Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 5. The Underworld 126
ancestral communities. The idea is definitely modern, is most likely carry-over from
Christian upbringing,” and may never have really played any major part in the
Northern European Heathen worldview at all. This, however, is one of those things
that cultural anthropologists will be trying to sort out for a long time.
The idea that becoming one of the “straw-dead” 21 was somehow a bad thing is
an ill-founded modernism probably having its origin in the warrior sects of the Late
Viking Age. The Finns and the Saamí both had an ancient saying common into this
century that “going up” after death was a bad thing, and that “going downwards”
(into the earth) was a good thing. “Going upwards” meant that one had died a
violent death, such as having been murdered or killed in battle, and the results of
the bloody death could be seen in the night sky particularly in the omen of the
“red lights,” a reddish aurora borealis, which forebode ill luck for the village. In
their belief, they knew that the bloody dead went to the Finno-Ugric equivalent of
Valhalla, and being usually a nonviolent people by nature, felt that an eternity of
warfare and violence was one of the worst fates that could befall a person. Dying
back into the fold of the kin, where one was safe, fed, and loved, was ideal. Although
the Icelandic sagas are records of the exploits and lifestyles of a part-time-warrior
society, most people in Scandinavia at the time were engaged primarily in agriculture,
hence the need for gaining and holding the favor of the ancestors. For the
professional mercenary, perhaps, the idea of becoming “straw-dead” was abhorrent,
but, then, so was being stuck at home as a father/ farmer.
Dying outside the circle of the kin was not a good thing. The drowned, for
example, were scooped up into the nets of Ran and were removed to her hall far
below the waves. Egil Skallagrimson says
“My lineage ends, like the storm-
Felled maples of the forest.
I have buried the bodies
Of too many of my kin.
I search for speech, for telling
Praise of my long-dead parents.
Words bud in my mind now, break,
Blossom and blaze in green song.
21 ”Straw-dead” is a kenning (Nordic-type metaphor) for one who dies in his/ her sleep either
from illness or ”naturally.” In modern times, and probably in Heathen times as well, it is generally
used in a pejorative sense.