So we've found a nice spot in the warmth with some some good old Swedish coffee.
So anyway, we have a lot of things to talk about.
First and foremost, Tom, you have released a book, a very nice one.
I shared it on my Instagram, it looks like this.
Boom.
And in it, I saw a character that is somewhat familiar to me and this is the Green Knight.
And the first time I actually heard about the Green Knight was from Warhammer.
So Horror Fantasy.
So there is a faction called Bretonia, which are based upon medieval France plus Arthurian legend.
And one of these characters is the Green Knight.
And I obviously got hooked immediately.
I was only 14 at the time and I thought that was a really, really epic sort of thing.
But I thought you could elaborate a bit on to my dear subscribers who the green hat is.
And also first, I'm sorry, I didn't really give an introduction to Survive the Dive.
So if anyone isn't aware of Tom, I will link his channel below and I definitely do suggest that you subscribe, watch all of his videos.
I watched all of his videos and I gained a good bit of enlightenment and knowledge from the man.
I would say that's probably my very favorite channel.
And I'm not just saying that because he's my mate, but because it's a good channel.
So check him out.
Yeah, it's mostly pagan religion, Germanic history, DNA and science, like about population genetics and sort of traditionalism and spirituality.
That's what my channel's about.
Yeah, so if you like René Gunnon, Julius Evola, if you like history in general, spirituality, definitely check out all of his videos.
It will be a good thing you can do now over Christmas and Jewel time.
So anyway, back to the topic of the Green Knight.
who give us the info.
The book that you mentioned, it's got a cartoon you can see as well.
It's called The Spirit of Yule.
And the reason I wrote the Green Knight into it, because the Green Knight didn't exist in pagan times.
And the story is about a Christian guy from Victorian times going back into pagan times.
So the Green Knight's from the time in between, early Christian ideas.
But the reason I included him is because he's in a specific Arthurian story about Christmas.
So he was quite an early Christmas figure, you could say, in that sense.
And he's very popular in that sense.
He's a very mystical figure.
The design of the character that we did, or rather Christopher the artist did, is based partly on something called the Green Man, which is a different thing.
But that's like a church masonry motif in England where they, in the medieval times, they carved this figure whose face was made of leaves and stuff.
And no one really knows why they had that on these churches, but a lot of people want to say that it has a pagan origin.
But there's no record of any pagan gods that had faces made of leaves anyway.
But maybe it does, but it certainly doesn't correspond to anything in the Bible.
So it's quite mysterious.
And anyway, we decided to merge the Green Knight and the Green Man because they're similar and from the same time and kind of mystical figures.
But the Green Knight, this is the story, it's from a story called Sagawain and the Green Knight.
And it's in Middle English.
So in Middle English, this would be the Green Aknicht, which, okay, if you don't, you might imagine you can speak Middle English, but if you haven't had any practice with it, it's going to be hard.
So you would read a translation otherwise.
And there's some great readings online, and there's even a cartoon that you can watch online that someone, I think the BBC made a long time ago.
And that's really cool to watch, even if it's in Middle English, because you get the picture from the cartoon.
So I'll try and summarize the story.
King Arthur and his knights, it's Christmas, they're sat around the round table in Camelot, feasting and enjoying themselves, drinking and whatnot.
And then, boom, the doors open and a massive green knight with green armor, green face, everything green, riding a green horse, just rides right into the court, which is not what you do.
You don't ride horses into court, and challenges everyone there, telling them that they're not real Christians, that they don't follow, they're not doing Christmas right, and that they're all bad, and insults them basically, and challenges them, insulting their honor in the process, saying, Who will accept my challenge?
And only of all the knights, only Sir Gawain, the virtuous but young and somewhat naive knight, he rises to the challenge and says he will take the Green Knight's challenge.
And that is that the Green Knight has an axe, and he says, You will strike my head with the axe, and then I will strike off yours.
And then, so Sir Gawain does that, chops off the Green Knight's head, but that does the Green Knight picks up his own head, he's still alive.
And then he says, Okay, now next year, this day on Christmas, I'm gonna do the same to you.
And then basically, the whole story then is about what Gawain is doing to try and avoid the inevitable fate, the next Christmas.
And to summarize it and ruin it a bit for you, this story is a Christian morality tale.
It's about like Gawain learning like virtue of sacrifice and stuff like that.
And the short story is he passes the test.
And the Green Knight is really on the side of the court.
And he's working for King Arthur.
And it's all a game to show.
But the Green Knight is an interesting figure because green is just as kind of is now, was associated with paganism and evil.
Not now, we don't think green is an evil colour, but green, because of its association with paganism in Christian Europe, did have an evil and magical aspect.
And that is why, even though the Green Knight didn't exist in pagan Europe, we often like to see him as kind of like a pagan figure and representing somehow paganism.
Although he's a deliverer, he's actually testing them according to Christian values.
Yeah, I always associated him more with a force of nature.
And obviously I always associate pagan things more with nature and more human things more with Christianity.
But obviously the intermarriage between Christianity and paganism always in Europe looks a bit different than it does in the Bible.
So I suppose the mythic character of the Green Knight is not something you would find in the Bible.
No, no, it's very European.
It's very British.
It's very Indo-European.
Very Indo-European nature.
Yeah, yeah.
it's very british french whatever welsh it probably i mean it's hard to say because obviously the welsh want to claim arthur as uh as their own but many of these myths don't appear in not all of them appear in in where in welsh literature Sargawain and the Green Knight is written in Middle English.
I mean there's some, Wolfram's Parcel book is German.
So, I mean, Arthurian myth and legend, it may have originated the trend in Celtic-speaking parts of Britain, but it spread to France, to Germany.
