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THOROLF'S BOOKHOARD by Thorolf
This month's book is: Lady of the Norther Light, by Susan Gitlin-Emmer. I really wanted to like this book, honest. I was hoping that this would be a good book for runic beginners who might be intimidated by the popular view of Nordic traditions (you know: hairy-chested testosterone-laden Viking wannabees....). Unfortunately, it turned out to be a book that I would not recommend at all. The first problem is that Gitlin-Emmer is not Asatru, or even Norse Wiccan. She is a feminist Goddess worshipper, and subscribes to the archaeological and anthropological theories of Marija Gimbutas (for a critique of these theories, see "A Sexist View of Prehistory" by Brian Fagan in the March/April 1992 issue of Archaeology magazine). This tends to color her approach to the runes. As she herself points out, "the end result is colored by what we expect to find," (.5). Gitlin-Emmer is up front about her approach and her assumptions about the runes and their mysteries. She assumes that the Goddess was worshipped in Scandinavia, and that Her mysteries were incorporated into the runes after those nasty, awful horse-riding Iron Age patriarchal folks that invaded Europe. The Eddic poems about Odin hanging on Yggdrasil, or Rig teaching the runes to Athelings, are assumed (in this worldview) to be late patriarchal accretions, and are therefore totally ignored by Gitlin-Emmer. This, or course, is the second problem. Gitlin-Emmer shows little respect for the lore that Asatruar hold dear, and the folks who wroter her cover blurbs are even worse: "....returning the runes to their Goddess origins", ".....scraped off the layers of patriarchal misinformation", ".....the original meaning of the runic alphabet", and so forth. Personally, I find strictly patriarchal attitudes (such as those in the Abrahamic religions) objectionable, and I am encouraged by honest attempts to increase our knowledge of the Goddesses, as much of their lore was targeted specifically during the various conversions. I must object, however, to the matriarchal fundamentalism that is expressed on the cover (and inside) this book. Treating our gods in as shabby a way as they believe that their Goddess has been treated is not ethical of just. Having embraced the dubious theories of Gimbutas, Gitlin-Emmer proceeds to make a number of historical errors in her zeal to demonstrate the inherently feminine nature of the runes. One particularly egregious mistake is her assumption that seidh involved runes, and that the seidhkonas were therefore runecasters, so runes must have been exclusively a female mystery at some point, right? Wrong. The accounts of seidh practice do not explicitly mention runes, male seidh practitioners were rare but not unknown, and the account of runecasting mentioned in Tacitus' Germania (which, by the way, appears in Gitlin-Emmer's bibliography) mentions a male runecaster. Gitlin-Emmer also plays fast and loose with traditional runelore. Her interpretation of Tiwaz is particularly tortured. She identifies the obviously spear-like rune of Tyr as "Freya's distaff" and explains away the association of Tiwaz with justice and order by pointing out that 4,000 years ago, the pole star was Thubin in the constellation Draco, so the spindle points to the belly of the serpent and the zodiac revolves around it. I am not making this up. Her astronomy is correct, but I question whether our Scandinavian ancestors recognized the Greek constellations 4,000 years ago. Another example is her interpretation of the story of the Mead of Poetry. Gitlin-Emmer points out that the mead was kept in a cave under a sacred mountain, guarded by a giantess, and therefore "the original source of inspiration belongs to the Goddess as Crone," (p. 33). Leaving aside the issue of the Triple Goddess (an archetype that does not exist as such in Norse lore), the fact of the matter is that the mead was not serving its proper function hoarded in Gunnloth's cave. Odin's theft served to restore the mead to its rightful users. Besides, Gunnloth behaves much more like a maiden than a crone in exchanging her favors for three draughts of the mead. If the feminist Goddess theologians are correct in their assertion that patriarchal gods "usurped" the place of the Goddess, perhaps they would do well to reflect on the possible motivations that these gods might have had. Just as violence is the dark side of action, so stagnation is the dark side of inaction. The runes have always seemed to me to be a balanced, dualistic system that encompasses both masculine and feminine principles. There is no need, in my opinion, to stretch and cut them on the Procrustean bed of feminist Goddess theology. For a feminist guide to the runes that treats the lore with respect , see Freya Aswynn's "Leaves of Yggdrasil". "Lady of the Northern Light" just doesn't cut it.
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