--- slug: asatru type: lineage subsection: neopagan-currents created: 2026-06-01 updated: 2026-06-16 summary: "The modern reconstruction of pre-Christian Norse and Germanic polytheism — the most widely recognized strand of contemporary Heathenry, founded near-simultaneously in Iceland and the United States in 1972." related: theosophy: relation: related note: "One of Ásatrú's Icelandic founders came up through a Reykjavík theosophical circle, a documented thread linking the revival to the wider Western esoteric milieu." sigil-magic: relation: complements note: "Asatru's rune work — carving, reddening, and reading the elder futhark for divination and intent — shares the wider reconstructionist and chaos-magick interest in self-made symbol systems." moon-rituals: relation: complements note: "The Heathen wheel of the year and its seasonal blóts sit alongside the broader neopagan revival's lunar and solar observance as an earth-based ritual calendar." new-age: relation: contrasts-with note: "Asatru is reconstructionist and ancestral where the New Age is eclectic and universalist; the two share a milieu but pull in opposite directions on lineage and authority." modern-spirituality: relation: related note: "Heathenry is part of the contemporary spiritual field, one of its most strongly reconstructionist and community-anchored currents." order-nine-angles: relation: risks note: "The folkish capture of Norse symbolism, and the explicitly fascist fringe that exploits Heathen imagery, are documented in the Discernment entry on esoteric fascism." cultural-appropriation: relation: risks note: "Reconstructing a pre-Christian ancestral religion raises the appropriation and ancestry questions the Discernment entry treats in full." --- # Asatru > **Lineage** > > Transmission of ideas and practices through movements, teachers, works, and institutions. > "Cattle die, kinsmen die, you yourself must die; one thing I know that never dies: the fame of a dead man's deeds." > — *Hávamál*, stanza 77 Asatru is the most widely recognized form of modern Heathenry: the reconstructed worship of the old Norse and Germanic gods, undertaken by people who have chosen to be true to deities most of the West stopped honoring a thousand years ago. The name is Old Norse, *Ásatrú*, "to be true to the Æsir," and it gathers under one word a movement that began in two countries at once and has spent its whole modern life arguing with itself about who gets to belong. ## What Asatru is Asatru is the contemporary revival and reconstruction of the pre-Christian polytheism of the Norse, Scandinavian, and broader Germanic peoples. Practitioners honor the gods of the Eddas, mark the turning of the year with offering rites, and try to recover a religious world that left no continuous tradition behind, only texts, archaeology, and place-names. It is one strand, the best known, of a wider field its adherents call **Heathenry** or **the Northern Tradition**, which also includes Theodism, Forn Sidr, Vanatru, and various regional and reconstructionist currents. It is a religion built from fragments. There wasn't an unbroken priesthood, a surviving liturgy, or a scripture in the Christian sense. What practitioners work from is a body of medieval Icelandic literature written down after conversion, supplemented by the historical and archaeological record and by personal experience of the gods. That gap between the sources and the living practice is the central fact of the tradition: every Heathen is, to some degree, a reconstructor, and the question of how to fill the gaps honestly is one Heathens take seriously. ## Origin and historical development Modern Asatru has an unusual founding story: it appeared in several places at nearly the same moment, in 1972, with no single originator. In **Iceland**, a small group led by the farmer and poet **Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson** founded the **Ásatrúarfélagið** (the Ásatrú Fellowship) in 1972 and won official state recognition as a religious body in 1973, a remarkable early legitimacy that no other Heathen organization enjoyed. Sveinbjörn, who chanted the old poetry in the traditional *rímur* meters, gave the Icelandic revival a tone of cultural continuity rather than rupture: in Iceland the sagas had never stopped being read. In the **United States**, and independently, **Stephen McNallen** founded what began as the Viking Brotherhood, reorganized it as the **Asatru Free Assembly** in the 1970s, and after its dissolution refounded it as the **Asatru Folk Assembly**. A separate American organization, **The Troth**, grew from the work of **Edred Thorsson** (the pen name of Stephen Flowers) and **James Chisholm** in the late 1980s and took shape as the inclusive, universalist alternative. In **Britain**, parallel groups formed in the same period. None of these founders was working from the others; the revival was, in effect, an idea whose time had arrived across the post-1960s West. ## Main figures Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson (1924–1993) remains the revival's elder statesman, the chanting poet-farmer whose recordings preserved the old meters. Stephen McNallen anchored one pole of the American movement and, over decades, became the most prominent advocate of the ancestral, **folkish** reading of the religion. Edred Thorsson supplied much of the early scholarship and runology that the broader community drew on, while The Troth's organizers built the institutional home of the **inclusive** wing. No single teacher commands the tradition; Heathenry is decentralized by temperament, organized into local kindreds and hearths more than around national leaders. ## Major works and institutions The tradition's primary sources are medieval, not modern. The **Poetic Edda** (a collection of mythological and heroic poems preserved chiefly in the thirteenth-century *Codex Regius*) and the **Prose Edda** of **Snorri Sturluson** (c. 1220) supply nearly everything practitioners know about the gods and the cosmology. The **Hávamál** ("Sayings of the High One"), a poem in the Poetic Edda voiced by Odin, functions for many Heathens as the closest thing the tradition has to an ethical text. The Icelandic family **sagas** add the texture of how the old religion sat inside daily life. The modern institutions are the Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland, which has built the first purpose-made Heathen temple in modern times near Reykjavík; The Troth and the Asatru Folk Assembly in the United States, at opposite ends of the inclusive–folkish divide; and a scattering of national bodies and independent kindreds elsewhere. ## Core teachings and practice Asatru is orthopraxic more than orthodox: it asks less what you believe than what you do and how you conduct yourself. The gods fall into two families, the **Æsir** (Odin, Thor, Tyr, Frigg) and the **Vanir** (Freyr, Freyja, Njörðr), with the trickster Loki occupying his own ambiguous place. Around them stand the giants, the ancestors, the land-spirits (*landvættir*), and the disir, the female ancestral powers. A few practices carry the working life of the religion: - **Blót.