February 12, 2025 • 50 mins
Law and justice are two institutions which are meant to address the role violence players violence within society. Join your host for a walk through how these questions were mediated by the Nordic peoples, why this is different from how we handle it today, what that suggests for modern practitioners, and more!
Episode 45 - Violence
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Episode 45 - Violence
I am teaching a class on the Younger Futhark, the runes of the Viking Age, this March! If you are interested, sign up at this link.
I am hitting the conference circuit this spring! Please contribute by donating whatever you can afford at my Ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/ryansmithwfi
Want to support this podcast and my other work? Check out my Patreon!
You can also help out by scheduling a rune reading with me!
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey everybody, this is Ryan. If you enjoy this podcast
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(00:24):
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(00:45):
Your support makes my work possible. Thank you for your
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You can find information on upcoming classes at on Blackwings
(01:06):
dot com slash classes, and if you're interested in a reading,
then just click on the link in the show notes
and select whatever day and time works best for you.
I'm also happy to announce that beginning in March, I
will be teaching a class on the Younger Footharch the
Ruins of the Viking Age, along with other members of
(01:26):
the teaching collective who will be offering classes in the
Elderfootharch intro to Nordic Paganism, magic and Mysticism, and for
any Australian listeners out there, for the first time, we'll
be offering a class on the elderfooth Arch in Brisbane
evening time. You can sign up for classes by clicking
(01:48):
on the link in the show notes below, and now
on with the show. It's time to talk about the
other side of the scales from violence. Welcome to the
Law and Justice episode. Violence and the law have, throughout
(02:38):
human history in many different societies, had a contentious and
complicated relationship. The reason why this is such a messy
and complicated story is because the law, in many ways,
at its most basic level, is heavily concerned with regulating
(02:59):
who is is and is not allowed to use force
and violence, and under what circumstances force and violence are
acceptable to be used. Justice is an even thornier question,
even though much of modern society likes to frame the
(03:20):
different legal systems we operate under as a way of
ensuring justice look at, for example, the criminal justice system
as a great example of this kind of mentality and framing.
But when you look at examples of justice, whether you're
talking myth or in history throughout different periods, what is
(03:42):
just is not always what is necessarily legal, and there
is more of a sense of justice being the realization
of a right and morally acceptable as well as generally
beneficial outcome for what I never the particular circumstance is.
(04:05):
Even though the law in theory strives to be just,
there is this tension that exists between these systems which
at their core give and revoke permission for exercising different
kinds of violence and what is considered to be right
(04:25):
in a moral or ethical sense. The same is true
when you look at Nordic myth and the source material
that is used by modern Heathens for developing Nordic derived spiritualities.
Even though a lot of modern popular culture as well
(04:49):
as online culture around what you could call this sort
of Nordic esthetic that's developed, focuses a lot on vikings,
epic heroes of myth, and these other examples of conflict,
which I get into more in the last episode talking
about violence, which I've got linked below. I think far
(05:12):
more can be learned both about the attitudes within this
material towards violence, as well as just this material in
general by looking at the ways that the Nordic people's
handled these questions of law and justice. This especially because
(05:32):
when you dig even just a couple inches down into
the source material, it's sort of hard to miss that
there's a pretty intricate and very critical set of legal practices,
methods for dispute resolution, for establishing the new directions that
(05:55):
societies would take. All of that stuff is just sort
of all over the place, Like you can't really get
into the Nordic myth without running into examples of weird
guild being collected, people coming together in the Great Tang assemblies,
and all these other expressions of the legal and social
(06:16):
frameworks that guided these societies. So in this episode, I'm
going to get into these questions of law and justice.
And the way I'm going to do that is I'm
first going to start by talking about what we know
of the Nordic peoples and their world, as far as
(06:38):
the legal and you could say political framework functioned within
their societies. I'm going to then move forward to talking
a little bit about the modern state, which is to say,
the dominant form that political affairs tend to take in
the modern world. And the reason why I'm going to
(07:01):
do this is because I think that we can't fully
understand how the different legal systems and social and political
implications of that within the Nordic world are without then
comparing it to what we take for granted today. That's
(07:24):
going to be then a jumping off point for a
much bigger question that I think is raised by both
these systems as well as generally talking about these questions
of law and justice, and that question is who does
the law protect and what determines who is under the
law's protection. And then I'm going to just sort of
(07:49):
clean everything up, recap and summarize and set the stage
for the third in you could call this triptich of
episodes on these questions of violence, where I'm going to
get into another thing that's extremely pervasive in Nordic myth, vengeance.
So all of that said, let's get started. The central
(08:17):
institution of law as well as handling social affairs in
the different Nordic societies that existed before and during the
conversion period was the Ting Assembly. This is also speaking
in somewhat broad strokes, as there were a lot of
(08:38):
different variations on this specific names, as well as structural
differences between some of these different examples of what you
could broadly say fits under this umbrella. So to talk
in those general tendencies, the Ting system could be just
(09:00):
described as a not properly or perfectly, but broadly directly
democratic system of social organization. And I'm saying broadly because again,
this is trying to take modern concepts that themselves are
also not terribly well understood or defined and applying them
(09:22):
to a system that greatly predates these different ideas. Now,
when I say directly democratic, what I mean is that
these were bodies that broadly could be described as operating
on democratic forms in terms of how decisions were made
and proposals and disputes were brought before the Ting And
(09:47):
I'm saying direct because people directly represented themselves. They didn't have,
at least initially elected representatives or other similar figures who
spoke on their behalf. Now, this is something that was
somewhat true in the Icelandic Commonwealth, where you have the
Office of Gothar, which sort of broadly corresponds to like
(10:10):
say a regional chief or big man, or however you
want to put it, that leans more in that kind
of representative direction. But even then anyone could still appear
before the all tang. These assemblies generally speaking, could be
(10:32):
described as a combination legislative body and law court. Most
of what tings did, in fairness was handle questions of
law and justice as a court where the members of
the community as part of the tang served as the jury.
(10:53):
And there are arguments that I've seen made by legal
historians that similar systems like the moot and the Wheaton
gamut in Anglo Saxon, England could be seen as precursors
to the modern trial by jury system, along with some
other medieval additions and various other accoutrements and developments that
(11:14):
have just sort of happened along the way. This wasn't
exactly a jury like we'd think of it in that
you have twelve randomly selected members of the community who
make their deliberations in a closed off room. But rather
this was everybody in the community coming together talking about
(11:36):
how they were going to resolve a particular dispute. Assign
we're guild or levy punishment on individuals who had gone
against the expectations of the community. These resolutions were also
enforced by the members of the community. Now, this is
(11:57):
something that I think is very important to emphasize that
these were societies where the people who made the law
and were bound by the law were also involved in
upholding that law. What I mean by this is that
the implementation of the decisions made by these bodies was
(12:22):
up to the people who were part of these bodies.
