#66.12, Thursday, March 27, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

We are sitting in the open space where a door would be in a house, looking out at the rocks on the sea channel. The wind comes stiff and steady but it brings no ships.

“When I was a baby, it was Auld Bjorn who kept me as his own infant, then as a child I was his thrall at his hearth until I was fully a seiðr. And now he has little Marian there as his thrall.”

         “I wouldn’t think he even takes notice of her except when someone at the feast wants to take her away from him. Was he also that distant to you when he was your father?”

         “Father? He is nothing like a father. He never touches a woman, much less does he set his seed.”

         “I was thinking ‘father’ more in the sense of family.”

         “There you go Christian again, where all the monks say they are brothers together and pray to ‘Father.’”

         I change the subject. “Are we waiting here for the wind to change so a ship will come and row us back, again?”

         “No. We are just here.”

         “Is there something more you want to see here?”

         “You asked about our way of writing, so I still have to show you bind runes.”

         “So we will be going on to see more of the rune stones?”

         “I don’t know. I’ve only heard they have runes stones here.”

         “If we are going to be here a while, maybe I should prepare to keep a fire.”

         “No. We shouldn’t even have made any fire here. It has to stay just as always.”

         “While the tide is out, I’ll go down and look for shellfish in the crevasses of the shore rocks, then we can make a cooking fire and have a fine meal.”

         “I just told you, you can’t make any more fire here! It will make this place appear as a house for the living, and then no mothers will set their infants out here.”

         Now I understand. Sjókona came here to rescue an abandoned infant. But that could happen any time or never.  I’m hungry and losing patience with doing nothing. So, I go down to the sea to look for shell fish and crabs, and she follows me.

         When I kneel by the water to snatch a lobster, she stands behind me, caressing my shoulders with the familiar touch of a woman’s hands, and I can only think of Ana. It is a sour grief.

(Continues Tuesday, April 1)

#66.11, Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         “Sjókona, I can call you by a name now. And is this your home?”

         “Home?”

“Yet you said you haven’t been back here since you were abandoned as an infant.?”

         “Really, I’ve only been told of this. Some years ago Auld Bjorn brought another infant girl across the sea. She also had survived on these rocks and he gifted her to me. Auld Bjorn was the one who told me the reason for deaths of girls. It was the scarcity of good farmlands and the fear of having to feed so many new generations that only boys were needed. He told me he thought that a thrall who had to put her girl baby out would make a wish that some sailor would come and find that child yet alive, so it is that this secret house is where daughters are left to be rescued as I was.”

         “Whenever a wind persists from the West I’ve imagined coming here, but then I just never came.”

         “So, the old man, I know now is named Auld Bjorn, gifted you with a baby girl?”

         “She didn’t live. She had already suffered too long and she shivered through that night and then died.”

         “I’m sorry. I also know grief well.”

         “Oh, I don’t grieve. She had no name. If you don’t allow yourself to fall into caring, you only have to grieve when the death is of a hero, and then everyone makes a memorial of it.”

         “However you try to hide from grief, that’s what brought you here to this place, isn’t it?”

         “But Lazarus, I would think, you, claiming life and life again would never have to worry over the woes of death.”

         “It is quite the opposite.  The one thing about living into the future is the persistent pain of longing for what once was. I grieve for my once family, for my loved ones and for the farm we had. I even long for the geese and the fish in the creek. Now, I find that in this time and place, my grief is particularly deep and heavy.”

         “I kind of guessed Christianity was good at grief, with the moaning after the cross and all?”

         “Grief isn’t a Christian thing, or a Pagan thing; It is the sorrow for of all of life regardless of religion.”

         Now silence, maybe we both know grief too well for more words.

         I shift the silence with a new question. “So, the old man is this Auld Bjorn?”

         She laughs. It breaks the stress. 

         “You don’t know anything at all, do you, Heitman?”

