0.96

02:18:53.960 rebel leader and heathen king, willingly accepted Rabbi Yeshua as his lord and savior and Charlemagne 0.93

02:18:59.240 as the new David. Why not toot the trumpets a little louder, you know? Interestingly, however, 0.99

02:19:05.460 There's a lot of fanciful and obviously fictional stories about Widukind being a devout Christian and patron of Christianity,

02:19:13.660 founding churches and monasteries.

02:19:15.600 There's also problems in that these treat him like a normal person in the medieval era,

02:19:20.780 and not like an aristocratic Germanic warlord who lives in a hall with retainers and stuff.

02:19:26.380 In one of them, he creeps through the bushes to watch Mass,

02:19:29.300 and is just so moved by the beauty of the Eucharist that he has to convert,

02:19:35.900 and a child teaches him the wisdom of Jesus, and it, what?

02:19:41.320 This guy leads a war band.

02:19:42.960 Like, what is he doing creeping in the bushes to watch Mass?

02:19:47.840 These stories come about later, and it's interesting that they view Wittekind as a good guy.

02:19:53.600 Medieval Christians in Saxony viewed Wittekind as a good guy to be defended,

02:19:57.520 but the Christian clergymen did become patrons of the Saxons against the Franks shortly after the

02:20:05.100 4,500 loyal Saxons here died. So a co-opting of this figure of Wudukind, this figure of resistance

02:20:13.760 would not only be obvious, it might just have been necessary. The church was over time becoming 0.98

02:20:18.340 increasingly fed up with the Franks, with Clovis actually starting a conflict that would become 0.98

02:20:25.280 Gallicanism versus Ultramontanism, and the Ghibelein and wealth conflict, as I said, 0.55

02:20:30.740 essentially over the question of who is in charge, the Pope or the Emperor slash King. 0.72

02:20:36.860 So the Christian clergy patronized the Saxons to undermine the Frankish crown and baptize,

02:20:43.120 literally and metaphorically, Wadukin's legacy to get rid of the resistance to Frankia equals 0.53

02:20:48.320 also true connotations. As already stated in the matter involving Alcuin, the church was

02:20:53.600 increasingly growing weary of the Frankish tyranny, which was making it increasingly

02:20:57.500 difficult to actually convert people. A much more effective strategy was the sort of internal churn 0.91

02:21:03.520 that is seen by the church demanding the Franks butcher the Saxons, then immediately patronizing

02:21:08.780 the Saxons against the Franks that they had up to this point been supporting. This same phenomena

02:21:14.640 shows up in Scandinavia, as an aside, this divide and conquer through Christianity kind of thing.

02:21:21.340 an overt association with the frankish crown prevents that as an over association of christianity

02:21:31.080 with the frankish crown prevents that as from the popish perspective the franks were just a weapon

02:21:36.080 to be discarded when they were no longer useful and charlemagne driving these people towards this

02:21:43.160 state of i would rather die than apostatize makes it extremely hard to get them to apostatize

02:21:51.320 So I want to deviate here for a second.

02:21:57.680 I know that Chris has got more for his wrap-up and his, you know, summation,

02:22:06.100 but I think now is the appropriate time to talk about Whitakind.

02:22:10.120 I know that Speckinger Spahn is excited about the idea and has some questions.

02:22:20.620 It is very seductive and a cool idea to think that Whittakin remained the stalwart champion of Alistair True and the Saxons that he was for much of his life, but we don't have that.

02:22:43.460 history didn't bring that to us we don't have any alternate tales of him remaining true

02:22:51.860 none of those things exist what we do have is the narrative that eventually

02:22:56.980 he submitted to frankish authority and he apostatized against the ice here and embraced christ

02:23:06.340 is like creeping around in the woods

02:23:11.240 to watch a mass or whatever 0.96

02:23:13.340 is kind of silly. 0.79

02:23:16.080 But we don't have a counter narrative.

02:23:19.020 And here are my thoughts.

02:23:21.540 And genuinely, if I'm wrong

02:23:23.700 and would attend to some kind of horribly

02:23:26.500 historically misrepresented character,

02:23:31.620 then I apologize.

02:23:32.340 does. But we have to go with what we have. There's the opportunity to take any of these

02:23:40.840 leaders who opposed Christianity and to write into the history that, no, no, really, they

02:23:47.500 submitted and they embraced Jesus and they got baptized and it was all good. We don't

02:23:53.780 see that with a number of other local leaders that opposed Christianity. For example, in

02:24:00.140 a relatively similar period we don't see that about radbot now they could have made up stuff

02:24:07.260 about radbot too but they didn't the record that's left to us barring some kind of new discovery is

02:24:17.260 the buddhiken eventually got worn down and he finished though he spent a large portion of his

02:24:25.820 life fighting christianity and fighting charlemagne he ended his life submitting to frankish rule

02:24:34.940 and to the christian religion now it is easy to look at that with scorn

02:24:45.820 it is harder when the consequences of death and when the stakes are as high as they were

02:24:52.220 in Whitaken's life. I get that. I will never say it's okay or make the excuse that it's

02:25:00.440 alright to forsake the Iceder under whatever the odds. But I do understand that people 0.85

02:25:08.820 have a breaking point. What I would like to say, and I'd like to use this point to announce,

02:25:15.980 And Nick has a graphic.

02:25:21.080 As of this year, on October the 9th, we will be celebrating a day of remembrance for the 4,500 loyal Saxons that lost their life for their loyalty to the Iser at the Blood Court of Burden.

02:25:41.900 If I knew all of their names, I would cloud your calendar with 4,500 names of heroes that sacrifice their life for their trough to the Aesir.

02:25:58.740 The best I can do at this point is acknowledge them en masse on October the 9th.

02:26:11.740 But it's important to me that we do so.

02:26:18.740 These brave men that stood for the Iser at the cost of their heads are profoundly important,

02:26:32.560 and we are obliged as their spiritual descendants to honor them and to acknowledge the sacrifice they made for their faith in our gods

02:26:48.240 and for their loyalty um the picture if you could throw it back up for a second

02:26:59.360 is of um saxonhaime which is a monumental park raised up i don't know if you guys really see it

02:27:08.560 here but it is a pathway lined with 4 500 stones each stone representing one of these

02:27:19.600 brave saxon men that stood for our gods and lost his head

02:27:25.920 this park is still in existence today it is a place where our founder steve mcnallen and i

02:27:34.560 I went and made offerings of mead and showed our respect to these brave men of our folk.

02:27:46.720 It's a very special place, and I wish that we could do more to honor these heroes,

02:27:57.020 But I want to, at the very least, honor them all on October the 9th in celebration for their loyalty.

02:28:08.660 And I'll get to talking about Saxonian here in a moment.

02:28:17.100 So to go back to the historical stuff for a bit, we're coming to the close here.

02:28:25.020 I just want to talk about, talk briefly about why this all happens this way.

02:28:29.620 In other parts of the Germanic world, we see stuff like the Frankish king just waltzes in with an army,

02:28:35.440 murders a bunch of people, bullies some lords into apostasy, 0.80

02:28:38.460 and then the Herderi are now Christian, right? 0.93

02:28:42.760 Why doesn't this happen with Saxony and to a degree Frisia also?

02:28:46.940 I'm going to posit that the Saxon and Frisian societies were not characterized by the warlord society all that much.

02:28:54.000 The Frankish Empire was based on a pure middle hierarchy of interpersonal relations,

02:28:58.600 so in absence of warbands to bind to loyalty, they actually couldn't really control territory.

02:29:04.340 We're told about incredibly few Saxon, and for that matter, Frisian leaders.

02:29:08.700 This leads me to believe that the Saxons and Frisians were probably still operating under older Germanic government forms,

02:29:14.700 that of the ethno-republican tribe that elected, not necessarily democratically, a theodens or theoden to lead them.

02:29:22.800 This would explain why we're mostly just told about raids and invasions rather than battles.

02:29:29.600 There really weren't singular individuals for Frankish chroniclers to write about.

02:29:35.100 This 30-ish-year struggle was really more of a conflict between the Frankish mafioso hierarchy

02:29:41.600 and the Saxon and Frisian people as ethnosis, rather than between individual big men like we see with, for example, the Aquitanians or the Burgondians.

02:29:52.100 Charlemagne would die on 814s, January 28th, and his empire would collapse into, you guessed it, a pointless fratricidal bloodbath.

02:30:02.200 One of Charlemagne's greatest achievements was his massive library of Germanic history and lore.

02:30:07.560 It would be burnt to the ground by his son, Louis the Pious, on the orders of the Pope.

