Hark, the Soothsayer!

Weekly Reading for 2021′s Week 8 (Feb 28-Mar 6) 

The path that best serves our growth this week focuses on communication (ᚨ). You need to be charitable with your words (ᚠ), by sharing joy and remembering life is too short (ᛗ).

Ansuz is rendered as “god” in Proto-Germanic and “ash” in Old English. One of the other glosses for this rune in OE can be considered “the mouth,” “the beginning of all speech, a support to wisdom and a comfort to the wise.” I also checked the ogham meaning for the ash tree, the fïd Nin, as I plan to blend the two systems in the future. Erynn Rowan Laurie says that ash trees were used for both the weaving beam and the spear, relating Nin and thus the ash tree relates to networking, familial obligations, and the protection and support of the community. I feel this is reflected in the Old English kenning of Ansuz as well.

Fehu translates to “livestock, wealth” across all three Rune Poems. They also describe it as the “source of discord amongst kin.” The Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem goes further to say “must everyone bestow it freely.” I would personally gloss this rune as charity and generosity. 

Mannaz is glossed across the board as “man, human.” The Anglo-Saxon Rune Poem says, in its first line, “Man is in mirth dear to his brother.” All three refer to the fleeting nature of human life. 

More than happy to. Some of this is (like a lot of my thoughts) still in development, but here's a summary. I'm actually not talking about the rune, I'm talking about the actual institution of óðal, that is, not the rune as a rune, but the meaning of the word that is the rune's name, and therefore also what it means when it appears as a rune in text like here, in Beowulf:

Óðal an institution of rights pertaining to inheritance of land. If the land is to be sold, a person who has óðalsréttr has the right to buy it first before anyone else, and if it is sold outside of the family, the bearer of óðalsréttr has the right to buy it back (at the same price that was paid for it) within a certain amount of time. Normally in English this is known as allodial title, or else we could say that is the specifically Scandinavian form of allodial title.

It does seem to have other, older meanings that are a bit harder to grasp but which do not have to do with literal ownership of property, but one of the greatest deficiencies in modern heathens' ability to understand how symbols convey meaning and are deployed in discourse (e.g. by fascists) is a refusal to see them as having any more than exactly one universal, eternal, unchanging ur-meaning. This attempt to escape from history depletes symbols of meaning and hamstrings heathens' attempts to approach them. We have to deal with them identifying ourselves as historical actors approaching historical objects with complex genealogies.

From many perspectives, óðal seems to be a positive institution. In Norway, it's seen as protecting the rights of the small, independent farmer against centralizing aristocratic (and later, corporate) power and maintaining a decentralized field of power and relatively low hierarchization compared to other kingdoms/states. For example we can see its role in the class conflict around the formation of the early Norwegian kingdom when Haraldr hárfagri ruptured the institution in order to claim the right to tax Norwegian landholders, and it was subsequently restored by Hákon góði. This interpretation is not entirely without merit, but it fails to capture the overall reality of the development of economic relations in the society it was part of. From Knut Helle, Cambridge History of Scandinavia:

However, recent research in both Denmark and Norway indicates that Iron Age society was marked by considerable and growing inequality, both economically and socially. There were chiefs and magnates who owned or controlled extensive complexes of land farmed by thralls, freedmen and free men who were dependent on the landowners in varying degrees or were in a client relationship with them. The large number of tenant farmers in Denmark, Norway and Iceland towards the end of the high Middle Ages is now being regarded as a result of a long-term process with roots in the early Iron Age and continuing in the early and high Middle Ages.

Of course, one could argue that the insufficiency of óðal rights to defend individual farmers from other structures of power as they grew over time doesn't mean that it's bad, and perhaps even that without it things would have been even worse. But this is only looking at the social relations between land-owning farmers and people with more institutional power.

This quotation also brings up something that often goes unconsidered: land ownership in Scandinavia was dependent on massive amounts of slave labor (as well as "free" but still dependent labor). Even in situations where hierarchy didn't develop in a way that centralized under a king, decentralization does not necessarily indicate a lack of hierarchy, and in this case that illusion can only be maintained by taking the land-owning individual farmer (in some places, restricted specifically to male farmers, though not everywhere) as the fundamental unit of society, with all others who didn't own land being dismissed from consideration. None of these people had óðal. Heathens are not wont to talk about how óðal didn't belong to everyone.

In recent studies on the topic, Erik Magnus Fuglestad has drawn very direct comparisons between this recognition of the land-owning free farmer as the basic unit of humanity to things that Americans can relate to our own history. We see this in things like the right to vote being afforded only to white landowning men. Now, my comment referred less to its function over time and more to its inception. So far, I have failed to find evidence to the contrary of the belief that before óðal rights were established, that property was held in common. Here's Proudhon in 1841:

As long as the German tribes dwelt in their forests, it did not occur to them to divide and appropriate the soil. The land was held in common: each individual could plow, sow, and reap. But, when the empire was once invaded, they bethought themselves of sharing the land, just as they shared spoils after a victory. “Hence,” says M. Laboulaye, “the expressions sortes Burgundiorum Gothorum and klhroi Ouandigwn*; hence the German words allod, allodium, and loos, lot, which are used in all modern languages to designate the gifts of chance.”

*I have no idea wtf this means and when you Google it you just get this Proudhon letter. Maybe it originates in a bad image-to-text software transcription?

I imagine that there is both more nuance in what actually happened and history that is inaccessible to us (archaeologists in Scandinavia tell us that there were oscillating periods of hierarchization and egalitarianism for a long time leading up to the beginning of recorded history) but the point is that óðal presupposes a commodification of land that appears not to have existed prior to the establishment of óðal. So this body of laws protecting the rights of the landowner is concomitant with the seizure of what had previously been the commons, and the creation of a formal, economically-determined class distinction. Notwithstanding the fact that this began in conquered places (at least, according to Proudhon's narrative, which I would want to revisit with more recent research), the pattern seems to have repeated one way or another northward into Scandinavia (perhaps we see an early operation of something like the imperial boomerang, without even requiring a colonial state apparatus?). This initial commodification is of course also a prerequisite for the more advanced accumulation that would go on to form kingdoms and nation states later on.

If you think this is exaggeration, consider the set of words related to óðal and its related (by vrddhi) cognate aðal (the cognates especially in non-Norse Germanic languages; in fact Norse may be a source for the older meanings of aðal) meaning 'noble' and 'nobility.' They were quite aware of the class difference between an óðalsborinn ('born with óðal') person and someone who wasn't one, and they were proud of it.

When I see things like t-shirts and stickers with rainbow othalas and "othala means family" and stuff like that, it becomes clear to me that heathens are living in some kind of fantasy world outside of time and space, and their moral high ground will be the death not only of our symbols and traditions but of the countless victims of fascism. Here in the real world, neo-nazis are playing an active role in shaping global geopolitics. Here's some graffiti left by Russian mercenaries in either Syria or Libya (I'm not sure which, photo via Ruslan Trad; click for the full picture):

The liberal neutralization of the history of óðal, land ownership, and colonialism seeks to make the settler heathen innocent and alleviates the responsibility for taking action. For most so-called anti-racist heathens, that is taking action, because washing the blood off their hands is the goal, not the self-transformation required to learn to fight for international autonomy and total liberation for all peoples.