(Continues tomorrow)

#66.10, Tuesday, March 25, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         Apparently, the god who is God agrees with the seiðr, that no matter how righteous my opinion may be, or how terrible the practice of sacrificing girl children is, addressing this evil must only be spoken with empathy. The difference between judgment and empathy sounds like nothing more than inflection in blaming; but it is a vast chasm between empathy and judgement in the consequences. I was given no holy words, only a reprimand for letting a moral rule stand in the way of my ability to sort through the personal pain of this to find the frail little ravel from the love thread.

         My prayer is dismissed with silence. So, I argue more to God. “But, dear God, how can I bring empathy and caring when even she knows herself only by purpose and not as a beloved being?”

I know she’s heard rumors of Christians, and we are known for seeking sins and judging others. So, she made fun of her own human nature telling me she is “Eve” a motherless any-woman slotted by Christians as a sin source.

         “You are nothing like Eve,” I tell her. “You had a mother who wanted her girl child to survive, placing a rock in your mouth for breath, rather than a suffocating cloth that could pretend to be a breast.”

         “It is no rock, it is a precious jade pendant. It was probably all my mother had left from before she was captured.”

         “So, your carved sea-monster pendant tells you that you were once someone’s beloved child?”

         “I imagine my mother waited here, then the old wood carver, Auld Bjorn — The one you bring wood to — he was once a coxswain on a fine longship. That ship stopped here and gathered up an infant to carry across the sea and live in his house as young Marian does now.”

         “But Marian wasn’t an abandoned infant. She was stolen, kidnapped from Gaul already knowing her own name and family traditions.” She told me this.

         “And she isn’t a goddess or a seer either. And the old man doesn’t command a ship anymore. Things change. So, you can call me Sjókona, because I belong to the sea, and my spawn are the dragons, and monsters. That is how Sjókona is known.”

         “Is that how you wish to be known? With your children magical and feared?”

         “In truth, I have no children. If I had children, they would be immortal gods.” [footnote]

[footnote] sjókona — Old Norse word for meremaid. Call it a meremaid, merewuf, siren, or follow the wikipedea rabbit hole and find many more.

(Continues tomorrow)


#66.9, Thursday, March 20, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         How can I not speak up against such a terrible practice as setting girl infants out to die? And yet, anything I say to her, a victim, seems more like an accusation or a judgment against these people. The answer to my prayer asking for words comes only with judgment of my own judgmentalism. I understand I need to come to this with more empathy. But how can I be empathetic to something that just seems evil? It kills children, and leaves loving mothers grieving. I have empathy as an answer, but there is no one asking a question.

          I say again, “I don’t even know your name.”

         She argues, “You don’t know my name, and yet you know who I am.”

         “’A seiðr,’ I was told.”

         “So why would I need a name? I am known well enough by purpose.”

         “A name is like a door that when set into a doorway gives power of entrance.  Your name is how you are open to your friends and how you choose which strangers to welcome. To say you have no name is to bar everyone from knowing you. If you say you only have a purpose, though you are living and walking on earth, I’m asking, has this death of the infant happened to you even though your life was saved?”

         “I have no death. Obviously, I am living. And I know things. I read the runestones, I know the heroes and the stories; I have answers that stand on their own without attribution: ‘it is the opinion of Steph,’ or ‘the word of Gull.’ What a seiðr says is said. A seiðr needs no name. If you came to me because I said my name Eve, woman of earth with no mother, we would have traveled all this way as a man and a woman, but not as a god guided by a seiðr.”

          “You blamed me for being a ‘judgmental Christian,’ as though my sense of conscience is anathema here. So, I prayed for the right words to answer you because, surely, the love source, Creator of all life, would agree with my judgment and would give me the words I need to prove righteousness. But I wasn’t given any kind of offering of amazing words. Apparently, the god who is God agrees with you, I am just making a loud noise by judging without empathy. So, I was given a reminder to come to this with more human caring and less judgment. Now I feel such a need to know you by a name.”