02:30:12.280 Louis ruled in Aquitaine, so this act of arson was an ironic final strike by Aquitaine against the Carolingians,

02:30:18.100 and another in a long line of Carolingian and Merovingian father-son betrayals,

02:30:23.580 which is particularly ironic given the numerous times that Charlemagne had betrayed his own sons.

02:30:28.520 So ridiculous thing that I just want to mention because it was there and I wanted to mention it earlier. 0.65

02:30:35.680 After all this battling with the Muslims, as the emperor of the West, 0.95

02:30:41.580 Charlemagne received as a gift from Caliph Haran al-Rashid an elephant named Abul Abbas.

02:30:55.080 And this elephant came into, I assume, the court at Aachen and was an amazing sight to be seen for Europeans that had not seen an Indian elephant that was given to him by the Caliph.

02:31:11.580 It is not relevant to what we're talking about at all, but it was a fun point of interest that I learned in high school about Carlos Magnus.

02:31:21.380 There you go.

02:31:22.920 I love it whenever an animal has a Wikipedia article.

02:31:26.920 It's fun.

02:31:29.580 Abul Abbas, he has his own Wikipedia article. 0.67

02:31:33.480 Anyways, so Louis the Pious takes over.

02:31:38.140 The other three sons of Charlemagne all died in various schemes.

02:31:41.220 leaving only Lewis's line extant.

02:31:43.760 Lewis's three sons would then come to quarrel

02:31:46.120 and eventually split the empire into three de facto separate states.

02:31:50.080 I've already talked about this a little bit.

02:31:51.800 But all three of their lines would inevitably end up unable to produce suitable heirs,

02:31:59.500 resulting in the Carolingian dynasty extinguishing itself

02:32:02.380 as other more worthy leaders rose up and did to them what they had done to the Merovingians.

02:32:08.300 So, I've already touched on retrospectives of the Frankish Empire in the medieval period,

02:32:12.980 but I want to go into the modern period.

02:32:15.280 In the Renaissance and Enlightenment, this entire period was viewed as a complete catastrophe.

02:32:21.400 Even Christians were aghast at the actions of the Merovingians and Carolingians. 0.95

02:32:26.060 And to be fair, Alcuin is proof that at least one Christian was kind of like, 0.92

02:32:30.680 wow, hey, we shouldn't be doing this, right?

02:32:33.580 in germany in the 19th and 20th centuries german nationalists got in on the discussion

02:32:39.520 was charlemagne a destroyer of german culture and tradition or a noble german hero initially

02:32:46.780 during the third reich the opinion was actually quite against charlemagne however there was not

02:32:51.860 one notable figure who at the very least did not openly speak against charlemagne and that was

02:32:56.380 adolf hitler hitler's influence caused the reich to do a 180 on his thitherto opinion on charlemagne

02:33:03.340 as he wished to use Charlemagne as a sort of bridge between Germany and France, rather than a divider.

02:33:10.140 It's important to remember that up till this point, Charlemagne was seen as like a wedge to push Germany and France away from each other.

02:33:19.080 In 1935, Wilhelm Huberter was commissioned to build the Saxenhayn, a large memorial grove to the 4,500 loyal Saxons at Verdun.

02:33:32.500 it's as the author so elsewhere you go they said a field surrounded by a tree covered path

02:33:38.420 that is ringed in a double ring with these 4 500 large stones you want to throw up the 10th image

02:33:45.900 there we go so if you see it the outer ring of that is lined with the stones and you kind of

02:33:54.920 enter around this point where it branches on the okay wait start you enter from the top or bottom

02:34:02.760 at the southwest or northeast corners but then you can get into that interior field which as far as i

02:34:09.980 can tell they just farm crops in there's pictures on google maps of some guy who went there and

02:34:15.780 there's like cattle just sitting around in the interior field um but the stone pathway is this

02:34:22.700 double ring structure going around the park i guess you could call it and then there's a point

02:34:27.560 where there's a break where you can get in kind of on the east here where it appears to fork

02:34:31.620 right um the site was a meeting ground for the schutzstaffel but i haven't been able to find

02:34:38.840 out what precisely they did there i didn't go digging in german sources because it's the

02:34:44.820 schutzstaffel they they did schutzstaffel stuff good enough right um most of the modern references

02:34:50.740 that i could find to the schudstaffel meeting there are just people getting upset about

02:34:55.620 the schudstaffel meeting there there was a lady walking her dog there when uh when steve and i

02:35:03.060 were there which on the one hand feels part of me wants to say it feels kind of sacrilegious but i

02:35:10.900 also kind of like that it's just something people can go to you know yeah what was cool was it

02:35:18.500 wasn't some evil nazi site it was a nice park where citizens of lower saxony jogged and walked

02:35:29.860 their dogs and did stuff and had um you know signage to where you what it was about it didn't

02:35:38.180 praise the rights for your xss for patronizing the erection of the park or whatever but it did

02:35:47.860 talk about the saxon nobles that died there and it is a lasting um monument to them over the last

02:35:57.540 hundred years which is really a nice thing and it seems to have transcended all of the different

02:36:06.100 uh political reactions to german national socialism it was much more a uh

02:36:13.860 acknowledgement of ancestries that perished there for a noble cause before i get to the

02:36:20.760 kind of sermon to end this i just want to part of why i want to say it feels almost sacrilegious

02:36:26.520 is uh it's kind of like a grave site almost but in the west the reason we feel we view graves as 0.97

02:36:36.380 spooky and bad and off-limits is because, you know, Germanic peoples in Asatru would go and

02:36:44.160 commune with their ancestors by doing things like sleeping on top of barrows, or going and

02:36:50.640 visiting graves to speak to the dead there, or just doing things around the sites of their dead.

02:36:56.520 And that was relatively mundane, in a sense, and normal to do. And when Christianity came along, 0.98

02:37:01.980 that sort of behavior was not allowed because it's literally paganism so that's an important

02:37:09.260 point to make before chris gets to his um denouement here um

02:37:19.980 there is an interesting interplay between what christianity has attempted to teach us

02:37:28.860 is spooky or bad or diabolic literally

02:37:38.940 utasetta mound sitting communing with our ancestors who passed beyond the veil in graveyards

02:37:50.460 guys beautiful and i feel

02:37:52.220 the least thing i could imagine feeling in a graveyard is scared or unsettled

02:38:05.340 and i run into this because some of you may know my family and i recently moved down here to

02:38:11.260 to Gainesboro, Tennessee, really close to Sickerhaim.

02:38:17.880 And at Sickerhaim, we inherited a family graveyard on the site.

02:38:26.600 And it has 16 souls are interred out there.

02:38:32.000 One of them, a Revolutionary War veteran,

02:38:34.640 which is exciting this year at the 250th anniversary of our nation.

02:38:44.240 Mr. Yelveton Neville, we spent a lot of time out there

02:38:49.580 kind of clearing out graveyard stuff and overgrowth

02:38:52.740 and trying to take care of the space,

02:38:54.780 and I interred my mother's ashes out there.

02:38:58.380 And I have my daughter with me,

02:39:00.480 and there's whatever to be spooky about graveyards.

02:39:04.640 But no, that's where we do our rituals oftentimes at Zingerhang.

02:39:09.720 It's where we go to celebrate spending time with those honored men that have passed.

02:39:19.640 There is an enforced thing within Christianity to separate us between us and our ancestors.

02:39:30.120 and i think this is akin to the i believe it's in matthew that i come not to their peace but a sword

02:39:38.360 to separate you know various family members no we commune with the dead there we celebrate

02:39:46.280 the honor to pass beyond the veil and it's such a special thing that we're able to do at um

02:39:55.080 At Odenshof, we have three of our loved ones who are interred there.

02:40:06.080 At Thorshof, we have one gentleman, Philip Bethay, who is interred there at Thorshof.

02:40:15.080 And we have, again, 16 at Sigurheim.

02:40:19.080 We have two at Njordshof.

02:40:20.080 So having the opportunity to commune with the dead that we cherish who are beyond the veil is a special and celebrated thing amongst Alcetor, but it's terrifying amongst the followers of Christ, and I think that's an important thing for us to keep in mind. 0.57

02:40:42.420 And there is a sanctity of holy ground like Saxonite, but having German women and kids playing and walking their dogs and going for a jog and spending time there, that's a beautiful thing to our ancestors. 0.74

02:41:09.240 And its existence in this day and age is a real testimony to the memorial that folks put into effect in the 1930s to celebrate these people.

02:41:25.080 And that's a noble thing that they did and something that we certainly want to celebrate and do our part to acknowledge in our time.

