No, I'm Actually Not a Norse Pagan, But Perhaps a Beardo

Ignorance in Full Display: Pete Hegseth Banning Norse Pagans
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen // Bjorn Talks | 18 July 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BmM_NG_iMVY

4:27 While not a Norse Pagan, I believe Odin was a real person.

Meaning the one who came to Gylfi and fooled him into believing he was a god or even one of three creator gods.

In objective favour of my position, Jackson Crawford (though he didn't refer to it) verified that the Deyr fé stanza in Havamal, which resembles Ecclesiastes closely (Praekeren in Norwegian) would have been metric even if reconstructed as Proto-Norse, around the time when Odin would have come.

I am also a bearded man whom some consider a weirdo. However, you show some ignorance of US slang, the wiktionary entry on "beardo" starts in 2006.*

So, I kind of feel a bit targetted ... indirectly.

7:41 I must say, I'm thankful that Christianity allows me to be a Critic of Science, for instance ditch Evolution (like on the scale of microbes to trees or the radicality of ape to man).

You do you of course, but one day God will call you out for not being a Geocentric and concluding He exists, turning the universe around us, like St. Paul says in Romans 1.

8:48 "it doesn't become extreme, it doesn't infringe on other people's rights"

Somewhat rich from a person who just called himself a science believer.

Between 1934 and 1977, a total of slightly less than 44,000 sterilization procedures were performed in Norway under the 1934 act.

Now, I'm citing one who claims that those who were targetted involuntarily were only c. 2000, but even 2000 is 2000 too many, in the name of science.**

10:29 "a fundamentalist attitude towards other people"

What is that supposed to mean, even?

Fundamentalism is normally used of an attitude to one's religious texts. If one has any.

But you sound as if meaning a brutal attitude against someone because he has a different religion, guess what, killing monks is pretty brutal, whether it's done by Norse Pagans or by Lutherans or Calvinists, and doing it because Gregorian is regarded as seiðr or because shaving the beard is regarded as unmanly is hardly a motivation that excludes some high degree of religious exclusivism. Perhaps this wasn't done all through the Viking age, but at least a part of it.

And a motivation involving the cutting down of Irminsul in Saxony sounds pretty much like solid Fundamentalism about Norse and Saxon hallows ...

11:36 Nah, cruel and evil are not always synonymous.

Franco was cruel, my grandpa argued, in 1975 when he died, because he used the vile garrote.***

Franco was good, my ma argued in 1984, when stopping me from joining De Molays, because he had abortion banned in Spain.

I don't see any totally irreconcilable thing between the two.

Besides, if cruel were evil, where does that leave Gudrun's revenge or Ivar Boneless' revenge and so on? I don't think St. Olaf went as far as to "rista blodsörn"

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* https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=beardo&action=history

** https://www.eurozine.com/sterilization-in-norway-a-dark-chapter/

Citing further:

Free will was the guiding principle in the act. Physical coercion was not allowed. The person in question had to apply for or consent to the procedure him or herself – if he or she were able to do so – before the sterilization could be carried out. However, the act did open up for sterilization without consent of the “insane” and of persons of “deficient mental development and/or permanently impaired mental capacity”9 , but in these cases the procedure could not be carried out without the prior written consent of the person’s legal guardian or, if the legal guardian was incompetent, a person appointed to act on his or her behalf.

Mental institutions have a way of faking consent by extortion and things ... "dat don't impressin' me much" ... and in some cases the legal guardians could be foster parents aligned with the system rather than the patient.

*** Never the cruelty of forced sterilisation, though! In Badajoz, there was a case of castrations, but that was by ill disciplined troops, not on Franco's orders (and I'm not a fan of Yagüe under whose orders it happened, at all).

Ibn Fadlan's View on Vikings

Ahmad ibn Fadlan's Encounter With the "Vikings"
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen | 28 Febr. 2026
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi6hEI1uJr4

3:14 Free translation. Fadlan considers Muslim Ritual Purity as equal to normal hygiene.

