Borgvættir & Staðvættir: the Heathen cityscape.
Listening to Gifts of the Wyrd podcast, Heathen urban planner Paul Mercutio of the North River Kindred recontextualizes the city as just as much a landvættir connective space. To paraphrase Mercutio's thoughts: In the wild there are trees, rivers, lakes, mountains, and all of that is majestic and obvious in terms of connecting with nature. And going outside's all well & good, but in the intervening 1000+ years, man has gone from agricultural to urban and is unlikely to perform any sort of radical reversal on a large scale, so we have to find connective praxis in the modern context of the city's environment. If we look at the materials of the city we find that concrete was once air, water, sand, gravel, and eight other bits of earth cemented to make that concrete. Glass is just a sheet of heated sand. Steel is iron and carbon. These are all natural elements reformed into what makes a city. Also, your utilities are tubed, piped, and wired in what resembles a root syst