02:41:39.140 Chris has vanished on us after his amazing presentation.

02:41:44.820 He'll be back with the thrilling conclusion here momentarily.

02:41:49.720 I am looking at the side chat.

02:41:52.140 It's fine. I appreciate you joining us tonight.

02:41:57.500 Where are we at on stuff we can answer in Chris's absence?

02:42:08.240 I'm sorry, as I'm looking at the chat on the backside, trying to find a spot where we can go for something.

02:42:16.560 All right. So Jill, you may notice Jill, our newest apprentice folk builder from the eastern Pennsylvania area.

02:42:25.840 She's been doing great things. Find yourself in that part of the United States.

02:42:29.800 Please come out to her things. And she asks, and I believe she's asking us over on Rumble.

02:42:38.240 for Chris and Matt

02:42:40.440 for us living folk who posted

02:42:42.260 and participated in Ausatru

02:42:44.260 which

02:42:46.400 top three lessons

02:42:48.240 do you think the loyal 0.99

02:42:50.260 Saxons leave behind for us 0.61

02:42:52.280 during our moats 1.00

02:42:54.420 bloat and

02:42:56.080 sumble. All my best

02:42:58.520 Jill. Jill

02:43:00.300 you're awesome. You're doing amazing things

02:43:02.300 we appreciate you very much

02:43:03.900 so it's a challenging thing because you

02:43:06.180 asked for three

02:43:08.220 So let me think for a second.

02:43:14.520 The first, I would say, be loud and proud about your faith.

02:43:23.600 Today we don't face the same consequences that these brave men face.

02:43:30.080 But the principle is still there.

02:43:32.460 There is a fear factor or at least a discomfort oftentimes in saying openly before whoever's in front of you, hey, what church do you go to?

02:43:48.740 What religion are you?

02:43:50.620 I'm Mousetre.

02:43:52.120 I am true to the I-seer.

02:43:55.680 And having whatever degree of awkward that conversation might be.

02:43:59.920 i have that conversation with my chiropractor this morning it's not comfortable it's strange

02:44:07.660 you have to explain stuff to an audience that may not know

02:44:11.780 if these men can sacrifice the head from their shoulders the very least we can do

02:44:21.660 is feel awkward for a few minutes as we explain our faith to somebody who might be curious

02:44:30.560 We can do at least that much.

02:44:37.080 Other things.

02:44:40.660 I suppose standing against opposition.

02:44:45.520 When others would criticize our faith or call us names or say that we're racist or that we're, you know, whatever names they want to call us.

02:44:59.620 To bear the burden of that, and to stand strong for the Aesir, even when people are calling us names, I think that is another courageous lesson to learn from these brave men who sacrificed their lives for their loyalty.

02:45:16.920 I'll venture this

02:45:26.660 and maybe it's because I'm

02:45:28.660 several

02:45:29.440 beer hoves

02:45:33.060 in

02:45:33.840 so

02:45:38.180 Schutzoffel's motto

02:45:41.020 was my

02:45:41.840 by honor's loyalty

02:45:44.820 there's something to be said by identifying yourself by your loyalty these loyal saxons

02:45:53.400 did that at the cost of their lives choosing in this day and age where it might be uncomfortable

02:46:00.500 to stand for our faith or our folk to be loyal and to make that loyalty the defining characteristic

02:46:11.120 of our people and of who we are as Alcetreur,

02:46:15.540 I think is a good lesson that we all can learn.

02:46:20.040 Those are my three.

02:46:22.620 Now that Chris has returned to us and is well hydrated,

02:46:28.040 Chris, before you get to your denouement here,

02:46:32.160 what would you say the three lessons that we can learn 0.99

02:46:36.420 from the loyal Saxons of the Blood Court of Verdun 0.92

02:46:40.880 What three lessons can we learn from you? 0.97

02:46:47.960 Putting me on the spot here. 0.98

02:46:49.880 Having to go do baby stuff.

02:46:52.260 Absolutely.

02:46:56.660 There are things better than comfort and things worse than pain.

02:47:03.180 Those are two.

02:47:04.240 um i think it's important to keep in mind what loyalty entails there was an older generation

02:47:16.440 of asatru that very often thought of it as entailing an antinomianism there's no rules

02:47:24.120 complete freedom i can do whatever i want and they said that asatru would ask nothing of you

02:47:31.020 that it would require nothing of you that the gods would only ever give you things and it's

02:47:35.340 true that the gods give you things and i believe i've gotten many great boons from them i'm very

02:47:39.460 thankful for that but it's also true that things things that matter ask things of you

02:47:49.860 they require you to do things you need to do things for them and

02:47:55.160 the hardships that you suffer in doing those things

02:48:01.760 vastly outweigh the hardships that you suffer from not doing them

02:48:07.440 I think that most of us today will have never will never have any anything near 1.00

02:48:21.760 accept my religion or i'll cut your head off and chop your body up and chuck it out in the woods 1.00

02:48:27.600 and i honestly really do hope that that never happens to anyone who hears who listens to this 1.00

02:48:33.760 i i don't want anyone to get their head i don't want to get anyone i don't want anyone to be

02:48:38.080 threatened but beheading but it is a question of are you willing to do what it takes to do the

02:48:48.180 right thing are you willing to take a stand when it's meaningful to do so most of us

02:48:58.440 vast majority of us do not face things like beheading

02:49:03.300 the and this gets into what i'm going to talk about in a minute so i'm

02:49:09.960 the 4,500

02:49:16.540 it's your fault for having to take a

02:49:18.580 bathroom break

02:49:19.580 I had to take a baby break

02:49:21.300 either way it's the price of being a father

02:49:24.480 anyways

02:49:25.360 the 4,500

02:49:28.580 heroes we're talking about tonight

02:49:30.520 they chose to get beheaded

02:49:34.440 over apostasy

02:49:36.540 after

02:49:38.580 fighting a defensive battle they could have just knelt to the bandits and let whatever happened

02:49:46.480 happen they could have just knelt to charlemagne and let whatever happened happen they chose to

02:49:52.920 get beheaded overturning tail and being disloyal there's a lot of things we could do today that

02:50:00.880 nowhere near as onerous as that was upon would be upon us wearing your hammer out saying that 0.98

02:50:09.520 you're asitru on arbitrary forms i you go to the doctor they ask you your religion you put down

02:50:16.840 asitru you wear your hammer out you tell people that this is your religion you're probably not 0.94

02:50:25.360 to get threatened with beheading for that and there are some people who would choose beheading

02:50:34.400 or disloyalty if given the choice 0.98

02:50:38.480 i think it's important to try your damnness to live up to that 0.68

02:50:44.640 i dare say and i think it is worth saying 0.80

02:50:47.920 St. Peter

02:50:51.860 the cornerstone

02:50:55.180 that the papacy is founded upon

02:50:57.520 denied

02:50:59.740 his savior thrice

02:51:03.240 the 4,500

02:51:09.240 men who were

02:51:11.160 beheaded at the

02:51:13.040 Blood Court of Burden

02:51:14.300 refused to deny 0.86

02:51:17.200 of the divinity of the Aesir even once. 0.90

02:51:26.160 Hail the loyal Saxons. 1.00

02:51:33.500 All right.

02:51:35.940 About the heroes we're talking about today as individuals,

02:51:40.220 we know very little.

02:51:42.480 We do know, however, that they defended their people

02:51:45.120 against foreign aggression.

02:51:46.980 We do know that they fought against evil.

02:51:49.460 We do know that they chose loyalty to their gods, ancestors, and folk over apostasy, disownment, and treason.

02:51:57.160 The loyal men and women of Verdun are thus representatives or archetypes to the victims of Christianization of Europe as a whole.

02:52:05.120 They stand for all of the men and women who chose death before dishonor.

02:52:09.260 They are memorial stones for all of the men and women who died in ignominy because they

02:52:15.100 refused to be untrue. We do not know their names, but they stand tall. They were given the choice

02:52:21.180 between kneeling and being disloyal or being beheaded and remaining true. When that choice

02:52:26.380 was presented, 4,500 heads hit the ground before their knees did. In an older area of Asatru,

02:52:33.900 There was often an attitude that because the Aesir have not given us 613 mitzvot concerning minutia,

02:52:41.340 that there were no rules and that we did not have to ever do anything hard.

02:52:45.520 Our religion, some would say, never motivated us to do anything or to suffer anything.

02:52:50.660 We did not have to hold fast to anything in the face of hardship or adversity.

02:52:55.480 This is wrong.

02:52:56.920 It is wrong to say that Asachar asks nothing of us.

02:53:00.300 It does.