The implicit social contract that shows up in surviving historical
and mythic materials is that being part of the ting
meant you also were responsible for upholding the decisions of
(12:44):
the ting. An example of this would be the practice
of exile or outlawry, where individuals who committed serious crimes
like murder or something like that were declared outcast for
a community, and what that meant was that person was
denied the protection of the law, any expectation of receiving
(13:09):
hospitality within those spaces, and anyone who was response who
was part of that community was well within their rights
to in some cases kill the outcast on site. And
this was again something that wasn't enforced by like say
a sheriff in their deputies or some kind of organized
(13:31):
militia or something like that, although I'm sure when you
start to get to more stratified communities where you have
a more entrenched warrior aristocracy, especially later on in the
Viking Age, you probably did have an element of house
carls and armed retainers serving in a similar fashion, you know,
(13:53):
sort of Erzat's police. But generally we're talking something that's
a bit more like just the duties of being in
a society also means enforcing the expectations and decisions of
that society. This is a logic that also kind of
(14:13):
seamlessly flows from the people under arms kind of system
that existed in many of these communities, where essentially being
an able bodied adult finding the term adult somewhat more loosely,
who had the means in the equipment was expected to
take part in defending and fighting on behalf of their communities.
(14:38):
There's no better example of how interconnected this understanding of
duty to defense as well as duty to law were
than in the regular observation in the Heimskringla of where
attendees to the different things by custom brought their w
(15:00):
weapons with them, and sometimes these weapons would be used
as a display of expressing particular opinions on different courses
of action or rulings, such as the case of Thorgny
Laghmann before the Ting of all Swedes, and I believe
it was the year one thousand AD, where the King
(15:22):
of Sweden was pressing for support for continuation of a war,
and Thorgny rows Up gives a short speech as a
former law speaker, which meant someone who knew and kept
the law within these communities and sort of served as
judges facilitators something along those lines, not judges in the
(15:46):
sense of handing down like rulings and such, but I
guess the word sort of works anyway. He also reminded
the king that previous kings who had gone against the
will of the ting had been drowned in a bos
over Yonder and in the Heimskringla, Snorri specifically notes that
in the description of what happened, at least according to Snorri,
(16:10):
then the attendees of the tang shook their weapons and
clashed them against their shields in support of Thorgny's position.
Even though we don't have, like say a Nordic Aristotle,
who is describing the implications of this, I think it's
(16:31):
sort of interesting that this is a society that, to
some extent had ways of expressing and understanding questions of
law and war and violence that saw these as related phenomena.
(16:52):
At least you could infer that based on things like
the practice of bringing weapons to the ting, which was
the place of law and the place of making big decisions. Now,
this doesn't mean this is any kind of example of
perfect pluralistic equal rights or anything like that. These were
(17:13):
societies that practiced a form of slavery known as thraldom,
and who was and was not allowed to speak at
these tangs varied. We do have one example from the
Uta Lebuini, which is an account by a Frankish missionary
in the Kingdom of Saxony, which was, you know, in
modern day northwestern Germany today, where he describes the Tang
(17:37):
of the Saxons, where, according to him, even bonded people
which was a term often used for thralls, were allowed
to speak before the tang. Though whether they actually had
power before the tang or were able to give that
testimony freely or seek redress freely is another question. Entirely,
(17:57):
all of these particular nuances and conser turns were things
that probably would have flown right over Saint Lebwin's head,
since he wasn't of that culture and also was coming
from one that practiced its own very top down and
at times brutally violent system of law and punishment. Based
(18:20):
on what I have read, I don't know how consistent
that would have been, and whether or not that was
unique to the Saxons, as well as if it even
was restricted to particular people under thralldom, because again there
were distinctions between who was and was not a thrall
and why you became a thrall. It wasn't completely cut
(18:40):
and dry. It would also be fair to say that
more influential or powerful people within different communities exerted different
levels of influence over these processes. The point is that
this is a significantly for an understanding of distributions of power,
(19:04):
how law is made, and who law applies to than
what we see in the modern world. And this is
where we get to get into a little short polysi
one oh one. So the state is the form of
political organization that exists in the present day. Now. A state,
(19:31):
to sort of summarize briefly, is a specific collection of
institutions and interest groups within a society who, through a
variety of different means, enjoy the monopoly on the legitimate
use of force and violence within their area of influence.
(19:58):
This monopoly on is what allows the state to establish
and enforce laws, enact policy, and exert power over different societies. States,
by their nature, are somewhat external to the people that
(20:21):
they hold power over, in that you'll frequently see in
different kinds of state systems. This can range from modern
constitutional democracies to single party dictatorships oligarchies. Wherever it is
you go or however it is you want to do
it that actors and agents of states often enjoy certain
(20:44):
privileges and immunities that exempt them from specific laws or
specific regulations which allow them, in theory, to then perform
their different functions on behalf of the state. Qualified immunity
is a great example of what I mean, and for
(21:06):
folks who are not familiar, qualified immunity is the legal
practice in the United States that holds that specific public employees,
most often police, are shielded from being sued in civil
court for damages for anything that they do on the
job to people within their particular communities. And this has
(21:30):
argued that it is necessary for making it possible for
police officers to do their jobs. Now, not all states
have qualified immunity, but does exist on the federal level
and is a good example of what I mean by
this sort of exception and this externality, that the state
(21:50):
is always allowed to do things to the population that
it disallows the population from doing to it. And that's
what makes the state, by its nature external to the
people that it holds power over. The reason why this
(22:12):
is the case is because the model that would end
up exported through colonialism and imperialism to the rest of
the planet was the European nation state system, and the
nation state's foundation rests mostly on the continued process of
centralization of different feudal realms within Europe. And this process
(22:37):
of centralization wasn't just a question of allocating different rights
and responsibilities or what have you away from different nobles.
It frequently involved having to go to war with different
feudal magnates and bringing these different local and regional powers
to heal violently. This is where, at least in that
(23:00):
sort of distantly modern sense that we could say this
emphasis on monopoly, unforced and violence comes from the feudal
order which preceded the early modern period and the rise
of the nation state model in Europe, was one where
the right and ability to exercise violence was a function
(23:22):
of being a member of a specific class within society,
whereas what's happening now is the privileges of that class
as a whole are being curtailed and concentrated within the
hands of the centralized state, whether that's what eventually becomes
the parliamentary monarchy of the United Kingdom or the more
(23:44):
centralized absolutist state in France that you see around like
Louis the Sun King and all that business. This military
force also became the bedrock for exercising power over the
populations that were within the jurisdiction of that particular state.
(24:05):
After all, when you have all of the organized fighting personnel,
armed and equipped under your control, it gets a lot
easier to deal with things like peasant uprisings, people resisting enclosure,
religious revolts, and all that other stuff by sending in
the people with guns. This, ever since has remained the
(24:31):
foundation of how state power is applied. Even when you're
talking a modern liberal democracy. The power of the state
at its core rests on its ability to designate something
within or outside of the bounds of law and receiving
the attention of agents of the state that are capable
(24:53):
of bringing the different powers of their government to bear,
which can be everything from finds and investigations to incarceration
and even potentially worse. Law in this case is written
from the perspective of maintaining that order and doing whatever
(25:16):
is necessary to uphold that. That could include stuff that
promotes the general welfare and is beneficial to a lot
of the population. It could also cover stuff like using
force and violence to keep different populations in line, maintain
systems of marginalization, and in other ways perpetuate social inequalities.
