Heathens care about reputation more than most people do. We quote the old verse about how cattle die and kinsfolk die, but the good name of one who has earned it never dies. We call it word-fame. So let me ask an awkward question. In your community, who is getting it?
A feast for forty
Some years ago I helped to run a harvest gathering for about forty people. It went well. At symbel that night the horn went around and people were generous. They toasted the man who had led the blot, and it was a fine blot. They toasted the man who had dug the fire pit, and the man who had brewed the mead.
Nobody toasted the three women who had planned the menu, shopped for it, and cooked for two days. Nobody toasted the woman who had answered every email, collected every payment, and found a bed for every traveler. Nobody toasted the woman who had spent the whole of the blot at the back with the small children, so that their parents could take part.
I was not angry. Nobody meant anything by it. But I went home thinking about that verse.
An exercise
If you lead a kindred or help to run events, try this. Take a sheet of paper and write down the last three gatherings your group held. Under each one, list every task that had to be done for it to happen. Be thorough: the planning, the messages, the money, the shopping, the cooking, the cleaning before and after, the driving, the childcare, the setting up of the altar, and the leading of the rite.
Now write a name beside each task. Then take a second color and mark the tasks for which someone was publicly thanked.
I have done this with a dozen groups. The pattern is almost always the same. The visible tasks, which are the ones done standing up in front of people, are thanked. The invisible ones are not. And the invisible ones are done, very largely, by women.
Our ancestors knew better
What strikes me, as a Heathen, is that the people we look to did not make this mistake.
In Sweden there is a rune stone that a man named Holmgaut raised for his wife, Odindisa. It says that no better mistress will ever come to Hassmyra to manage the farm. That is a man's judgment of his wife's work, and he thought it worth carving in stone so that strangers would read it a thousand years later.
In Norway there is a stone raised by a mother for her daughter Astrid. It says that she was the handiest maiden in Hadeland: the most skilled with her hands.
Managing a farm. Skill of hand. These are precisely the kinds of work that go unmentioned at our feasts, and our ancestors cut them into stone. If they could carve it, we can say it over a horn.
Why it matters more than manners
This is about more than courtesy. Heathen ethics rests on reciprocity: a gift calls for a gift. A person who gives her labor to a community, year after year, and receives nothing back, not even acknowledgment, is in an unbalanced exchange. Our own worldview tells us that such a thing cannot last.
And it does not last. This is how communities lose their women. There is rarely a quarrel. The woman who cooked for two days simply does not offer next time. A year later she is no longer coming. Somebody remarks that it is a pity she drifted away.
What to do
- Name names. "Thanks to everyone who helped" is not word-fame. Say who, and say what she did.
- Thank the invisible work first. Open symbel with a toast to the people who made the gathering possible.
- Share the work in rotation. The Frith Standard asks that kitchen, cleaning, and childcare be shared among all who are able, without regard to sex.
- Share the visible roles too. If the same person always leads the rite, ask who has never been invited to.
- Put names on things. If someone wrote the ritual, illustrated the booklet, or built the website, her name belongs on it.
- Correct the record. When someone is praised for work that another person did, say so, kindly and at once.
The Naming of Deeds
At Disting each year, Heathen Women United sets aside the last morning for what we call the Naming of Deeds. Members stand, one after another, and each names another woman and says exactly what she did that year. You may not name yourself, and you may not be vague.
The first time we did it, it took twenty minutes. Now it takes most of the morning, and I have seen women in tears at hearing work acknowledged that they had assumed no one had noticed. It costs nothing. Any kindred could do it at its next gathering.
The verse says that a good name never dies. It cannot live either, until somebody speaks it aloud.