Modern society tends to portray oral traditions as inherently inferior to written records in pretty much all cases. It's frequently compared to the Telephone Game, since we can never trust that the version we're hearing now is the same as the "original."
In terms of transmitting knowledge about...
Popular saying among Heathens, taken from the Anglo-Saxon poem "The Wanderer." It's frequently translated as "Wyrd remains fully inexorable", and sometimes as "One cannot fight Wyrd." (Wyrd is kind of in between the wholly fatalistic "fate", and the easily changeable "destiny.")
However...
In Heathenry, family is considered central. Loyalty to one's family and ancestors is considered the core of Heathenry, more than anything else (even the Gods.)
It doesn't take much to realize how this could be a problem.
I know people who come from/live in abusive families. I've seen the kind...
No, not because I know a lot about them and want to educate the uneducated masses. Quite the contrary: I know very little about them and want an excuse to look deeper at what survived, particularly regarding the Esan I might not think to look into, or answers to questions I might not think of. I...
This is following from another thread, where @Goddess_Ashtara and I got into a very interesting discussion that I'd like to continue and get other ideas on.
To get everyone up to speed:
So, to continue...
I can't just relocate. When I say that money is a thing, I mean that...
I've been thinking about this on and off periodically, but would anyone be interested in getting together a full (15 person) party of RF members for the online browser game, Town of Salem?
The game is totally free to play (though does require an account), with payment being only for little...
I've been REALLY drawn to Sif lately, ever since I had a UPG about her relationship to Thor/Thunor. I've come to sometimes call her Frith, as the embodiment of that very concept.
So, here's some of my MUS (Made-Up S***) about Sif/Frith that I've been thinking about lately, some of it based on...
A few days ago, I wrote this article and posted it on tumblr, and I thought I'd get a debate going here, as well. The following is abridged from my original post, which you can read here: (EDIT: Can't link directly to the article itself, unfortunately, but it's in there...
I hesitate to call this an "omen" since I'm largely unfamiliar with how omens are regarded these days, but it sure felt like one.
...and come to think of it, I was startled awake this morning from a dream where I opened my bedroom door and saw a hooded man, whom I can only interpret as Woden...
The English language has NO central authority. What words are "valid", what they mean, how to construct them, how to spell them... all subject entirely to the whims of linguistic evolution. Sure, we often pretend there's some "standard" form of English, and think that dictionaries are the...
Every part of my life is based on Anglo-Saxon (or, for a potential alternative Old English word that I've found for the over-tribe as a whole, Ingwine) Heathenry. But, that doesn't mean that every part of my life is strictly an echo of pre-Christian Ingwina traditions. Plenty of my values and...
HEAVY amounts of UPG to follow!
So, I was doing a bit of wiki-research to see if I could find any Norse/Germanic analogue to the Phoenix, a wight I've always had a very strong connection to but who has ultimate origins in Greece.
This is important to me, largely because I try to be...
I'm writing a fictional series of stories featuring a flock of troodontid dinosaurs (of an unspecified, wholly fictional species that has human-type intelligence), and I'm trying to do some research regarding the K-Pg extinction event, but am having some trouble coming across information I want...
One of my favorite skits from Monty Python is a scene from Life of Brian. "What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?" If anyone's never seen it, here:
Whenever I start to feel vindictive towards Christianity (or the Romans), I either watch or remember this skit. (...and then wonder about...
I only recently learned that there's a possibility for a very big earthquake in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington State, British Columbia), that could be potentially, well, very bad.
The “Big One” in the Pacific Northwest: Taking conversation to action | FEMA.gov
I had questioned the...
Religion and its related topics seem to have always had a real problem, that being the relevant terminology is among the most thrown around and misused to the point that many have dozens of definitions, which are often unrelated or conflicting. That makes effective religious discussion almost...
Note: for those not aware, a * in front of a word in a linguistic context indicates a hypothetical construction, i.e., a word that has no direct attestation but would probably have looked/been pronounced like this assuming all the rules thus far observed apply.
I thought it would be fun for...
This mostly applies to the surviving written stories that are either recordings of pre-Christian stories (such as those found in the Poetic Edda), or post-Christian stories that were heavily influenced by pre-Christian beliefs (such as Beowulf).
The thing to keep in mind is the specific work's...