02:53:01.320 It is wrong to say that we have no rules to follow.

02:53:03.800 We do.

02:53:04.780 It is wrong to say that we have never have to do anything hard.

02:53:07.740 We do.

02:53:08.760 There are certainly our rewards for those struggles, but there certainly are struggles.

02:53:13.320 Sometimes good men and women are not properly rewarded for their actions.

02:53:17.020 This is a tragedy.

02:53:18.720 It is dishonorable.

02:53:20.260 It was dishonorable for Charlemagne to murder these Saxon heroes, just as it was dishonorable

02:53:24.820 for him to do much of what he did.

02:53:26.660 But it is also dishonorable that we do not know the names of these men and women today.

02:53:30.480 no one listening to this should feel responsible for that it happened long before you were born

02:53:36.240 what i want from you the listener is to understand that your duty is to make sure that this never

02:53:43.040 happens again never again charlemagne never again the raping and pillaging of the saxons

02:53:48.960 never again good men too scared to work together never again good men sent to the slaughter

02:53:54.660 never again good men and women

02:53:56.960 whose names are forgotten

02:53:57.900 that's the least that you

02:54:01.120 can do

02:54:01.740 hail the 4500 Saxon heroes

02:54:05.260 Chris

02:54:11.120 thank you so much

02:54:13.400 for an amazing

02:54:14.980 amazing lesson for all

02:54:17.240 of us tonight

02:54:18.020 sigh

02:54:20.680 there

02:54:23.080 are

02:54:23.560 Or people who suffer from are enhanced by your tism.

02:54:38.060 And so there's some of us that nerd out over history.

02:54:42.680 There's a lot of us that may not know these things.

02:54:45.340 thank you for being a guide through these you know quote-unquote dark ages for our people

02:54:55.400 a lot of people it's the first time they encounter this information and your

02:55:01.900 masquerade of it is a boon to the folk and to me personally thank you chris we appreciate you

02:55:13.480 you're welcome so we have a few questions kind of stacking up hill of a 4 500

02:55:33.080 it's sobering one of the reasons that charlemagne was so

02:55:38.040 pissed off to conduct such massacre as chris mentioned earlier he had a lot of stuff to do

02:55:50.680 on the various frontiers of his rome and he'd subdue the saxons and then he'd go do something

02:55:57.800 else and they would continue being austral you'd have to come back and try to beat them up again

02:56:05.480 and again

02:56:07.060 and again

02:56:08.620 and finally out of frustration

02:56:10.900 he

02:56:12.440 expressed that frustration

02:56:15.640 and bloodletting

02:56:16.820 but even

02:56:19.360 one of his

02:56:21.560 most loyal

02:56:22.640 most loyal men

02:56:26.620 Alcuin

02:56:27.320 he had a

02:56:30.000 two chroniclers

02:56:31.920 the cleric

02:56:34.580 alcuin who i believe was from england and the uh like scald chronicler

02:56:52.340 the name will come to me here in a second i apology i apologize it's kind hard um anyways

02:57:00.340 he had a chronicler and a clergyman that was with him but alcuin was so offended and he mentioned

02:57:07.780 that faith was like you can force them to be baptized but you can't force them to believe

02:57:15.220 was a close approximation of what he said to uh the holy roman the first holy roman ever

02:57:21.620 and it expressed to the mightiest ruler in europe a limit to his power he could make people do a

02:57:37.700 certain function but he couldn't force the minds and the hearts of men to embrace his faith and

02:57:46.480 not the faith they know to be true.

02:57:51.160 So I think that's really important to know.

02:57:54.360 I want to go back on trying to find some of the questions that we have this evening.

02:58:01.980 Also, kind of a random side note.

02:58:04.420 You guys have been exceptionally generous tonight.

02:58:08.320 Thank you for that.

02:58:09.400 We appreciate it tremendously.

02:58:12.560 Some guys may not realize.

02:58:14.720 I think our founder and I in, Chris can tell us the year.

02:58:26.380 I want to say 2014.

02:58:29.340 Chris may tell us 2013.

02:58:33.820 I'm an old man who's five beers in, so give me that.

02:58:40.320 And they're potent, too.

02:58:41.440 So, the beer hug people make delicious libations.

02:58:47.500 So anyways, when we were in Westphalia and Lower Saxon,

02:58:53.020 we got a tremendous sense of the idea of the sacred center,

02:59:03.120 of a coalescing of,

02:59:14.140 to harken back to an eternal discussion,

02:59:18.300 vril, und, oder,

02:59:24.100 spiritual might emanating from a central axis.

02:59:28.920 A lot of that has gone into the planning, preparation, and conceptualization of Sigerheim, the home of victory here in Tennessee.

02:59:40.920 So, these currents, though they seem deep in antiquity of our time, affect us and animate

02:59:56.720 movements within our folk even today.

03:00:01.640 To look at a few things that we have in our chat, here's first questions.

03:00:09.960 And also, just in case I forgot to say it, thank you guys for being so generous tonight.

03:00:16.460 Your donations make a difference.

03:00:19.040 We appreciate them.

03:00:23.720 Thank you guys so much.

03:00:26.640 I know.

03:00:30.200 It is humbling to me.

03:00:32.040 So this year is, next month will be 10 years since I've been the al-Sheria-Gothia of the Austrian Folkism.

03:00:43.740 I've seen how far we've come.

03:00:48.040 I've seen the generosity, the piety, and the seriousness of our membership increase in that time

03:00:56.580 in a truly miraculous fashion.

03:01:02.040 So thank you all for being a part of that.

03:01:07.020 So we have a wild backstage chat tonight, more so than normal.

03:01:19.900 I apologize for taking me a second to find where the questions are.

03:01:25.520 From Austin, we have,

03:01:27.040 Greetings, all.

03:01:28.960 Hope your evening is going well.

03:01:30.600 What would you say to the people that say Europeans could not accomplish anything worthwhile and would have remained uncivilized barbarians without the conversion to Christianity?

03:01:45.140 Thank you all.

03:01:47.720 Thank you all you do.

03:01:50.140 I believe he means thank you all for what you do.

03:01:53.780 But Chris, what say you?

03:01:57.200 um i don't mean to correct the asker but people don't say that no one actually believes that

03:02:07.280 that is nonsense rhetoric and ideology that people on the internet come up with

03:02:14.020 because they're confronted with reality not uh aligning with their ideologies

03:02:19.640 actual christians don't say that they don't think like that they don't think that europeans are a

03:02:28.620 thing they don't think the non-europeans are a thing chris keeping it up

03:02:33.380 keeping it 100 as they say

03:02:39.160 but if they did what would the rhetoric

03:02:46.760 i don't want to use profanity on this program i have refrained i think githya erickson was

03:02:54.620 the first one to speak profanity on the program so open a book they're just wrong

03:03:03.740 um the idea of barbarism itself is silly it's based on 0.98

03:03:11.400 homosexual Greeks 1.00

03:03:14.780 being mad that people drank 1.00

03:03:16.660 their wine at full strength

03:03:18.540 and not watered down

03:03:20.080 so

03:03:22.160 I think that

03:03:28.760 one of the blessings

03:03:30.740 that in

03:03:32.260 forever 1.00

03:03:33.840 the Jehovah's Witness

03:03:36.040 I respect you guys

03:03:38.800 they decided to take modern christianity

03:03:46.120 strip it of all of the paganism 0.99

03:03:52.540 that for the last 2 000 years have been a part of it and keep it biblical and it sucks 0.96

03:04:03.720 Biblical Christianity is not appealing to the Western mind and psyche and the warrior ethos that is defined in the West.

03:04:16.200 The defining current that has shaped Western Europe, and Central Europe for that matter, shoot, and Eastern Europe for that matter, has been our Aryan roots to the Aesir. 0.84

03:04:36.940 you find the Middle Eastern communism 0.61

03:04:44.600 that is Christianity setting in very late in our development 1.00

03:04:48.920 and after immense bloodletting 0.99

03:04:52.600 of our bravest and our best 0.88

03:04:56.020 the Christianity that developed in early medieval Europe

03:05:03.320 east, west, or central

03:05:06.940 is a reflection of our soul as was shaped by Oven, Billy, and Veid

03:05:15.540 on those distant shores so long ago.

03:05:20.620 That warrior ethos that brought all of the amazing things we celebrate

03:05:26.700 has zero to do with the Rabbi Yeshua 1.00

03:05:32.340 and everything to do with the blood of the Iser 0.99

03:05:36.180 coursing in our veins. 1.00

03:05:38.740 Those people are silly and foolish. 1.00

03:05:42.300 And if you compare them to Middle Eastern Christianity, 1.00

03:05:46.260 Coptic Christianity, Korean Christianity, 1.00

03:05:50.080 outside of their super swole Jesus they got, 1.00

03:05:54.100 because that Jesus has been hitting the bench press pretty hard.

