Asatru Folk Assembly - September 18, 2023


That Could Well Cost You Your Life (from VNS Episode 62)


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

103.31793

Word count

902

Sentence count

34


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 Before we get too far in the weeds, Eric, if you could talk to folks about our heroine of the
00:00:15.820 evening today, Queen Sigrid, if you could just kind of give people a rundown if they've never
00:00:22.720 heard of her and are completely unfamiliar with her or even Austertru for that matter and happen
00:00:27.000 be tuning into the program yeah so um so we're going to speak about uh queen sigrid or as she's
00:00:37.640 also um also known as uh sigrid the haughty which we will get into why she received that nickname
00:00:45.080 and when we're talking about her life we're talking about the late 1900s and the early 1000s
00:00:52.280 So Sigrid was a Swedish noblewoman and was first married to King Erik Segersell, or Erik the Victorious, whom she had their son with, Olaf Schötung.
00:01:11.280 Unfortunately, Erik passed away from illness after some time, and Queen Sigrid was left without a husband.
00:01:21.100 And it is said that she retreated to her estate and that her position and her wealth drew in the attention of many suitors.
00:01:33.860 unfortunately for these suitors and perhaps for Sigrid herself as well was that these were suitors
00:01:42.160 that were not up to her standard. She considered them to be not high enough born. They were sort
00:01:51.220 of these low-born nobles is what she thought of them as. And besides that, they were also
00:01:58.880 poor of manners. And this is where her nickname comes in, is that there were two suitors that
00:02:08.120 were especially atrocious towards her. And so she decided that she was going to make an example out
00:02:17.100 of them. So she invited these two suitors to a feast and had them served great meals and a lot
00:02:27.920 of alcohol and waited until they drunk themselves into a stupor before she had them locked inside
00:02:34.760 the building and had it set on fire, burning them to death. And she was hoping that this would
00:02:40.680 put an end to all the proposals that were pouring in from these poor-mannered suitors.
00:02:47.940 And this is where she gets her nickname the Haughty from. But Sigrid did eventually agree
00:02:56.360 to marry Olav Tryggvason, who ended up not being deterred
00:03:02.080 by the fact that the queen had killed two of her suitors already.
00:03:07.760 And they did meet up and were going through the marriage ceremony
00:03:14.180 when it turns out that Sigrid was not willing to convert to Christianity,
00:03:23.160 which Olav had already converted to Christianity.
00:03:26.360 and was a big player in the Christianization of Northern Europe.
00:03:33.360 And when Olaf learned that she would in fact not convert to Christianity, she refused,
00:03:40.360 he was enraged, outraged, and was so outraged that he ended up slapping Queen Sigurd in her face,
00:03:50.360 asking why he would ever marry a heathen dog.
00:03:54.360 And supposedly, Queen Sigrid answered that this display might very well spell the end of Olav, that it was going to likely be his death.
00:04:08.360 And so, needless to say, this marriage did not turn out to be a marriage, and they parted ways, but Sigrid did not forget this slight and was not going to let it slide.
00:04:25.020 And she did end up remarrying, ended up remarrying the king of Denmark, Sven Tveschegg, or Forkbeard.
00:04:35.120 And Sven already had animosity towards Olav, who had married Sven's sister.
00:04:43.000 And so Sigrid found fertile ground when she convinced her new husband and also enlisted the help of her son, Olof, whom she'd had with Erik the Victorious, to go into warfare or go into war with Olof.
00:05:06.680 And this they did, they got together, so we have Sven Tversheg and we have Olof and then we also have the Swedish Jarl Erik HÃ¥konsson, who was a son-in-law to Sven.
00:05:26.680 and the three of them ambushed Olav out in sea.
00:05:32.500 And this was the Battle of Svolder,
00:05:34.980 which is one of the great maritime battles of ancient times.
00:05:41.060 And Queen Sigrid's words came true.
00:05:45.320 Olav was overwhelmed by the force that had been gathered,
00:05:51.040 And supposedly he threw himself overboard as they were taking his ship.
00:05:57.580 He threw himself overboard, fully armored into the sea, as he said that he'd rather die by his own hand than be killed by his enemy.
00:06:08.380 And with his reign coming to an end, the spoils of war were then shared between these three men that had defeated him in battle.
00:06:29.940 All right.
00:06:38.380 important for a lot of a lot of reasons but
00:06:46.460 the value that she placed on herself and her dignity and realizing her worth and
00:06:58.780 refusing to compromise on the things that were fundamental to her value and
00:07:03.100 in things that were important to her in her life are why her name echoes through the ages and why
00:07:08.940 we celebrate her standing firm for our gods even when it wasn't convenient um and holding holding
00:07:18.940 true to them is uh certainly something worth celebrating um and i think
00:07:27.820 I think she was certainly our first female or our first heroine in our heroes that we honor with a day of remembrance, followed by the folk mother years later.
00:07:43.840 But it's really a testament to loyalty, I'd say, in a lot of ways, troth with our gods.
00:07:55.840 She was true to the Iser, whereas it's easy to say, but it's much harder to do when you're on the spot.
00:08:05.820 So, yeah, she's very inspirational, especially for our young ladies and daughters.
00:08:13.840 We'll be right back.