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Gender & Homosexuality in Norse Culture
Liberals today use Norse mythology and our heritage to justify their LGBT+ agenda. For legal reasons I will not argue against their agenda here, but I will show you how here they err in this context.
The common misconceptions they have are Loki's assumed "genderfluid" role as a mare, giving birth to an eight-legged horse, Þórr's "cross-dressing" when he tries to regain his hammer, and Óðinn's sorcery (seið), learned from a goddess and that also involves cross-dressing and that therefore was seen as unmanly, according to Christians.
They also refer to a Norse term, ergi, which they believe to mean "homosexuality".
They also refer to Gudmundar Saga, where there is talk about the rape of a man, involving no shame for the rapist, and only shame for the rape victim.
The common misconceptions they have are Loki's assumed "genderfluid" role as a mare, giving birth to an eight-legged horse, Þórr's "cross-dressing" when he tries to regain his hammer, and Óðinn's sorcery (seið), learned from a goddess and that also involves cross-dressing and that therefore was seen as unmanly, according to Christians.
They also refer to a Norse term, ergi, which they believe to mean "homosexuality".
They also refer to Gudmundar Saga, where there is talk about the rape of a man, involving no shame for the rapist, and only shame for the rape victim.
***
Let's take the last thing first. Gudmundar Saga. This is not the full name of that saga, so let us first call it by it's real name: Prestssaga Guðmundar byskups. This translates approximately as "The Priest Saga of the Bishop Gudmund", who died in 1237 on Iceland.
Iceland was converted to Christianity in the year 1000, and as the title of the saga in question suggests, this was not a saga about Pagans in a Pagan Iceland. This was a saga about Christians in a country that had officially converted to Christianity some 200+ years before, and 300+ years before the saga was written, much of it in a Benedictine School of writing, I may add (so at least much of it was written by Benedictine monks).
The opinions and world view in that saga are wholly that of the Christian monks who wrote it, and not that of the Pagan society that had existed 300+ years before. This is also the only saga where anything like this is written about.
It is clear that many places, even in Europe, a man is not considered to be homosexual if he rapes another man. It is not considered to be homosexual to "give", but only to "receive". This however is not and has never been the case in Scandinavia, where both the "giver" and the "receiver" are considered to be homosexual. Therefore, for example, you find no sexualized violence in Scandinavian prisons, because the rapist would have been seen as a homosexual just as much as the rape victim – and yes, that would have been seen as extremely shameful for him. The last thing you want to be in a prison, save perhaps except a rapist, is a homosexual. They are not treated well by the other prisoners at all, so to speak. Outside of modern liberals, there is and never was a culture of or tolerance for homosexuality in Scandinavia.
Ergi translates as "immoral lust", "fornication", "madness", "anger" and "evil (or "bad force")". The verb ergjast, from the same root, means "become unmanly", "become weak" or simply "weaken", known from the Norse proverb: Svá ergjast hverr sem eldist ("Every man who grows old grows weak").
The term still exists in modern Norwegian ergelig, meaning "annoying", "irritating" or "vexatious" and ergre, "to annoy" etc. It appears in modern Icelandic as ergeligur, meaning "to seem irritable" or "to appear irritable".
David F. Greenberg, who did the original studies on this, concludes that only the "taker" was ergi ("had immoral lust"), and not the giver, but he comes to this conclusion based on a Christian saga written at least partly by Benedictine monks 300+ years after Iceland was Christianized. I don't see how this should prove anything in relation to Pagan Scandinavia, or Pagan Iceland.
Then we arrive at the first mentioned group of arguments they have, with reference to different myths in the Norse mythology. Their problem is that they take the myths literally, when we know they are actually metaphorical, filled to the brim with kenningar ("metaphors"). They come to their conclusions because they don't understand the myths, their meaning or purpose; they don't understand what the deities represent or indeed what a Norse deity is to begin with.
As demonstrated in our Paganism Explained series, and as demonstrated by Marie Cachet in her The Secret of the She-Bear, our mythology revolves around reincarnation. When the deities return to life, when they reincarnate, they need the mother to panic, to become afraid, at the end of the birth. As the term suggests, it is related to the deity Pan, known in Norse mythology by the name Víðarr and Loki. This is adrenaline, or what causes adrenaline to come. Called Panic.
The myth about Loki changing into a mare and giving birth to Sleipnir, is a myth describing the pregnancy and its end. The Ettin mason hired to build a wall is the womb, building the fetus, with help from a horse, the placenta. After some time "the building of the wall" (the pregnancy) has to end, for the child to be born, and this is where adrenaline, Loki, comes in, provoking the birth and thus getting rid of the placenta.