It was really, it was like the Star Wars of its day.
I don't like, I mean, not everyone likes Star Wars now because of all the horrible recently.
Yeah, I've actually never even seen it, so.
Yeah, you're not missing too much.
But anyway, actually, even the original Star Wars was based partially on Arthurian literature.
So Arthurian themes are in the original Star Wars.
You have, I don't want to go too much into Star Wars, but Obi-Wan Kenobi is kind of like Merlin...
You know, it's like young Luke Skywalker is kind of like a parcel or Gawain or something.
So, yeah, what was good in the original Star Wars is only the aspects that are good about it, the things that come from eternal, you know, myths.
And that's the same with Arthurian literature.
Although it typifies the Christian high middle ages, as Julius Evella has written in his book, The Mystery of the Grail, you can see that a lot of the themes were from older pagan sources.
But they're not saying that they're pagan stories, but they have parallels in earlier pagan stories.
Yeah.
So I suppose, at least for me, I've always been quite interested in the Arthurian legend.
I think it's a very mythic and epic and heroic tale.
And since you talk a lot about it, I know you've made some videos and yet again you can check them out.
But to just answer the question right here, some people have seen also in the film King Arthur from like 10 years ago, they claim that King Arthur came from the Sarmatians, if I'm not mistaken.
Okay, yeah.
Have you seen the film before?
No, but I know about this theory.
It's very old, very, very old, and that's why it's popular.
But it's not true.
There actually were...
I've done a talk recently in America, and I uploaded it to my SoundCloud about origin narratives and identity.
And it explains that actually around the Middle Ages, it was very popular all across Europe.
People wanted to ascribe mythical origins to their people, to their races.
So the French started to say that they were descended from the Trojans.
The Welsh also said they were descended from the Trojans, but later also they said they're simultaneously descended from Trojans and Jews somehow.
And some of the Celts in the British Isles decided they were descended from the Scythians.
Now what do the Trojans, the Jews, the Scythians have in common at that time in the Middle Ages?
People know about them.
That's the basic thing is when they switched to a Europeans, Celts and Germans switched to a literate culture, they lost a lot of their history of where people came from.
But they had access to very old records of ancient civilizations.
Rome, Greece, the Trojan War, the ancient Hebrews, which they learn about through the Bible.
And the Scythians are mentioned by Romans and the Hebrews.
So they're in the Bible.
So the Scythians are a good and suitable source to say where you come from.
So that is why you find in these medical texts people saying that, why did Snoris Sturtuson say that the gods came from Troy?
Why did the French say that they came from Troy?
Why did the Celts start saying they were Scythian?
Not because they were, because we can see from DNA that they weren't, but because that was prestigious.
It's good for them to say that.
And you should watch that talk if you want to hear more about that.
Yeah, and also speaking of this, during the 1600s, I suppose it was.
I might have the dates wrong here, but I know that the Swedish Empire or Kingdom then promoted quite heavily their Gothic past.
And I know that other European nations also did that.
Spain, for example, harken back to the Visigothic path because that was a kind of prestigious thing.
We come from this brave people who restructured Europe.
So it is something that is seen in different times as well, this claiming a past.
But the difference is with that is that Spain, the Visigoths were in Spain.
Yeah, it's true.
And also, the Goths do come from Scandinavia originally.
So the Swedes do have a connection to the Goths.
So that's slightly different.
But store Gothicism, that trend in the 1600s in Sweden, where they celebrated the Goths a lot.
What was untrue about it is that they started to say that the Goths did certain things that the Goths never did.
They kind of made up the idea that Uppsala was the center of the world's civilization.
Yeah, I didn't actually know about that.
Oh, they made up all kinds of crazy stuff.
But that I mean that yeah, the the Goths weren't uh, the inventor, the the Goths were the inventors of all the world's civilizations.
We was inventors yeah, we was Goths basically but, but they were, they were got, but the Goths weren't everything else.
But the important thing here is that you can definitely see the importance of history like, for identity and people, like they need to have a strong sense of who they are, and this is obviously something I've talked about before that in order to, if we're talking about the soullessness of the modern world in in the Western world, a lot of that can probably stem from the fact that the, the tree has been cut, the roots have been cut.
We have no idea who we are.
We have no idea who our ancestors were, where we come from anything, yeah.
So, in my view, if we want to revive Europe yeah, rekindle the spirit of like who we are yeah, so I think that's what history is.
A large part of the history, and that it gets people interested in history is to know who you are, where you come from.
Behind this stuff, whether you're researching your ancestors or researching ancient kings it's uh, it has a similar motive behind it.
It reinforces your sense of self grounds you in the process of time, because life is just the experience of time, of being within time.
So history is a major part of that and it should help you to focus your sense of self and being.
Yeah, and this is also something I've said before, is that if you view Sweden, for example, in a historic context going back to the Gothic age and the Viking age, then the Karelian age, if you view a certain nation or civilization in that context, you're more prone to actually care about what happens after you're dead, whereas if you only if you don't care, you don't know that we were Goths or whatever yeah, why would you care what happens in in 20 years?
So, getting a good view and understanding history of myths and legends, everything very important stuff and that's also, yet again, why I appreciate your channel, because you delve into these myths so much and especially, like we talked a bit about the wild hunt just the previous video getting that sense of epicness and heroicness into a self-improvement game very useful.
And yeah, I think, incorporating these myths and our history into our own rituals, whether you're going to the gym or whatever you're, It's important because it mustn't be, history shouldn't be an us and them sensation.
There's a constant chain leading us right back through time to our ancestors and forwards to our descendants, and that's where our role is: to pass on that flame to the next generation.
Yeah, and in our case, maybe rekindle it because it's going out a bit.
