Asatru

Asatru is a modern polytheistic religion that honors the gods, spirits, and ancestral values of the Norse and broader Germanic peoples. Its practitioners worship the Aesir gods including Odin, Thor, Frigg, Tyr, and Loki, and the Vanir gods including Freyr and Freyja, alongside a rich cast of other divine beings, landvaettir (land spirits), and ancestral spirits called the disir and alfar. Asatru draws on the Eddas, sagas, and other medieval Scandinavian and Germanic sources as primary references, combined with archaeological evidence and comparative scholarship.

Modern Asatru is genuinely modern: it was formalized in Iceland in the early 1970s after a hiatus of approximately a thousand years during which Germanic polytheism was replaced by Christianity. Most Asatru practitioners are clear that they are building a living religion from documented historical sources rather than following an unbroken line of transmission. The resulting tradition is both historically grounded and creatively alive, continuing to develop as its communities grow in experience and understanding.

History and origins

The Norse and Germanic peoples practiced polytheistic religion from long before historical documentation through the Viking Age (roughly 793-1066 CE). The primary surviving sources for this religion are two 13th century Icelandic texts known as the Eddas: the Prose Edda compiled by the scholar Snorri Sturluson, and the Poetic Edda, a collection of earlier mythological and wisdom poems. These texts were written two centuries after Iceland’s conversion to Christianity and reflect both genuine pre-Christian tradition and medieval Christian interpretation. They are invaluable but must be read critically.

The conversion of Scandinavia to Christianity was largely complete by the 12th century. Folk practices, seasonal observances, and beliefs about landvaettir and household spirits persisted in popular culture long after formal religious conversion, embedded in festivals, folk medicine, and local traditions. This survival of folk-level practice is often cited as a continuing thread connecting modern Heathenry to its pre-Christian past.

Modern revival of Norse religion began in the 19th century alongside broader Romantic interest in Germanic national heritage, most famously in the operas of Richard Wagner, whose Ring Cycle drew heavily on Norse and Germanic mythology. This early revival was sometimes entangled with nationalist politics that later generations have had to work consciously to disentangle from the religion itself.

The formal founding of modern Asatru is associated with Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson in Iceland, who gathered a group of practitioners and gained legal recognition for the Ásatrúarfélagið from the Icelandic government in 1973. Simultaneously, Stephen McNallen in the United States was developing an American expression of the tradition through the Viking Brotherhood and later the Asatru Folk Assembly, and in Germany and Scandinavia other groups were forming independently.

Core beliefs and practices

Asatru is polytheistic and animistic. The gods are understood as real, distinct, powerful beings who are interested in human life and with whom genuine relationships are possible. The world is alive with spiritual presences beyond the gods: landvaettir inhabit natural features of the landscape, the alfar and disir are ancestral spirits with ongoing investment in the living, and the nine worlds of Norse cosmology (including Midgard, Asgard, Hel, Jotunheim, and others) are understood as real realms connected by the world-tree Yggdrasil.

Blót (plural: blótar) is the primary ritual form: a communal gathering involving offerings of food, drink (typically mead or ale), and prayer to the gods. Blótar are held seasonally, with major observances at Yule (midwinter), Ostara (spring equinox), Midsummer, and the fall harvest season, among others. The shared drinking vessel passed around the gathering, called the horn, is central to blót as a ritual act of community and divine connection.

Sumbel is a ritual of toasting: participants stand in turn and offer formal toasts to the gods, to ancestors, and to personal oaths or boasts. Sumbel takes place in a ritual container in which words carry special weight; what is spoken in sumbel is understood to become part of the recipient’s legacy and the speaker’s reputation in the community of the living and dead.

The Nine Noble Virtues, a set of ethical principles derived loosely from sources including the Hávamál (a poem of Odin’s wisdom), provide moral guidance. These vary somewhat by community but typically include courage, truth, honor, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, industriousness, self-reliance, and perseverance.

Open or closed

Asatru is generally open. No formal initiation is required, and the tradition is accessible to anyone willing to engage honestly with its sources and practices. Most national Asatru organizations welcome all sincere practitioners regardless of ethnic background.