(25:40):
Now you could say there is a system that's a
lot more impartial, it's much less likely to be prone
to local or particular biases, and in theory, is going
to make decisions with a better eye towards the collective good.
All that said, I think we can look at what's
happening politically right now and much of recent political history
(26:06):
if we want examples of where different states have utilized
their power in ways that have been detrimental to the
people under their power, and especially as we're seeing right
now with the current occupant of the White House in
the United States, that just because you have a system
which has all of these monopolies and privileges and remove
(26:29):
it from the day to day reality of people, to
be able to have that sort of superior position to
act doesn't mean it's going to be free from being
intruded on by certainly less than objective actors. And that's
without me even touching on the whole hornet's nest that is,
(26:51):
can we say objectivity is a thing? Put a pin
in that, because that will be a thing for a
future podcast episode. But to focus on what's at hand here,
The state in many modern instances depicts itself as the
arbiter and dispenser of justice in all the different forms
that represents, whether that is resolving disputes between citizens or
(27:17):
other residents within their area of power, which you could
call civil suits in court, or breaches against accepted codes
of social conduct, namely criminal law, along with managing many
other functions that are essential to making modern life as
we know it possible. This does mean that sometimes, in fact,
(27:41):
in many cases, you could argue that even though justice
is claimed to be the province of the state, that
in practice that which is just is not always necessarily
that which is legal. And there have been many instances
of what has been described as great injustices, like the
many different systems of slavery that existed throughout human history,
(28:03):
as injustices against people that were perfectly legal, aided and abetted.
And I think there is a certain truth to this.
There are many examples of people and power systems moving
beyond accepted norms and limits that go on to inflict
great atrocities. But there's also plenty of cases throughout history where,
(28:26):
through perfectly legal and above board means within the existing
system in question, horrifically unjust things were enacted. The rise
of fascism in the different places where it's happened and
it's currently happening, is a great example of how the law,
in its contradictions around justice and dispensing the common good,
(28:51):
can lead to injustices that open the way to even
worse abuses. And like a good spot to take a
little break, and we are back, and here we get
(29:12):
to the thorny question who does the law protect? In
the abstract ideal world, the law exists to protect society
and all of its inhabitants, though in practice, how this
(29:35):
works is a lot less ideal, shall we say, generally speaking,
when you look at different social and political systems, laws
exist to protect and perpetuate that particular social system. We
can look at, for example, the different Nordic communities, who,
(29:58):
alongside what you could describe as a very relatively democratic
system compared to like say, the kind of feudalism that
was developing on the European continent at the same time,
was a pervasive system of slavery which became the bedrock
(30:20):
of the wealth that made the feudal aristocracy who became
dominant during and after the conversion process possible. There were
laws that codified and regulated and enshrined this practice in
all its different particulars and variations. It's not for nothing
(30:49):
that many of the first converts to Christianity within the
Nordic societies came from the ranks of the enslaved. Now, granted,
this system never is fully eradicated, and the different modern
(31:10):
parliaments of the Scandinavian nations trace their descent back to
these different original assemblies that existed for I mean, at
least as far back as we have documentation for that region.
Though that isn't as ancient as that phrase implies. The
(31:30):
same can also be said of modern states. Legal systems
exist to perpetuate the state's power and ability to be
a major arbiter as well as provider of services to
the people under its particular power. These services can be
direct in the case of like say, public ownership of
(31:52):
specific enterprises or resources, or more indirect, like maintaining the
legal systems and protections and just sort of basic domestic
tranquility that's necessary for complex economies and long distance commerce
to really become a thing like It is worth remembering
(32:15):
that many of these first states cemented their power by
making it safer to do business within their borders. Taking
that forward to the present day, and we see in
our capitalist world now that much of the resources of
governments are expended on activities and provisioning of services that
(32:40):
are beneficial to the perpetuation of the capitalist system we
live under. This has generally been true for most of
the history of the modern nation state as we know it,
and is especially the case now, even if we get
away from the avert oligarchy that is currently happening in Washington,
(33:04):
DC right now, where co president and all but name
Musk is behaving as if he's just done a massive
corporate takeover. You can look at many different examples of
democracies and systems which claim different forms of popular sovereignty,
where policy frequently is made following the input and under
(33:28):
the influence of powerful commercial and economic interests. This isn't
any kind of conspiratorial thinking at work here. This is
just simply how things work of where you'll have things
like business associations approaching elected officials and lobbying for different
preferential treatments or investments in projects that are beneficial to
(33:50):
their particular area of activity, or say, when we're talking
at higher levels with folks that have a lot more
money to throw around, locking up and basically buying a
presidential campaign because you've got two hundred and fifty million
dollars that you can throw out like its couch change.
(34:11):
Politicians also constantly campaign on who's going to be better
for the economy, which in many ways is basically who's
going to be better for creating a climate that is
seen as beneficial to economic actors, and specifically which economic actors,
which industries in which forms of business, depending of course,
on how you structure your policies and enact them. And
(34:38):
this also gives us to the question that has haunted
societies throughout the ages when it comes to how we
keep order and maintain accepted social conditions. To go back
to some Latin for a minute, quis custodiat ipsos custodes
(34:59):
or who you will watch the watchmen? Anytime, regardless of society,
that someone is specifically empowered to enact the law, there
is always the risk that they're going to do so
in a way that is detrimental to others and to
their particular social order, especially if those who are given
(35:24):
the power to enact law also receive special protections and
privileges in doing so, whether those are explicit or implicit
because of social privilege and esteem within their particular community. Now,
in theory, if you have a more kind of communal
(35:45):
system of law and governance, like you see with the
tank system, then it's easier to hold these kind of
people to account. And that's because at the end of
the day, the power to make and enforce law is
vest within the community through a body that's also less
(36:05):
separated from the space where the laws being enacted. Now,
I'm not going to pretend that the ting system was
a perfect system that was capable of keeping people constantly
in check and accountable. After all, it did end up
succumbing to the influences of feudal power and influence. Even
(36:28):
the Icelandic Commonwealth, which was in part founded by people
who were on the receiving end of King Harold Fairhair's
campaign to centralized power under his rule and more importantly
his sword and the swords of those who followed him,
even though they ultimately succumbed to the power of the
(36:51):
Norwegian crown by the twelve hundreds and ceased to be
an independent society. It's interesting how this process sort of
mirrors what's happening now of where economic elites whose wealth,
particularly if we're going to keep picking on Elon Musk
(37:11):
for a minute, depends heavily on public funding, public resources,
protection offered by the public in the form of law,
courts and the police, and all kinds of other public
assets that have made many of these industries possible, that
have certainly been at the foundation of Silicon Valley going
(37:35):
back to when it started as an offshoot of some
defense industry labs. And yet now these people who have
taken control over those resources are leveraging them to attemptencize
outright control of all of society. And that's not me,
that's Curtis Jarvin, the favorite philosopher of a lot of
(37:57):
this particular click of Silicon Valley types. You could say
there is no perfect system, though I think that is
a little glib, and it's better to ask what is
it within these different ways of making and maintaining law
and most importantly, keeping accountable those who benefit from those
(38:21):
different apparatuses, or even more importantly, actively enact power on
behalf of that apparatus, exercise it, potentially abuse it, and
ways of addressing it. This struggle against the march of ages,
the deterioration of systems, and the need for constant renewal
(38:43):
is one that is echoed all the way into the
cycle of Ragnarok and the creation of the world that
came before it, as well as the one that comes after,
a mythic cycle, which suggests an understanding of the world
is more dynamic and with it, a world where how
(39:05):
we make decisions and address problems is one that needs
to be constantly changing and developing. So where does that
leave us on the question of justice? I guess you
could say, there's a lot of different ways that that
can be enacted in theory, regardless of how you structure
(39:27):
the idea of law, that should come built into the
way that your different legal processes work. But in case
they're not, what is to be done. I think this
brings us back around to an interesting feature that I
(39:47):
noted before of the ting assemblies, which was the tendency
of participants to show up with their weapons, something that
could be read as an ext expression of their ability
to inflict violence and exercise power within the world that
they lived in. And this is what I think is
(40:11):
really at work here, that regardless of how you justify
the law and legal systems, justice is ultimately something that
has to be decided and enacted by the actions of people,
and sometimes this means going up against laws that may
have made sense once upon a time, or maybe were
(40:34):
enacted with deliberate malicious intent, confronting them and bringing to
light the weaknesses of those laws. Just as much as
you have examples of violent disputes, blood feuds, and all
kinds of other similar examples of eruptions of conflict within
the Nordic source material, there's also examples of what you
(40:57):
could describe as potentially more justified acts of violence in
that regard. And this is where I'm going to talk
for a minute about hack On the Good, the first
Christian King of Norway, who, interestingly enough, according to one source,
the hack On arml requested a heathen burial in the
(41:21):
end because he had ultimately lived more as a Heathen
than a Christian throughout his time on the throne. Now,
hack On the Good came to power after the rise
of King Harold fair Hair, and how Harold became the
first King of Norway was through military might. He and
his allies used basically force and violence to bring other
(41:46):
regions of what would become Norway under his control. Along
the way, he seized land from his opponents and redistributed
them to his supporters. This was meant to cement their
power and create an incentive for them to back Harold.
