How did you become so knowledgable about everything? Do you have any tips for anyone starting with being a heathen? I have been practicing for a couple years and I can't even fathom how vast your wisdom is.
I donāt know as much as you probably think I do. I have bad memory and worse study habits. I procrastinate relentlessly and am subject to rather severe fluctuations of attention span (it seems to run on a cycle. If youāre like me, learning to take advantage of the useful parts of that cycle could make for a useful point on the list below). Iām just very good at looking stuff up. But I do have a couple things going for me, a lot of which is just me being lucky, and a bit of it is me playing what strengths I do have. But some of it is stuff that others might be able to make some use of.
Make your goal learning, NOT understanding. If you focus on learning you will occasionally find understanding as a side effect. If you focus on understanding you will end up sabotaging yourself.
Iām university educated. Thatās an enormous advantage I have over most other people on tumblr. However you canĀ still access a lot of the same stuff I can (if youāre in school, depending on which one, you might even have access to moreĀ than I do). My very very veryĀ long-time followers will remember I was already fucking around in scans of Icelandic manuscripts before I ever left the US.Ā
Do not forget that we are not pre-Christian heathens. We are trying to assimilate to a foreign culture, and without help from its members. Alienation and other mental and emotional difficulties are inevitable. If you donāt get that youāre doing it wrong (this applies whether you are recon or not; all that changes is how you resolve this). Make ambiguity and uncertainty your best friends, they will teach you much more than certainty. Usually the correct answer to everything isĀ āI donāt knowā (though you can usually narrow the boundaries of that uncertainty).
Donāt read books written for heathens. It feels at first like youāre saving time by cutting to the important, relevant stuff but the truth is youāll waste far more time unlearning later than youāll save (note: this is different from the oft-given adviceĀ ādonāt read books byĀ heathens; there are plenty of perfectly capable heathen authors but their works are able to address a general audience).
Choosing slow, hard work over fast, easy work almost always ends up faster and easier.Ā For example, the next point.
Study Old Norse language. Not because you need to to be a heathen or anything like that, but it cuts out so much bullshit that I would have no patience for, like accounting for a translatorās influence on what youāre reading.
If you know Old Norse you can use the Dictionary of Old Norse Prose, and it also greatly increases the effectiveness of the Skaldic Poetry Project (though this is always getting better and more helpful even for people who donāt know the language of the poetry itself).
Misuse of the language is one of the greatest sources of bullshit in modern heathenry; if someone can convince you their definition of an Old Norse word is correct then they can convince you that their ideas were a part of pre-Christian culture (e.g., if someone can convince people that vitkiĀ meansĀ ārune magicianā then he can convince you that there were rune magicians). Disarm them.
With reference to the previous point about āslow work,ā this is fucking difficult. I have old notebooks full pages of the same words written over and over to practice different paradigms. Donāt rush it. But donāt put it off either. Even if it takes ten years, itās better than still being baffled by Old Norse ten years from now.
You donāt have to be an expert. Every little bit helps somewhat.
You can download A New Introduction to Old Norse here.
This is the only significant difference between me and any other tumblr heathen. If you can do this, you can do everything I can.
Try to get used to using resources in languages you donāt know. If youāre interested in runes and Proto-Norse and stuff like that youāre not going to be able to avoid German. Google Translate is your friend.Ā The standard Old Norse grammar is Adolf Noreenās Altnordische GrammatikĀ (available for free online); the standard Proto-Norse grammar is Wolfgang Krauseās Die Sprache der urnordischen Runeninschriften. I donāt know German but boy do I know how to extract useful stuff from it.
Know what resources are available to you for free through the internet. That includes the stuff I put underĀ āReferenceā on this page:Ā http://thorraborinn.tumblr.com/primary_sources. This is how I give the impression that I know a lot. I just look stuff up.
In Old Norse studies everything related to primary sources can be traced to at least one physical object (a manuscript, a runestone, etc) that could theoretically be seen and touched. Learn how to figure out what that object is, where it is, its own history. If you are reading a book that does not give you the tools to do this, burn it and throw the ashes in the eyes of its author.
Iāve pirated an imperial shit-ton of books.
Read stuff thatās over your head. Force-feed it to yourself. The benefit is not always immediate but itās usually there.
I read From Proto-Indo-European to Proto-GermanicĀ by Don Ringe cover-to-cover three times and finally on the third read-through I started to understand the PIE stuff.
Authors sometimes have difficulty knowing what order to present stuff in, so they might not even give you the tools necessary to understand the first chapter until the second chapter (because theyāre using it to explain something youāll need by the second chapter). Itās unavoidable.
If youāre still too far from understanding to see any use in choking down stuff you donāt get, find out what youāre missing and learn that, then return to the more difficult thing later (e.g. I found a great article by Paul Kiparsky applying optimality theory (OT) to Germanic umlaut. I read the whole thing, but still wasnāt totally clear on OT so I didnāt really get the argument. So I found some books on general OT, then read the article again and completely understood it. Now I know how to use OT).
In my experience, if I pound down an article, get nothing out of it, and go to bed totally burnt out... if I read it again the next day it goes down pretty smooth.
Donāt read everything on a subject. Read only the most recent stuff you can get; if the authorās done their job theyāll summarize the main points of those who have come before them.
Donāt try to be an expert on everything. My knowledge of archaeology is crap. I know this and Iāve come to terms with it and I try to account for it instead of pretending it isnāt true.Ā āOld Norse studiesā is too big a field for anyone to know everything. Itās better to specialize (especially if your specialty requires a multidisciplinary approach).
Use sources that show you how to do what they did (and occasionally do it). Apply their methods to other questions.
Forgive yourself. If youāre doing this right youāre going to fuck up constantly. On multiple occasions Iāve purged my tumblr of bullshit that Iāve produced that I would be loath to stand by today. You gotta move on from it. However much of a waste of time something seems like in retrospect, it was necessary for you to get to where you are now.
Make learning a form of religious devotion and rank it higher than anything else. Donāt let attachment to certain ideas prevent you from rejecting them if necessary. The goddess Gefjun is very important to me. If I discovered evidence that the word GefjunĀ was just another name for Freyja it would be my religious imperative to reject her independent existence.
Keep your religious practice and intellectual understanding separate. A scholar and a devotee have different responsibilities; you can do both but not always at the same time. My actual religious beliefs are very different from whatās on my blog about Old Norse religion (there is veryĀ little about my actual personal religious beliefs on my blog). This allows you to do the previous point better. You can perform faith while thinking uncertainty.
Teach others. Youāll find the holes in your ideology better that way. Sometimes by others pointing them out. When that happens, take responsibility for it.
Donāt forget to enjoy it. If you donāt enjoy it thereās no point.
Thereās probably other stuff but I think thatāll do for now and I think this is long enough.
