Stefanie von Schnurbein: Norse Revival. Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism

摘要

Stefanie von Schnurbein has been studying Asatru for thirty years, long enough to be well positioned to write a weighty, carefully researched and introspective book on the intellectual and cultural currents from which spring both religious reconstructions of Germanic/Nordic religious thought and the academic study of Norse myth and religion. This she has done in . Her subject is not just Asatru or heathenism, the contemporary religion, but what she calls Germanic Neopaganism more broadly, which encompasses both Asatru and the German Faith movement founded in the early twentieth century. Her nominal thesis is that the same “sacralization of culture and simultaneous culturalization of religion” (8) that has brought increased interest in things “Norse” and pre-Christian since the 1990s has given Asatru increased respectability in the same period. I say “nominal” because the book encompasses far more than that. The text swirls around the author’s deep ambivalence about her and others’ fascination with pre-Christian Norse religion and culture and her abhorrence of the ideological baggage that always (she holds) threatens any approach to it. It is both a very learned book and a very sincere and personal one. Norse Revival.