This also, as you can imagine, didn't exactly go over
well with the people on the receiving end of King
(42:08):
Harold's power and influence. This then brings us to hack
On the Good, who, seeking to take the throne of Norway,
made the central plank of his campaign for the crown
a push to restore the lost land rights to those
(42:29):
who had had their states seized by Harold and his supporters.
He then redistributed these lands to the people who backed him.
Once he became king, he also tried to impose Christian
law over his new kingdom. But when he first attempted
this at the Frosty Thing, he met serious resistance because,
(42:53):
among other things, it meant the end of regular sacrificial feasts,
which served not just a vital social religious function, but
also were a source of plentiful feasting and wealth for
the people who participated in these feasts. So attempting to
end that, as well as the customs of their ancestors,
(43:16):
was strongly opposed, and in one particular instance, Hakon was
rebuked in the Tang and informed that if he persisted
in trying to impose Christianity and its strictures on the
people of Norway, that they would go apart and pick
a new king, at least according to the heims Kringla. Now,
(43:37):
just to go back over some of the beats of this,
it's not hard to see what's happening here as broadly
similar to a number of much more modern revolutions that
started with some variation on restoring land rights as a
central rallying cry. The diggers resisting enclosure or the Zapatis
(44:00):
during the Mexican Revolution are two of many examples that
I can name off the top of my head of
this particular pattern of people rising up and demanding what
they saw as a more just system in response to
changes in their legal, political, and material environments. That's just
(44:20):
rather interesting that this is a thing that not only happened,
but could be accommodated and folded into the existing system
of law that previously had empowered Harold, at least within
the laws that he had made and established to maintain
his position. Mythically, you could make a similar case with
(44:44):
odin Veelli and Vey rising up against Emir, the only
being in creation at that time who had access to
the milk of Odumla, and replacing Emir and their realm
with a new way of existence, or like say in
the case of Beowulf, where Beowulf goes forth to liberate
the Hall of growth Gar from Grendel's oppression. This idea
(45:09):
of using violence specifically as a redress of grievances or
other forms of direct action as a way of redressing
unjust systems is an idea that's pretty well in there
within the Nordic myth. One particular example, which I know
(45:30):
I've brought up before and is going to be another
one of those things that I'm going to do a
whole episode on someday, is the example of the saga
of voland the voln dark Vita. This is a story
that makes its way into the poetic Eta, which by
the way, is the same collection of poems that includes
the Riggs Thula, which enshrines a class system that includes
(45:53):
thraldom as being divinely ordained. Where the hero of the
volndark Vita is Voland, a smith who is taken into
enslavement by force. And when we're talking by force, I
even mean that his captor slashes off his hamstrings so
that Voland cannot run away or escape, and is forced
(46:14):
to labor at the anvil all day on behalf of
his captor. Voland, in response, works his way into the
affections of his captor's children, turns them against their parent,
and fashions for himself a set of wings that allow
him to fly free from captivity while wreaking a terrible
(46:35):
vengeance upon the one who took him captive. And this
is thing that's kind of interesting that there is a
little bit of this thread that exists of that on
one hand, thralldom is a system that is protected within
the society, but on the other taking vengeance for being
forcibly enthralled and claiming your freedom at sword point is
(47:00):
also celebrated. It's definitely an interesting tension, to say the least.
Anything more there would veer into the topic of vengeance,
which I'm going to get into a lot more in
the next episode, which will be coming out in March
(47:20):
at least, you know, next long form episode. So just
to recap, law and justice as understood within the Nordic
world operated in a different framework than what we live
in today. It was one where the people who were
responsible for making laws were also the ones who were
(47:43):
responsible for enforcing and maintaining those laws. There was no
significant separation between the institutions that were responsible for these
kinds of decisions as well as for making collective social
decisions and echoes and air to This can be seen
in different parliamentary systems as well as trials by jury.
(48:06):
In contrast, where we live in a modern society where
justice and its dispensation, as well as the creating and
maintaining of law is professionalized and external from the people
who are subject to that law. It also rests on
a foundation of violence, which is definitely strongly implied as
(48:28):
being the case as well within the ting system. Now,
the way that laws are made and the directions that
it goes are very much a product of the society
that's making it, as well as who within that society
is capable of enforcing it. And as always, it's important
(48:51):
to bear in mind that it is quite possible for
those who have power and influence to eventually use it
to undo these kind of more collective and egalitarian systems
that can exist and replace it with ones that favor
their own personal desires. There is also, finally, within Nordic myth,
a tendency towards justice sometimes clashing with existing law, and
(49:17):
it being acceptable for people to change this through different
kinds of direct action, including open violence and overthrow of
an existing system. Now, what this might suggest for the
present day really depends on who you are and where
it is that you stand. So I think a convincing
(49:38):
case can be made that at least some of the
criteria that seem to come up, and I'll get more
into this next time when I talk about vengeance. Have
certainly been met for people to take action on the
world that we're living in and seek some kind of
redress of grievances. So thank you again for listening. This
(50:03):
has been Ryan Smith at The Wayward Wanderer, now signing off.