03:05:58.300 um no that is our folks shining through despite middle eastern opposition

03:06:08.100 so i i you know we could come up with rude and cur and uh coarse anecdotes towards it

03:06:21.220 They are simply wrong and very misguided.

03:06:26.300 Medieval Christianity and the development of Western civilization

03:06:30.240 has very little to do with Levantine Jesus until very recently.

03:06:41.080 And all those things we see recently define as literally the fall of Western civilization.

03:06:48.400 So those people are confused.

03:06:51.220 Um, the next question we've got. So here's a more controversial one, and Chris will get your take on it first. And this kind of came up, I don't know if this is the weft of erther or what, but this came up in a men's chat in our MeWe chat today.

03:07:16.560 I've heard talk in the past about how the AFA will not perform a marriage ceremony that isn't legally binding.

03:07:25.600 How is paying Zod, the Zionist-occupied government, for those that aren't in the loop, for a marriage license a good thing?

03:07:35.460 All I'm seeing are potential negatives. 0.78

03:07:38.300 What is the benefit of this legal arrangement?

03:07:40.860 It doesn't keep anyone from cheating or leaving.

03:07:44.740 It doesn't even punish them.

03:07:46.560 why wouldn't you just live your life and have strong families without one 0.99

03:07:54.000 christopher what say you as man and husband so i wanna okay okay so he says why pay zog

03:08:06.720 for the license i paid twenty dollars for the marriage license when i got married that's

03:08:14.160 that's not a lot of money. People don't get married all that often. This is not a significant

03:08:20.680 source of revenue for the state government. When you get married in the U.S., you get a marriage

03:08:26.260 license from a state. I don't know how it works in the military, but you get married in a state

03:08:33.840 and other states assent to that marriage. I am married in the state of Michigan. I'm not married

03:08:39.920 in the state of Texas. I'm not married in the state of Utah. Those states do not have any record

03:08:45.660 of me being married. They do assent to whatever I produce when I give them my Michigan marriage

03:08:52.780 license. So you're not funding the U.S. federal government or any other singular organization

03:09:00.340 other than your state government. And quite frankly, you're not really funding the state

03:09:05.360 government either the cost of the marriage license goes to paying the wages of the county clerks

03:09:12.320 who work at the county clerk's office you're basically paying 20 bucks to the gal at the

03:09:20.040 front desk so that she can file paperwork um when i went to the county clerks in the county that i

03:09:28.280 went to each as an aside for those who don't know and for any european listeners every single

03:09:35.340 US state does this differently they have their own bureaucracy in place their own

03:09:40.740 fee schedules their own setup in Michigan you have to tell them the date

03:09:44.760 you're getting married and it can be it has to be 30 days out it has like a

03:09:50.020 limit has to be within 30 to 60 days so you can't get a marriage license a year

03:09:54.520 in advance you also can't get a week in advance you need to do it a month to two

03:09:58.200 months in advance over a month less than two months or something like that you

03:10:03.460 have to go to the county clerk's office of whatever county you live in either of you the man can go to

03:10:09.760 the husband or wife's county of residence their county clerk um that really sucks if your county

03:10:16.000 clerk's office for your county is in a city with a bad parking setup it's not legally possible to

03:10:23.020 get married in the state of michigan outside of the state of michigan so i could not go to i'm 0.76

03:10:29.380 just making this up texas with my wife and have a wedding there that would technically be illegal

03:10:35.160 we have to you have to physically get married in the state of michigan but of course there's no

03:10:41.080 record of where you're getting married just like how there's no record of who is an officiant to

03:10:47.320 marry someone in the state of michigan so when uh when specklinger clifford erickson performed

03:10:54.940 to the wedding ceremony, he wrote down

03:10:56.940 I can't remember if he wrote down

03:10:58.720 Witten or Goethe, but title

03:11:01.000 Clifford Erickson as the officiant.

03:11:04.960 The state of Michigan really does. No way of

03:11:06.960 confirming or denying that he is actually

03:11:09.300 the individual he says he is

03:11:11.160 or that he

03:11:13.120 holds that title, but theoretically

03:11:14.760 I can do it.

03:11:16.820 As the person who

03:11:19.220 legitimizes said

03:11:21.160 title or not,

03:11:22.700 they do in fact i i'm going there i'm going there they don't not pause because you didn't

03:11:31.740 and you suggested that wasn't the case we really do fill out with our and we have um cards that

03:11:41.580 earth are yet that state like our 501c3 registry and my contact information so literally the state

03:11:53.180 of michigan can call me up personally and say hey you are the head of this church is speckinger

03:12:04.140 Erickson entitled to bestow the sacrament of marriage upon Chris and his wife and I can say

03:12:13.020 no who is this cliff guy that's absurd or I can ratify yes in fact a priest of the Iseer

03:12:22.760 and I stand by his ordination and again I know that I'm presenting it in a funny way

03:12:29.460 But it's deadly serious to me.

03:12:35.080 We are a real church.

03:12:38.320 We have a legitimate 501c3 designation.

03:12:43.620 I am a recognized, as is Cliff, man of the cloth, with the power in the state of Michigan,

03:12:51.800 and in every state where we register and certify to perform legally binding unions between man and

03:13:00.560 woman. That means something. I know for our European audience, it might not, but in the

03:13:13.920 united states it has a meaning so i moved out of here from the state of nevada it's funny nevada is

03:13:22.800 a almost a comical like you go out and get drunk and get married in vegas thing

03:13:32.000 they take the power to marry or not very very seriously i performed a wedding in white pines

03:13:40.960 county nevada which is a very rural county and because of discrepancies and filings

03:13:48.320 no the state was going to hold me legally accountable and with possibility of jail time

03:13:56.240 for performing an illegal marriage until i demonstrated that i was in fact a legitimate

03:14:03.680 clergyman performing this sacrament it's a serious thing in the united states of america

03:14:10.720 This may be different in different nations, and I understand that, but it's worth noting.

03:14:15.900 Continue.

03:14:17.220 Right. Sorry. I'm tired. Let me amend what I was trying to say.

03:14:21.340 I'm tired, and I've got the addition of five ear hugs.

03:14:27.220 In some U.S. states, such as Arkansas, I didn't know one off the top of my head, and I had to look one up real quick.

03:14:35.740 in arkansas an officiant has to legally register with the state as getting a marriage sacrament

03:14:46.260 license you don't have to do that in michigan so in michigan you don't have to get a marriage

03:14:51.600 officiant license in order to marry people um from what i've seen if you do go to divorce court

03:15:00.240 then failure to follow technical procedure of the marriage is something you can use to get divorced.

03:15:09.540 But it's not, the government, the state of Michigan does not ask for proof that the officiant is who they say they are

03:15:18.120 or that they can perform weddings just because a marriage is occurring, right?

03:15:23.820 so what you're basically doing is really interfacing with the government in order to

03:15:31.400 get certain procedures done that let you get tax breaks um you are interfacing with the

03:15:37.160 government for certain procedures involving child custody and the like um those aren't 0.97

03:15:45.120 Negatives, those are positives for you as the men's chat was brought up. 1.00

03:15:54.700 So I'm assuming this individual is a man because typically women don't view marriage like this. 0.98

03:16:02.900 You do as a man actually get a number of benefits with or by virtue of getting married.

03:16:08.900 Again, the tax breaks are very helpful.

03:16:12.060 you get to file as a family there's a wide variety of processes and

03:16:20.640 procedures that require you to be legally married legally married in order

03:16:24.820 to take part in them those aren't negatives I guess you could argue in

03:16:32.340 abstract that it's bad that the government makes you engage with its

03:16:36.120 procedures to get those benefits, but I wouldn't say they're bad. It's really, if you were to make

03:16:43.660 that argument, you'd really be more getting upset about the government itself rather than

03:16:48.640 the benefits of it. And again, you're not really funding the federal government with the $20

03:16:56.480 marriage license. You're funding the middle-aged lady working at the clerk's office, which all of 0.62

03:17:02.040 these are on well way understaffed um there are indeed possible negatives to

03:17:10.040 getting married you could get divorced you could suffer a number of maladies

03:17:15.300 you're probably not going to though most divorces happen to a small pool of

03:17:22.220 boomers who keep divorcing and remarrying each other for the ninth time 0.79

03:17:26.160 most marriages don't actually end in divorce unless you cook the numbers a little bit

03:17:33.600 and quite frankly as a sort of theological point maybe the ulcer ago that you can clarify on this

03:17:43.700 if my sleepy rambling goes off the rails but you are swearing an oath when you get married

03:17:50.220 I swore an oath in my marriage I everyone in the AFA swores an oath when they get married

03:17:55.980 there are consequences to not fulfilling your oath.