(Continues Tuesday, March 25)

#66.8, Wednesday, March 19, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne
 

         The seiðr, whose name I don’t even know, brought me to a ruin of a house with no door. We sailed here on the west wind so I could know the answers to my questions about this land.

         As always, I’m wandering, just looking for the thread of love that brought everything into being. And here it seems lost from human grasp – it is a ruffian world with few women. I’ve learned that here books are only runestones, and the deep grief that rules these lands isn’t about the hours of darkness at the winter solstice. The hidden grief is for daughters turned out as infants – after a mother held them and sang to them, nurtured them and knew their human spirit — daughters were put out into the wind and cold with something to appease their hunger – a thing, a piece of cloth to stifle cries, and here, a precious pendant was used to take the place of her mother’s breast. This practice makes a linage of Norsewomen a rarity. Mostly, captives, women are thralls, slaves, concubines. Or the few women are perceived like the seiðr, oddly powerful and nearly magical.

         As I watch her pondering this ruin of a house, I wonder if the seiðr brought me here, not for my questions, but to search her own life. She goaded me into speaking something of a Christian judgement against Paganism. And now, in the calm of the turning winds I asked God to give me better words to answer her argument.  God sends no words. But I do have a glimpse of understanding.

         My first perception of her was a docile woman with a wine skin and a walking stick, with tales to tell. Now, I see a woman, once a maiden, still grasping onto little hates and hurts that shadowed her own loss of a mother despite her own survival. I don’t even know her name.

Dear God, is my need for the words you haven’t given me, purposed to remind me that the need is not for words, but for human compassion? Are you asking me to listen to her with caring?

         I go back to the seiðr still standing in the wind in the doorway that is not filled with a door.  “I’ve spoken with the invisible God who is God, and I am reminded not to be so critical of the ways of others.”

(Continues tomorrow)

#66.7, Tuesday, March 18, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         “So when you were an infant you were put out to die of exposure here in a ruin of a house? And that practice is why women are rare here?”

         The seiðr fondles the jade pendant still at her neck. “You speak as though being rare were a problem.”

         “Isn’t something askew when a whole people simply puts its girl children outside in the wind to die?”

         “So, the Christian God sent you back from your own death just so you could come here and judge our Pagan rituals and wonders?”

         “No! I’m not on a mission from God to judge you. I am simply a normal empathetic human being. All my years have allowed me the opportunity to hold and nurture infant daughters and infant sons. I’ve seen my children grow up as individuals – as unique and valued human beings – not valued for their rarity of gender, but for who they are.”

         “I hear you judging us. It seems to be the Christian nature to come creeping into another’s land uninvited and decide if we are righteous in the eyes of some invisible unnamed loser god who hangs suffering on a cross while other gods are honored on runestones and monuments as winners.”

         What can I say? Is this the time that calls for this Christian pilgrim on a mission to gather up multitudes of Pagans, pleasing God with the head count, then, like holy magic, the Paganism is vanquished and the saint scores a win for the Christians? After all, proselytizing seems to be what Christians do best.      

         My silence is gaping. I walk out onto the rocks in the tide to give this my best thought and I come to the edge of the sea offering God a silence in which to answer.

         Dear God, what can I say?  I’m waiting for your answer, God. Is she asking me to explain the value of human life? Should I mention the love command, the love source, the fearless love? Give me the good words for this sermon I need to give now.

         I have nothing to say. I look back toward the doorway that isn’t a door and I see the seiðr alone there, so rare. The wind fondles her skirts, pressing her robes against her abundant woman’s form – breasts that have never nurtured an infant, a belly that has never shared the thump of life and there I see my answer to her should not come as judgement, or a win, rather it is more of a shared grief.

(Continues tomorrow)

#66.6, Thursday, March 13, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne
 

 “So, how do Christians determine winners in games and wars when the object isn’t simply to be the last man standing?”

         I think the seiðr is asking a serious question of Christians. In her world, simply the fallacy of scarcity can completely upend the nature of family and turn men into marauders, ravaging villages for no good cause but blatant greed. They’ve let greed-think rule their world. In these Norsemen ways winning is everything.

