#65.7, Tuesday, February 18, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

         This elder seiðr and I are walking north along the shore. I was hoping we would only be talking about the nature of runes so that I might learn of the meanings of these markings and learn more about this time. She carries a walking stick engraved with runes. My walking stick is a broken branch I found along the way. Mine doesn’t speak stories of heroes and history or offer any legacy. It only mentions a tree that withered in the forest. But the seiðr questioned my oddity of life and life again, based on simply taking notice of my awareness of past things, like aurochs for example.

         She interrupts the thoughtful quiet of this walk.

         “Here, we chisel our gods and the heroes’ tales into rocks and stand them by the pathways. I know Christians try to capture stories with inks. But here, in the trusted way of eternity, we pass our stories from kingdom to kingdom as stories that are spun around the names that are chiseled into pillars of stone and those don’t change with whims or winds.”

         “You’re right about the inks.” I answer, “With Christians, we keep our stories of faith as gospels written and added on to the ancient tradition of Jewish writings. It is all copied again and again and bound as books or rolled into scrolls.”

         “I’m well aware that different gods have different ways of keeping the stories. But, Christians, with all their books, can’t explain how this one Christian man right here can speak from his memory of seeing an auroch?”

         “It was actually two aurochs we saw that day.”

         “So, let me ask you, have you ever listened to a stone?”

         “You are taking me on this long walk so that we can listen to a stone?”

         “Inks aside, it is a stone that speaks of forever. In the runes carved in the stones are the names and the battles and the intrusions of the gods. From the runes, the stories are drawn to life, fat and fleshy, breathing, thumping with life as only a mortal can speak them.”

         “But then can you also say the stones would be silent, without a mortal seiðr to read the runes and speak for the stone? Don’t the runes need a translator?” I wonder.

         “A storyteller.”

         Walking a winter beach with shoes still dry is something I am accomplishing in this trek, at least until now when we come to a river. 

(Continues tomorrow)


#65.6, Thursday, February 13, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

I expected to walk with the seiðr so that she could answer my questions; but now, it is her questions that fill our conversation.  She asks me the source of this gift of ‘eternal healing’ as I explained my circumstance of life and life again. 

         I try, “This unlikely twist of nature was intended to speak a message of spiritual resilience, ‘on earth as it is in heaven.’ My friend bestowed this on me so that I would be an earthly, mortal sign. Now, here I am the earthbound metaphorical example of life and life again. I am a tangible sign for the spiritual nature of resurrection.”

         She answers, “Umph.”

         I try to amend the confusion, “It’s a Christian thing I guess.”

         Maybe she guesses, but apparently, she isn’t interested in the identity of this gifting friend.

         She asks, “How is it that you say you saw a creature who is considered to be mythical?”

         “You mean an auroch? It wasn’t mythical several hundred years ago. People hunted it. All of the giant oxen were felled by well-placed arrows. So, tell me of the ancestors of your own people and your gods.”

         “Were you not there to see them for yourself in the ancient times?”

         “No, I wasn’t. Mostly what is in my memory is narrowly Christian.”

Actually, my oddity would easily be explained to any Christian who knew the gospel story of the raising of Lazarus. [John 11] But to a Pagan, probably unfamiliar with Christian scriptures, there is a conundrum or at best a sermon. I’m sure she wouldn’t like a sermon. What can I say?

         So, I turn the question. “What about this time and place? I still want to know about your runes and writings so that I may better understand the language and the people where I am right now.”

         “You know, for someone who claims all the time in the world, you aren’t very patient. It may seem long and slow, but we are walking to a better place of understanding.”

         It is possible she is taking me to what some call ‘thin places’ as are on an island of Christian saints. I’m thinking maybe these gods actually are many names for the one God who speaks to each spirit, touching us with understanding, needing no voice or words.

         But not so.

(Continues Tuesday, February 18)


#65.5, Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland
 

Walking with the seiðr on the edge of the sea, I meant to be asking her of the runes, but now she is asking me how I know of other times.

          “I am one who tells a Christian story from a time before Christian was a religion.”

         “So, you travel through time?”

         “But isn’t traveling through time every person’s journey? An infant comes from the darkness of the womb into the bright lights of the keepers of time — the sun and the moon and the stars — and from birth, one moment of life is always the next moment in time.”

         “That would make every old person a far traveler, though you have seen aurochs and I have not.”

         “The life journey only travels forward, always into what was once future. To go back requires a good memory which is tethered to imagination because the past is always imaginary. It is always not the now.”

         “So how deeply must one remember if he were to believe he saw a giant ox roaming the earth?”

         “For me it was only one generation, because then I was dead for nearly two hundred years. My sons, who knew of aurochs were with me when we saw two of them in the King’s hunting grounds. My oldest sons were children then and aurochs were already very rare. I lived to see these sons become men, but we never saw any more aurochs in our lifetimes.”

         “So, you travel through time from death into life?”

         “I believe that is my oddity.  I wish it were normal, then my grief could be shared with others. If others were like me, I could know them with daily touch and sight and the sounds of their voices and footsteps, the smell of their hair… Now when I find them, they crash into my grief wrapped in all the spirit of ancestors, invisible, inaudible with words, but present. And so, now I want to ask you how know my language?”

         She doesn’t let me change the subject so easily.

         She answers, “I’ve wondered if we people weren’t mortal, would we still cherish life? And now I want to know how does one attain this ‘oddity’?”

         “My oddity or gift, as I received it, is simply radical healing, even from death to life. I am a physical sign for a spiritual truth.”

         “This is a long journey we walk.”

(Continues tomorrow)


#65.4, Tuesday, February 11, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

         I knock on the door and the elder comes from behind the house with her cloak and bag, a skin of wine and walking stick prepared for a journey.

         I know enough words to understand, “Let’s walk together so we may hear one another’s long stories.”

          “Where will we find the meanings for words?”

         She answers in my own language, “We tried a translator who wouldn’t tell me what you said when you told me you are old and have a long memory. And I wanted to know more from you.”

         “How is it you know my language?”

         “Only the words change with time and place, language is the same” –undoubtedly one of her riddles for which she is known.

         We are walking north along the shore seeing more of these boats.

         She answers the language question again, but now with earthly clarity, “We have boats. We visit all of the distant lands for trade. We have to deal with the languages of others and all the oddities and verbosities of communication.”

         “I noticed your brooch of jade, depicting an eastern dragon.”      

         “So, you have a good eye. It’s a very long journey to that eastern land, but the trade isn’t complicated—simply gem for gem, metal for metal, art for art, word for word. It doesn’t require portraits of Romans or Kings hammered in gold to force the fairness of trade. But this one was my mother’s.”

         “Really Your mother had this?”

         “I didn’t know her. She was probably a thrall. But here gems are traded for amber and amber is often found just across the sea. There begins the amber road for trade to all the lands east.”

         “So, the hard amber that once oozed from a tree is precious enough to trade for jade?”

         “Of course, amber is precious because it keeps what once was. Sometimes that is pure and clear, but sometimes it holds a memory of a life in a more ancient time.  Then if a living stranger shows up among us, claiming he is what went before, speaking the old language of the northern edge of Gaul, any seiðr would want to hear what he has to say; it’s like finding a dragon fly in amber. When the child thrall knows of the oddity of him she just chooses not to translate, so I’ll have to hear it myself.”

         “If it eases your curiosity, I did once see aurochs.”

         “So you, like the dragonfly in the amber, are a visitor to us from another time?”

(Continues tomorrow)


#65.3, Thursday, February 6, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland
 

         The seiðr seemed surprised I would know of an auroch, which was a rare beast three hundred years ago. Considering the nature of hunting and poaching, I’m sure there are no more aurochs now. She asked me how I knew of them and now Marian offers to explain.  “I will just tell her you don’t know anything because you are new.”        

         “No, tell her I am very old and have a good memory.”

         “But you aren’t very old. The seiðr and the smiðr are old. You are no older than my father was when they struck him dead.”

         The seiðr interrupts and tells Marian what to tell me.

         “She wants you to come to her house again tomorrow and she said you won’t need a translator.”

         Now the old woman presses her walking stick firmly into the earthen floor, and rises on it, to turn her attention away from our conversation looking off into nowhere, yet far away. She tells me, “The ancient stories are of heroes and grief. Children don’t need to know what you are asking me.”

         Apparently, she will feel free to answer my questions if I don’t bring a child with me. And I wonder how might that conversation go with no translator and the hard questions I’m seeking answers to, like why must writing be limited to stone and wood and iron? Why are the inks only for Christians? What tragedy came to these lands that shattered families, leaving no respect for age and little use for children? What is the source of this same art? Was it gifted to this land, or was it stolen from them by others?

         I don’t need to ask if slaves always grieve. Of course, grieving for one’s homeland is the deepest nature of the thrall. But apparently, the seiðr chooses not to acknowledge the grief of slaves. She doesn’t wish to have grieving Marian come with me tomorrow.

         On this new day, it’s late in the morning when I go back to the house of the seiðr alone. Even though she dismissed my translator my ear for understanding the language is improving, so maybe we wouldn’t need a translator unless she wishes to tell me something that requires rare words. And I guess the child translator’s editorial input was clouding the issues. Maybe it is better to try this without a translator.