03:18:01.160 Christopher, I shall turn your butter into ghee.

03:18:06.120 So that's the thing.

03:18:12.000 It makes it real.

03:18:14.960 Things become real when there is consequence to them.

03:18:19.540 lacking consequence

03:18:23.080 it is just kind of pretend

03:18:25.940 for many people

03:18:27.280 there is a truth

03:18:33.840 to the story 0.50

03:18:36.020 of Lord Tyr putting his hand

03:18:38.140 in the mouth of Fenrir

03:18:39.820 there's consequence

03:18:42.460 it's not

03:18:46.120 that you can't pay the consequence

03:18:48.260 but it makes it real.

03:18:54.060 Lord Tear lost his hand for consequence

03:18:57.620 because that's what it took.

03:19:03.840 I learned early on in this

03:19:07.060 and early on, I will admit in my early 20s

03:19:10.620 I had a similar view of, well, why can't I just have

03:19:14.680 our relationship be solemnized before the gods

03:19:18.100 and it's just as good as whatever.

03:19:21.800 No.

03:19:23.660 I ran into another man of our faith

03:19:26.940 and he's like, no, 0.96

03:19:28.460 my relationship with my wife

03:19:30.600 is different than you and your girlfriend.

03:19:34.480 This is real.

03:19:36.200 That's pretend.

03:19:38.000 And it was.

03:19:39.540 And it is.

03:19:41.540 There's a couple of things.

03:19:44.200 There's consequence.

03:19:45.840 When you get married,

03:19:46.680 There is a, for whatever it's worth, and there's plenty of argument to why it doesn't work out right, that it's not fair, and it penalizes men more than it does women, and cry me a river, any number of things.

03:20:05.540 Then don't get divorced.

03:20:08.320 Have a stable family that you raise your kids in.

03:20:14.580 But there's consequence.

03:20:16.680 there is a process, and it is painful and obnoxious, to go through a divorce.

03:20:25.100 So it makes it real and serious and binding.

03:20:30.820 I have met in my time in Amsterdam so many people that take oaths,

03:20:37.160 that if there's no real legal teeth to them,

03:20:41.060 they abandon those oaths as soon as they become inconvenient.

03:20:46.680 And there's a myriad of moves of mental gymnastics one does

03:20:52.320 to justify the abdication of your oath.

03:20:56.620 But when it's legal and it's real and there's actual consequence,

03:21:04.040 marriage has a weight to it.

03:21:06.920 and it in is an insult to all of us who stand as married husbands for guys that

03:21:20.240 are shacking up with chick that claim to be married no I'm a husband Chris 0.97

03:21:29.920 If you would also like to be a husband, put your hand in the wolf's mouth and become a husband.

03:21:38.980 And if you don't, then step back when the rest of us celebrate our commitment in our marriage.

03:21:46.640 It's not nice, it's not fun, but it is honest.

03:21:52.000 And it makes it real.

03:21:53.720 Also, there is a tremendous value to the fact that our Gothar performed legally binding marriages. 0.99

03:22:04.520 Zog getting $20 is silly. 1.00

03:22:09.260 What Jews make money every time you go to the bank? 1.00

03:22:12.880 Lots. 0.99

03:22:14.760 What Jews make money every time you transact funds in any way you transact? 1.00

03:22:21.500 Tons. 1.00

03:22:22.380 the $20 or $100 or whatever nominal fee you pay 0.55

03:22:28.720 to certify a marriage is not enriching international Jewry. 0.75

03:22:35.640 It is making you accountable to the oaths that you make.

03:22:41.580 And the oaths that we make are far lacking in significance to the soul of our folk.

03:22:50.600 real marriage

03:22:52.980 between a real husband

03:22:55.040 and a real wife 0.80

03:22:56.320 solemnized by a gothi

03:22:59.120 in front of the gods

03:23:00.900 that is legally

03:23:03.040 binding in the United States

03:23:05.220 of America

03:23:05.940 that means

03:23:09.080 something

03:23:09.900 less than that is

03:23:12.800 unacceptable

03:23:13.700 just putting it out there

03:23:16.840 it's not the answer everybody wants

03:23:18.900 to hear but it is the adult answer it's not the answer i wanted to hear when i was 20.

03:23:25.620 but it is the real answer i just want to throw in something here too

03:23:31.940 the courts do they do not favor men in uh in divorce court you know who they really don't favor

03:23:40.900 men who didn't get married if you go through and you know have a relationship that is uh i'm i'm

03:23:51.580 quoting more so what the ulcer ago they said here but you know valid in the eyes of the gods not the

03:23:56.380 government you can still get taken to court for child support or any number of things many states

03:24:03.760 have common law marriages and i'm not an attorney so i can't give you a precise number but many of

03:24:09.640 them have what is de facto common law marriage where yeah you were living together for 10 years

03:24:14.960 you have three kids so we're just going to treat it as if you're married even though common law

03:24:19.100 marriage isn't a thing you do have protection as a man by getting married you can these systems

03:24:28.940 they do not favor men but they really look down upon men that are simply put to use the language

03:24:38.040 of the people who would be a pro or would be in favor of not favoring men they really look down

03:24:45.400 on deadbeats right like furthermore i think this line of reasoning is kind of wrong-headed on its

03:24:56.240 face because it presumes that you shouldn't get married because you could get divorced

03:25:01.840 Most marriages do not actually end in divorce

03:25:06.340 once you remove serial divorcers

03:25:10.400 marrying each other for the ninth time. 0.93

03:25:13.740 And it's kind of silly on its face 0.94

03:25:18.500 to avoid getting married

03:25:19.900 because of the potential bad consequences.

03:25:23.220 You could get run over by a car

03:25:25.420 every time you step out of your house.

03:25:28.400 that doesn't mean you don't step out of your house it means you take precautions not to

03:25:34.340 get run over by a car we teach children to look both ways before they cross the street

03:25:40.320 we do that because there are bad consequences to doing things and those consequences can be avoided

03:25:47.100 so one of the worst things that i see

03:25:51.900 amongst your folk i get it i really do um i see so many

03:26:08.140 so many children born out of wedlock and in contentious custody struggles between parents

03:26:17.740 legally binding marriage in the United States forces a process that you don't

03:26:29.080 see otherwise it's not so and I get this too as a man it's not fair doesn't play

03:26:46.360 out fair you're not treated fairly so don't get divorced I'm saying that as a

03:26:59.800 man who has been divorced I get it I got legally married I got a legal divorce

03:27:10.240 from my wife I have now legally married for a second time this time it is to the

03:27:21.460 mother of my child legal things are in place for reason and they cut against me

03:27:30.160 and often but they also hold people accountable to the oaths that they

03:27:36.300 when we get in

03:27:42.780 and this sounds absurd but it's the immediate thing that comes to mind

03:27:48.780 when you're in elementary school on the playground kids get married to other kids

03:27:56.380 it's pretend and it's fun you play and you play in the sand and you go down the slide

03:28:03.660 you go home and it's not real actually legal binding marriage is a real thing we should

03:28:14.060 celebrate that institution while it has weight in our society don't marry foolishly 0.54

03:28:25.180 choose wisely

03:28:28.100 who you have children with 0.93

03:28:30.100 but a real marriage

03:28:32.840 where there's real consequence

03:28:34.900 is an entirely different animal

03:28:38.680 than not real marriage

03:28:42.180 as somebody who's had plenty of girlfriends

03:28:46.620 in their time

03:28:47.740 who's been divorced once

03:28:50.760 who is now married for

03:28:53.780 nine years next month to the mother of my child,

03:28:59.820 I feel like I can speak on that authoritatively

03:29:04.040 and be listened to.

03:29:06.120 I hope that you hear what I'm saying.

03:29:10.120 Consequence is what makes things viscerally real.

03:29:16.560 And my wife and I are bonded in matrimony

03:29:20.240 before our gods, officiated by our law speaker.

03:29:23.780 but also in accordance with the laws of the United States of America. 0.81

03:29:29.420 And yes, the Zionist-occupied government

03:29:32.100 got 20 bucks from us, or whatever. 0.79

03:29:38.040 I spent 20 bucks, shoot, I spent four times that today at Walmart.

03:29:44.260 It's not that.

03:29:48.020 Chris, do you have anything to add?

