Interview with Ukrainian Freyja’s Woman Tove Freyjadottir, Part II

Tove, a devotee to Freya, and a Soviet era born Ukrainian, provides a deep dive into the history of her native country.

Gangleri's Grove

As promised, here is part 2 of a much longer interview that I conducted recently with Ukrainian Freyja’s woman Tove Freyjadottir. You may find Part I here if you haven’t had a chance to read it yet. Now, let’s jump right into part two. My questions are in bold and then Tove’s response unbolded. If there is bolded text in her response, it is her own emphasis.

Artist Raja Nanadepu

GK:What is at stake for Ukraine here? What factors do you think contributed to the current war? How did we get here? I ask this, because many of my readers, especially in the USA, may not be aware of the history and politics that led up to this current point. It’s a long, long story.

Tove: What is at stake? Well, if Ukraine succeeds and wins this war, repelling Russia to its natural internationally established borders, it will spell the…

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Pope Apologizes for Native Schools

I had heard of the residential/mission schools (example: Carlisle Indian School), where Indigenous children were removed from their families & communities and sent to boarding schools to strip them of their language and culture. I never knew that the Church had done something similar to the children of conquered Saxon Heathens in the 9th Century.

Gangleri's Grove

Part of me sarcastically wants to say “a day late and a dollar short” but acknowledging that these schools were places of torture, abuse, and genocide, and taking public responsibility for that, tendering the apology is a good thing, potentially a healing thing. I probably shouldn’t be so sarcastic. Here’s the link.

Now, let’s see him apologize for the destruction, erasure, and genocide his Church caused to Pagans and Polytheists and their families, cultures, and communities across Europe from oh, I don’t know, the fifth through the fourteenth centuries? I’m not holding my breath. You see, we aren’t visible enough, there aren’t enough of us yet. The Church can still think it won. 

I bring this up not to equate pain with pain or genocide with genocide but to point out that historically, Christian imperium did not start in the 15^thcentury with Columbus. They practiced for a…

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Cultic Worship to Loki

Did you know we have possible evidence of cultic worship to Loki from antiquity?

Al-Tartuschi (also known as Ibrahim ibn Yaqub) hailed from the Cordoba Caliphate (specifically the Al-Andalus area from the Iberian peninsula), and wrote of his travels abroad in Europe in 961 – 962 CE.  He records seeing worship connected to the Sirius star in Hedeby, Denmark. The population size is estimated to have been around 1500-2000 people. Hedeby of the time was a commercial center populated by a range of groups: Danes, Frisians, Franks, Germans, Swedes, and Slavs. So that suggests to me the possibility for a much wider dispersion of the practice outside of Hedeby.