It is even suggested in the myth, that fear is what drives Loki to take action. The other deities threaten to beat him to death unless he does something. Terrified, he… panics, and does his job.
No, they did not know about adrenaline, but they knew about the feeling caused by adrenaline, and they knew about fear and panic, and how important this was for the woman to give birth. And no, Loki is not "genderfluid". Adrenaline, fear and panic, has no sex. Both men and women, young and old, can panic.
The "cross-dressing" of Þórr is a myth about how Ettins have stolen his hammer, and he needs to get it back. To do so, he needs to pretend to be Freyja. Again, it's a myth about reincarnation. Þórr is the spark of life, his hammer is his beating heart, life itself. He is dead, and needs to be reborn. So he travels to the Ettins, the womb, in form of a fertilized egg: the male deity Þórr as Freyja ("[female] seed [i.e. egg])". There he eats and drinks greedily, in order to grow as a fetus, and when he is finally ready to be reborn, he grabs his hammer and kills the Ettins. Note that when a child is born and starts to breathe, when his heart starts to work sans assistance from the mother, this "kills" the placenta. Also, when still a fetus, the child has no sex. It is neither male nor female. It will become a male or a female later on in the pregnancy.
Note that he is accompanied by Loki, adrenaline, panic, because he cannot be reborn and get his heart back without him!
This has nothing to do with cross-dressing…
Then their final piece of evidence: Óðinn's "shameful" female sorcery. You can read what I said about Sorcery, to know more about this, but first let me explain a few things: when a woman is pregnant and is ready to give birth, she is assisted by midwives. Women who dress in white robes, wise women, known as the Norns in Norse mythology, able to examine the placenta and by doing so tell if the child will suffer from this or that illness in life, or have this or that quality in life (they are thus called "goddesses of destiny", not because they give a destiny to the child, but because they can predict it, by analyzing the placenta after birth).
Well, they were the midwives alright, but in Pagan Europe they also had something called the midwives of the mind. Yes, we know this from Ancient Greek philosophy as maïeutics – commonly known as "the Socratic method". As you can understand, the term comes from the goddess Maïa, the midwife of the gods. The midwives of the mind of the ancient world are commonly known as the Druids today, and they dressed in white robes, just like "real" midwives. Yes, they were taught about midwifery from the goddess of midwifery, Maïa…
This is the "shameful" midwifery of Óðinn – the god of the mind in Scandinavia. As I explain in my blog post about Sorcery, this has nothing to do with homosexual practices and it is not shameful at all, save perhaps in Christian eyes. It was not unmanly to be a Druid.
Iceland was converted to Christianity in the year 1000, and as the title of the saga in question suggests, this was not a saga about Pagans in a Pagan Iceland. This was a saga about Christians in a country that had officially converted to Christianity some 200+ years before, and 300+ years before the saga was written, much of it in a Benedictine School of writing, I may add (so at least much of it was written by Benedictine monks).
The opinions and world view in that saga are wholly that of the Christian monks who wrote it, and not that of the Pagan society that had existed 300+ years before. This is also the only saga where anything like this is written about.
It is clear that many places, even in Europe, a man is not considered to be homosexual if he rapes another man. It is not considered to be homosexual to "give", but only to "receive". This however is not and has never been the case in Scandinavia, where both the "giver" and the "receiver" are considered to be homosexual. Therefore, for example, you find no sexualized violence in Scandinavian prisons, because the rapist would have been seen as a homosexual just as much as the rape victim – and yes, that would have been seen as extremely shameful for him. The last thing you want to be in a prison, save perhaps except a rapist, is a homosexual. They are not treated well by the other prisoners at all, so to speak. Outside of modern liberals, there is and never was a culture of or tolerance for homosexuality in Scandinavia.
Ergi translates as "immoral lust", "fornication", "madness", "anger" and "evil (or "bad force")". The verb ergjast, from the same root, means "become unmanly", "become weak" or simply "weaken", known from the Norse proverb: Svá ergjast hverr sem eldist ("Every man who grows old grows weak").
The term still exists in modern Norwegian ergelig, meaning "annoying", "irritating" or "vexatious" and ergre, "to annoy" etc. It appears in modern Icelandic as ergeligur, meaning "to seem irritable" or "to appear irritable".
David F. Greenberg, who did the original studies on this, concludes that only the "taker" was ergi ("had immoral lust"), and not the giver, but he comes to this conclusion based on a Christian saga written at least partly by Benedictine monks 300+ years after Iceland was Christianized. I don't see how this should prove anything in relation to Pagan Scandinavia, or Pagan Iceland.