03:29:49.860 I have waxed over long on this.

03:29:52.280 I want to throw in two things here. Yes, the courts disfavor men in these situations. They disfavor white people in these situations. They could just as soon disfavor people for a lot of reasons and favor people for a lot of reasons.

03:30:07.420 not living because you could be discriminated against is silly

03:30:15.540 i also i want to just reframe this for a minute here

03:30:21.940 you know who divorce really screws up screws up children it actually it also actually really 1.00

03:30:30.900 screws up women. Statistically, women suffer greatly from divorce. It might not seem that way 1.00

03:30:39.960 to men, but if you look at the outcomes of divorce for women, they are not pretty. Women do a lot 1.00

03:30:46.960 worse off after getting divorced than men do. Most women suffer more than men do in the long

03:30:54.460 term from getting divorced. Now, I'm not saying that, like, oh, you should get married because

03:30:59.980 it's a weapon to use against your spouse in a divorce that's looking at this wrong it gives

03:31:06.760 gravity and consequence to an arrangement that quite frankly i actually had this thought when

03:31:12.880 i was going through getting married why does the government let us do this like this is a lot of

03:31:19.640 work and a lot of a lot of bureaucratic procedure and there's tax breaks and there's privileges for

03:31:28.020 for married people. There's benefits with health care. Here's the thing. If you get health care

03:31:33.860 through your employer, your wife and kids can get it if you're married. They can't get it if you're

03:31:39.220 not. Why does the government let us do that? Honestly, the fact that the government lets us

03:31:46.220 do this is a really weird benefit that they give us in a certain sense. I was working for the other

03:31:55.280 team, if I was on team evil, this would be one of the things I'd want to get rid of. Because

03:32:00.400 if you do it right, it's really helpful for you and your spouse and your kids, and it makes

03:32:07.860 everything better. So yes, it can be dangerous. A lot of things can be dangerous. But rather than

03:32:18.360 thinking about what could go wrong all the time stop and ask yourself what could go right

03:32:27.640 so jv i want to i want to put this and thank you for this discussion i think it's very honest and i

03:32:34.120 don't this isn't contentious at all um from our end

03:32:41.560 because we live in a political system

03:32:50.220 that we feel has let us down in so many ways

03:32:55.580 and so far from what we feel is natural

03:33:01.660 or right or good

03:33:04.020 it's easy to suggest like nah screw all that i'm just going to get married in the backyard

03:33:14.060 between me and the gods and government doesn't matter

03:33:17.660 as men we know better than that and it's our job as the head of the household

03:33:30.380 sold to be honest with ourselves about the situation we face.

03:33:40.620 You mentioned YPZOG, what if it wasn't ZOG?

03:33:47.260 What if it wasn't the Zionist-occupied government? 0.92

03:33:51.780 What if it was, as our founders intended, a government made up of landowning, free white 0.73

03:34:03.840 citizens of the United States? 0.75

03:34:07.480 I think in that circumstance, we would want to be married legally.

03:34:13.180 What if we were in a kingdom of our people, with a king descended from the All-Father?

03:34:21.360 want to be married legally the resistance is because the system we live in is screwed up

03:34:29.760 and i wish it wasn't

03:34:33.520 being legally married versus and i don't mean this rudely but pretend to marry it matters

03:34:44.160 i've been pretend married and i've been legally married it matters

03:34:51.360 and we all know it matters.

03:34:56.760 We may have resentment for the rule

03:34:59.900 that we find ourselves under,

03:35:01.840 and I get that.

03:35:03.040 I'm very sympathetic.

03:35:06.100 But there's real or not real.

03:35:09.180 We owe it to our wives.

03:35:10.700 We owe it to our children

03:35:12.480 for us to be in a real marriage

03:35:17.740 and to make it work.

03:35:21.360 all the arguments and all the concerns other than

03:35:26.880 buying somebody a new dreidel with your 20 bucks

03:35:32.880 cool you know spin to your heart's content it's 20 bucks i'm not that cheap

03:35:40.720 making it real versus not real is something we owe our lives and our children

03:35:44.880 if you don't want it weaponized against you and choose your partner correctly

03:35:51.200 again I'm on my second marriage I'm not telling you I'm better than everybody else I'm not

03:35:59.280 I am so blessed that Mandy and I are united by faith and values and the things necessary to

03:36:12.760 raise our daughter. Find that for yourself. Let us help you with that. But it's real or

03:36:21.520 not real. And I think we all feel the gravity of that. But again, I wax overly verbose when

03:36:35.600 the beer hug isn't pointing. So we don't have a lot of questions tonight, so I am kind of

03:36:43.040 entertaining. There's a number of things. Also with the marriages, there are benefits that do

03:36:50.020 factor in. With the homosexual incursion into the marriage space, some of those benefits are 1.00

03:36:59.100 diluted sucks but this one it is um question from wanderer do you believe the political conversion 0.95

03:37:14.700 harold clack while in exile in 826 to secure an alliance with the carolingians to retake 0.93

03:37:24.140 denmark sparked a domino effect that led to the conversion of later scandinavian kings

03:37:32.700 or were there more isolated and independent decisions christopher what say you

03:37:41.740 yes to both um with scandinavia in this isn't this episode wasn't about scandinavia so i don't

03:37:51.020 want to go too much without having like a kind of prepared thing on it but with scandinavia in

03:37:59.660 particular by the time that christianity started making inroads there there were multiple christian

03:38:06.540 powers that could essentially pull apart scandinavia there was continental germany

03:38:13.580 there was the vatican itself denmark as you point out had become christian relatively early through

03:38:18.860 the Franks, but then there was also the French. There were the Anglo-Saxons, there were the Scots,

03:38:23.500 there were the Irish. If you were a Scandinavian warlord with a particularly loose attachment to

03:38:30.460 the Isere, you actually had a lot of people you could get backing from. Scandinavia was also

03:38:37.580 pretty far away from most of these places, unless it was Denmark, but you know what I mean. That

03:38:42.780 That meant that you didn't really have to do a lot other than profess Christianity to whatever your patron saw as acceptable, which meant whatever for whoever, right?

03:38:56.700 So, yes, I don't think it's as simple as, oh, well, if Harold Glack had died on the way to the Carolingian capital, then this wouldn't have happened.

03:39:07.000 And I think there were other entry points and vectors, but yes, I think this would have certainly impacted Denmark, which would have impacted southern Sweden, which would have impacted southern Norway, and so on.

03:39:20.400 I know that's kind of simplistic, but that's my answer.

03:39:37.000 Yes, so I am also, I feel like, I feel like yes, but I'm, Chris could probably bust out

03:40:00.040 really cool Latin version of this. At some point, the dais cast. And Chris busted out as soon as

03:40:12.760 you know the Latin for the phrase because it entertains me and it makes me smile. But either

03:40:19.380 Anyway, there's a situation where once conversion was on a certain course, that was going to go, the momentum was headed one direction.

03:40:37.200 If not that, it would have been something else.

03:40:41.020 It's not fatalist.

03:40:42.140 I think there could have been a stark it hitting the wall.

03:40:46.960 But if the wall doesn't happen, then the slow creek would happen.

03:40:54.240 If not with Harold, it would have happened with someone else.

03:40:59.040 Obviously, geographically, Denmark is the step between hitting Sweden and Norway and Iceland.

03:41:10.060 but if that would have been a hard no

03:41:14.120 you could have gone across at Lubeck

03:41:17.660 across to Stockholm and worked from there

03:41:20.900 I do think it was the start of something

03:41:27.540 like I said I think that's a momentum

03:41:31.040 decision more than a

03:41:34.160 man if only that would happen

03:41:37.120 and then we would have had a strong, defiant,

03:41:40.580 ous-of-truth presence.

03:41:42.460 I don't think that's fair to level on him. 0.99

03:41:46.960 Although, death to every foe and traitor, 0.99

03:41:51.840 tis the rising of the moon.

03:41:57.080 I do think that's an issue of momentum, though,

03:41:59.820 more than one specific guy at a specific place.

03:42:03.200 To put it all on his head is not fair.

03:42:07.120 sorry let me catch up with the chat for a sec

03:42:13.400 Chris you are a superstar

03:42:21.480 everybody seems to very much

03:42:23.340 enjoy your episodes as do I

03:42:25.700 you're doing an awesome job

03:42:27.300 I think that's kind of

03:42:29.600 what we've got tonight

03:42:30.980 barring

03:42:33.660 anything else

03:42:34.740 There is a question here from ML Wiz. Unless you consider the marriage stuff bookended. I'm sorry.