If you want to find out more about radical Heathen practice,
head on over to on Blackwings dot com, where you
can find articles, classes, resources, and more. If you enjoyed
(50:26):
this podcast and would like to help support my work,
then please head on over to Patreon dot com slash
Wayward Wanderer. This podcast was created and produced by Ryan Smith.
Thanks for listening.
Hey everybody, this is Ryan. If you enjoy this podcast
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(00:24):
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(00:45):
Your support makes my work possible. Thank you for your
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You can find information on upcoming classes at on Blackwings
(01:06):
dot com slash classes, and if you're interested in a reading,
then just click on the link in the show notes
and select whatever day and time works best for you.
I'm also happy to announce that beginning in March, I
will be teaching a class on the Younger Footharch the
Ruins of the Viking Age, along with other members of
(01:26):
the teaching collective who will be offering classes in the
Elderfootharch intro to Nordic Paganism, magic and Mysticism, and for
any Australian listeners out there, for the first time, we'll
be offering a class on the elderfooth Arch in Brisbane
evening time. You can sign up for classes by clicking
(01:48):
on the link in the show notes below, and now
on with the show. It's time to talk about the
other side of the scales from violence. Welcome to the
Law and Justice episode. Violence and the law have, throughout
(02:38):
human history in many different societies, had a contentious and
complicated relationship. The reason why this is such a messy
and complicated story is because the law, in many ways,
at its most basic level, is heavily concerned with regulating
(02:59):
who is is and is not allowed to use force
and violence, and under what circumstances force and violence are
acceptable to be used. Justice is an even thornier question,
even though much of modern society likes to frame the
(03:20):
different legal systems we operate under as a way of
ensuring justice look at, for example, the criminal justice system
as a great example of this kind of mentality and framing.
But when you look at examples of justice, whether you're
talking myth or in history throughout different periods, what is
(03:42):
just is not always what is necessarily legal, and there
is more of a sense of justice being the realization
of a right and morally acceptable as well as generally
beneficial outcome for what I never the particular circumstance is.
(04:05):
Even though the law in theory strives to be just,
there is this tension that exists between these systems which
at their core give and revoke permission for exercising different
kinds of violence and what is considered to be right
(04:25):
in a moral or ethical sense. The same is true
when you look at Nordic myth and the source material
that is used by modern Heathens for developing Nordic derived spiritualities.
Even though a lot of modern popular culture as well
(04:49):
as online culture around what you could call this sort
of Nordic esthetic that's developed, focuses a lot on vikings,
epic heroes of myth, and these other examples of conflict,
which I get into more in the last episode talking
about violence, which I've got linked below. I think far
(05:12):
more can be learned both about the attitudes within this
material towards violence, as well as just this material in
general by looking at the ways that the Nordic people's
handled these questions of law and justice. This especially because
(05:32):
when you dig even just a couple inches down into
the source material, it's sort of hard to miss that
there's a pretty intricate and very critical set of legal practices,
methods for dispute resolution, for establishing the new directions that
(05:55):
societies would take. All of that stuff is just sort
of all over the place, Like you can't really get
into the Nordic myth without running into examples of weird
guild being collected, people coming together in the Great Tang assemblies,
and all these other expressions of the legal and social
(06:16):
frameworks that guided these societies. So in this episode, I'm
going to get into these questions of law and justice.
And the way I'm going to do that is I'm
first going to start by talking about what we know
of the Nordic peoples and their world, as far as
(06:38):
the legal and you could say political framework functioned within
their societies. I'm going to then move forward to talking
a little bit about the modern state, which is to say,
the dominant form that political affairs tend to take in
the modern world. And the reason why I'm going to
(07:01):
do this is because I think that we can't fully
understand how the different legal systems and social and political
implications of that within the Nordic world are without then
comparing it to what we take for granted today. That's
(07:24):
going to be then a jumping off point for a
much bigger question that I think is raised by both
these systems as well as generally talking about these questions
of law and justice, and that question is who does
the law protect and what determines who is under the
law's protection. And then I'm going to just sort of
(07:49):
clean everything up, recap and summarize and set the stage
for the third in you could call this triptich of
episodes on these questions of violence, where I'm going to
get into another thing that's extremely pervasive in Nordic myth, vengeance.
So all of that said, let's get started. The central
(08:17):
institution of law as well as handling social affairs in
the different Nordic societies that existed before and during the
conversion period was the Ting Assembly. This is also speaking
in somewhat broad strokes, as there were a lot of
(08:38):
different variations on this specific names, as well as structural
differences between some of these different examples of what you
could broadly say fits under this umbrella. So to talk
in those general tendencies, the Ting system could be just
(09:00):
described as a not properly or perfectly, but broadly directly
democratic system of social organization. And I'm saying broadly because again,
this is trying to take modern concepts that themselves are
also not terribly well understood or defined and applying them
(09:22):
to a system that greatly predates these different ideas. Now,
when I say directly democratic, what I mean is that
these were bodies that broadly could be described as operating
on democratic forms in terms of how decisions were made
and proposals and disputes were brought before the Ting And
(09:47):
I'm saying direct because people directly represented themselves. They didn't have,
at least initially elected representatives or other similar figures who
spoke on their behalf. Now, this is something that was
somewhat true in the Icelandic Commonwealth, where you have the
Office of Gothar, which sort of broadly corresponds to like
(10:10):
say a regional chief or big man, or however you
want to put it, that leans more in that kind
of representative direction. But even then anyone could still appear
before the all tang. These assemblies generally speaking, could be
(10:32):
described as a combination legislative body and law court. Most
of what tings did, in fairness was handle questions of
law and justice as a court where the members of
the community as part of the tang served as the jury.
(10:53):
And there are arguments that I've seen made by legal
historians that similar systems like the moot and the Wheaton
gamut in Anglo Saxon, England could be seen as precursors
to the modern trial by jury system, along with some
other medieval additions and various other accoutrements and developments that
(11:14):
have just sort of happened along the way. This wasn't
exactly a jury like we'd think of it in that
you have twelve randomly selected members of the community who
make their deliberations in a closed off room. But rather
this was everybody in the community coming together talking about
(11:36):
how they were going to resolve a particular dispute. Assign
we're guild or levy punishment on individuals who had gone
against the expectations of the community. These resolutions were also
enforced by the members of the community. Now, this is
(11:57):
something that I think is very important to emphasize that
these were societies where the people who made the law
and were bound by the law were also involved in
upholding that law. What I mean by this is that
the implementation of the decisions made by these bodies was
(12:22):
up to the people who were part of these bodies.
The implicit social contract that shows up in surviving historical
and mythic materials is that being part of the ting
meant you also were responsible for upholding the decisions of
(12:44):
the ting. An example of this would be the practice
of exile or outlawry, where individuals who committed serious crimes
like murder or something like that were declared outcast for
a community, and what that meant was that person was
denied the protection of the law, any expectation of receiving
(13:09):
hospitality within those spaces, and anyone who was response who
was part of that community was well within their rights
to in some cases kill the outcast on site. And
this was again something that wasn't enforced by like say
a sheriff in their deputies or some kind of organized
(13:31):
militia or something like that, although I'm sure when you
start to get to more stratified communities where you have
a more entrenched warrior aristocracy, especially later on in the
Viking Age, you probably did have an element of house
carls and armed retainers serving in a similar fashion, you know,
(13:53):
sort of Erzat's police. But generally we're talking something that's
a bit more like just the duties of being in
a society also means enforcing the expectations and decisions of
that society. This is a logic that also kind of
(14:13):
seamlessly flows from the people under arms kind of system
that existed in many of these communities, where essentially being
an able bodied adult finding the term adult somewhat more loosely,
who had the means in the equipment was expected to
take part in defending and fighting on behalf of their communities.