Then we arrive at the first mentioned group of arguments they have, with reference to different myths in the Norse mythology. Their problem is that they take the myths literally, when we know they are actually metaphorical, filled to the brim with kenningar ("metaphors"). They come to their conclusions because they don't understand the myths, their meaning or purpose; they don't understand what the deities represent or indeed what a Norse deity is to begin with.
As demonstrated in our Paganism Explained series, and as demonstrated by Marie Cachet in her The Secret of the She-Bear, our mythology revolves around reincarnation. When the deities return to life, when they reincarnate, they need the mother to panic, to become afraid, at the end of the birth. As the term suggests, it is related to the deity Pan, known in Norse mythology by the name Víðarr and Loki. This is adrenaline, or what causes adrenaline to come. Called Panic.
The myth about Loki changing into a mare and giving birth to Sleipnir, is a myth describing the pregnancy and its end. The Ettin mason hired to build a wall is the womb, building the fetus, with help from a horse, the placenta. After some time "the building of the wall" (the pregnancy) has to end, for the child to be born, and this is where adrenaline, Loki, comes in, provoking the birth and thus getting rid of the placenta.
It is even suggested in the myth, that fear is what drives Loki to take action. The other deities threaten to beat him to death unless he does something. Terrified, he… panics, and does his job.
No, they did not know about adrenaline, but they knew about the feeling caused by adrenaline, and they knew about fear and panic, and how important this was for the woman to give birth. And no, Loki is not "genderfluid". Adrenaline, fear and panic, has no sex. Both men and women, young and old, can panic.
The "cross-dressing" of Þórr is a myth about how Ettins have stolen his hammer, and he needs to get it back. To do so, he needs to pretend to be Freyja. Again, it's a myth about reincarnation. Þórr is the spark of life, his hammer is his beating heart, life itself. He is dead, and needs to be reborn. So he travels to the Ettins, the womb, in form of a fertilized egg: the male deity Þórr as Freyja ("[female] seed [i.e. egg])". There he eats and drinks greedily, in order to grow as a fetus, and when he is finally ready to be reborn, he grabs his hammer and kills the Ettins. Note that when a child is born and starts to breathe, when his heart starts to work sans assistance from the mother, this "kills" the placenta. Also, when still a fetus, the child has no sex. It is neither male nor female. It will become a male or a female later on in the pregnancy.
Note that he is accompanied by Loki, adrenaline, panic, because he cannot be reborn and get his heart back without him!
This has nothing to do with cross-dressing…
Then their final piece of evidence: Óðinn's "shameful" female sorcery. You can read what I said about Sorcery, to know more about this, but first let me explain a few things: when a woman is pregnant and is ready to give birth, she is assisted by midwives. Women who dress in white robes, wise women, known as the Norns in Norse mythology, able to examine the placenta and by doing so tell if the child will suffer from this or that illness in life, or have this or that quality in life (they are thus called "goddesses of destiny", not because they give a destiny to the child, but because they can predict it, by analyzing the placenta after birth).
Well, they were the midwives alright, but in Pagan Europe they also had something called the midwives of the mind. Yes, we know this from Ancient Greek philosophy as maïeutics – commonly known as "the Socratic method". As you can understand, the term comes from the goddess Maïa, the midwife of the gods. The midwives of the mind of the ancient world are commonly known as the Druids today, and they dressed in white robes, just like "real" midwives. Yes, they were taught about midwifery from the goddess of midwifery, Maïa…
This is the "shameful" midwifery of Óðinn – the god of the mind in Scandinavia. As I explain in my blog post about Sorcery, this has nothing to do with homosexual practices and it is not shameful at all, save perhaps in Christian eyes. It was not unmanly to be a Druid.
***
So as you can see, all their evidence is rubbish, and proves only that they are ignorant and have zero understanding of our Native European heritage. Our Pagan forebears were not "cross-dressers", they did not approve of "genderfluid" people and they did not see homosexuality as anything but shameful. As you can tell from Tacitus' "Germania", supported by archaeological finds, our forebears actually even executed what they called "degenerates" (homosexuals), by smashing their skulls, cutting their throats, strangling them and then finally throwing their by then rather dead bodies into bogs.
They can argue for their liberal world view as much as they want, but they cannot rightfully take the world view of our pre-Christian Scandinavian forebears as support for their own world view. In fact, their modern world view crashes fully, totally, utterly and completely with the world view of the Ancient Scandinavians.
They can argue for their liberal world view as much as they want, but they cannot rightfully take the world view of our pre-Christian Scandinavian forebears as support for their own world view. In fact, their modern world view crashes fully, totally, utterly and completely with the world view of the Ancient Scandinavians.
Varg Vikernes
26.06.2020