Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 5. The Underworld 114
Teutons obviously were able to withhold their prejudices long enough to create the
border regions through both cultural and sexual intercourse in the first place!
Trade, migration, and inter-marriage played a large role in the creation and
maintenance of these border areas. H. R. , in her conclusion to Lost Beliefs of
Northern Europe points out that
“once we reach the Viking Age, we have also to be prepared for tales and
motifs from abroad being imported by the Scandinavians returning from their
travels to their homelands.” 4
One also needs to remember that while these importations seemed to be accepted
rather freely, they were accepted for two reasons:
1. they were not felt to be necessarily incompatible with the existing beliefs of the
time, and
2. they were most likely modified, or were at least modifiable, to fit into the current
prevailing worldview.
One need only look at the changes made in Christianity after it arrived in the North
to see that even a conservative religion/ culture can and will be modified after
encountering another culture. (Note: the reader is referred to the section below
dealing with the creation of modern Christian holidays and holiday customs.)
An interesting feature of border areas is that they tend to be in isolated areas,
and isolation often is concomitant with conservatism, a resistance to change. Thus,
in Switzerland, for example, the regional dialects spoken in many of the valleys is a
form of archaic southern German which disappeared in other areas 500 years ago,
and in New Mexico, in the southwest corner of the United States, the dialect of
Spanish spoken is very closely related to that spoken in medieval Spain coming to
the continent in the early 1500’s with the conquistadors.
In any nook of preserved tradition, the modern anthropologist or folklorist is
happy to find remnants of ancient cultures like rites of passage, food customs, and
magic related to hunting, occupation, marriage, and disease. For example, it is very
common, not only in Northern Europe, to find a flourishing set of traditions revolving
around the indigenous form of witchcraft (here in the anthropological sense, not
the New Age Wiccan) which is commonly applied to help family and friends and
also to harm enemies. These isolated areas have resisted changes brought by the
early Christian missionaries and the cultural legacies continue to this day so that
the Shetland and Orkneys, and the lives of folks in the northern zones of Norway,
Sweden, and Finland are still often controlled or manipulated to a great degree by
4 Ellis-Davidson, H. R. The Lost beliefs of Northern Europe (Routledge Press; New York, NY)
1993, p. 158.