(14:38):
There's no better example of how interconnected this understanding of
duty to defense as well as duty to law were
than in the regular observation in the Heimskringla of where
attendees to the different things by custom brought their w
(15:00):
weapons with them, and sometimes these weapons would be used
as a display of expressing particular opinions on different courses
of action or rulings, such as the case of Thorgny
Laghmann before the Ting of all Swedes, and I believe
it was the year one thousand AD, where the King
(15:22):
of Sweden was pressing for support for continuation of a war,
and Thorgny rows Up gives a short speech as a
former law speaker, which meant someone who knew and kept
the law within these communities and sort of served as
judges facilitators something along those lines, not judges in the
(15:46):
sense of handing down like rulings and such, but I
guess the word sort of works anyway. He also reminded
the king that previous kings who had gone against the
will of the ting had been drowned in a bos
over Yonder and in the Heimskringla, Snorri specifically notes that
in the description of what happened, at least according to Snorri,
(16:10):
then the attendees of the tang shook their weapons and
clashed them against their shields in support of Thorgny's position.
Even though we don't have, like say a Nordic Aristotle,
who is describing the implications of this, I think it's
(16:31):
sort of interesting that this is a society that, to
some extent had ways of expressing and understanding questions of
law and war and violence that saw these as related phenomena.
(16:52):
At least you could infer that based on things like
the practice of bringing weapons to the ting, which was
the place of law and the place of making big decisions. Now,
this doesn't mean this is any kind of example of
perfect pluralistic equal rights or anything like that. These were
(17:13):
societies that practiced a form of slavery known as thraldom,
and who was and was not allowed to speak at
these tangs varied. We do have one example from the
Uta Lebuini, which is an account by a Frankish missionary
in the Kingdom of Saxony, which was, you know, in
modern day northwestern Germany today, where he describes the Tang
(17:37):
of the Saxons, where, according to him, even bonded people
which was a term often used for thralls, were allowed
to speak before the tang. Though whether they actually had
power before the tang or were able to give that
testimony freely or seek redress freely is another question. Entirely,
(17:57):
all of these particular nuances and conser turns were things
that probably would have flown right over Saint Lebwin's head,
since he wasn't of that culture and also was coming
from one that practiced its own very top down and
at times brutally violent system of law and punishment. Based
(18:20):
on what I have read, I don't know how consistent
that would have been, and whether or not that was
unique to the Saxons, as well as if it even
was restricted to particular people under thralldom, because again there
were distinctions between who was and was not a thrall
and why you became a thrall. It wasn't completely cut
(18:40):
and dry. It would also be fair to say that
more influential or powerful people within different communities exerted different
levels of influence over these processes. The point is that
this is a significantly for an understanding of distributions of power,
(19:04):
how law is made, and who law applies to than
what we see in the modern world. And this is
where we get to get into a little short polysi
one oh one. So the state is the form of
political organization that exists in the present day. Now. A state,
(19:31):
to sort of summarize briefly, is a specific collection of
institutions and interest groups within a society who, through a
variety of different means, enjoy the monopoly on the legitimate
use of force and violence within their area of influence.
(19:58):
This monopoly on is what allows the state to establish
and enforce laws, enact policy, and exert power over different societies. States,
by their nature, are somewhat external to the people that
(20:21):
they hold power over, in that you'll frequently see in
different kinds of state systems. This can range from modern
constitutional democracies to single party dictatorships oligarchies. Wherever it is
you go or however it is you want to do
it that actors and agents of states often enjoy certain
(20:44):
privileges and immunities that exempt them from specific laws or
specific regulations which allow them, in theory, to then perform
their different functions on behalf of the state. Qualified immunity
is a great example of what I mean, and for
(21:06):
folks who are not familiar, qualified immunity is the legal
practice in the United States that holds that specific public employees,
most often police, are shielded from being sued in civil
court for damages for anything that they do on the
job to people within their particular communities. And this has
(21:30):
argued that it is necessary for making it possible for
police officers to do their jobs. Now, not all states
have qualified immunity, but does exist on the federal level
and is a good example of what I mean by
this sort of exception and this externality, that the state
(21:50):
is always allowed to do things to the population that
it disallows the population from doing to it. And that's
what makes the state, by its nature external to the
people that it holds power over. The reason why this
(22:12):
is the case is because the model that would end
up exported through colonialism and imperialism to the rest of
the planet was the European nation state system, and the
nation state's foundation rests mostly on the continued process of
centralization of different feudal realms within Europe. And this process
(22:37):
of centralization wasn't just a question of allocating different rights
and responsibilities or what have you away from different nobles.
It frequently involved having to go to war with different
feudal magnates and bringing these different local and regional powers
to heal violently. This is where, at least in that
(23:00):
sort of distantly modern sense that we could say this
emphasis on monopoly, unforced and violence comes from the feudal
order which preceded the early modern period and the rise
of the nation state model in Europe, was one where
the right and ability to exercise violence was a function
(23:22):
of being a member of a specific class within society,
whereas what's happening now is the privileges of that class
as a whole are being curtailed and concentrated within the
hands of the centralized state, whether that's what eventually becomes
the parliamentary monarchy of the United Kingdom or the more
(23:44):
centralized absolutist state in France that you see around like
Louis the Sun King and all that business. This military
force also became the bedrock for exercising power over the
populations that were within the jurisdiction of that particular state.
(24:05):
After all, when you have all of the organized fighting personnel,
armed and equipped under your control, it gets a lot
easier to deal with things like peasant uprisings, people resisting enclosure,
religious revolts, and all that other stuff by sending in
the people with guns. This, ever since has remained the
(24:31):
foundation of how state power is applied. Even when you're
talking a modern liberal democracy. The power of the state
at its core rests on its ability to designate something
within or outside of the bounds of law and receiving
the attention of agents of the state that are capable
(24:53):
of bringing the different powers of their government to bear,
which can be everything from finds and investigations to incarceration
and even potentially worse. Law in this case is written
from the perspective of maintaining that order and doing whatever
(25:16):
is necessary to uphold that. That could include stuff that
promotes the general welfare and is beneficial to a lot
of the population. It could also cover stuff like using
force and violence to keep different populations in line, maintain
systems of marginalization, and in other ways perpetuate social inequalities.
(25:40):
Now you could say there is a system that's a
lot more impartial, it's much less likely to be prone
to local or particular biases, and in theory, is going
to make decisions with a better eye towards the collective good.
