(Untitled)

[burningblood]

Was originally going to be a response to this thread, but ended up a bit long and self-indulgent.

Other poster: I don't know whether to smile or lament that the immediate response of most Heathens I know to someone asking to know more is to assign a fairly long reading list

Comments

[cor_cordivm]

*snerk* Funny!

Can I just say that the Heathen habit of referring to North America as "Vinland" really gets up my nose? Sure, "North America" is not exactly what the original inhabitants called this chunk o' planet either, but at least it's got the weight of usage behind it. And history. An awful lot of history, with attendant context and linkages with the history of everywhere else on the planet. (Chocolate, anyone? Potatoes?)

"Vinland" sounds like nothing so much as a bunch of white guys hoping that if they click their heels together three times and wish hard enough, the Revisionist History Fairy will wave her magic wand and turn this land into a Disney Viking Theme Park.

/rant

*pant* *pant* Sorry, it just foamed over :P

[burningblood]

I don't find it irritating so much as it seems politically problematic (I get the impression, for instance, that some indigenous people REALLY freakin resent it, for good reasonable reasons), and kind of unecessary. It feels like it comes from a need to claim America as part of the heathen world... which is totally redundant. The heathen world is "those bits of the world where there are heathens." People aren't somehow less heathen or not as good at heathenry just because they're not born in Northern Europe. True, you can't really have a pure and perfect strict reconstructionist practice Stateside coz to be a heathen you need to give good heed to the local landwights... and you're sitting on this land where the local wights just weren't venerated in precisely the same way as the wights in Northern Europe. You need a different approach. But then you can't really do pure and perfectly strict reconstruction anywhere, coz we don't live in pre-medieval fishing villages anymore.

[desika]

LOL.

Oooh. Please tell me that Wayland_S is who I think he is...

I haven't been spending enough time online lately. (Wait, did I really just say that?)

[mordantcarnival]

Yep, _that_ Wayland.

[desika]

Squeeee!