The question of whether the tradition is more appropriate for people of Germanic ancestry (the “folkish” position) or open universally (the “inclusive” position) is a genuine and active debate within the Heathen community, addressed in its own entry.

How to begin

Diana Paxson’s “Essential Asatru” and Raven Kaldera and Galina Krasskova’s “Exploring the Northern Tradition” are accessible introductions. The Prose Edda in Anthony Faulkes’s translation and the Poetic Edda in Carolyne Larrington’s translation are the foundational primary sources. Many beginners begin by building a simple altar to one of the gods they feel drawn to, learning that deity’s mythology and associations, and beginning to offer prayers and small gifts.

In myth and popular culture

The Norse mythological tradition at the heart of Asatru is one of the most widely represented in contemporary popular culture. The Marvel Comics and film versions of Thor (beginning with the Thor comics in 1962 and the Marvel Cinematic Universe films from 2011 onward) drew the thunder god and his family into mainstream global awareness, though with considerable distance from the Eddic sources. Marvel’s Thor is broadly recognizable as drawing on the mythology, but practitioners of Asatru note consistently that the MCU characterizations diverge significantly from the Thor, Odin, and Loki of the Poetic Edda.

Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (2001) and his Norse Mythology (2017) engage far more carefully with the original sources. Norse Mythology in particular is a straightforward retelling of the Eddic stories, and Gaiman has acknowledged the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda as his primary sources. The book has served as an entry point for many readers who subsequently sought the original texts. The Sandman comic series also incorporated Odin, Loki, and aspects of Norse cosmology with more textual fidelity than most popular treatments.

Wagner’s Ring Cycle, a four-opera series completed in 1876, drew extensively on Norse and Germanic mythology while substantially reinterpreting it through nineteenth-century German Romanticism and Wagner’s own dramatic priorities. Odin appears as Wotan, Brunnhilde as a Valkyrie, and Fafnir as a dragon guarding the Rhine gold. The Ring’s influence on how Norse mythology has been understood in Western culture is enormous, and the Asatru community has often had to distinguish its tradition from the Romantic-nationalist layer Wagner added.

Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings drew extensively on Norse sources, though Tolkien was careful not to translate directly. The figure of Gandalf draws closely on the wandering Odin, complete with staff, wide-brimmed hat, and ravens; the cosmology of Middle Earth shares structural elements with Norse cosmology; and the dwarves and their culture are essentially Norse dwarves transplanted. Tolkien scholars have traced these connections in detail.

Myths and facts

Several common misunderstandings about Asatru deserve straightforward correction.

• Asatru is frequently assumed to be connected to white nationalism because white nationalist groups have adopted Norse symbols. The vast majority of Asatru organizations worldwide explicitly reject ethnic exclusivity and welcome practitioners of all backgrounds. The Ásatrúarfélagið in Iceland, Asatru’s founding organization, has been consistently inclusive.
• Some people assume that Asatru is a survivalist religion with an unbroken line from the Viking Age. Modern Asatru was formally established in 1972-73. It draws on historical sources but is a new religion built from those sources, not a continuous tradition that survived Christianization intact.
• Wagner’s Ring Cycle is sometimes treated as an authentic representation of Norse mythology. It is a nineteenth-century German Romantic reinterpretation with significant departures from the Eddic sources. Practitioners studying the actual mythology should go to the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda rather than to Wagner.
• The Marvel depiction of Loki as purely a villain is difficult to reconcile with the Eddic Loki, who is a complex trickster figure whose relationship to the other gods involves both essential assistance and eventual antagonism. The Eddic Loki fathers monsters, solves problems the gods cannot solve otherwise, and sets the end of the world in motion. He is morally complex rather than evil in any simple sense.
• Some popular sources claim that Valhalla is the Norse afterlife. It is one of several possible afterlife destinations. Warriors who die in battle may go to Valhalla; others go to Hel, which is not a place of punishment but a neutral realm ruled by the goddess Hel; some go to the realm of Freya; others join the ancestors in different ways. The Norse afterlife cosmology is considerably more varied than the popular Valhalla-as-warrior-paradise summary suggests.