** The central offering rite, in which food, drink, or other gifts are given to the gods, ancestors, or land-spirits, often with mead poured out or shared. The logic is reciprocal gift-giving (*a gift for a gift*), not petition. - **Sumbel (symbel).** The ritual drinking round, in which a horn is passed and participants make toasts, boasts, and oaths over it. An oath sworn at sumbel is taken with great seriousness; words spoken over the horn are held to carry real weight. - **The wheel of the year.** Seasonal observances anchored to the solstices and to dates such as Winter Nights and Yule, marking the agricultural and ancestral calendar. - **Rune work.** The elder futhark used for divination and for focused intent, drawing on the poem in which Odin wins the runes by hanging nine nights on the world-tree. Many Heathens also hold to a loose ethical frame sometimes codified as the **Nine Noble Virtues** (courage, truth, honor, fidelity, hospitality, and so on). These are themselves a modern compilation, drawn from the Hávamál and the sagas rather than handed down intact, and a good many practitioners treat them with suspicion as a tidy nineteenth-century-style invention rather than an authentic survival. The disagreement is itself characteristic: Heathens don't hide their arguments about the authenticity of their own reconstructions, they have them in the open. ## Influence on the contemporary field Asatru pulled the reconstructionist, ancestor-honoring, earth-based wing of modern spirituality into focus and gave it a vocabulary. It demonstrated that a polytheism abandoned a millennium ago could be rebuilt into a living practice with legal standing, public temples, and a literature of its own. Its rune work fed the wider occult and divinatory revival; its emphasis on ancestors and land-spirits influenced the broader neopagan turn toward place and lineage. Where the [New Age](new-age.md) tends toward the universal and the eclectic, Heathenry offered a sharply different model: specific gods, specific ancestors, specific sources, and a built-in insistence on getting the reconstruction right. ## Controversies and legacy The defining fault line of modern Asatru is the question of who the gods belong to. On one side stands **inclusive** or **universalist** Heathenry, represented above all by The Troth: anyone called to the Norse gods may honor them, regardless of ancestry, and the religion is a matter of devotion, not descent. On the other stands **folkish** Heathenry, which holds that the gods are bound to a particular people and that worship is properly the inheritance of those of Northern European descent. The Asatru Folk Assembly is the best-known organization on the folkish side. It isn't a minor disagreement; it goes to the root of what the religion is. The conflict came to a head in **2016**, when a coalition of inclusive Heathen organizations issued **Declaration 127**, publicly repudiating the Asatru Folk Assembly and refusing to do business with it. The name points to the Hávamál stanza that counsels speaking out against wrong wherever it is found. Organizations around the world signed; the stewardship of the declaration passed to The Troth in 2024. That a tradition this small produced so formal and so wide a public statement is a measure of how seriously its inclusive majority takes the matter. Beyond the intra-tradition divide lies a separate and darker problem: the appropriation of Norse symbolism by explicitly fascist and white-supremacist movements that have no standing inside Heathenry and that the inclusive mainstream actively opposes. The runes, the hammer, and the gods have been pulled into that orbit by actors outside the religion. How that exploitation works, and how to tell it apart from the faith it parasitizes, belongs to the Discernment treatment of [esoteric fascism](order-nine-angles.md). The broader question of whether and how a pre-Christian ancestral religion can be reconstructed without slipping into [cultural appropriation](cultural-appropriation.md) is treated there as well. What remains, after the arguments, is a working religion. A Heathen today can pour out mead to Thor, swear an oath over the horn, read the runes, mark Yule with her kindred, and chant a thousand-year-old poem in its old meter. She does all of it as a deliberate act of fidelity to gods her ancestors knew and her culture forgot. That recovery, against the odds and from fragments, is the achievement the tradition is proudest of. ## Sources - *The Poetic Edda*, trans. Carolyne Larrington, [*The Poetic Edda*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL18233476W) (Oxford University Press, 1996) — the primary collection of mythological and heroic poems, including the Hávamál, that supplies most of what is known of the gods. - Snorri Sturluson, [*The Prose Edda*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL16249247W) (c. 1220) — the systematic medieval account of Norse cosmology and myth, written after the conversion. - Jennifer Snook, [*American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religious Movement*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL21562354W) (Temple University Press, 2015) — the standard sociological study of the inclusive–folkish divide in the United States. - Stefanie von Schnurbein, [*Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism*](https://openlibrary.org/works/OL20200945W) (Brill, 2016) — a scholarly history of the modern revival and its political fault lines. - The Troth's Declaration 127 statement and the Ásatrúarfélagið's own materials document the two poles of the tradition's self-description and the 2016 repudiation. --- - [Next: Wicca](wicca.md) - [Previous: Neopagan & Earth-Based Currents](neopagan-currents.md)