Probably not too uncommon among Muslims.

4:11 I have, up to an attack of gout, diagnosed on 13th XII (St. Lucy), been drinking 1 pint (50 cl) of beer, strength 6.6 to 7.2 each evening before bed.

You can imagine how this relates to avoiding nycturia.

Now, there have been Muslims who have because of this stamped me as a drunkard.

4:24 Muslims probably have a ritual law reminiscent of Leviticus 15:16.

Fadlan probably meant that Vikings skipped the "unclean until the evening" part.

5:45 Probably there is some people group that has tattoos or are supposed to have had tattoos.

Fadlan finds the Vikings remind him of that, and so he applies the stereotype. Imagine he was more familiar with Lapps than with Tatters, learned that Tatters travel around and then he assumed (and wrote as eyewitness testimony) that Tatters live in roundish tents called goahti.

That's probably how Fadlan came to imagine Vikings wore tattoos. Of course, this could be a custom simply limited to the Novgorod area and using an East Slavic word ... from what I know about that, which is not much. I just know that unlike what you told me of Vikings, I don't know for sure Rus' Slavs didn't have tattoos.

9:40 No, being true to the Islamic culture wasn't so much part of his job as part of his Pavlovian reactions.

Flat Earth Vikings?

Did the Vikings Believe the Earth is FLAT?
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen | 11 Oct. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=708pMwN4dmg

1:15 Eratosthenes. Not Erastothenes.

1:43 It implies that Hellenistic Greeks at that point* ...

2:37 You pretty much describe how Phoenicians figured out and transmitted eventually to Aristotle that the Earth was round. I think it was them that Aristotle credited for the observation.

Except, in the case of Vikings, you speak of "they would have" ... are they reported to have made that conclusion?

Huns lived on the Puszta of Hungary, wide prairies of grass with no trees. Similar observations as on sea are perfectly possible. Are they reported to have come to conclude that Earth was round?

A thing may be very easily accessible, and still "pass under the radar" so to speak.

How many Heliocentrics these days are completely unaware that all astronomic observations, with a few exceptions from SOHO, Moon, Mars, formerly also Voyager are made from Earth and are therefore Geocentric as observations? It passes below the radar.

3:18 "Most people couldn't read"

Depends on period, but the rise in literacy, where even peasants who cannot read get aware of the value of written documents, where all boys in towns are at least offered schooling is from c. 1200 or so, so after the Viking Age.

For the Viking Age, that point stands.

3:41 As to the ascertaining of latitude, you could have a point, at least for Eirik Rauthi and Leif Eiriksson. Much of the rest was pretty "close to coast" ... North Sea is nearly inland, and Mediterranean is inland.

But the problem is, they could have used a technique without knowing why it worked. Sea farers have used magnets for compasses since Marco Polo. This doesn't mean they had studied Maxwell and knew electro-magnetism inside out.

4:05 "they were probably aware of the knowledge for the South of Europe"

Does this mean they believed it? Between 795 and c. 1000 quite a lot of them knew of Christianity and didn't believe it.

5:18 When it comes to me, you can tell him,** I'm already subscribed ...

8:32 The video is nearly finished.

Now, one thing you left out of the calculation is, has Norse Paganism a Flat Earth view?

We can be pretty sure, though it's not all that explicit, that Greek Paganism in Homer's time had, and in Roman times, after Eratosthenes, no longer had a flat earth view.

Norse Paganism has an image of three platforms in a giant tree, the narrowest being Asgard with Valhall and Trudheim and a few more nice places, the middle one in size and position is earth, and the lowest and nethermost is divided into Hel below Earth (where Earth blocks sunlight from it) and Utgarth around it, because it's even broader than Earth. That's very obviously a Flat Earth view.

However, this doesn't totally decide whether the Old Norse Flat Earth view was actually still accepted in the Viking age, or whether it was to the Vikings like Homer was to the Romans.

