Somewhere East of Midgard

This article later became the first chapter of my book, Tales from the Ironwood: The Spiritual Journey of a Modern-Day Heathen. The initial draft was written on 10 November 2017. It has gone through substantial editing and rewriting since that time. It is presented here to introduce my very personal adventures along the road from the Ironwood to Midgard.

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THE IRONWOOD IS A DARK and frightening place—a forest located somewhere east of Midgard—inhabited by mythical monsters. It is the home of troll women and giantesses and wolves of tremendous stature and hunger.

In the Eddas, the author of the Voluspa (The Prophecy of the Seeress) mentions the Ironwood:

The giantess old in Ironwood sat,
In the east, and bore the brood of Fenrir;
Among these one in monster's guise
Was soon to steal the sun from the sky. (Henry Adams Bellows trans., The Poetic Edda: The Mythological Poems (New York: Dover Publications, 2004), 18. 


Snorri Sturluson also recounts in his Gylfaginning (The Tricking of Gylfi):

A certain giantess lives east of Midgard in a forest called Ironwood. In that forest live trollwives called Iarnvidiur. The ancient giantess breeds as sons many giants and all in wolf shapes, and it is from them that these wolves are descended. And they say that from this clan will come a most mighty one called Moongarm. He will fill himself with the lifeblood of everyone that dies, and he will swallow heavenly bodies and spatter heaven and all the skies with blood. As a result the sun will lose its shine and winds will then be violent and will rage to and fro. (Snorri Sturluson, Edda, trans. Anthony Faulkes (North Clarendon, VT: Everyman, 1995), 15.)


The Ironwood is not a very hospitable place. As I consider the Ironwood, I can’t help but be reminded of that land “east of Eden” to which the biblical Cain is said to have been exiled following his murder of his brother Abel. No doubt this memory stems from many years spent in Christian churches. It took most of my life to realize that I had been living in a less-than-welcoming world—a strange and foreign place—one that was out of sync with my inner nature, a place of exile.

I asked my friend Joe, who graciously accepted the challenge of editing this book for me, to let me know what he thought of it. He responded, “You, at all times, counter the trend of conventional belief around you.” His insight seems fairly accurate. But I’m also one to challenge my own beliefs. I have never been shy from exploring unusual topics. When I turned 34 years old, I left behind nearly two decades of atheism to embrace Christianity. That was a strange choice indeed. Monotheistic religions require adherence to dogma—to a common set of beliefs. There’s little room for the unconventional. I found myself having to condition my mind to accept the basic tenets of Christianity.

I became a Christian because I had begun to seek the spiritual. I also didn’t want to let my earlier choice—to not believe—come in the way of a faith experience for my two children, Jess and Adam. While neither was baptized as an infant, my wife, Beth and I agreed that it was a good idea for them to grow up with faith in god. Normal social interaction might be made difficult for them if their upbringing resulted in belief as unconventional as my own.

My children had always been good students and so when they began attending Sunday school, it was no surprise that they excelled at their lessons. One evening when I arrived home from work, Beth was visibly upset. Something had happened that afternoon when Adam got together with his friends. Our town is a typical New Jersey town. It is made up of a wide range of people from different backgrounds and nationalities. The makeup of my son’s band of friends was no different. Beth explained the uproar that occurred when Adam explained to his pals that since they weren’t Christians, they were all going to hell. He had comprehended Christian doctrine quite well—likely better than most.

The universal nature of the major monotheistic religions is inconsistent with my experience and the world I see around me. There are many different peoples inhabiting our planet. They each have (or at least at one time had) a unique culture and spirituality. Native spiritualities affect us in many ways; how we think, how we understand morality, how we view of the world, and even how we view ourselves. With such variability, is it foolish then to consider that there may be many different gods? Shall we explain to the Hindus or the Buddhists that only Jesus is god? As an American of European ancestry, I wonder if everything we’ve been taught about god is wrong. Recently, I’ve become aware that I am not alone in such thoughts. There are others seeking their roots in what has become a drab world of sameness. “Monotheism” after all shares an etymological root with “monotony.”

The modern world is very strange indeed. It is a place where the inhabitants are quick to denounce what they don't understand. On one hand, they seem to embrace a wide plurality of beliefs. On the other hand, there is little tolerance of the unconventional. It has become commonplace for students on one college campus or another to express outrage at some manifestation of what is perceived as “cultural appropriation.” Conversely, there is the vast majority who comfortably embrace a foreign deity while quickly condemning any who do not. Realize that despite the actors who have portrayed him in film, Jesus is not any sort of European deity. The same students who march to defend foreign and exotic cultures from being misappropriated are outraged when they learn of someone of European ancestry worshipping and honoring their ancestral gods. At best they consider us fools, at worst, as evil proponents of long-gone totalitarian regimes.

My mind returns to thoughts of Midgard; the middle-enclosure—one of the Nine Worlds of Norse cosmology. Midgard is the land of humans. Asgard, perhaps the best-known of the Nine Worlds, is the home of the Aesir gods—the world in which Odin rules from his famous hall, Valhalla. Alfheim is the world of the Light-Elves. Svartalfheim is the world of the Black-Elves or dwarves. There is also a world of mist, Niflheim and a world of fire, Muspelheim. We are told that to the west is the world of the Vanir gods, Vanaheim. To the east there is Jotunheim, the realm of giants. Beneath them all is Hel, the world of the dead—a place quite different than the Christian conception of an eternal torturous inferno.

The many cultures of our planet have diverse beliefs about the origin and structure of the world. Such varied beliefs reveal much about the inner nature of the people who comprise each culture. They are a roadmap to the souls and to the spirituality of the world. My distant ancestors understood that they inhabited Midgard. They shared a common understanding of its makeup, the creatures that lived there, and the gods who watched over it, with those with whom they interacted.

This book recounts a life that had been “normal” (at least somewhat so) until I realized that I was not living in a way that was true to myself. It tells the tale of my discovery that there are those who traveled before me to a land where worshipping the old gods of the north is not strange or evil, but rather expected and honorable.

This book is an unconventional travelogue. It relates my adventures on the road from the Ironwood to Midgard. This is the tale of my quest to find my native spirituality.

Copyright © 2019 by Donald van den Andel

Comments

  1. I'm an atheist, as were my parents. Once I was telling a friend - a liberal, tolerant, not strongly Christian woman - about my parents letting nature take its course as to whether they had another child. She said something like, "They decided it was just as Satan willed?" I was absolutely dumb-founded. Strange indeed that people think either heathens or atheists are Satan worshippers.

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  2. Unfortunately there is a long history of damning the pre-Christian Germanic Gods as demons as well as destroying heathen temples, chopping down sacred forests, and of course even murdering leaders who refused to convert. There is a moral certainty which is demanded by monotheism which at its worst results in various forms of intolerance, sometimes expressed even through violence, aimed towards those who think differently.

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