Untitled - Awaken Video

Chapter 3. Midgard 68
“The village was the peasants’ castle. Its raison d’etre was mutual assistance.
In illness, want or danger they came to each others’ assistance.
Always there was someone in the village who knew how to drive out evil with
fire and steel. If a cow fell sick, it was handy to have a neighbor who knew
how to cure it. Birth and marriage, death and funerals, all were the common
concern of the village council. Agriculture too was carried out by the men of
the village. The soil was distributed in such a way that the peasant’s plots
of land might well be scattered in thirty different places. Since the fields
were tilled simultaneously, the work had to be done on a basis of mutual
understanding. The cattle went out, hoof by hoof, to graze together on the
common land. Each villager drew his water from the village well, and at
festivals all gathered on the same hillock, the ’court’ (hóf) of some god.” 12
He goes on to say that since about 1000 CE, there have been solitary farms on
record, but these have always been associated with a village. The ancient Germanic
people have always been social, community loving people as far as can be discerned
from the archeological record, and they worked together and celebrated both life
and death as a community.
The concept of ownership is relatively new. In the 20th century “ownership”
generally means “to belong to one person,” in fact, the word “own” comes from
the same root-word as “one.” To truly have a sense of ownership, one needs also
to embrace the idea that one is somehow immortal: one owns something now and
one will continue own on into the future. This sense of continuity, however, was
somewhat foreign to the early Teutons who carried with them the idea that this life
was somehow transient and that they would each pass away, leaving nothing but
names and memories of good deeds performed during their short stay on Midgard.
This is the meaning of the formulaic line from the Hávamál mentioned earlier,
”Cattle die and kinsmen die, thyself eke soon wilt die.” 13 (Hollander, St. 76).
Property was in one’s care until it was moved to another. Wealth was acquired so
that it could be given away. A kenning for a king was “gold-hater” because kings were
expected to give what they had acquired. And ownership of land was no exception
to this rule; it was passed on to the eldest son as the successor in stewardship over
the family lands which were lived upon and worked by the extended family. The
ancestral lineage tied to the land was important so lands were often kept within the
same family, but true ownership, in the modern sense, did not develop until long
12 In A History of the Swedish People, p. 39, by Vilhelm Moberg. This is a very pleasant,
easy-to-read history of the Swedish people republished as a two volume set by Dorset Press (New
York) in 1989 from the original 1971 translation by Paul B. Austin.
13 Hollander translation, H ávamál, St. 76.