All that said, I think we can look at what's
happening politically right now and much of recent political history
(26:06):
if we want examples of where different states have utilized
their power in ways that have been detrimental to the
people under their power, and especially as we're seeing right
now with the current occupant of the White House in
the United States, that just because you have a system
which has all of these monopolies and privileges and remove
(26:29):
it from the day to day reality of people, to
be able to have that sort of superior position to
act doesn't mean it's going to be free from being
intruded on by certainly less than objective actors. And that's
without me even touching on the whole hornet's nest that is,
(26:51):
can we say objectivity is a thing? Put a pin
in that, because that will be a thing for a
future podcast episode. But to focus on what's at hand here,
The state in many modern instances depicts itself as the
arbiter and dispenser of justice in all the different forms
that represents, whether that is resolving disputes between citizens or
(27:17):
other residents within their area of power, which you could
call civil suits in court, or breaches against accepted codes
of social conduct, namely criminal law, along with managing many
other functions that are essential to making modern life as
we know it possible. This does mean that sometimes, in fact,
(27:41):
in many cases, you could argue that even though justice
is claimed to be the province of the state, that
in practice that which is just is not always necessarily
that which is legal. And there have been many instances
of what has been described as great injustices, like the
many different systems of slavery that existed throughout human history,
(28:03):
as injustices against people that were perfectly legal, aided and abetted.
And I think there is a certain truth to this.
There are many examples of people and power systems moving
beyond accepted norms and limits that go on to inflict
great atrocities. But there's also plenty of cases throughout history where,
(28:26):
through perfectly legal and above board means within the existing
system in question, horrifically unjust things were enacted. The rise
of fascism in the different places where it's happened and
it's currently happening, is a great example of how the law,
in its contradictions around justice and dispensing the common good,
(28:51):
can lead to injustices that open the way to even
worse abuses. And like a good spot to take a
little break, and we are back, and here we get
(29:12):
to the thorny question who does the law protect? In
the abstract ideal world, the law exists to protect society
and all of its inhabitants, though in practice, how this
(29:35):
works is a lot less ideal, shall we say, generally speaking,
when you look at different social and political systems, laws
exist to protect and perpetuate that particular social system. We
can look at, for example, the different Nordic communities, who,
(29:58):
alongside what you could describe as a very relatively democratic
system compared to like say, the kind of feudalism that
was developing on the European continent at the same time,
was a pervasive system of slavery which became the bedrock
(30:20):
of the wealth that made the feudal aristocracy who became
dominant during and after the conversion process possible. There were
laws that codified and regulated and enshrined this practice in
all its different particulars and variations. It's not for nothing
(30:49):
that many of the first converts to Christianity within the
Nordic societies came from the ranks of the enslaved. Now, granted,
this system never is fully eradicated, and the different modern
(31:10):
parliaments of the Scandinavian nations trace their descent back to
these different original assemblies that existed for I mean, at
least as far back as we have documentation for that region.
Though that isn't as ancient as that phrase implies. The
(31:30):
same can also be said of modern states. Legal systems
exist to perpetuate the state's power and ability to be
a major arbiter as well as provider of services to
the people under its particular power. These services can be
direct in the case of like say, public ownership of
(31:52):
specific enterprises or resources, or more indirect, like maintaining the
legal systems and protections and just sort of basic domestic
tranquility that's necessary for complex economies and long distance commerce
to really become a thing like It is worth remembering
(32:15):
that many of these first states cemented their power by
making it safer to do business within their borders. Taking
that forward to the present day, and we see in
our capitalist world now that much of the resources of
governments are expended on activities and provisioning of services that
(32:40):
are beneficial to the perpetuation of the capitalist system we
live under. This has generally been true for most of
the history of the modern nation state as we know it,
and is especially the case now, even if we get
away from the avert oligarchy that is currently happening in Washington,
(33:04):
DC right now, where co president and all but name
Musk is behaving as if he's just done a massive
corporate takeover. You can look at many different examples of
democracies and systems which claim different forms of popular sovereignty,
where policy frequently is made following the input and under
(33:28):
the influence of powerful commercial and economic interests. This isn't
any kind of conspiratorial thinking at work here. This is
just simply how things work of where you'll have things
like business associations approaching elected officials and lobbying for different
preferential treatments or investments in projects that are beneficial to
(33:50):
their particular area of activity, or say, when we're talking
at higher levels with folks that have a lot more
money to throw around, locking up and basically buying a
presidential campaign because you've got two hundred and fifty million
dollars that you can throw out like its couch change.
(34:11):
Politicians also constantly campaign on who's going to be better
for the economy, which in many ways is basically who's
going to be better for creating a climate that is
seen as beneficial to economic actors, and specifically which economic actors,
which industries in which forms of business, depending of course,
on how you structure your policies and enact them. And
(34:38):
this also gives us to the question that has haunted
societies throughout the ages when it comes to how we
keep order and maintain accepted social conditions. To go back
to some Latin for a minute, quis custodiat ipsos custodes
(34:59):
or who you will watch the watchmen? Anytime, regardless of society,
that someone is specifically empowered to enact the law, there
is always the risk that they're going to do so
in a way that is detrimental to others and to
their particular social order, especially if those who are given
(35:24):
the power to enact law also receive special protections and
privileges in doing so, whether those are explicit or implicit
because of social privilege and esteem within their particular community. Now,
in theory, if you have a more kind of communal
(35:45):
system of law and governance, like you see with the
tank system, then it's easier to hold these kind of
people to account. And that's because at the end of
the day, the power to make and enforce law is
vest within the community through a body that's also less
(36:05):
separated from the space where the laws being enacted. Now,
I'm not going to pretend that the ting system was
a perfect system that was capable of keeping people constantly
in check and accountable. After all, it did end up
succumbing to the influences of feudal power and influence. Even
(36:28):
the Icelandic Commonwealth, which was in part founded by people
who were on the receiving end of King Harold Fairhair's
campaign to centralized power under his rule and more importantly
his sword and the swords of those who followed him,
even though they ultimately succumbed to the power of the
(36:51):
Norwegian crown by the twelve hundreds and ceased to be
an independent society. It's interesting how this process sort of
mirrors what's happening now of where economic elites whose wealth,
particularly if we're going to keep picking on Elon Musk
(37:11):
for a minute, depends heavily on public funding, public resources,
protection offered by the public in the form of law,
courts and the police, and all kinds of other public
assets that have made many of these industries possible, that
have certainly been at the foundation of Silicon Valley going
(37:35):
back to when it started as an offshoot of some
defense industry labs. And yet now these people who have
taken control over those resources are leveraging them to attemptencize
outright control of all of society. And that's not me,
that's Curtis Jarvin, the favorite philosopher of a lot of
(37:57):
this particular click of Silicon Valley types. You could say
there is no perfect system, though I think that is
a little glib, and it's better to ask what is
it within these different ways of making and maintaining law
and most importantly, keeping accountable those who benefit from those
(38:21):
different apparatuses, or even more importantly, actively enact power on
behalf of that apparatus, exercise it, potentially abuse it, and
ways of addressing it. This struggle against the march of ages,
the deterioration of systems, and the need for constant renewal
(38:43):
is one that is echoed all the way into the
cycle of Ragnarok and the creation of the world that
came before it, as well as the one that comes after,
a mythic cycle, which suggests an understanding of the world
is more dynamic and with it, a world where how
(39:05):
we make decisions and address problems is one that needs
to be constantly changing and developing. So where does that
leave us on the question of justice? I guess you
could say, there's a lot of different ways that that
can be enacted in theory, regardless of how you structure
(39:27):
the idea of law, that should come built into the
way that your different legal processes work. But in case
they're not, what is to be done. I think this
brings us back around to an interesting feature that I
(39:47):
noted before of the ting assemblies, which was the tendency
of participants to show up with their weapons, something that
could be read as an ext expression of their ability
to inflict violence and exercise power within the world that
they lived in. And this is what I think is
(40:11):
really at work here, that regardless of how you justify
the law and legal systems, justice is ultimately something that
has to be decided and enacted by the actions of people,
and sometimes this means going up against laws that may
have made sense once upon a time, or maybe were
(40:34):
enacted with deliberate malicious intent, confronting them and bringing to
light the weaknesses of those laws. Just as much as
you have examples of violent disputes, blood feuds, and all
kinds of other similar examples of eruptions of conflict within
the Nordic source material, there's also examples of what you
(40:57):
could describe as potentially more justified acts of violence in
that regard. And this is where I'm going to talk
for a minute about hack On the Good, the first
Christian King of Norway, who, interestingly enough, according to one source,
the hack On arml requested a heathen burial in the
(41:21):
end because he had ultimately lived more as a Heathen
than a Christian throughout his time on the throne. Now,
hack On the Good came to power after the rise
of King Harold fair Hair, and how Harold became the
first King of Norway was through military might. He and
his allies used basically force and violence to bring other
(41:46):
regions of what would become Norway under his control. Along
the way, he seized land from his opponents and redistributed
them to his supporters. This was meant to cement their
power and create an incentive for them to back Harold.
