Ásatrú

Ásatrú (Icelandic, “faith in the Æsir” — the Norse gods) is the most widely used name for the modern revival of the pre-Christian religion of Scandinavia. The word itself is modern, coined in the nineteenth-century Scandinavian romantic revival, but the tradition it names reaches back to the lore preserved in the Poetic Edda, Snorri’s Prose Edda, the sagas, and the ritual descriptions of Heimskringla.

The refounding

The decisive modern moment came in Iceland: in 1972 the poet and farmer Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson and others founded the Ásatrúarfélagið (“Æsir-faith fellowship”), and in 1973 the Icelandic state formally recognized it as a religion — roughly a millennium after Iceland’s conversion by arbitration at the Althing in the year 1000. From that seed the faith spread through the Nordic countries, North America, and beyond. In Iceland it is now among the fastest-growing religions in the country.

What Ásatrú holds

Ásatrú is a polytheist and orthopraxic tradition — defined by what is done rather than by creed. Its living heart is:

• The gods: the Æsir and Vanir — Odin, Thor, Freyja, Freyr, Frigg, Týr, and the wider company — approached as real and living Powers.
• Blót: the ritual of offering, the engine of the gift-relationship between humans and the gods.
• Sumbel: the ritual round of toasts, memory, and oaths.
• The ancestors and the land: honoring the dead and the landvættir, the spirits of place.
• The virtues of the lore: hospitality, honor, courage, and troth (loyalty), as taught above all by the Hávamál — the “sayings of the High One.”

Ásatrú and Heathenry

Heathenry is the broader umbrella term for Germanic polytheism as a whole; Ásatrú is the name most associated with its Norse-Icelandic expression. In practice the words overlap heavily, and most practitioners answer to both.