Conversion, Survival, and Revival

A long change

The Germanic peoples did not convert in a single moment. The change took seven hundred years and happened differently in every land.

Iceland's case is the best known. Faced with the threat of civil war between the two parties, the assembly entrusted the decision to its lawspeaker, himself a heathen, who ruled that all should be baptized, but that sacrifice in private would at first still be allowed. That compromise, and Iceland's distance from the rest of Europe, is one reason so much of the old lore was preserved there.

What changed for women

It is sometimes said that conversion simply robbed northern women of a freedom they had enjoyed. The truth is more mixed, and we should be fair to it.

What was lost

The clearest loss was religious authority. The old religion had priestesses, seeresses, and housewives who led the rites of their own homes. The new one reserved its priesthood to men. A woman who claimed to speak for the holy now needed the approval of a male hierarchy, and as the fate of Thiota shows, she was unlikely to receive it. Divorce, which Norse law had allowed to either spouse, was gradually closed off.

What was gained or kept

The Church in time came to insist that a marriage required the free consent of both parties, a rule that gave daughters a ground to refuse. It opposed the exposure of unwanted infants. Convents offered some women learning and an alternative to marriage. And women were prominent among the early Christians of the North: many late rune stones record women having bridges built for the souls of their kin.

Much also simply continued. Women kept their rights in property under the old laws for centuries. Life inside the threshold went on as before.

What the churchmen forbade

We can see which heathen practices survived by reading what the clergy tried to stamp out. The handbooks written to guide priests in hearing confession are full of questions addressed to women.

One such handbook, compiled in the Rhineland shortly after the year 1000, asks whether a woman has believed that she rides out at night in the company of a being called Holda. It asks whether she has set a table in her house with food, drink, and three knives for "those three sisters" whom earlier ages called the Fates, so that they might be kind to her. And it asks whether she has taken part in what women do at their weaving, when they begin a web and work spells into the threads.

Early Norwegian church law forbids keeping a staff or an altar in the house, and forbids sitting out at night to wake the spirits. Each prohibition is a small window. Through it we glimpse women, long after conversion, still feeding the powers of fate, still weaving with words, and still keeping in the house a staff that the Church thought dangerous enough to forbid.

What survived

The gods' names remained in the days of the week and in the names of hills, groves, and farms. The powers of land and home lived on in folk belief: the hidden people of Iceland, the house spirit of the Scandinavian farm who was given his bowl of porridge at Yule, the German Holle who shook out her featherbeds to make the snow. Charms were adapted, with saints' names set in the places of the old gods. And in Iceland, scholars and poets copied the old poems and wrote the sagas, so that the stories themselves came through.

Rediscovery and misuse

From the seventeenth century, when the manuscript of the Poetic Edda came to light in Iceland, the old literature began to be read again across Europe. In the nineteenth century it inspired painters, composers, and collectors of folklore, and became bound up with the rise of national feeling.

That enthusiasm had a dark side. In the early twentieth century, nationalist and racial movements in central Europe seized on the old gods and symbols as emblems of a supposed pure race, and the Nazi regime made heavy use of runes and other signs taken from the heathen past. This was a theft and a distortion. The harm it did, to millions of people and to the name of the old religion, has not been undone, and groups that carry on that misuse are still with us. Our Statement Against Extremism sets out where we stand.

The modern revival

Heathenry as a practiced religion took its present form in the early 1970s, independently and almost simultaneously in Iceland, Britain, and North America. In Iceland a small fellowship won recognition from the state in 1973, and held the first public blot the country had seen in nearly a thousand years. Since then the religion has spread to every inhabited continent.

Women were present in the revival from the start, as founders, organizers, and writers. The reconstruction of seidr from the 1980s onward was led largely by women, and much of the most careful teaching material in circulation today is women's work.

The revival also inherited a division. Most Heathens hold that the religion is open to anyone. A minority insist that it belongs to one ancestry, and that outlook has often come joined to rigid ideas about the proper place of women. By the middle of the 2010s that minority was loud, and many inclusive communities, though sound in principle, had not yet reckoned with how often their own women went unheard.

That is the moment in which, in the first weeks of 2017, eleven women began to compare notes. The rest is our story.