An ancient way of life is having a moment right now. Why?
Spend any amount of time in Iceland, and you are going to be reminded of the country’s pagan heritage. Frequently. This may come in overt, conscious choices such as putting the word “viking” in front of shops, restaurants, or even hot dogs. But if you have even a cursory knowledge of Norse mythology, certain place names and proper nouns may also stand out to you: Bifröst, the legendary bridge to the realm of the gods, is also a business school. Miðgarður, the mortal realm within the world tree, is also a cultural centre in the northwest. You will meet people with names such as Baldur, Freyja and Þór — quite often in fact.
At the same time, Iceland is a nominally Christian country. There is a national church, the Lutheran Evangelical Church of Iceland, and Christianity in general enjoys the largest population share of those who align with any religion. The Baldurs and Freyjas you meet are more likely to have been named after a grandparent than their eponymous gods.
All of this attests to a country that grew from Norse pagan roots and later embraced Christianity but retained the cultural memories of its past. However, paganism is on the rise across North America and Europe, and Iceland is no exception. In some cases, the increase in self-identifying pagans has been dramatic, and has not been without its growing pains.
So what, exactly, is Norse paganism? What makes Iceland’s approach to it distinct? And why are so many people drawn to it? In conversations we had with Icelandic pagans, we discovered people searching for meaning in our postmodern world, celebrating their past and embracing the future, while trying their best to practice an open, tolerant faith in the face of intolerant actors trying to appropriate them.
Paganism’s rise
Paganism, within a modern context, can be roughly defined as any number of spiritual practices that derive its mythologies, deities, ethics and practices from the non-Christian, ancient European world. “Derives” does a lot of heavy lifting here: as the early Christian church swept across Europe, it did its best to erase, suppress or appropriate pagan beliefs and practices, resulting in fragmented, incomplete knowledge of early spiritual paths.
Norse paganism has some advantages where this is concerned. The Nordic and Baltic countries were the last in Europe to be Christianised; Iceland wouldn’t officially embrace the faith until 1000 CE. Christianisation is, historically, not an instantaneous process; it can take decades or even centuries to fully take hold. Iceland’s decision to become officially Christian was to the greatest extent a political one. Missionaries had been largely unsuccessful in the country, but when King OIaf Tryggvason, himself a Christian, ascended to the Norwegian throne, tensions began to rise, culminating in war in Denmark and Norway. Iceland saw the writing on the wall and made the change to Christianity, albeit with some concessions to its largely pagan populace.
“I think a big part of being Norse pagan today is definitely being a nerd about it.”
The Norse were also a passionately literate people, and Icelandic historian Snorri Sturluson would record much of the Norse myths and legends in the 13th century — just two or three generations from Iceland’s official Christianisation. As such, works such as the Prose Edda, Snorri’s compilation of Norse mythology and still our best source for it, retained their freshness. The irony that our most famous source for pagan belief was compiled by a Christian is not lost on modern practitioners, many of whom take Snorri’s works with a grain of salt.
Fast forward to 1972. This is the year Ásatrúarfélagið, Iceland’s modern Norse pagan religious organisation, was founded and legally recognised by the state. It got off to a slow start, to say the least. In 1998, only 280 Icelanders were registered in Ásatrúarfélagið. It wouldn’t cross 1,000 until late 2006, 44 years from its inception. However, that number would double in just seven years’ time, and double again in another four. Today, Ásatrúarfélagið boasts over 6,000 members, making it the largest non-Christian religion in Iceland.
Paganism elsewhere has seen a similar trend. Polls of religious beliefs in the United States consistently show a tenfold increase in self-identifying pagans from the 1990s into the modern day, with conservative estimates putting them at close to 1.5 million today. In Europe, a 2021 survey showed some 74,000 people in England and Wales identifying as pagan, up from 17,000 in 2011.
How did we get to this point? Learning how Norse pagan practitioners themselves view their path sheds light on what drew them there in the first place.
What is Norse paganism anyway?
Broadly speaking, Norse paganism is a modern take on the myths, beliefs and practices of the Viking Age Nordic peoples, but that only tells part of the story. Despite the wealth of literary material from the aforementioned Snorri and others, how one “does” Norse paganism spans a very wide spectrum and is largely up to individual interpretation.
“If somebody would say Norse paganism, I can see it from my cultural perspective and how we have it here,” explains Ísvöld Ljósbera Sigríðarbur, an Icelandic völva (the closest translation being “seeress”). “We can think that someone literally is believing in all of these gods and having some kind of relation to them and a practice around them. But also, just being raised here in Iceland, it can also be that you are much of a child of nature, that you are a nature-believer first, and can see all these spirits in nature and the seasons around us.”
Ísvöld continues, “So it’s not dogmatic in my perspective, because all approaches are valid, 100%.”
Alda Villiljós, another practitioner whose focus includes animism, ancestor work, and seiðr (a form of divination), also recognises Norse paganism’s blend of the historic and the personal.
