Anglo-Saxon Paganism: History and Beliefs by Jamie Lang

The book was given me by my friend Anwen who runs Airy Fairy, Sheffield's premier pagan bookshop, meeting place and cafe. It was written by her friend Jamie and features a Freya painting modelled on Anwen on the front cover. 

So this is a book that came out of a community that overlaps my own local magical one, and I wanted to give it a thorough review. 

And it is well worth the effort. It's an unusual and, in its own way, groundbreaking book. 

But it’s taken me years to do. First the book went missing when I was moving house two years ago. Then… well, enough of excuses. The review is finally here. 

Anglo-Saxon Paganism consists of essays about the history and myths of the Anglo-Saxon world plus the author’s own versions of the mythic tales. The book is a rich offering, with nice attention to history and useful timelines to contextualize the origins of AS culture.

I’m going to dive into the bits of the text I particularly engaged with before discussing the book’s shortcomings. 

Lang’s approach to myth is broad and inclusive, even making use of Rydberg's ideas; the latter material is a personal take on the myth corpus, a poetic slant, and so is Lang's. He doesn’t however attempt a massive rewrite of the myths like Rydberg does, rather he makes great use of the overlaps between characters, lineages and incidents in different myth tellings. 

For instance his treatment of the Scyld Sceafing lineages that underlie Beowulf brings into focus an older layer of mythology - the Vanir gods of early agriculture, the remnants of an older Goddess culture. We read of the kingly lines that claimed descent from the Vanir, and suddenly these ideas make more sense to me, bringing the Vanir out of their usual obscurity. 

With the Beowulf sections Lang dives deep by comparing the translations and notes of J R R Tolkien and Seamus Heaney and their attitudes to pagan culture. This analysis raises the idea that these pagans were interested in the salvation of the tribe, not of the individual. The question of hope and despair about life is very different for pagans and Christians, and this comes out in his appreciation of Heaney's interpretation of the story, much subtler and closer in spirit to the original text than Tolkien's Christian take. 

The great frith of Frodi is another hinted legend that fits in with this Olden Time, a vision of a society at peace that is often missing from people’s interpretations of the more warlike phases of Germanic myth.

Lang also shows how Northern theology and eschatology is more sophisticated than that of Mediterranean paganism. This is illustrated by the death of Balder, framed as a lesson taught by Loki to Frigg, that even her beloved son, the most perfect of the gods, must die and pass away. Such tales cast the gods as subject to death, and their world impermanent, unlike the truly immortal Olympian deities. This is a version of human development that doesn't confuse the values of the then-current culture with some timeless standard - after Ragnarok the Norse deities are mostly replaced by a new pantheon, of which little can be said. The values and codes of society are not fixed for all time. Take note, heathen LARPers! 

A nice feature of the book is the use of stories, tales that draw on the old tales, to illustrate particular features of the myths. People use old tales as historical-traditional justification for their ideology - and tales of Odin have often been used as proof that the Germanic peoples were all about war. The way Lang unpicks it tells a different story. An earlier layer of Woden, an English slant, less warlike than the Scandinavian Odin, comes into focus. This is Woden the wandering wizard, the wise stranger, the prophet of mystery - pretty much the ancestor of Tolkien’s Gandalf. This archetype is much closer to what most contemporary heathens practise than that of the cunning, amoral military leader that Odin often represents. 

The use of stories breaks up the literal-historical flow and engages another channel of thought. But of course, this means we get a personal take, and not all of those takes work so well for me. For instance, Lang retells the tale of Freyja and the Brisingamen necklace as the journey of a young mortal woman, and thereby turns it into a story of sexual abuse. I always saw it as a tale of the cosmic love of the Goddess extending to a new order of being, the Dwarves or Dark-elves, but that reading is not possible if the protagonist is a mortal. (There is of course nothing ‘wrong’ in Lang’s retelling - myths work at numerous levels and we can all learn from new readings.) 

