The Sacred Flame
The Sacred Flame Podcast explores our ancestral story-worlds: the ancient foundation narratives that helped guide our ancestors in life. In this podcast, we reinvigorate the modern world with those stories and bring us back to a place of balance through an archaic revival, a new force that is sourced from the old, forgotten knowledge that was once transmitted in living stories in sacred settings. We gather by the sacred flame and revive the old ways of creating community in the world; by listening to nature and reestablishing the ties that let us realize that we are connected with everything that exists.Our ancestors knew that cultivating the right relationships with the other-than-human beings in the world is the key to living a good life. In this podcast, I am retelling and reconnecting the Nordic story-world with our current reality and offering my thoughts on how you can use these stories to reflect on what it means to exist in the modern world.
The Sacred Flame
Odin and Loki: Queer sexuality in the Viking Age
In episode 8, I tackled sex and sexuality in a broad perspective. I would be remiss not to follow that up with a deep dive into what we today call queer sexualities and categorize with the LGBTQ+ acronym. Are there sources from the medieval period, the Viking Age, and before that, which can help illuminate these subjects? Some scholars and practitioners of Nordic paganisms suggest there are -but what does it look like with a critical eye toward the pre-Christian context; a period that did not (at least as far as we know) have a language for expressing queer sexuality like we do today? I'll unpack the stories that are often used as examples of pre-Christian attitudes to queer sexuality and take a deep dive into them. After that, I'll offer some additional thoughts on how we should approach the stories, the material culture from the Viking Age, and our current situation.
Please NOTE: if you're looking to have biases confirmed in this episode, please understand that this is not how a critical perspective on our story-world functions. I do hope that you'll find inspiration from what I say. As always, I expect you as listeners to form your own opinions and interpret what I say as recommendations for further development of your own thoughts!
SHOW NOTES
How Copenhagen Became The "Gay Village Of Northern Europe" - Jetset Times
Valkyrie fra Hårby - Birka female Viking warrior - Wikipedia
Viking warrior women? Reassessing Birka chamber grave Bj.581 | Antiquity | Cambridge Core
A female Viking warrior confirmed by genomics - PMC (nih.gov)