NorsePlay.

Of course we realized that holiday ham, whether for Yule or Ēostre, is the modern Heathen animal sacrifice for the Gods and the feast meat you share with them at your table. And while we already saw the cool little Thoresque hammer pictured above through the lens of our Heathen Worldview, it took Eric "Word-Weaver" Sjerven in his Raven's Call " Yuletide Special " video to connect the action of smashing & sharing the candy peppermint pig to animal sacrifice , which is an American  German  and Pennsylvania Dutch popular holiday ritual adaptation, which we can now also recognize as a symbolic b lót . #    #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at age seven. Since t hen he's been fascinated by the truthful potency of Norse Mythology, passionately read & studied, embraced Ásatrú, launched the  Map of Midgard  project, and sp

Examine this NorsePlay with me: Black Metal's signature look is corpsepaint. Black Metal hails from Norway and, if we watch the documentaries about the subgenre's roots, has nothing to do with the press' sensationalistic misconstruals of Satanism, but with reconnecting to a Nordic pre-Christian past. The  often-malign  foraying corpses of Norse Lore are the Draugr. Since Black Metal bands & their followers' ritualistic near-necroshamanic painting practice at least partly stems from a willful feeling for a lost past, this mirrors the Draugr's protectiveness of its valued artifacts, and a postmortem renascence of ancient ideas from within the mound waiting to emerge once again. [photo from Daughters Of Darkness  book by Jeremy Saffer, Draugr logo from Hertfordshire, England band.] #    #    # Guillermo Maytorena IV knew there was something special in  the Norse Lore when he picked up a copy of the d'Aulaires'  Norse Gods and Giants  at

As of this writing, I've plotted 200 mappoints for my Map Of Midgard Project! This is the first update since the original blog post  as 200's an achievement of remarkable single-handed progress in & of itself. Note in the above screencap that Iceland resembles a cartographic porcupine mostly because they recognize & love their landvættir , and they're saga-riffic about recording their past. There remain 270+ locations left to attempt to map, and this number grows as more source/secondary/tertiary materials are mined for Lore-relevant sites. Subscribe & stay tuned to NorsePlay for more updates & announcements about my Map Of Midgard Project. Description Landvættir .  "There must be ready and generous cooperation between experts in different fields of knowledge if we are to make profitable use of the wealth of new information piling up concerning the pagan religion from which the myths emerged."   ~ H.R. Ellis Davidson #