I would not say Voluspa is a poem dating in an original form to BC times. Or if the view comes from Snorre. I would say, this view was still prevalent among Pagans of the Viking age. I'd have loved to hear you make a case for the opposite.

Actually, looking up, this is not so clearcut in Voluspa or Snorre as I thought.

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* His words: "it implies that people at that point"
** Bjørn has problems with a nisse, a gnome or goblin, about subscribers, he says ... basically every second video, or perhaps even every single one by now ...

Snorre was a Christian

No, Odin is not a demigod
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen | 4 Oct. 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVjQvcMgqcw

4:09 Snorre is simply giving history.

He would not have understood what you meant by calling Genesis references "Christian Creation Myth" and he would have regarded Pagan ones (including Ask and Embla starting out as two tree trunks) more like fake history than a totally different literary genus than history.

Precisely as in Heimskringla he is giving history from the Yngling Dynasty from Yngwe Frey's stepfather Odin to his far off descendant St. Olaf. (Yeah, your pet peeve).

A man who renounced believing Odin was a god, but not believing Odin or more properly perhaps his stepson was an ancestor.

4:54 If you believe Christianity, you don't need to be devout to believe Christianity.

Using the phrase as you do comes from the practise of describing freethinkers like Rousseau or Esaias Tegnér (you have probably examples in Norway too) as "lax Christians" ... it's more like "cultural Christians" (like an Atheist from Iran is a "cultural Muslim" ... I met one in Lund).

Sæmund was a bishop and gave a collection of Norse poetry of partly at least genuine or closely fac simile Pagan inspiration without such explicit caveats, no one suspected him of Paganism, i e Apostasy.

To both, Norse Paganism was partly like Greek Paganism was to monks copying Homer before they copy the Bible, partly a way of allowing poets to make references that aren't sincere about factual belief but impressive (the latest in the row being of course a Jew, not a Christian, a certain Stan Lee). Given that poetry in the sense of fiction is meant to be impressive.

5:12 No, Snorre doesn't say Odin created the Earth and Homer doesn't say Ulysses blinded Polypheme.

Snorre says that High, Just-as-High and Third tell Gylfe that Odin and his brothers created the Earth.

Homer says that Ulysses tells Nausicaa that Ulysses blinded Polypheme.

7:39 Why would Snorre's story originate the idea that Norse gods are demi-gods?

In Norse and Homeric "theoiology" the gods were corporeal. Not pure spirits.

Perhaps a Jew considers Christians consider their God as a pure spirit and actually God, but Jesus as "a demi-god," because He's corporeal, but that's absolutely not correct either to Christianity or to Paganism.

Obviously, Nazi Gottgläubige were Deists, with language borrowed from Norse myths, they weren't actual Norse pagans any more than the proto-Deist Voltaire was. At least on the interpretation of Bohrmann. They have far more to do with Voltaire's benefactor Frederick II Hohenzollern than with your religion.

Viking Age Norse Women

The truth about Viking women will surprise you
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen | 9.VIII.2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hl0yR09XnS0

2:35 At least for Sweden, I would say that Norse women in the Viking age had no right to inheritance, at least not unless it was per testament and at least about capital.

Prior to Magnus Ladulås (son of Birger Jarl, a Crusader to Finland, of the dynasty previously mostly called "Folkungar" and now the "house of Bjelbo" ... Bjelbo-ätten), the rule was "gånge hatt till och hufva från" — to the hat and away from the bonnet. He changed it to "syster ärfve hälften mot brodern"* (so, 1/1 to male heirs first, later with a brother and a sister 2/3 to male heir, 1/3 to female and so on depending on number of heirs in total).

I suppose this did not refer to items of clothing or to looms and spindles.

Summers Idyll

@SummersIdyll

Most societies are patrilineal and practice primogeniture...even if the woman was smarter, wiser, more capable...a deranged younger male would be given the crown or inheritance...for instance. All that mattered was male or female.

