Beyond the North Wind: The Fall and Rise of the Mystic North - Softcover

McIntosh, Christopher (Christopher McIntosh)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 157863640X ISBN 13: 9781578636402

Verlag: Red Wheel/Weiser, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

"Beyond the North Wind is a masterful example of academic detective work, leading to the astounding conclusion that our Arctic northlands were once home to a lost prehistoric civilization. Highly recommended." —Herbie Brennan, author of The Atlantis Enigma -- Herbie Brennan

"The North" is simultaneously a location, a direction, and a mystical concept. Although this concept has ancient roots in mythology, folklore, and fairy tales, it continues to resonate today within modern culture. McIntosh leads readers, chapter by chapter, through the magical and spiritual history of the North, as well as its modern manifestations, as documented through physical records, such as runestones and megaliths, but also through mythology and lore.

This mythic conception of a unique, powerful, and mysterious Northern civilization was known to the Greeks as "Hyberborea"--the "Land Beyond the North Wind"--which they considered to be the true origin place of their god, Apollo, bringer of civilization. Through the Greeks, this concept of the mythic North would spread throughout Western civilization.

In addition, McIntosh discusses Russian Hyperboreanism, which he describes as among "the most influential of the new religions and quasi-religious movements that have sprung up in Russia since the fall of Communism" and which is currently almost unknown in the West.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Christopher McIntosh is a writer and historian specializing in the esoteric traditions of the West. He was for several years on the faculty of the Centre for the Study of Esotericism at Exeter University. He lives in Bremen, Germany.

Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson is the Allsherjargoði (high priest) of the Ásatru community of Iceland. He is an internationally celebrated musician and a composer of film music, who has written the scores for such films as Children of Nature, Cold Fever, and In the Cut.

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Beyond the North Wind

The Fall and Rise of the Mystic North

By Christopher McIntosh

Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

Copyright © 2019 Christopher McIntosh
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-57863-640-2

Contents

Foreword by Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, 
Preface and Acknowledgments, 
1 Introduction, 
2 The Search for the Land beyond the North Wind, 
3 Midnight Land, Northern Light, 
4 Children of the Polestar: Evidence for Migration from the North, 
5 The Nordic World and Its Legacy, 
6 The Runes, 
7 The Vikings: Samurai of the West, 
8 Northern Mysteries Resurrected, 
9 Iceland: The Northern Sanctum, 
10 Old Gods, New Age, 
11 The East Turns Northward: Russia and the Northern Spirit, 
12 A Russian Hyperborea?, 
13 The North in the Age of Mass Communication, 
14 Conclusion, 
Appendix: Who's Who in Northern Mythology, 
Bibliography, 
Illustration Credits, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The North is not just a compass point but a state of mind. It has a geographical location and at the same time it exists wherever its call is felt. Certain words and names evoke it: Hyperborea, "the land beyond the north wind," as the ancient Greeks called it; Thule, the northern promised land; Asgard, home of the Nordic gods. The writer C. S. Lewis was one of those who felt the call. In his autobiography, he describes how, as a boy, he was reading a translation of a Swedish elegiac poem called Tegner's Drapa and came across the lines:

I heard a voice that cried
Balder the beautiful
Is dead, is dead —

"I knew nothing about Balder," he writes, "but instantly I was uplifted into huge regions of northern sky, I desired with almost sickening intensity something never to be described (except that it is cold, spacious, severe, pale, and remote) and then ... found myself at the very same moment already falling out of that desire and wishing I were back in it."

Lewis's fascination with the North was shared by his friend J. R. R. Tolkien, a fellow member of the Inklings circle in Oxford in the 1930s and '40s — the name is partly a play on the title of the Old Norse Ynglinga Saga. Tolkien brilliantly created his own version of the Nordic epic in his trilogy The Lord of the Rings, with its numerous borrowings from Old Norse literature and mythology. And, significantly, Tolkien locates his evil empire in the south.

