This video from 2018 mentions a Discord community connected to my Patreon page. This Discord was a brief experiment that was discontinued later in 2018 and no longer exists.
I have enjoyed Ecclesiastes as well, and especially appreciate the injunction to not be “too wise,” which Oðin also mentions. And I am mildly annoyed by people who argue about “which culture influenced other cultures earlier,” as if there is a cosmic competition to be the first culture to have had someone write down an idea in a form which reaches us.
You know every time I go to your Channel, I am always inspired. And it's nice to know that someone with your depth of understanding about an extremely obscure subject has almost 80,000 followers. It gives hope to Independence like myself that if you can do it I can too. I've studied Norse mythology since I was a young man I am now 63 years old. I don't have anywhere near the knowledge that you do, but please keep reducing videos keep writing books. This knowledge has to be transferred to a younger generation . European culture has Deep Roots and should be respected and shown the proper place in the world.
I’m from Montana originally. I love to see the backdrop of the beautiful Rockies. It’s a soothing balm to my homesickness. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and knowledge. Blessings
There is a scene in Don Quixote De La Mancha where Don Quixote is giving advice to Sancho Panza before he leaves his service as a squire and becomes govener of an "island". I read this about a week after I first read the Poetic Edda, and I was quite taken by the similarities between the advice given by Don Quixote and by Óðinn in Hávamál.
This topic clearly means a great deal to Dr Crawford. It really is ok to let go, admit you're basically "heathen" or "pagan" in your soul, or maybe you kinda shade in that direction. You feel something there. You wouldn't pursue this so ardently if you didn't. :wink wink: Well, ok, I'll be a good girl for now, but if you ever decide to come on over to the dark side just know this: You'd be hugely welcome We. Have. Cookies.
I have become more and more enthralled (not to be confused with the lowest level of Norse Society:) with your presentations and and seeking them out here on YT. I had forgotten how good it felt to attend classes.I plan on becoming a Patreon member. Thank you.
That's a great perspective to have. Hopefully someday recognizing parallels will be commonplace and we won't have to fight over who was first/superior/inspiring/correct/absolute with their ideas and concepts.
When it comes to the part of Hávamál that talks about it being better to be alive than dead, I am reminded of Ecclesiastes, 'Better a live dog than a dead lion.'
very interesting to see that stanza about the alcohol and what it does to men and the wise, and then on top that odin doesn’t eat and only intakes wine. does this perhaps suggest that the knowledge he gained was to great to bear?
In new zealand there are many examples of old men that have gone the opposite way...I've met 12 year old with more grace and maturity than most of these guys. (They're usually city dweller/townies) When you met a truly wise man though; he changes your life :)
3:15 I think the lesson here is not necessarily a pure dichotomy between being wise and unwise. There is a middle ground one might call common sense. It is neither wise, nor unwise, but rather a baseline of expected behavior to keep you out of trouble. The unwise may lack the common sense of cows to stop eating when full, but the alternative (having this common sense) does not necessarily make one wise, it just makes the /not/ unwise. :) Those we consider wise are simply sharing experience, often hard-won through past unwise behavior. Heed their warnings and learn from their mistakes.
How powerful must light be that it pushes back the darkness at that speed 🤷♂️ you can flip that phrase pretty easily to a more optimistic view. Seems more fitting to me.
I'm stuck thinking about the self-sacrifice of Odin and the self-sacrifice of Siddhartha Gautama. Both were self-centered sacrifices to try to obtain wisdom through suffering. When I read through the Havamal, my question isn't, "Is the Bible in this?" but rather "This has a faint whiff of Buddhist thought and Eastern wisdom." I'm kind of stuck thinking about the Buddha statue found at Helgo. Any thoughts on this?
Odin leaves his signature in a way that can be read from aeon to aeon. That signature is a reoccurring story that he leaves behind in each lifetime so that humanity can see the work that he has been doing. Odin and King Solomon are one and the same. Thanks for the video.
Maybe I am only paraphrasing what you said, but I think that phrasing proverbs in the negative accomplishes something else. By spotlighting the attributes and actions of "the lesser man," the speaker is including the listener in the group of beings who are (again negative) not of the group that includes "the lesser man": Us against Them. The speaker, by virtue of that inclusion, is inviting the listener to contemplate wisdom and to seek it merely by assuming that the listener is already doing so. To me, it has the flavor of an inside joke but the intention (or effect) is that of a Keeper of The Way, or more properly, a Torchbearer Toward The Way. The line in the sand has been drawn; the listener must then choose the side.