         In Jesus’ way, love is everything. But as long as only war heroes are welcomed to Valhalla and as long as the practices of life for people are only about attaining wealth and singular achievement, as long as art and music only honor the artist and not the choirs singing and the awe of children, these pagan ways will never understand what Jesus was teaching.  So, what will Christians do when they come to this land to make it over for their own religion? I’m only left with more questions.

         The seiðr asks me if I can better understand this tragedy of the Norsemen now. Shear greed and sanctity of selfishness may explain why marauders murder the men, but it doesn’t answer why the women left living here were mostly those captured to be enslaved. And here children are rare. I seem to have missed the meaning of the house without a door.

         “So, what is the meaning of this ruin of a house?” I ask.

         “It could have been my house. My real mother believed it was a place for putting out a girl child. And, when I was an infant to be set out for “exposure” instead of stuffing a cloth in my mouth, as was usually done, the pretend breast in my mouth to stifle cries was my mother’s own jade pendant. When the north winds came into the door place it was supposed to take my life-breath. It was how it was done. [Footnote]

         “Likely, my father was a Norsemen raider and my mother was thrall stolen from a wealthy home in the eastern lands.

         “But when I was put out, the cold winds didn’t come – they didn’t blow from the west or the north so the oarsmen came here, stopping, waiting for the change in the winds and here they found me with the precious carved stone in my mouth and believed that meant I was destined to be a magical seiðr. So, I was saved by them.

[Footnote] https://www.medievalists.net/2011/08/selective-female-infanticide-as-partial-explanation-for-the-dearth-of-women-in-Norsemen-age-scandinavia/ retrieved 7-5-2024,

Violence and Society in the Early Medieval West, edited by Guy Halsall (Boydell, 1998)

(Continues Tuesday, March 18)

#66.5, Wednesday, March 12, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         I was asking a history question. “What was the tragedy that made these Norsemen brutal?” The answer the seiðr offers is to take me to a rocky shore with a ruin of a house and tell me I don’t know human nature.

         “In the far north, where the winters are dark and the summers are still frozen-over, the only people are the ones who have always been.

         “But in this place, further to the south in this land, people came dreaming of rich farms and overflowing gardens. The ones who were always seeking bigger farms were the first to be unsatisfied with parceled lands in Gaul. So, they came here and found all these rocks and bad soil and they tried to make farms of it because here the fields could be as large as they could imagine. But eventually, their wide imaginations slimmed to fit reality. Each farm grazed a few cows. The pasture lands were frozen away in the winters. So, dreams of endless fields and flocks were never really fulfilled. One small farm could sustain the few cows for milking, but with the multiplications of generations came a fear of too many people. How would they divide the land small enough to make every grandchild a farmer? So, what do you suppose happened?”

         “The second and third generations of the farmers found other means?”

         “No, of course not. That’s not what people do. Because everyone does what they know – farmers spawn farmers – well actually, that spawning of farmers is blamed on the wives of farmers.  You know how the song goes, ‘The farmer takes a wife, the wife takes a child, the wife takes a child,’ the wife takes more children,’ on and on until ‘the cheese stands alone.’” [Footnote]

         “That’s a silly children’s game. It isn’t how people actually live their lives, dwindling away to nothing but the cheese.”

         “Even if it isn’t true, if people believe it is a fallacy, it is acted on as true. And the mindset of these patriarchs was this fallacy that too many people could cause a famine in a frail world — the fear of scarcity.”

         “No wonder, after all my deaths and earthly years too, I had no imagination for such a disaster. It is completely the opposite of the Christian generosity and love for neighbor and the Jesus teaching of abundance when food is shared. Jesus showed it as a sign in the feeding of the multitudes [John 6:1-14] 

[Footnote] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Farmer_in_the_Dell traditional courting game with many European versions, first find of it written was German in the 19th century. Guessing it has ancient roots.