“I think today, what we have is a reconstructed faith that builds on both what we have in the written sources and archaeological sources, but also builds on the personal,” they say. “It’s just the kind of spiritual truth that you find yourself, and is not necessarily something other people will share. It might be personal. It might be something other people agree on. But it does draw from writings that have existed for a very long time.”
A great deal of these myths and practices are present not just in the Poetic Edda, but also in Icelandic folk tales and beliefs. Many are familiar with the sagas, but there are many, many more highly localised stories across the country involving natural formations where supernatural (or hypernatural) beings such as elves, trolls, and spirits are reported to make their homes. These may be hills, waterfalls, or just oddly shaped rocks, with stories about them known to an entire region, or just to a single village.
This presents an interesting blend of the scholarly pursuits of the Prose Edda, Völuspá (a 10th century poem from the Poetic Edda that recounts how the world was created and how it will end) and other ancient texts, along with the deeply personal when it comes to Icelandic Norse paganism, as Regn Sólmundur Evu points out.
“I think a big part of being Norse pagan today is definitely being a nerd about it,” they say, regarding the scholarly aspect. “But for me, I think because it is reconstructed, it can be kind of whatever you want, within maybe a sensible limit, because it is this kind of almost new thing, while still being with these ancient roots, it is so much up for interpretation.”
“We are a small nation where, and we have, in our isolation, managed to preserve so many wonderful practices”
Regn brings up being raised in Hafnarfjörður. This capital area town of about 30,000 is well known for its legendary elf population.
“Some of my first memories from kindergarten are going to the elf church [essentially a large rock formation where elves are reputed to live],” they say. “So I was very, very influenced by that just in early childhood.”
Ísvöld also appreciates how Icelandic culture has influenced modern Norse paganism.
“We are a small nation where, and we have, in our isolation, managed to preserve so many wonderful practices that have been allowed to have a continuum and grow with our ages and and be in a service proper to our times,” they say. “I didn’t realise how rare we were in our practices until later in life.”
In terms of a sort of code of ethics, there is Hávamál (literally “the sayings of the High One”, referring to Óðinn), a poem recorded in the 10th century, though likely older, containing sayings and suggestions for how one should behave in their day-to-day lives. Ísvöld points out that this text is more of a guidebook than dogma.
“It’s all about being a good person and not being an asshole,” they say. “Being honest, tolerable, tolerant and honorable, and how reputation matters. It’s not like the ten commandments. It’s a very strong suggestion. And it’s just saying you can be a fool, you can drink too much and talk your head off, but the consequences are people are going to remember you as a silly guy. And if you don’t leave your home, you’re gonna become dumb. It’s common sense. I really enjoy that.”
While Ásatrúarfélagið does have a structure of sorts, composed of local chieftains and one national allsherjargoði, a great many Norse pagans do not belong to any formal religious structure. Ísvöld says this is in contrast to one of the biggest misconceptions they’ve seen about Norse paganism.
“I think a big misunderstanding is to treat it as so religious and dogmatic,” they say. “That there’s good and evil, or sin, or you’re rewarded by something, that there is an all powerful creator in it. From our perspective, it’s just rebranding Christianity.”
Photo by Alda Villiljós
No tolerance for the intolerant
One subject that sadly must be addressed is the fact that it’s not just academic nerds and elf hill enjoyers who are attracted to Norse paganism. There has been an uptick in white supremacists doing everything from appropriating Norse runes to forming their own bastardised versions of Norse paganism. These groups, which will not be named here, purport a closed practice, off-limits to non-Scandinavians, while purporting the Nazi’s “blood and soil” beliefs dressed in pagan clothing.
“There are bigots that want to talk about source material, and then they want to ignore just how queer it is, how mixed race is, how worldly it is.”
This is often a source of frustration for the majority of Norse pagans, who are not just not Nazis but also expressly anti-racist. So how does a decent heathen push back against bigotry? Do you fight to defend the symbols Nazis want to claim, or let them go?
“It’s gonna depend on how every individual feels comfortable with,” Ísvöld says. “I do not judge reclaiming at all. And I also definitely understand people that are just cutting stuff out. When you are reclaiming, then you can expect some backlash from some people, certainly. And if you want to cut something out, maybe a reclaimer might get a little frustrated with that, too. So it depends on the consequences you’re comfortable with.”
For their part, Ísvöld finds the Nazi appropriation of Norse paganism perplexing, citing Hávamál.
“If we’re going to look into and be inspired by Hávamál, then we should be inspired to be an open practice,” they say. “Because it advises to expand yourself, to see the world, to travel far and not to be quick, to make judgments, learn from people, listen to people. There are bigots that want to talk about source material, and then they want to ignore just how queer it is, how mixed race is, how worldly it is.”
“I think for me, I honestly try to just let it go,” Alda says of Nazi-appropriated symbols. “If there’s a symbol that has been taken over, and other people feel like it’s become a hateful symbol, if other people are immediately feeling uncomfortable by the presence of a symbol or a way of speaking or some text or something, then I think that becomes more important than me trying to hold on to something that maybe was important to me, but I can also substitute with something else, because symbols are just that.”