The subsequent phenomenal success of The Lord of the Rings is one symptom of a remarkable upsurge of enthusiasm for things northern, which has become a feature of the present age, although its roots go back several centuries. It is difficult to say precisely when this modern revival began, but certainly it was not in evidence when I was growing up in the 1950s and '60s. Throughout my education, if we learned anything about mythology it was the classical gods and goddesses of Greece and Rome who were dominant. I, along with most of my school contemporaries, could easily have said who Zeus and Apollo and Aphrodite were, but we would have been hard pressed to say anything about, say, Tyr, Odin, Thor, or Freya (despite the fact that we invoked their names every time we said the words Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday), let alone Balder.

If we thought about the Nordic deities at all, we considered them as belonging to a primitive and barbaric world. Similarly, we knew quite a lot about the Romans, and we could quote, say, Julius Caesar's "Veni, vidi, vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered), but about the Druids or the Vikings we had only the vaguest notions, and they were largely distorted. Essentially, we were taught that European civilization spread from south to north and that northern Europe was first civilized by the Romans and further civilized by the Christianization process in the early Middle Ages. So the whole early culture of northern Europe tended to be marginalized. Culturally and spiritually, the northern part of the compass was semi-invisible.

Now all that has changed dramatically. The North is back with a vengeance. It is everywhere you look — in culture, high and low, in academia, in religion, and in politics. Take its influence in the cinema, where in recent years the Beowulf story has been the subject of two films and a British television series. Two other movies have appeared about the god Thor, based on how he is depicted in Marvel Comics, and there are many further examples in film. The North is also writ large in the domain of global popular music, as for example in the case of the Icelandic group Sigur Rós, which has attracted a worldwide following with its subtle, hypnotic tones and falsetto singing. Innumerable other bands have picked up the Nordic theme in recent years, from the German group Faun, with its rather gentle, folk-music style, to heavy metal groups like Forefather (UK), Helrunar (Germany), Pagan Blood (France), and Tyr (Faroe Islands).

The digital realm offers an enormous sphere for Nordic themes. There are numerous video games with names like God of Thunder, Heimdall, Rune, and Valhalla, in which you can take on the role of Thor or some other Nordic god or hero in a great cosmic struggle involving perilous journeys and fights with all manner of malevolent beings. And then there is the Internet, which reveals a whole other dimension to the Nordic revival, namely the growing number of people who follow the Nordic way as a belief system — a phenomenon that is part of a wider and steadily growing Pagan movement. One can see this in the number of websites belonging to the various Pagan groups that identify themselves as Heathen, Odinist, or Asatru (a term meaning "faithfulness to the Aesir," one of the two main groups of Nordic deities). In a number of countries, Nordic Paganism is now officially recognized as a religion — most notably in Iceland which led the way in the 1970s with the official establishment of Ásatrú as a religious community. Neo-Paganism also encompasses a revival of the Celtic gods and goddesses as well as a neo-Druid movement, a neo-witchcraft movement, and similar phenomena. I shall touch on these insofar as they relate to the general theme of the North.

We have also seen an increase in the number of books published about the North. An interesting case in point is the work of the Italian researcher Felice Vinci, author of a book called The Baltic Origins of Homer's Epic Tales, in which he argues that the setting of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey was not the eastern Mediterranean but the Baltic, the North Sea, and the North Atlantic. The increasing fascination exerted by northern mythology and the mystique of the North is further attested by works such as Joscelyn Godwin's Arktos, Heather O'Donoghue's From Asgard to Valhalla, Kevin Crossly-Holland's The Norse Myths, and Andrew Wawn's learned and witty study The Vikings and the Victorians, as well as by numerous novels on Nordic themes. Books on the runes and runic divination are also abundant.

The northern mystique is particularly strong in Russia, and this opens up a vast and intriguing territory, which is explored in detail in chapters 12 and 13. It is a territory that has its alarming aspects, as it can overlap with xenophobia and political extremism. "Here be dragons" — or in Russia's case "here be bears." The Russian bear can be a fierce animal, and we would do well to understand what stirs him.

The interesting questions that now arise are: Why is all this...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Red Wheel/Weiser
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 157863640X
• ISBN 13: 9781578636402
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland