#67.4, Tuesday, April 8, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne
 

         Some of these ships are prepared for a journey. I imagine, with the calm winds and the complexities of navigating these inlets more men will surely be needed at the oars. My language doesn’t seem an impediment here. This harbor chatters in a cacophony of languages and I know words for every meaning. So, I ask.

         “With all these ships, surely rowers are needed.”

          “Indeed, rowers are always needed – marauders and merchants alike, we all need rowers.”

         I learn that rowers on these vessels either have a stake in the journey, or they are thralls or debtors. I am simply in need of purpose and a shirt. Rowers have both. But since I have no stake in a ship, and I am neither a thrall nor a debtor, it is suggested I offer myself to a coxswain for whatever trade can be negotiated.

         I’ve found a ship that has a place where an oar lays loose with no trunk or bench for a rower’s seat. And the coxswain is here just now, re-harnessing the tiller.

         “Aye Sir, this looks to be a very fast ship with the right wind or a good string of rowers.”

         “And we have neither.”

         “I am an able oarsman.”

         “Why are you offering?  Do you know where we are going?”

         “No. I hardly know where I am.  But I was noticing all the rowers have fine tunics of woven fabrics and I am in need of a shirt.”

         “So, you can buy the fabric for a shirt from the merchant who deals in goods for sails.”

         He tells me this, as he is looking more closely at my stained and stiffened deerskins. This deer hide I wear should be an outer garment, and I think he is noticing it is pierced by wolf fangs and poorly made. Surely, he can understand why I’m begging for a shirt. Very well, row with us.

         “It is a strange pattern in the skies and clouds. So often the easterly winds make the planting season drought. We expect tomorrow will be another day of calm in the heat of the day so no one would need to wear a shirt for the row. When we arrive at Bergenshalvøyen the owner of these boats will provide you with a shirt. Just put your rower’s bench next to Emil.” I see this place where I am assigned but I have no trunk or seat.

(Continues tomorrow)


#67.3, Thursday April 3, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

         The dark emptiness of grief —

         She shouts her enticements to my back as I am walking away, inland, maybe, following this river back to its source.

         She raises her voice, “You’re right. We don’t have any rune for this, and even laying one rune on another we have none!”

          “There is nothing to say, Sjókona. I’m grieving.”

         “Consider ‘dagaz’ for light of the gods… You need to learn more before you can know anything. You are walking into a day of darkness.”

         As I set enough distance between us now, I can barely hear her shouting unknown words at me. Maybe they are accusations cursing me with some kind of holy darkness.

         I’m pretty sure a dearth of explanation isn’t the cause of my grief. Grief happens among Christians and Pagens as well. Simply, love is missing. We, who are of earth, tend to make this love thing — this all-encompassing God and heaven who is a god bigger than words can say — into something small and earthly or simply an afterthought to impose a waxen seal on a document of words. If love is real, so is the void when it is gone. And if love is small and manageable, so is the void it leaves. But I’m not managing the void well.

         Walking toward the mountains, what looks to be a river is really a deep bay, a long finger of the sea reaching between the rising mountains. The river of tide water curls into a harbor, here, and even the sea drinks from the fresh springs off the mountainsides.

         As I had guessed a shipyard is here. It is a busy place in this season. Fresh streams, flowing free of ice again, and the wanderlust of human loves billow where the west winds don’t go. So, yes, rowers are needed.  I don’t need complicated words to sign on to this work.

         I find one of the sailors who rode across the sea with Sjókona and I on our journey here. With the few words I know, and some scratches in the sand, I can let them know she’s alone there. Maybe that’s as she wishes to be. If it isn’t, she can ask them to take her home. I will be a rower on a different boat then.       

         There are no expectations or obligations owning me so I’ll take up an oar and go wherever this ship goes. There is very little difference between being free and being lost.

(Continues Tuesday, April 8, 2025)

#67.2, Wednesday, April 2, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

I just asked to learn how writing is done so I could know more about this new time and place where I am. And the seiðr brought me on this journey to see markings on stones of stories of mythical gods and pagan heroes. Now I know that writing here is done with a chisel and a hammer. And I learn that this woman wants something from me I can’t give her while I am still in the midst of my own grief for my wife and family.

         Apparently Sjókona is going to stay right here to wait for something that may never happen — for an infant to be put out for exposure. She seems intent on leaving this shore with an infant in her arms or in her womb. But my yearning is only for what I once had — for belonging — to love and be loved. Even if I could get beyond my own grief, her desire for an infant seems as though it is really to own a little person. She perceives relationship as possession. To be a part of that would cost me too much.

         The wind has shifted. The clinging stillness of the east wind lays the waters flat. An east wind brings the first black flies of spring looking for spoils, buzzing, biting, setting the earth with maggots.

         “You can’t leave,” she tells me. “You have no place to go.”

         “I’ll find the mooring place for the ships and I can go anywhere.”

         “And then I will follow you and I will tell the rowers not to take you because you are a sailor’s curse.”

         “I’m no curse against anyone and ships always need strong rowers.”

         “Not all of the ships that travel the sea will go back to the land of our home, you know.”

         “It is your home. I’m yet a stranger there. But I can ask which ship is crossing the sea straight toward the west and I will tell them you are alone here and need to be carried back to your home.”

         “That’s ridiculous! You don’t even know the language. How can you talk to anyone! And I haven’t told you of the bind-runes yet, and there is even a Christian bind-rune. You have so much more to learn. You can’t leave!”

         “So much more to learn.”

         I turn toward the east and set out walking, following the waters that flow back into the sea.

(Continues tomorrow)

#67.1, Tuesday, April 1, 2025

Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Skåne

Sjókona is no longer known to me simply by her purpose, seiðr, she is a human being with a name, though not a name given her by loving parents as a birth gift.  At least it isn’t a statement of utility; it is a name. But it is a name that reeks with purpose in myth – mother of sea creatures. And here she is grieving for a child she never had. Maybe it’s always true that a woman is burdened with purpose even when the world fears increasing the generations of people could cause famines.

         Low tide now, so I kneel to search the tidepools. She comes behind me and lays her hands on my shoulders, maybe a kindness, maybe to ease my stiff shoulders. But in my own grief it is the terrible dream over and again of the gentle touch, the fragrance of woman, then I wake prepared to set my gaze on Ana, warm and familiar and here is this stranger. I stand and step away from her, scowling…

         “What? You are afraid to be touched?”

         “My grief is too raw.”

         “How ridiculous! Your old life was long ago and far away now. Here you are free from obligations of any Christian rules of chastity.”

         Sjókona believes “father” means nothing more than planting the seed in the womb. And maybe she wants that from me. She came to this house to wait for a child to be discarded so she could take it up and have it as her own. 

         She argues, “Think of the wonderful infant he would be, son of an eternal time traveler and a seer – he would be a god.”

         “No, I can’t even think of that now, Sjókona.”

         “Don’t worry. I will rescue the child myself, just place the seed. You can just be on your way and never look back.”

         “No. I can’t do that Sjókona. My grief isn’t resolved.  Always I find my way following that fine silken thread of love, but it seems out of reach for me, right now.

         There are some crabs and shellfish in these rocks that can be eaten without the need of a fire. I break them with a rock, so we sit out here on the boulders and share breakfast with no Christian blessing on this food, and no word spoken.

         Now she says,  “You can’t leave now, because you have yet to learn of bind runes.”

(Continues tomorrow)

#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)