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Chapter 3. Midgard 69
after the Christian invasion. By that time, people had forgotten about or neglected
ancestral guardians, land-spirits (see below), and lineages of both families and land.
In modern Germanic countries, lands still usually held by the same family generation
after generation, but this is becoming, for the most part, a matter of convenience.
The last real vestige remaining of this ancient concept of stewardship is the
“family heirloom” which is still fairly common throughout all the modern countries
where the descendants of Germans, Scandinavians, and Anglo-Saxons settled.
Central to many communities in the north is the church and its graveyard. Interestingly,
the word in modern German for cemetery is derFriedhof and is cognate
to the OE fridhgeard which was a sacred place where sacrificial offerings were left.
The word literally translates as “peace-enclosure” where violence and bloodshed were
banned and which was often situated near plots where luck was felt to flow up from
the Land of the Ancestors out over Midgard. Although it can not be said with
any degree of certainty that the fridhgeard was the fore-runner to the Christian
cemetery, it is known and well recorded that burial mounds, howes, and barrows
were a central feature in many communities and were often considered to be the
place where wisdom could be dispensed throughout the community in the form of
reciting the laws or holding court. Additionally, the burial mound of ancestors is
the traditional place for the practice known as útisetja or “sitting-out” which was
apparently a night-long vigil during which leaders and kings sought inspiration prior
to making important decisions from the ancestors but was probably practiced by
common folk for similar reasons as well. The topic of community cemeteries will
be expanded upon later in the chapter dealing with the underworld; the only point
being made here is that cemeteries have always been considered 1) a place wherefrom
luck and knowledge could flow out upon Midgard, and 2) by maintaining a line of
ancestors buried beneath the soil, one could rest assured that the lineages of the
individuals within the community were bound well with that of the locale.
The health of fields were important to the Germanic peoples, which is somewhat
of an understatement since farmers’ livelihoods depended upon the ability of a field
to produce; no farmer, even in the 20th century, can say that he does not mind
if his fields are blighted or barren. However, the approach that the ancients used
was that of “one person (really, a community) blessing and healing another.” The
Acre-bot is a “field ceremony” which has survived in written form in an 11th century
Anglo-Saxon herbal preserved as a manuscript in the Harleian Collection:
“Earth, divine Goddess, Mother Nature, who generatest all things . . . thou
indeed art duly called great Mother of the Gods . . . . Those who rightly