(Continues Tuesday, February 11)


#65.2, Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland
 

         When my question about writing in this new world is finally passed along in translation to the seiðr, the wise woman shows us the carvings on her walking stick. The seiðr calls them “Runes.” But I perceive this as some kind of numbering system. These people are near a hub for world trade. That was how it was when I came on that journey with my son and his partner. That journey we took nearly two hundred years ago began at a world trading post at the mouth of the Rhine. Now, here I am north, in this winter-hardened land. Yet, all around us are influences of distant traditions, not only of the ancient Celts and Christians, but little treasures and traditions from all four corners of the wind. The seiðr is wearing a brooch carved from jade with a distinctly eastern design.

         I ask a simple question about the runes on the cane, expecting the answer will be about the need for recording numbers for trade. But not so.

         With Marian’s translations the elder seiðr tells me runes are each complete ideas in their own way. Each is poetry. They are more than letters on a page would be – more than the writing of Christians.

         “Runes each have a depth. It is not just a fraction of a word as is a letter in languages of Roman and Greek. A rune is already a completeness of thought.”

         I’m thinking of that far traveler who imagined a Sphinx while staring off a ship’s prow considering ancient omnipotence. It riled the traditional wood carver. So do carved glyphs from faraway places teach these people to savor language that can be chiseled in with straight lines?

         She points to one little set of lines on her staff and tells me its meanings. “This one is bravery, and here is Odin and the gods.”

         I point to one and ask.

         “That one means ‘Auroch’” She says.

         “Auroch?”

         “Wild ox”

         “I believe an auroch hasn’t been seen on earth for more than two centuries.” I know these things.

         Marian translates.

         The elder woman asks and Marian translates, “And how would you know something like that when you seem to be a man who knows nothing at all?”

         I know enough of these words to know Marian’s translation was rough.

(Continues tomorrow)


#65.1, Tuesday, February 4, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland

         Here I am so far in the future where my language is only spoken by slaves.  Here the god that is God isn’t known and writing isn’t valued because no one reads.

         Dear God, maybe people always imagine a future inventing a life that will be the same or better than the present. Then, here I’ve come into the future, and now I find the world has gone Pagan. Are you still here with us, God?

         This is one of those prayers where I ask God to show presence with me. And God answers, not with a vision, but with my vision and so I am suddenly seeing beauty all around in everything. These strangers were feasting with me, laughing, singing, smiling, nearly welcoming if only they could welcome a stranger – surely God is here, even unseen.

         Here the cold waters of the sea are rising up in all their translucence, tumbling onto the shore in foam with every next breath of sea – surely God is stirring the waters, yet unseen. And at night when the sky is still stained with lost sun on the western horizon and a glitter of stars spread in the east – surely God is setting each in place to guide the sailors and comfort night shepherds with an eternity, yet unseen.  Thank you, God, I knew you were here all along. Let me not forget.

         My questions are hard ones and not easily answered with the simplicity of words even if I knew the words.

         May the seiðr be my source for understanding this strange new world. Marian and I sit down in her house and Marian translates my first question.

         “I see lots of art work done in the style used by Christian monks in copying manuscripts. Do people also read and write in this time and place?”

         The woman doesn’t answer with words. She rises from her great chair and walks slowly to the wall rack with cloak and the wineskin. She takes another long swig from the wine skin and hangs it back on the hook, then brings the walking staff to this bench where Marian and I are seated, and she points to the carvings on the staff.

         It could be letters for making words, but it looks to me, more like a numbering system because each little mark was spaced and spread out like numbers were independent of the others, for the meanings.

(Continues tomorrow)

#64.14, Thursday, January 30, 2025

Historical Setting: 789 C.E. Jutland

The feast of the solstice is over but days don’t seem long.

         I remind, “Marian, I would visit the seiðr after the feast.”

         I still have my questions about the nature of literacy here and also, why this population is oddly, mostly middle-aged men.

         “I can’t imagine why you would want to know that stuff. They aren’t Christian here. And you already heard her tell a story as she does.  So, what is there to read?”

         “I can’t know that without knowing what is written.”

         “And how might that matter if you don’t even know the language?”

         “I’m just asking for your help as I try to understand things. I expect I will know the language soon enough. I caught some of what was happening in the story, just not the reason why all that shape-changing happened.”

         “There didn’t have to be a reason. It was a story.”

         So today little Marian and I go to the seiðr. Marian says we need to take a gift so I bring a bundle of wood and Marian brings a skin of wine she says she stole from the community cache. That’s where our food comes from and it is the source of furs and the pelts we use. It may not be stealing, as I think it is for community sharing.

         The seiðr answers the door seeming more haggard than at the feast last night. She isn’t animated by story. Her long silver locks are laying limp and her dress is uncinched, spreading wide and free, but also, large and unkempt. She lives in a house with lots of others, and it has the fragrance of mint tea, boiled dry, burned in an iron pot. She tells me where to put the wood and takes the wineskin from Marian, thanking the child profusely as she guzzles a good swell, then hangs the satchel of drink carefully next to one of the cloaks and her walking stick.