I don't understand it, other than, they feared she would be swayed into a marriage in a rival family or something, or over powered by brute force.

Yet in history women are among the more effective rulers. We can all think of some probably.

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@hglundahl

@SummersIdyll "primogeniture"

Only for land or political power.

"Yet in history women are among the more effective rulers."

Efficiency is not all one looks for in a ruler.**

The last ruler of independent Wales was a woman, she lost. Not effective. Dito for Mary Queen of Scots. Elisabeth Tudor was taken hostage by Protestant interests, those of the Cecils, and her apparent efficiency was a misfortune for England.

But these women were pretty few. The 18th C. was relatively frequent in them, in Austria and Russia. I think 3 in total. A fourth in Portugal was kept in a kind of wardship as a doctor declared her insane.

4:42 The past is not just a relief from grey and boring, but from things like Covid mandates and "taking responsibility" for people one tactically presents as incapable of doing that for themselves and from things like compulsory school (it came to Sweden in 1842, or not really, homeschooling was still allowed if the parents were competent for it, that was pushed back in Social Democrat decades.)

Peter Lustig

@peterlustig7336

You certainly “relieved” yourself from school, didn’t you

Hans-Georg Lundahl

@peterlustig7336 Indeed, after suffering too long in it ... both as pupil, partly as university student and as teacher.

Are you from Germany, the country that still upholds Hitler-Bohrmann's homeschooling ban from 1938, Reichsschulgesetz?

A country that has a tendency to overvalue school attendance, I'd say.

8:48 Speaking of modern times as "feudalism 2.0" is not very respectful of actual feudalism.

9:51 ερρωσο και συ!

* Sister shall inherit half of the brother's lot.

** I had written, "in a women" and when trying to correct this, I found out my comment had been deleted. The screenshot doesn't function, so I can't show you.

Did Harald Bluetooth in 945 Still Want Revenge for Verden? Probably Not?

The SHOCKING reason why the VIKING raids began
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen | 28 June 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StJ0BcKwzYI

Before I hear the video, I think I have heard it before, was it about the felling of Donar's oak or about the Frankish reprisal in Saxony? Both persecution of Widukind (who I think ended up Catholic and even a saint) and toppling of Irminsul?

2:18 Sure, along with Norway, Prussia, Estonians, Curonians and Livonians, Saxons were one of the peoples who were Christianised by force, in the Norwegian case from the king, otherwise from the outside.

Finland is a more complex case, one story repeated itself:

• part of the Finns were Swedish subjects (possession or in one case protectorate) and Christian
• other part were Pagan and attacked the Christians
• Swedish Christians took more land

But in a sense, the Saxons are not alltogether unlike the Finnish example, since Charlemagne's decision in 772 came after 100 years of Frankish Christians being harrassed by the still Pagan Saxons.

back then Christianity was forced upon people. 3:10 Christianity was not seen as a force of good. It was seen as a force of subjugation and control. 3:22

And Germanic (Saxon or Norse) Paganism was somehow NOT a force of subjugation and control?

And subjugation and control was not seen as, up to a point (like becoming a slave was not good for the man becoming a slave) as good?

When you state that subjugation of peoples under a common ruler and his rules and control over the subjugated people was NOT a good thing, like automatically not good, not just because it was on occasion abused and bad for that reason on that occasion, you are basically appealing to a certain fringe movement within Christianity, which in English are variously called Radical Reformation and Evangelicals and in Nordic countries Frikyrkliga.

A Christian back then (as a Catholic now) saw and sees a Catholic state as an ideal, given that Jesus told His disciples to make disciples of all nations (i e collectively, including state and government), not "people from all nations" as the Watchtower Sect mistranslate. Note, in the absence of a Catholic state, we still have a duty to convert individuals, see Mark, but in Matthew, the scope is clearly nations.

But the Pagan was not an individualist. He could of course decide to worship Thor or Odhinn or Frey personally, like Hravnkel Freysgode, but he could not neglect an actual vé or the sacrifices that were supposed to take place there if under his responsibility. And they did not tolerate the presence of another public worship either. If you check on the conversion of Riga, the Livonians were actually killing missionaries to stop the mission.