(Continues tomorrow)

#66.4, Tuesday, March 11, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne
 

         Sleep last night wasn’t a peaceful conclusion for day. It was only gifted me by fatigue. The fire and ruin of walls may have provided a bit of warmth and shelter from the wind, but snow fell lightly inside these walls, as though we had no shelter at all. I expect we will move toward more civilization today, but for now, I tend the fire.

         The seiðr is spending these morning hours in deep contemplation. She seems not the least bit concerned about food or roof or any of the earth things we should probably think about.

         I’ve been collecting snow and melting it in an iron pot left with this hearthstone where I keep the fire going.

         “You should have some water here before we move on.”

         Saying nothing, she pours the water from the pot into her empty wineskin, and sloshes it around before drinking it. Apparently, she prefers the flavor of old wineskin to the flavor of the old cooking pot. I drink the water, rusty, as it is.

         Finally, I ask her, “Should we prepare to continue our journey, soon?”

         “Our journey to where?”

         “I don’t know this land. Where are we going?”

         “You know all this perfectly well. Does it not answer the question you had that brought us here?”

         All along this way I’ve been asking about the people here. What was the tragedy that befell this land and made it a whole world of men and only a few women so that raiding communities on other lands, slaughtering its men and capturing the women becomes the way of life. When I asked for answers possibly buried in the writings of their history, Marian, the slave child led me to this seiðr. And the seiðr showed me no stories of tragedy, only the etched stones telling of gods and heroes. So, what is the root of all this cruelty and suffering?  Why is brutality a way of life here? Grief hangs heavy on this land, yet it seems no one knows of the reason for sorrow. Their gods are loveless. The wives are slaves. Children are a rarity. And seeing one ruin of a cottage by the sea doesn’t explain all this pain to me.

         The seiðr asks how I see this.

         “What I see are walls left of something that may have been a cottage – a home – maybe for a family once. Was this your home?”

         “How is it you can live all those years and still be so ignorant of human nature?”

(Continues tomorrow)

#66.3, Thursday, March 6, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         The stiff West wind would bring the fragrances of spring thaw to my lost homeland in Gaul, but here it only ushers in more winter days as it fills the sails and scurries our ship across the sea. Sun is low behind us over the waters; and ahead of us, foreboding rocks and cliffs are washed by the sea. But the ship makes its way into an inlet, into a tranquil bay laid among rocky islands and across a sea. Frosty rocks and winter weeds of seashore surround an outcropping of land. Far ahead of us is a bay where other ships are moored. The oarsmen are rowing this part. The dinghy, or a “fearing,” takes us two passengers onto the empty part of the shore stretched out ahead of the harbor.

         The seiðr is silent, studying the shoreline ever more intensely, with her eyes glinting with the steel-color of the eastern sky and her teeth clenched sculpting a jawline of stone. I understand this place where she‘s brought me is her own homeland. But there seems to be no homecoming here — no joyful reunion.

         She finds us a night shelter not far back from the shore. It is a ruin of a cottage, white washed walls of mudbrick, standing naked in a thorny thicket. The thatch of roof, and shutters are long-gone.  There is nothing here that is really a house but the four corners and the crumbling walls. She considers a gapping open space on the sea side to be a door, though there is no sign of anything that could ever be hinged for closure – no wood – no sill – to bar – no knocker – yet she says we must leave our shoes outside the “door.” So, we do. If the cottage had a roof we would see the blackened smoke hole center at the peak, because there is a hearthstone here, and it is indeed blackened from once having a fire.

Maybe it is good we took off our shoes. Clearly this is a home.

         Her jaw is quivering now and she turns to hide her human tears. I offer to gather some kindling and some wood and make us a fire.

         In the bleakness of the winter rocks, I find an abundance of kindling and wood, as though the earth had been preparing for life to return, waiting centuries, maybe, for me to come, gathering up the dry tender again.

(Continues Tuesday, March 11)