This also, as you can imagine, didn't exactly go over
well with the people on the receiving end of King
(42:08):
Harold's power and influence. This then brings us to hack
On the Good, who, seeking to take the throne of Norway,
made the central plank of his campaign for the crown
a push to restore the lost land rights to those
(42:29):
who had had their states seized by Harold and his supporters.
He then redistributed these lands to the people who backed him.
Once he became king, he also tried to impose Christian
law over his new kingdom. But when he first attempted
this at the Frosty Thing, he met serious resistance because,
(42:53):
among other things, it meant the end of regular sacrificial feasts,
which served not just a vital social religious function, but
also were a source of plentiful feasting and wealth for
the people who participated in these feasts. So attempting to
end that, as well as the customs of their ancestors,
(43:16):
was strongly opposed, and in one particular instance, Hakon was
rebuked in the Tang and informed that if he persisted
in trying to impose Christianity and its strictures on the
people of Norway, that they would go apart and pick
a new king, at least according to the heims Kringla. Now,
(43:37):
just to go back over some of the beats of this,
it's not hard to see what's happening here as broadly
similar to a number of much more modern revolutions that
started with some variation on restoring land rights as a
central rallying cry. The diggers resisting enclosure or the Zapatis
(44:00):
during the Mexican Revolution are two of many examples that
I can name off the top of my head of
this particular pattern of people rising up and demanding what
they saw as a more just system in response to
changes in their legal, political, and material environments. That's just
(44:20):
rather interesting that this is a thing that not only happened,
but could be accommodated and folded into the existing system
of law that previously had empowered Harold, at least within
the laws that he had made and established to maintain
his position. Mythically, you could make a similar case with
(44:44):
odin Veelli and Vey rising up against Emir, the only
being in creation at that time who had access to
the milk of Odumla, and replacing Emir and their realm
with a new way of existence, or like say in
the case of Beowulf, where Beowulf goes forth to liberate
the Hall of growth Gar from Grendel's oppression. This idea
(45:09):
of using violence specifically as a redress of grievances or
other forms of direct action as a way of redressing
unjust systems is an idea that's pretty well in there
within the Nordic myth. One particular example, which I know
(45:30):
I've brought up before and is going to be another
one of those things that I'm going to do a
whole episode on someday, is the example of the saga
of voland the voln dark Vita. This is a story
that makes its way into the poetic Eta, which by
the way, is the same collection of poems that includes
the Riggs Thula, which enshrines a class system that includes
(45:53):
thraldom as being divinely ordained. Where the hero of the
volndark Vita is Voland, a smith who is taken into
enslavement by force. And when we're talking by force, I
even mean that his captor slashes off his hamstrings so
that Voland cannot run away or escape, and is forced
(46:14):
to labor at the anvil all day on behalf of
his captor. Voland, in response, works his way into the
affections of his captor's children, turns them against their parent,
and fashions for himself a set of wings that allow
him to fly free from captivity while wreaking a terrible
(46:35):
vengeance upon the one who took him captive. And this
is thing that's kind of interesting that there is a
little bit of this thread that exists of that on
one hand, thralldom is a system that is protected within
the society, but on the other taking vengeance for being
forcibly enthralled and claiming your freedom at sword point is
(47:00):
also celebrated. It's definitely an interesting tension, to say the least.
Anything more there would veer into the topic of vengeance,
which I'm going to get into a lot more in
the next episode, which will be coming out in March
(47:20):
at least, you know, next long form episode. So just
to recap, law and justice as understood within the Nordic
world operated in a different framework than what we live
in today. It was one where the people who were
responsible for making laws were also the ones who were
(47:43):
responsible for enforcing and maintaining those laws. There was no
significant separation between the institutions that were responsible for these
kinds of decisions as well as for making collective social
decisions and echoes and air to This can be seen
in different parliamentary systems as well as trials by jury.
(48:06):
In contrast, where we live in a modern society where
justice and its dispensation, as well as the creating and
maintaining of law is professionalized and external from the people
who are subject to that law. It also rests on
a foundation of violence, which is definitely strongly implied as
(48:28):
being the case as well within the ting system. Now,
the way that laws are made and the directions that
it goes are very much a product of the society
that's making it, as well as who within that society
is capable of enforcing it. And as always, it's important
(48:51):
to bear in mind that it is quite possible for
those who have power and influence to eventually use it
to undo these kind of more collective and egalitarian systems
that can exist and replace it with ones that favor
their own personal desires. There is also, finally, within Nordic myth,
a tendency towards justice sometimes clashing with existing law, and
(49:17):
it being acceptable for people to change this through different
kinds of direct action, including open violence and overthrow of
an existing system. Now, what this might suggest for the
present day really depends on who you are and where
it is that you stand. So I think a convincing
(49:38):
case can be made that at least some of the
criteria that seem to come up, and I'll get more
into this next time when I talk about vengeance. Have
certainly been met for people to take action on the
world that we're living in and seek some kind of
redress of grievances. So thank you again for listening. This
(50:03):
has been Ryan Smith at The Wayward Wanderer, now signing off.
If you want to find out more about radical Heathen practice,
head on over to on Blackwings dot com, where you
can find articles, classes, resources, and more. If you enjoyed
(50:26):
this podcast and would like to help support my work,
then please head on over to Patreon dot com slash
Wayward Wanderer. This podcast was created and produced by Ryan Smith.
Thanks for listening.
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