Holy sh** what a question! Not easily answered in a short post, for sure…
In my kindred, we have both the type of people who take the stories as 100% fact, and some who see them as metaphors. You get that in most religions, certainly in the Judeo-Christian ones. The thing about asatru and atheism is that if you do not take the myths as fact, but still adhere to the general lifestyle of the ON, then at some point or another, you find yourself at a spot where it is no longer a religion, but rather, a philosophy. You can adhere to a philosophy and be an atheist. The same holds true for ancestor worship: if you do not believe that all the myths are 100% factual events, but let’s say 50% fact, 50% fiction added for us to learn/explain something pertinent to the lifestyle at hand, then you can look at Odin and co as ancestors who lived a long time ago. In that case, you can also be asatru and atheist, because then you are merely honoring your ancestors the way you would remember a dead grandfather, and hope that some of his spirit lives in you,and also hope that your grandchildren will do the same (hence the “kinsmen die, cattle die” stanzas 76 and 77 from the Havamal as well as the memory-stones spoken of in stanza 71). Then it boils down to DNA (some people see that as our ancestors’ legacy) and quantum physics (their energy transferred to other things but still being here), but for the sake of giving things a name, when people partake in such things, we call it ancestor worship, which falls under the heading of religion. If someone then asks you which religion you are when you think your ancestors’ names are Odin and Figga, then you’d have to say that you are asatru, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you feel like a religious person. Asatru actually lends itself extremely well to quantum physics, even in the way the old texts are worded and in the things within the things that are emphasized in the Norse culture, so for someone who does not have religious visions etc, it is quite easy to say that you can be both asatru and atheist. If you believe that the sky really is made up of Ymer’s skull, yes, then obviously you are adhering to a religious stance. If you think that that explanation is one which our ancestors came up with to explain things they did not understand, and that we as modern people must honor those same ancestors by keeping their stories (legacies) alive, because this is according to the Havamal (stanza 76 and 77) what a good descendant does. The concept of the good name being the way to gain eternal life is central to this thinking. But if it’s the name that lives on, and not the person’s soul or energy, then is it really a religion? Or are you asatru and atheist at the same time?It is because the likes of you and I (anthropologists, ethnologists and archaeologists) have to have a name for things under which to group them, such as religion as a difference to philosophy, that we in the modern western world view this as a contradiction of terms. That in itself is a very ethnocentric way of looking at things, and it stems from an inability to understand the archaic mind. If you look at asatru purely from a religious standpoint, you’ve failed to recognize the philosophy part and all the other parts that cannot be removed from it. It stems from a westernized way of viewing the linear time concept, whereas nature religions and many other non-western religions, have a three dimensional concept of time. In such a concept, one cannot remove religion from, say, lovemaking, cooking, hunting, fighting and so on, as there is no distinction. Every act is then a holy act, set up to maintain the bond between past, present and future, or else chaos will ensue. Does that help you any? I mean, I can answer it in personal terms, but this is the ethnoarchaeologist in me telling you this in very general terms. /T
But Finnveden is in Småland (Littleland), pretty far fro any finns. Remember that Frans G Bengtsson writes about their inhabitants in Röde Orm (Longships)?