Lang opens a very interesting exploration of gender roles and their fluidity in the tradition. For instance he quotes Alaric Hall on elves: ‘Early Anglo-Saxon ælfe were prototypically male, but … were paradigmatically associated with seductive, feminine beauty…’ and remarks that Hall sees the effeminacy of the elves as a ‘systematic gender inversion’ in early English mythology. He also examines Anglo-Saxon abstractions of animals in art, such as the dual horse images, as possible encodings of a disreputable gender fluidity associated with the practice of certain kinds of magic. 

Lang appeals to tradition in advocating for diversity and inclusiveness in our societal values. It's refreshing to read an author who goes against the tendency of anything labelled ‘traditional’ being associated with Evola's ridiculous hyper-masculine fantasies. 

In the 'Runes' chapter, Lang offers an original perspective when he looks at levels of meaning in the runestaves. This is something that Edred Thorsson deals with in some of his books, and this brought to my attention the fact that Lang does not at any point cite Thorsson’s very important work. Is this because for some people Thorsson’s writings are overshadowed by his reported association with figures on the racist far-Right? If so, this is unfortunate. My political outlook could be summarised as anarcho-leftie, and I tend to think that ‘woke’ usually means ‘decent people’, so if Thorsson’s works contained any such political slant it would have put me right off. But I’ve read most of them, and they don’t. 

So this is a taint that works purely by association, and of course it’s up to each of us to decide how many degrees of separation from nasty ideologies we’re prepared to accept in an author. But it might not do to look too closely at the political associations of some of the other writers that Lang quotes. Some are perhaps no more ‘innocent’, merely better at covering up their past. 

I feel Lang is on shaky ground with his discussion of runic origins. He quotes authors who say that runes most likely had a non-magical origin, and this serves to highlight the pitfalls of placing too much trust in academics. Taking on a method of recording language in written symbols IS magic, when you are a Germanic leader returning home from Roman service to their pre-literate culture. What else would it be? Academics don’t get this because they have no experiential sense of what magic is. Rather, they are simply parroting the party line of Scientism, the bargain-basement physicalist religion that dominates our  culture. It’s another few centuries, into the Viking age and the ‘Younger’ futhark, before we see more widespread runic literacy, when a bored Norseman could carve a salacious comment in runes on a doorway, when runes became mere letters. 

In my view, the 'Runes' chapter massively overuses quotations. And this unnecessary reliance on others’ words is really the biggest weakness of the whole book. Sometimes the quoted passages help, at others they just break the flow for no good reason. I see why the author would quote Tacitus or Simek in full, but not Jim Paul, an author who is seemingly writing at a considerably lower level of detail and depth than Lang. This deference to such a source comes over as a kind of excessive shyness; authors need to learn to steal ideas shamelessly! I know imposter syndrome; I’ve been writing books on magic and similar stuff for over 30 years and I still suffer from it with new audiences. You’re not an imposter, Mr Lang! Be bolder and claim your own insights!

In this book Lang distinguishes the AS pagan world from that of the later Germanic Viking era. He also distinguishes the worldliness, which he calls philosophical materialism, of the AS with the monotheistic tendency throughout any Paganism descended from the Greeks, with their Platonic doctrines.  These considerations lead into the enormous digression of the final few chapters, where he compares other pagan deities, especially Hekate, with the AS deities. I get that he is laying out a broad philosophical basis to contrast philosophical aspects of the AS worldview with the development of Platonism. But this could have been done much more succinctly; it feels like another book has just been tacked onto the end. I think this material would work much better as a separate book contrasting Hekate and the Anglo-Saxon deities. 

This is a very good book, which could become a great one. Whom would I recommend it to? 

For a start, someone who wants to dig deeper than the glossy TikTok surface of the current pagan revival and get close to the roots of where it all came from. Someone who wants a book that will lead them to many other books. 

On another level, someone who wants to dream the Germanic myth corpus into new life, to make it their own through poetic contemplation.

But it has to be said that the reader has to have the patience to extract these valuable insights from a text which, frankly, is in need of a good deal of editing. 

The overall effect of the text suggests it could evolve towards a kind of encyclopaedia. It would benefit a lot from being laid out like that, a big sourcebook for delving deeper via references, a volume to pore over again and again, to help us dream our personal myths. Mr Lang, please bring out another edition, larger and less crowded!