Hearth Wyrd

This post is a little different from my previous ones, more “from the heart,” less formal. What I want to express here is simple… while there are things we can know about the pre-Christian Anglo-Saxons, there is also much we will never know for certain. I write about what I learn through reading, researching, and reflecting. As I said in my welcome post, I’m not an expert and don’t claim to be one. I’m simply sharing the path I’m walking and what I learn along the way.

One of the strongest impressions I get when reading about life in early England after the arrival of Christianity is that it seems to have been a pretty miserable time for many people. I was raised in an extremely rigid form of Christianity myself so I can relate. Our congregation never had more than a dozen people. The rules were suffocating, the punishments harsh, and God was presented as a being of pure wrath. I cannot remember hearing the words “God’s love” even once. Everything was centered on hell and eternal torment. And the “goal posts” were always moving. Just when I thought I was getting close to approval, suddenly it wasn’t enough.

Those teachings never made sense to me. They still don’t. And looking back, it’s no wonder, they were completely at odds with how I saw the world. Even as a child, I saw life and spirit everywhere, in rivers, trees, animals, and the very Earth beneath my feet. I didn’t have a word for it then, but now I know that what I felt was animism.

In that small church community, animals weren’t considered conscious at all. They weren’t seen as beings with their own lives, their own experiences, their own worth. They were background scenery, created solely for human use and enjoyment. I remember being told that animals didn’t even feel pain, that it was perfectly fine to hunt for sport because “they don’t suffer.” To them, animals were little more than moving biological machines. It horrified me then, even before I had language for why. I can understand hunting our of necessity for food, but not for sport.

I’m grateful to be far removed from that culture now, both in distance and in time. I’m finally free to be myself. Back where I grew up, it still isn’t wise to openly express animist beliefs (or any belief that isn’t Christian and far-right politically). Leaving allowed me to breathe, to think, and to grow into the person I was always meant to be.

All of this is why I write here. I enjoy it. I learn from it. And I want to share what I’m discovering as I go. There is nothing in the surviving writings that plainly states the early English peoples were “animist”, the word itself wasn’t even coined until 1870 by Edward Burnett Tylor. But there are clues. There are patterns. Much like their Nordic neighbors, the early Anglo-Saxons didn’t only worship gods of natural forces, they saw those forces as the gods. Thunor wasn’t simply the god over thunder. He was the thunder. He was the living power of the storm.

Since I already hold an animist worldview myself, perhaps it’s easier for me to recognize animist hints in ancient beliefs. I do my best, though, to stay close to the evidence. And from what I’ve found so far, it seems clear that the early Anglo-Saxons held at least some animistic ways of seeing the world. We see hints of this worldview in charms like the Nine Herbs Charm, where plants are addressed as beings with agency.

So I keep studying, and I keep writing. I hope what I share here brings you something, whether it’s insight, inspiration, or simply a sense of connection.

~Buck