In the case of Odhinn, the cult was very much about subjugation and control, and Ynglings near a "lund" un Uppsala (now Older Uppsala, inside the Uppsala municipality) would every nine years sacrifice nine men there, and they would also make sure to expand. You know why the Ynglings came to Norway, via Wermland? One Yngling was just a bit too expansive, his name was Ingjald.

5:49 I'm not sure how much North Africa was involved in slaves caught by Vikings ... I took it, Christians who were enslaved would land in Scandinavia and become ancestral to later Scandinavians in part. Don't Norwegian and Danish redheads go back to Irish slaves?

If you are right, where is the documentation?

Christians in mainland Europe obviously documented Vikings had taken people. Vikings didn't document. So, is the documentation North African and only recently accessed?

6:19 Thank you for the admission.

So, in 900, a Viking raid on England, Ireland or France was not about revenge for Irminsul any more?

But your story about Irminsul or the Massacre of Verden provoking the Viking age, what about earlier Saxon raids?

Die Sachsen, die in dem Gebiet zwischen Nordsee und Harz bzw. Rhein und Eider siedelten, waren schon den Merowingern teilweise tributpflichtig gewesen, aber nie deren Untertanen. Auch hielten sie an germanischen Traditionen fest, wozu nicht nur die Religion und ein eher loser Stammesverband gehörten, sondern auch regelmäßige Raubzüge auf fränkisches Gebiet. Ob Karl zunächst nur diese Raubzüge unterbinden wollte oder von Anfang an eine Unterwerfung, Christianisierung und Eingliederung der Sachsen in das Fränkische Reich geplant hatte, ist historisch nicht gesichert.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sachsenkriege_Karls_des_Großen

Probably, after a century of raids, the latter.

8:07 Keeping land under one lord, subjugation and control, through primogeniture?

Vikings were often younger sons who couldn't get their own land. Later on, people in that position would often become clergy.

8:30 Sure, but eventually Christians were better at fighting back than Amerindians.

9:52 Yes, indeed. Canute as he's called in French and English won England. For a time, later Danish rule was ousted by another Viking who won, or rather his descendant. And by 1066, Danes around Rouen were so mixed with Gallo-Romans that the Normans weren't exactly Danes and also didn't speak Old Norse.

But Canute and Rollo had a thing in common with Clovis. They found out Christians aren't necessarily racists, they can accept a foreign ruler to some extent, but they are confessionalists. A Christian population (which we are unfortunately running out of) is lots easier to rule if the king is Christian too.

10:21 I would add two factors.

1) Norse rulers became Christians and as such were somewhat less prone to plunder fellow Christians.
2) Christianity gave another outlet for younger sons. Clergy instead of going into Viking.

11:14 Isn't it still (even if you might avoid the term) Sankt Hans in Norway?

Thank you, best wishes for Sts Peter and Paul ...

Some People would Like me to Give Up

When Should You Give Up?
Bjorn Andreas Bull-Hansen | 1 March 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UT8esSI8I8

Hi Loki old trickster, this one is not working with me.

But actually, I think I have a lot of enemies who would perhaps find some value in your words.

With millions of views, with thousands of texts, writing is not what I think I'd give up, it was a childhood dream and I made it come true. Some think only novels count. I disagreed long ago. I'm an essayist.

But some people think they'd do a real good thing persuading me to give up. Like I've been too categoric. For instance, just today, too categoric about opposing Creationism and Evolution. I can guess most Scandinavians and most Englishmen would like me to be less categoric on Roman Catholicism being the one Church Jesus founded.

Or like I forgot about my plans for being a novelist. No, I didn't forget, but the men who want me to give up my essays are making it impossible to have the leisure necessary for a novel.

I wonder how close they are to you. But I think they are the ones who should give up. Not sure if they want to.