… and teaching with historical accuracy in the twenty first century

In 2018, I opened my Forest School here in Sweden. At the time, I could foresee many challenges: students getting lost in the dense Nordic forest surrounding my school, students encountering moose, wolves and lynxes (and other wild animals), or perhaps students getting disoriented by the midnight sun. Even encounters with tiny creatures can be problematic, think of ticks.

Some of these things actually happened: one student, called Peter, encountered a lone wolf late at night (but being Dutch, he initially took it for a “lost dog”). So yes, we had “Peter and the Wolf” (a famous piece of music by Prokofiev). Another student encountered three (juvenile) brown bears immediately behind my house. When she shared her experience in class, I assumed she’d had an interesting “shamanic journey in the Forest”, but then our neighbour sent me a picture of bear tracks left on the muddy shore of our lake! Some of my students once spotted a lynx, but sadly, I wasn’t with them. The Midnight Sun can make students lose all sense of time. Thankfully, we have not had any tick bites or cases of Lyme Disease. And only the student ever got seriously lost (but was retrieved).

Leaving all that aside, the hardest thing of all is something I had not foreseen: teaching with historical accuracy. Not just that, but trying to get my students to (temporarily) shift into the mindset of Old Norse people (including the Vikings, but not all Old Norse people were Vikings!)

The Viking Age started in the late 8^th century and ended around the year 1100. Old Norse culture existed before that and lasted into the Early Medieval period. We are talking about a period which started over a millennium ago. So what gets lost in translation?

People from modern Western countries generally do not realise how relentlessly self-focused our own era is: “following our bliss” and posting selfies on social media. Narcissism appears to be on the rise, as is “cutting off” (estrangement from our parents or other family members). I have written extensively about all these topics on Substack, and I reassure you that I understand the reasons and causes. However, getting my students to shift out of the “modern” mindset into a truly “family-above-self” mindset, even for five minutes, is far from easy. (Having said that, a year ago I was in Vietnam, where I encountered a “family first” type of group-think which reminded me of the Old Norse period!)

The second issue is posed by the word “family”. We immediately think of the nuclear family: two parents (or other adults in the parental role) and their 1.7 children (the national average in the UK, in the 1990s it was 2.4 children). In the Old Norse period, “family” referred to your entire clan or kinship group, most of whom lived together on the same (large) farm. Slaves, labourers and other people were part of that larger community too. In every Seiðr or Rune Magician class, I spend time explaining this.

For instance, it affects the meaning we attribute to Rune Odal:

Home, sanctuary, enclosed space (and by extension, on the macro level, home country and homeland security). We are talking about home (and sense of security) and belonging to a larger group.

The third issue is “feminism”. We live in an era where feminism is popular and feminist viewpoints are often voiced. However, considering that feminism originated in the 18^th and 19^th centuries (depending on sources and choices around dating) most of the Old Norse period was literally over a thousand years before that.

Yes, in the Old Norse period, there was a clear role division between genders. But those roles could be reversed: some women chose to become elite warriors. Some men chose to practice Seiðr (which was seen as “unmanly”), and after the death of husbands and sons (or fathers), some women inherited wealth and responsibilities and became powerful rulers and decision makers in their own right.

I try to paint this complex picture in class, but I still get female students (more often in the USA than in Europe) complaining that the Vikings didn’t “play by the rule book of feminism”, and that makes them “bad” or “despicable”. Well, the Vikings were notorious for committing brutal acts anyway, but what makes you think they should practice feminism a full millennium before this ideology was invented?

Last but not least, social media culture has produced something I will call the “Instagram Aesthetic”: many (aspiring) heathen or pagan people now want the look: the tattoos (there is little evidence Vikings had tattoos), the staff of the Volva, the animal skulls, the horned helmets (the Vikings never wore horned helmets, that is popular fiction!) Commitment to any faith or tradition ought to be about practicing (and taking the ordeals along with the blessings), not a cool look or cool IG account.

I could go on, but I won’t! My handbook for rune magicians (based on a decade of teaching and my own rune work journals) was published by Moon Books a few weeks ago. It was written from the perspective of marrying historical accuracy to innovation: Portals, Patterns and Pathways: A Handbook for Rune Magicians, Star Gazers and Myth Makers. You can order it online or ask your local bookstore to order your copy for you. And please leave me a review on Amazon, I will be eternally grateful!

For more details: https://www.collectiveinkbooks.com/moon-books/our-books/portals-patterns-pathways-handbook-rune-magicians