Good Walls for Bad Neighbours: The Meaning of Asgard's Walls

Thor in Britain - Folk tales of a Viking God

Podcast: Interview with Ralph Harrison of the Odinist Fellowship

This Podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Player FM and all good podcasting apps and platforms.

Ralph Harrison has been an Odinist for 40 years. He is the Director of the Odinist Fellowship, the UK’s only registered charity for the indigenous faith of the English people. They acquired a 16th century chapel in Newark which was consecrated on Midsummer's Day 2014 as the first heathen Temple in England for well over a thousand years. You can donate to the charity or the temple using the links below. Ralph and I had a nice chat about the Heathen religion, its rise in popularity in recent years due to the success of TV programs like Vikings, and also the dangers the faith faces from new age influences like Wicca and naturalism.

Contact the Odinist Fellowship

 Email  OF website 

Address:
ODINIST FELLOWSHIP,
B.M. EDDA,
LONDON WC1N 3XX.

Newark Temple website
Newark Temple Facebook page

Thunor and the Axe-Hammer

Film: Útlaginn (1982)

 An Icelandic film with English subtitles. Útlaginn, English title "Outlaw: The Saga of Gisli" demonstrates the family feuds and the associated duty of vengeance that was the cultural norm in Iceland during the Viking age.

Documentary: Anglo-Saxon Paganism

This is the teaser trailer for an upcoming film on Anglo-Saxon paganism that I am making called From Runes to Ruins. The film is still in production, but will explain how the paganism of our ancestors lives on the landscape and the people. There are landmarks, place names and aspects of our language which are remnants of Anglo-Saxon paganism. It is from Woden, the god of war, that we take the name for the third day of the week, Wednesday (Woden’s day).

There are features of the landscape that take us right back to pagan times and give us insight into how people used to think. Burial mounds such as Cwichelm's barrow in Oxfordshire were thought to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead warriors they contained. Further up the Ridgeway is 'Wayland's smithy', a Neolithic long barrow which the Anglo-Saxons believed was built by Wayland, the blacksmith of the gods.

Despite the significance of Anglo-Saxon paganism to the history of Britain, no one has ever made a documentary exclusively on this subject. Until now.

Edit 2020: the film is now available to watch online for free

Review: The Seed of Yggdrasil

Heathens and Horses

The recent horse meat scandal involving tescos burgers has got people wondering why the English don't eat horses anyway. I covered this subject in my recent dissertation. The answer is to do with paganism. The Catholic church realised that eating horse meat was connected to pagan rites in the North of Europe, rites associated with gods like Odin, Thor and Freyr, so they banned it.

Riding To The Afterlife: The Role Of Horses In Early Medieval North-Western. Europe.