Welcome to this Jule special with my good friend Tom.
Welcome back to the channel Tom.
Thanks mate, good to be here.
Yeah, good to have you here.
And we are actually at our special place of the dead.
It's a grave field.
Yes, this is Åse Grafveld Säderörn in Sweden.
It's a very old and very large pagan burial ground with many barrows like these you see here dating.
I'm going to move out of the way so you can properly admire them.
Here's two beautiful ones and these probably date to the Iron Age but some of the ones here are more recent from the Viking Age and there's also stone circles, stone ship settings as well here from somewhere between the Iron Age and the Viking Age.
So this was used for well over a thousand years as a burial ground for many pagans.
Yeah, so we're at the western shores of Malaren, and Malaren is a central lake which connects to Stockholm, and all around Malaren you can find a lot of Viking burials etc.
And obviously I know Tom, you've made videos from Uppsala and the thing is that the level of the sea was much higher back in the day.
So probably where we stand now I don't know how high up we are, but this burial ground is all on a ridge.
You can do a shot afterwards to show exactly what we're looking at, but we're really high up and all these mounds are on this ridge.
But this ridge used to be an island, so what we can see now is feel like agricultural land surrounding the ridge was, of course, just the lake, and actually the lake itself was more the sea then because it was connected right out to Stockholm with this, with the Baltic so, like all the Viking boats could come up here and they'd see the burial mounds very prominently as they're sailing past, because it's like a motorway of those times.
So people wanted their mounds to be known like runestones that are set like on roads or near to like waterways, so everyone can see the names of the dead or the barrows of the dead so they can be remembered for many years to come.
Yeah, definitely so, if you are interested in these sort of things and you plan a trip to Sweden, the region of Malar and definitely including Uppsala, because that's connected via the waterways.
So anyway, since this is a Jule slash, Christmas special, do you have any any take on Jule or Christmas as a pagan, its pagan origins?
I thought you would be the best to answer this question, because I know a lot of my subscribers have um, have asked this as well.
Well, of course you may celebrate Yule how you choose you may.
If you're a pagan, you may have established your own rights and ways of doing things, and that's fine.
I'm not trying to say there's anything wrong with the way you've chosen to do stuff, but let me say what I understand from about how Germanic Pagan Yule was practiced.
Uh, both the the Anglo-saxon and the Norse sources say that it was two months of yule, so that's equivalent to december and january, but they used a different calendar so it wouldn't be exactly the same times.
But yeah so, two months long, two moons and uh, in the main big celebration would be in the second month.
But within the Yule time, these two Yule months, there's many celebrations, many sacred events for different gods, so and for different reasons during this holy time.
The main one, which is called, which is also called Yule, I think that would happen on the new moon following the full moon, following the solstice.
But many people like to just do it on the solstice because now we have a solar calendar, but the Germanic people used a lunar solar calendar, so they used they calculated by both the moon and the sun combined.
So, in any case, that main festival was all about Odin.
He was the main person celebrated for that one.
And it began with a sacrifice of a horse or something like that to Odin, and then many days of drinking that would last and feasting, because the word Yule was actually used as a kenning to mean feast and other times of year as well, because the Yule feast was such a big meal.
So, that big celebration of drunkenness and feasting and coming together was the main Yule celebration.
But as I said, it's two months long, and there are other things.
One of them is only attested in Anglo-Saxon sources.
They say the night before Yule, they had something called Modre Nicht, which means night of the mothers.
And I think that would be very similar to what the Norse had called Disirblot, which or Disablut, and that was actually at the end of February.
But the Anglo-Saxon one was the night before Yule, and it's about celebrating and worshiping the clan mothers, the ancestral mothers of your race.
So, not really just not actual, you know, your great-grandmother or whatever, but rather like symbolic representatives, like divine female, like goddesses almost, who represent your people.
And that they, you know, they help, they're instrumental in bringing the luck and fortunes of your people.
So, that would be an important and very solemn occasion, too.
And we can see from the fact that Odin is the Lord of the Dead, and that we had the Modre Nicht as well, which is about ancestral deities or something like a deity.
There's definitely a connection this time of year with the dead.
And I think that that is why we should remember our ancestors at this time of year and come to maybe somewhere like this or to wherever you can, wherever is appropriate for where you live.
And think about your ancestors and your people.
And remember that your ancestors are watching.
Now, another thing that most of my subscribers will be somewhat familiar with is the wild hunt, because I usually issue my wild hunt challenges, and that is to usually something to do with self-improvement.
That you embrace the embark upon the wild hunt to do something.
And I do this to get this mystic, heroic, epic fill.
But that's connected to the winter solstice as well, correct?
Yeah, the wild hunt is preserved in all different folkloric sources from around Europe.
And I'm sure that some of them are connected to mid-winter.
Definitely in England.
I mostly only know about the English folkloric sources, where it's definitely associated with winter.
I don't know if it's associated specifically with Christmas in England, but it may well be in other parts of Europe.
But it's widely agreed, although over the centuries, the wild hunt has become associated with different figures, like King Arthur, some local famous person like Barbarossa or whatever.
But originally, it's most likely that it was all about Odin and the rise from Odin.
And in Sweden, it's always been connected to Odin because they never departed from that original meaning of it.
Alright, cool.
Yeah, we will actually make another video in trying to find some sort of cafe or some warmer place to talk a bit more about the Arthurian legend and the Green Knight because we'll talk more in the next video.
So thank you, Tom, and yeah, thank you for watching.
