Fans of JRR Tolkien already know that his love of language led him to seek the roots of his native English in Anglo Saxon verse and Norse saga. Many of his scholarly investigations were published. As someone who loves ancient history, works like Tolkien’s ‘Beowulf and the Finnesburg Fragment‘ 1940, and ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and The Critics’, 1939 are of special interest to me. Tolkien was known to be a perfectionist who would constantly tweak and rewrite sections of whatever he was working on (a publishers nightmare), and as a result, a considerable amount of work remained scattered about his office in an unfinished state at the time of his death in 1973.
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Although most Christians are really only comfortable with the story that Santa Claus was really ‘St. Nicholas’ (of Turkey), it seems obvious to me that the current mythology behind Santa Claus is at least in part a survival of the pagan Viking belief in Odin. This doesn’t fit well with Santa’s arrival near Christmas, and so, has been fairly well disguised over the years. Odin, the ‘AllFather’ of the Viking (Norse) pantheon would occasionally take human form and leave his comfortable abode in Asgard to mingle with men (and women) in Midgard (the land of men) often as a grey bearded old man. On the Jule (Yule) or the Winter Solstice which is the longest night of the year, he would ride his 8 legged horse Sleipnir across the sky in a great hunt. Children would leave their boots out filled with carrots and straw for Sleipnir to eat, and Odin would reward the children for their kindness by replacing the offerings with gifts or candy.

Odin on Sleipnir
From the 18th century Icelandic manuscript NKS 1867 4 now in the care of the Danish Royal Library.
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According to Cinema Blend, Terry Jones was never very happy with Erik the Viking (1989) and has decided to release a re-cut, shorter version of the film later this year! This post is mainly to remind myself to order it when it comes out in December, since I see no way of pre-ordering it on Amazon.

I have a nice copy of the Tapestries in book form and have always enjoyed reading through them, but they never came to life for me quite like this. Brilliant work!

Did you catch all the sound effects from Warcraft in there?

Better known as ‘The Fragment’, what follows is a translation of all that is left of an (apparently) 5th century anglo-saxon lay that describes a saxon hero, Hengest. This may very well be the same Hengest who led the first Germanic invasion of Britain, and if so probably did so shortly after the events described below. You may be interested to note that this particular translation was made by the infamous Oxford scholar, J.R.R. Tolkien.

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