03:42:44.780 I thought it was, but since you opened the jar of worms, go ahead and address it. Go ahead, Chris Cook.

03:42:52.540 He says, are you tying the law around marriage to the official Ossetre stance on marriage? Does that translate to other things such as racial issues?

03:43:02.840 I'm a little too tired to have a coherent big brain answer to that I don't I don't think so

03:43:11.720 I think you and I are more so positing that it's a happy confluence of factors that the government

03:43:22.280 can put weight behind oaths because as I pointed out like the government

03:43:27.520 doesn't necessarily have to do marriage you could just not have marriage

03:43:30.940 so christopher my brain is on school the hour is late but i shall still participate

03:43:44.060 that being said i don't know if i understand the implications of the question as it was positive

03:43:53.340 But you lose everything you don't participate in, we're at a time in the United States where

03:44:06.820 our government recognizes religions officiating weddings.

03:44:18.340 We can do that, or we can choose not to.

03:44:23.700 I don't think the government has a right to invalidate or to encroach upon our understanding

03:44:31.500 of marriage, because our understanding of marriage and the government of the United

03:44:38.160 States' understanding of marriage was completely in alignment up until, I don't know, 10 years

03:44:46.700 ago i think that's legitimate the government can't force me as a gothi to solemn solemnize 0.87

03:45:01.500 solemnize a interracial marriage or a homosexual marriage i will not and our gothar will not do

03:45:11.340 such thing but we don't get to dictate to the united states what they can or can't recognize

03:45:23.820 we can occupy the space to as recognized religious authorities perform legally binding weddings and

03:45:34.140 we do. We will only provide those weddings under our belief of what marriage is between

03:45:46.080 man and woman, between white man and white woman in our context. We can't be compelled

03:45:59.840 to do other than that, and we'll maintain our right

03:46:03.840 to solemnize those unions

03:46:06.820 as best as we can.

03:46:12.200 That's significant.

03:46:17.420 It's funny, as we're having

03:46:20.020 this conversation, I look off up to my right,

03:46:23.900 and there's a...

03:46:25.940 We have to Google a couple of years ago, the copper anniversary of my wife and I.

03:46:32.800 There's a copper, there's a copper plate that's, I don't know, I don't know what the right words are,

03:46:42.620 but a photograph is inscribed on a copper plate of Mandy and I on the day of our wedding

03:46:49.980 with Alan, who was the officiant,

03:46:53.740 the goatee who solemnized our way at the time.

03:47:02.060 That's real.

03:47:06.620 Something else isn't.

03:47:11.380 Being a husband and a father is real.

03:47:16.040 we are in a place in the united states of america in 2026

03:47:24.280 where we still have the ability to make that real or not

03:47:27.620 in the afa we only solemnize real weddings 0.75

03:47:35.660 there's plenty of guys out there with a baby mama

03:47:40.940 and people they shack up with that want to claim the rights that I have.

03:47:53.620 I will fight tooth and nail for my status as a husband and father

03:48:00.080 versus baby daddy and dude who claimed he got married in the park or something.

03:48:13.800 This is real, and that's not.

03:48:17.420 It's not gatekeeping to delegitimize anyone else.

03:48:22.280 I would invite all of our men who want to take on the mantle of father

03:48:29.660 and husband to do that in a legally binding way

03:48:35.620 before our gods and before the government

03:48:39.060 of the United States of America 0.99

03:48:40.500 that may or may not be occupied by Zionists. 1.00

03:48:46.400 Make it real. 0.98

03:48:49.360 We all know there's a difference between real and not.

03:48:53.960 I'm not trying to flex on anybody that's not.

03:48:59.660 but we all know the difference join chris and i let's make it real

03:49:09.100 just to stay real just to to ml wiz he uh kind of clarifies in another message in here

03:49:18.140 i think his intention i think you answered this why wouldn't afa priests perform a marriage that

03:49:23.580 wasn't legal i think the distinction here is none of the marriages we would perform are illegal like

03:49:36.220 we only marry heterosexual white people that's not illegal so the question of would we perform

03:49:41.740 an illegal marriage is kind of moot you know like well so it's but

03:49:47.100 But is this real, or is this make-believe nonsense? 0.69

03:49:56.460 Gender-confused, pink-haired, make-believe nonsense people marry people to trees, or 0.85

03:50:04.640 to raggedy-and-raggedy-andy dolls, or to animals, or solemnized trifectas of mentally 0.93

03:50:14.740 ill fatties or whatever they do, that's not this. This is real. It's elevated, and it's

03:50:26.000 a bond between a husband and a wife. It's not the start of an ostrich family. It's one

03:50:33.580 of the reasons I'm so loathe to use the term pagan, because pagan is pink-haired, obese, 1.00

03:50:42.240 mentally ill people doing disgusting things to validate mental illness. 0.99

03:50:51.780 It's not what we're doing. 0.94

03:50:54.240 And we are blessed.

03:50:56.880 We're in a time and a place to where our marriages are legally binding.

03:51:03.420 We want to maximize that to the glory of our gods, our families,

03:51:08.820 and to make our ancestors proud of us.

03:51:13.500 And I think our ancestors would not be proud of us

03:51:17.460 with pretend marriages where real marriages are available.

03:51:32.740 And so to JV's comment,

03:51:36.300 A license does make it real. There's more that makes it more real. But whatever you call it,

03:51:47.580 if you don't have a license, mine's more real than yours. If we both have a license,

03:51:55.380 then yeah, we can find ways to make it more real and better. But as a low bar of entry,

03:52:03.160 we all know that a real marriage counts and other marriage counts less we all know that's true it

03:52:15.440 just is a boomer on their ninth marriage or some pink-haired trigly puff married to a rock

03:52:23.780 does not make my marriage less legitimate it does if your marriage was done on the playground with

03:52:31.520 whatever kid says he can marry you sure sure but but i did not have that no but that's the thing

03:52:40.320 that i say um that's one of the big differences and it sounds silly but i don't mean it that way

03:52:48.560 people have literally elementary school we got married on the playground yay

03:52:53.680 that counts just as much at whatever pagan binding ceremony you have that isn't legally

03:53:05.500 recognized. A legally recognized marriage in the United States is the thing. It has the force of

03:53:14.880 law to it. It counts. It has consequence, and it's real. We all know that's true, whether we like it

03:53:23.000 or whatever our thoughts about it,

03:53:27.540 we all know that one is real

03:53:31.740 and the other is pretend.

03:53:35.440 And we know that.

03:53:37.460 And it just is.

03:53:41.000 And that's not meant as any kind of slap

03:53:43.540 to the person who asked the question.

03:53:45.300 It's not that at all.

03:53:46.520 And I don't want to come off that way.

03:53:49.380 I do owe you honesty

03:53:51.160 because that is a core value in house. And so I'm providing that the best I can.

03:54:00.940 Chris, thank you so much for coming on and presenting this information today.

03:54:08.380 We all learned so much from your presentations. Everyone loves them.

03:54:14.160 they are highly requested and sought after and celebrated you do an amazing job

03:54:22.980 can't tell you how much we appreciate it and this is a really important one and one that

03:54:31.380 I'm very excited to formally celebrate and acknowledge these 4,500 men with a day of

03:54:41.220 remembrance and hopefully it influences our folk on how they see themselves how they see loyalty

03:54:51.860 and inspires them to uh raise their loyalty to that standard so thank you chris thank you nick

03:55:02.660 for all you've done thank you to everybody who has donated so generously we appreciate everybody

03:55:09.700 i am looking forward to next week's episode with swan as we continue our

03:55:16.580 study of the guilt beginning everybody go to your hall celebrate summer now

03:55:25.540 it's a fun and exciting day to celebrate with you and your family to kick off summer

03:55:32.100 in an auspicious

03:55:33.960 and right way. Go to your

03:55:35.880 Hoff. Make an happen.

03:55:37.660 If you can, show it to New York's Hoff.

03:55:40.000 I would love to see you there.

03:55:42.060 If not, I'll talk to you next Wednesday.

03:55:45.200 Hell the ISEER. 1.00

03:55:46.560 Hell the FOLK. Hell the 1.00

03:55:47.880 AFA. And remember,

03:55:49.940 bakery never sleeps.

03:55:51.200 Hail.

03:56:02.100 We'll be right back.

03:56:32.100 Thank you.

03:57:02.100 Thank you.

03:57:32.100 Thank you.

03:58:02.100 Thank you.

03:58:32.100 Transcription by CastingWords

Asatru Folk Assembly - May 14, 2026

5⧸13⧸26 Victory Never Sleeps, Ep 201 - The Loyal Saxons

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