Loved this! Super interesting video. I especially like how you find connections and resemblances between wisdom literature from different epochs and places, where there seemingly have not been any exchange (of ideas, or trade, or anything else). The parallel between the Christian sacrifice of Jesus, son of God (emphasizing OF God, i.e. God Himself) for the benefit or purchase of something (redemption, of fallen mankind) and Odin’s sacrifice of himself to himself is obvious; not least in the manner the sacrificial ritual is carried out. It’s one thing that there might be this age-old pattern in human life since before history that you need to let go of something of value in order to gain something of HIGHER value (that’s the sacrifice). This wisdom pattern could then pop up in different religious and spiritual traditions around the world. But why this particular parallel between Odin and Jesus? The sacrifice could have been carried out differently, for any of them. Why not throw yourself off a cliff? Why not being burnt alive? Or eaten by wild animals? Dying (and then rising again) is not enough; you have to die a certain way (on display, with an audience, at least in the case of Jesus) and then this hanging-on-a-piece-of-wood-thing. Or maybe it was just the common way of executing people, by ways of hanging, in both the times of Old Norse Myths and 1st century Jerusalem (with the exception that neither Odin nor Jesus were ’people’ according to their respective mythology). Also, the chronology confuses me here: why assume that Christianity influenced Old Norse Mythology when it probably was the other way around? Or possibly both ways? Does the Christian timeline and mythology stretch further back than the Old Norse? Some of the core ideas and concepts and rituals could have been there before written time, or maybe most of them. What’s to say that the idea of Odin, god, sacrificing himself to himself (God to God) on a piece of wood could not have trickled down southwards through the ages, and ended up in 1st century Jerusalem (or anywhere else for that matter 🙂). It’s an intriguing thought, not even counting the spiritual possibility (that Divinity has revealed itself in different times and different places but in similar fashion). Greetings from (modern) Sweden.
Divinity is our human consciousness coalesced, and distilled into a thought form. What we ascribe as divine is broad and thematic emblems, descriptive our experiential concerns. That is why time and distance cannot separate our shared questions and our shared attempts to answer them. The use of pain, ritual, and psychotropics to induce visions and spiritual experience is common across many early cultures. Shamans were the first 'priests' of animistic religion. Even the war between the Aesir and the Vanir can be see as the superceding of an older religion with a new one bought in by new migrating peoples, just as the Aesir would fall away from the onslaught of Christianity. The only constant is change.
Odin didn't kill the first thing explicitly, just the first jotunn. Wolves, snakes, and other hostile things are presumed to be older. It's interesting that both show up so much in the lore, perhaps as a callback to those primeval powers, but I'm likely overthinking it.
Eth and thorn are used interchangeably. Their pronunciation depends on whether they are used initially, finally or medially in a word. If at the beginning or end of a word, they are voiceless as in "thin" and "thick." If in the middle of a word they are voiced as in "thus" or "then."
I think the reason age is associated with wisdom and why the wise old man archetype exists is because for the majority of human history you'd be lucky to get to 40 so someone in their 60s or 70s must know a thing or two.
40? That's too low, honestly. I expect most could make it to 50 or 55, at least. We're really not as special as we like to think, so if someone's significantly older than you chance is they've gone through the same troubles you face, maybe even more than once. It's simply foolish to disregard all that experience.
Odin continually good Leadership. He walks his talk and has the scuff marks too prove it. Hard Experence is one way to acquire Wisdom or Brain Death. Cinch up your head gear!
Is the grandfather you reference in some of your videos your mother's father? I ask that to ask this...what is his surname? Do you have Norse roots from that side of your family?
@@user-bl3fo7dz3o Oh, ok. I'd never heard him approach the topic before, so I didn't know. I have mainly German and Scottish, but also some Danish and Norwegian ancestry, and it would've been cool to have been related lol....
@@merlith4650 I didn't mean literally related, as in he and I being family. I was just being silly about possibly having ancestors from the same country in Europe. Lighten up please.