         Marian explains who I am to the seiðr and all I understand of her explanation is “heit” because I did bring the wood for the fire.

         “Ah-ha! viðarhlass!”

         “She calls you ‘load of wood.’ She thinks she already knows you.”

         She says something more and Marian translates.

         “’Logs aren’t heat until they meet the fire.’ That’s what she said.” Marian interprets, “So it is probably something to make us think it into meaning. And making us think things into meaning is what a seiðr does.”

         May we continue?

(Continues Tuesday, February 4, 2025)

#64.13, Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Historical Setting: 789 C.E. Jutland
 

The elder woodcarver is complaining about the erroneous carving by a younger smiðr which was prepared for the new ship being built. The elder brought the failed art back to his own work table to “fix it.” He will have to magically shape-change this thing into a properly ferocious dragon. When he removes the bear skin, unveiling the art, it is very clearly a fine carving, but not of a toothy, scaly, dragon’s head. It is a regal and all-powerful head of an Egyptian Sphinx.[Footnote]

         Apparently, the younger smiðr assigned to this artwork is a well-seasoned world traveler. And the elder art critic only values local dragons and sea monsters. So maybe it is sometimes possible that tradition demands shape-changing.

         The old man sets the head with a Pharoh’s face onto his work stand, not even imagining the lion’s body with outstretched paws needed to transform a boat into a rightful sphinx. He might have missed the point of the mythical hybrid altogether, because clearly this thing he calls tradition does not flex for exotic foreign creatures.  He flicks his chisels on the whetstone and taps away at the nemes (or Pharoh’s striped cloth) changing the stripes to scales, cut deep, in a staggered pattern, row upon row of perfect dragon scales.

         Marian, as young as she is, believes she also knows the power of tradition. The wrangling over her as a slave, empowered her belief that it is tradition that gives a person value – even a slave. At least tradition, drawn from some other time or place where she was raised before capture, seems to be what gives utility to her person. She found that knowing the tradition of baking bread has become her bargaining chip. But she doesn’t get the coins for the bread. And that pittance of coins that were argued over is the price of the slave who bakes the bread.  Maybe, only in the mind of a ten-year-old, lost and grieving for her family, desperate to belong somewhere, is the price offered for the tradition she remembers worth the total value declared for her humanity.  It is a grieving child’s perspective.

         I ask her, “Is it different for you now that a price was asked to make you into a bought slave?”

         “You make it sound like a bad thing.”

         “Are you allowed to make your own choices, or must you only do what a slave does?”

         She laughs, “I’m a child. I do what I’m told.”

[Footnote] This element of a ship’s carved head is fiction here. What is sustainable history is that the trade routes through the Baltic and beyond were vast and included Egypt and areas to the east.

(Continues tomorrow)


#64.12, Tuesday, January 28, 2025

Historical Setting: 789 C.E. Jutland

         This morning men and the few women who passed around the horn last night are groggy with hangover. No one is here at the feasting board when I come out to clean up the dregs of celebration. Everyone who listened so long to the stories told by the seiðr must be sleeping or hiding or maybe there’s been some shape changing from drunkin’ partiers into woodland creatures that I see have visited this place in the early hours of this morning.  There is really very little left here to clean up.

         First thing this morning, at the house of the smiðr where I’m staying, Marian is already setting beans to soak for supper. The elder smiðr isn’t here just now. Marian tells me while I was out, he went to take his carving of a ship’s border to the building site for the new ship. But I was just out there, and I didn’t see him.

         Now he returns from a visit to another house where one he calls an “apprentice carver” was working the on the center piece of art for the new ship. He has the bear skin I’ve been using as a sleeping mat wrapped around this, something big and nearly too heavy for him to manage.

         Apparently, this elder smiðr considers himself the master carver and he stopped to assess the work of a younger artist. Now he is cursing, all twisted in knots over the “poor standard of workmanship” youngers get away with in these new times. Agism again.  It works both ways.

         Of course, I’ve seen this method of teaching before, when an elderly abbot inspecting the work of a novice speaks only the woes of youthful flaws, then the would-be teacher takes to the inks to do it over by himself.  It may sound like an exemplary teaching style, but really it is this old monster agism gnawing away at generational harmony. This elder smiðr who only works alone, had no intention of guiding an apprentice to do better work. In all his cursing and fuming he just plans to fix it himself.

         Unwrapped this whole ship’s head is nearly too large for the smiðr’s worktable. These ships are intended to look fearsome and dangerous, when they approach a village for a raid, so it is important that the carving, the vanguard of the attackers, represent the ferocious presence of a horrific monster, but here, is a…

(Continues tomorrow)