Regn agrees, saying, “I prioritise people with safety over everything else. I absolutely don’t want people to feel unsafe around me, and I don’t want to give the impression that I might be a white supremacist or a Nazi. The appropriation, it is really sad, and it gets kind of heavy sometimes, and it makes me, personally, sometimes, want to avoid talking about my spiritual beliefs. But I would rather prioritise people’s feelings of safety around me because I do want people to feel safer around me than not.”
“My focus is much better spent on trying to create a safe or a safer space around me and within my practice,” Alda says. “For other people to come into the practice rather than lamenting the fact that, ‘oh no, I can’t use the symbol,’ you know, like that just sounds like a waste of time to me personally, but I’m sure that’s more difficult for other people.”
Rise of the gods
As mentioned earlier, there has been an upswing in self-identified pagans across North America and Europe, and Icelandic Norse pagans have exponentially increased their numbers over just the past generation.
This naturally raises the question: why? Why now? What is drawing all these people to an ancient, often poorly understood way of life?
Ísvöld believes that, in the United States at least, it has a lot to do with feeling a loss of identity.
“There’s a huge upswing there because they lost so much of their identity to become an American, and that became a loss for them, right?,” they say. “And a bit of an identity crisis. And then they find out, ‘Oh, I have this much [Scandinavian] in me’, you know? And then they start looking back to the roots again. And that combined with the TV series of Vikings, that just made it all look so badass and sexy and cool and historically, very inaccurate. I’m still, for the first time in my life, feeling cool for a second.”
“The boundaries of what is empirical evidence and what is bullshit are being blurred to an extent that people can’t really trust anything.”
“I’m not a sociologist or statistician or anything, but I think maybe it’s because people are always searching, and it is quite comforting to find something that actually resonates with you,” Alda says. “I feel like maybe a lot of people have been looking into just different spiritualities and religions and have settled on this. Even though I’m not against Christianity in any way, I do feel maybe these people aren’t finding what they’re searching for in Christianity. Most pagans probably have Christian backgrounds because that is just the state of the world. It is very dominantly Christian. In paganism, you can make it kind of your own. It’s a very DIY thing, especially if you’re not in a community.”
Regn believes there is a global cultural shift, where “people are extremely tired of homogeneity, basically,” they say. They contend that people have an innate urge to be creative and connect with others, but that this movement towards Norse paganism runs deeper still than that.
“I feel like there’s just a surge of religiosity and spirituality in general, and I feel like that is somewhat caused by how chaotic the world is,” they say. “It is like we are living in really weird, weird times, and things don’t make sense and things are difficult for everyone, really, except for maybe the 1% of the richest people who can just buy their way out of their problems. So I do think there are people searching for a kind of solace and comfort really, which can be found in all different kinds of religions. But I do think because people are narrative creatures, and we need stories to make sense of things, and I do feel like that is probably the biggest reason.”
When our most trusted institutions are taken over by people with no respect for the scientific method, let alone for speaking truthfully, people will naturally turn elsewhere to find something real.
“The boundaries of what is empirical evidence and what is bullshit are being blurred to an extent that people can’t really trust anything,” Regn says. “And that is very scary. It is extremely frightening. And it worries me too. So I think it’s this kind of seeking for something, such as the nerdy aspect of it that we were talking about before, where you start reading all of these myths from all of these different cultures, and you start thinking, ‘wow, OK, this is something that resonates’.”
Becoming pagan
As discussed, Norse paganism is in many ways not so much a religion as it is a way of life. There is no baptism, no formal induction ceremony. So how does one become a practitioner of Norse paganism?
“What comes to my mind instantly is to just connect with nature and the people around you,” Regn says. “What I started with was just spending time in nature and finding divinity in nature, and it just comes differently to people.”
“Sitting in nature and just listening to all of your senses,” Alda says. “Sitting there in silence and listening to the sounds that you hear, just letting your mind wander and touching things, touching the grass and touching the trees, and just listening to what comes to you, and that takes practice. The first time, you’re probably not gonna get any deep insights because that’s just not how we work.”
“Go into the Völuspá and Hávamál and enjoy the poetry and the visions of it and be inspired by it, see how it reflects your daily life, how it reflects society and the cycles of life,” Ísvöld says. “You can draw a lot of wisdom from it, inspiration from it. Be open-minded with it because it just should be inspiring. The whole thing is that we are nature-based. So we start by just finding places where you can sit with nature, even if it’s just a corner of your yard. It’s just understanding that you’re part of nature, and from there, when you’re getting introduced to like the Norse gods, you can start relating it to what you see right in front of you, in nature and in life.”
Ísvöld helpfully points out that even if you live in an urban setting, and don’t have the time or money to get out into the countryside, you can still commune with the gods, the spirits, and life itself.
“I’ve lived in New York City, and I felt even more like power to be connected to nature there,” they say. “Just loving that tree on the street, just watching the sky, feeling the wind sitting in Central Park, watching what breaks through cracks and concrete, reminding us that we’re always standing on Mother Earth, and that we are also connecting with her through a communication with people, and the pigeons, the bugs, you know, it’s all there, and it’s all important to learn from it all.”