The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/amon-amarth)
The Midgardsblot festival, taking place each August in Borre, just south of Oslo, Norway, has slowly but surely become ubiquitous among Viking nerds, Norse Pagans, and metalheads alike. With its unique blend of extreme Metal and nordic folk acts (among others), alongside numerous artistic and academic entertainment acts, it was only a matter of time that I checked it out for myself.
This is why I no longer wear the hammer in public. There’s just too much darkness lurking below the surface, across the board.
“Even though Ásatrú might not have been quite where I had imagined it, people were actively trying to work toward something. You don’t get temples and songs and chants and beautiful ceremonies and certainly not a deep knowledge system overnight. You need to discover and build these things. And you need a community to do it with.”
Back in high school in the late 1980s, my friend Dan really liked the band Stryper. He cut the sleeves off his jean jacket, drew the band’s logo in Elmer’s glue on the back, then threw gold and black glitter at it to make the only Stryper vest any of us had ever seen. We teased him mercilessly. Why? Because Stryper was a totally cheesy Christian glam metal band from Orange County that sang about Jesus while wearing mascara and yellow spandex, and that seemed the most un-metal thing possible to a bunch of teenage hippies and metal-heads in 1986.