The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/world-serpent)
Fáfnir is not born a dragon. He is a man who kills his own father to steal his wealth, then turns into a dragon to embrace the gold he hoards without ever using. He symbolically represents the negation of values belonging to the culture that produced him.
There are plenty of options for pushing back on this culture of weak man-children using anger to puff themselves up. One of them is to turn to myths of mighty Thor.
In direct contrast to the supposedly universal “golden rule” and the “turn the other cheek” message of Christ, Odin teaches that we have no responsibility to be love our enemies. That particular Heathen teaching is a large part of what leads someone like me to be uncomfortable with some of Martin Luther King’s principles, but it does not mean that the embrace of violence is the answer.”
As in the Ziggy Stardust song from more than a half-century ago, we’re simultaneously surrounded by evidence of catastrophic climate change and absolutely unwilling to make the necessary changes to mitigate it.
Karl E.H. Seigfried delves into the ways we interpret and misinterpret the texts that shape our lives – whether those texts are Old Icelandic poems or the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
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