@@merlith4650 That's true, but what most native Europeans tend to either forget or not think about whatsoever is the fact that they likely share roots from as many different regions within Europe as do most Americans of European descent. Not that it even matters, but it just annoys me how 9 of 10 native Europeans claim that all Americans are a big mixed gene bag but they themselves claim to be mostly homogeneous when it's just simply not the case. Anyway, have a nice rest of your evening.
Well, technically we use writing, the wheel, the clock... literature and what not because of the Sumerians. We all are heavily (although indirectly influenced by them). Even though we live in 21. century our live is so much influenced by the Shumerians, more so perhaps than by any other people, at least any other non-European.
You are ready for a rodeo show Jackson that's my opinion and comment you guys went and recognize fossils if you had them in your hands I brought your colleagues some real stuff up there the other week. And they were real they're out for lunch and on good drugs. I would love to have your PhD for your degree and challenge you on these items that I have. They need to be x-rayed seriously. But you guys are out for lunch all the time and can't see what's real in front of you. I wished I got paid good to walk around and look like a genuine cowboy.
This video from 2018 mentions a Discord community connected to my Patreon page. This Discord was a brief experiment that was discontinued later in 2018 and no longer exists.
So Havamal is basically Odin's tweets. Neat.
He had Twitter before it was cool
Archangel Charlie you’re the best
sigh
*Facepalm*
Except is wasn't called Twitter, but Kraa. 😆
"Never laugh
at an old man.
There is often wisdom in what old men say;
wise words will often
come from a gray-bearded mouth."
“Wise words will often come from a mouth bearded grey”
I won't laugh, but I will SHOUT!
FUS RO DAH!!!
"...I also don't think of him as an old man."
Nice save. :)
I have enjoyed Ecclesiastes as well, and especially appreciate the injunction to not be “too wise,” which Oðin also mentions.
And I am mildly annoyed by people who argue about “which culture influenced other cultures earlier,” as if there is a cosmic competition to be the first culture to have had someone write down an idea in a form which reaches us.
First.
😂
@@sarahgray430 Guido Von List
@@sarahgray430 No worries, don't take it personally. I just put the right name out there for people who want to look him up.
You know every time I go to your Channel, I am always inspired. And it's nice to know that someone with your depth of understanding about an extremely obscure subject has almost 80,000 followers. It gives hope to Independence like myself that if you can do it I can too. I've studied Norse mythology since I was a young man I am now 63 years old. I don't have anywhere near the knowledge that you do, but please keep reducing videos keep writing books. This knowledge has to be transferred to a younger generation . European culture has Deep Roots and should be respected and shown the proper place in the world.
I'd love to see a pocket sized version of the Cowboy Havamal complete with some your slides sir...that'd be awesome.
Your grandfather sounds like the most awesome cowboy that ever lived.
I’m from Montana originally. I love to see the backdrop of the beautiful Rockies. It’s a soothing balm to my homesickness. Thank you for sharing your wisdom and knowledge. Blessings
YESSSSSSSSSS THIS IS HOW TO START A TUESDAY
@Be the change you want to see Danke! Guten Morgen from USA 😂😂😂 I will completely hack the little bit of German I do know lol
Agreed
There is a scene in Don Quixote De La Mancha where Don Quixote is giving advice to Sancho Panza before he leaves his service as a squire and becomes govener of an "island". I read this about a week after I first read the Poetic Edda, and I was quite taken by the similarities between the advice given by Don Quixote and by Óðinn in Hávamál.
Every day is a bad day. Every day is a fight. At the end of the day, I am victorious.
I like that!! Who said it?
Convergent evolution of thought.
I really liked the lecture style tone of this video, and the comparison to twitter.
... and there's the saying: "Great minds thinks alike"
This topic clearly means a great deal to Dr Crawford.
It really is ok to let go, admit you're basically "heathen" or "pagan" in your soul, or maybe you kinda shade in that direction. You feel something there. You wouldn't pursue this so ardently if you didn't. :wink wink:
Well, ok, I'll be a good girl for now, but if you ever decide to come on over to the dark side just know this:
You'd be hugely welcome
We. Have. Cookies.
I have become more and more enthralled (not to be confused with the lowest level of Norse Society:) with your presentations and and seeking them out here on YT. I had forgotten how good it felt to attend classes.I plan on becoming a Patreon member. Thank you.
Stabbing yourself hurts 😢
~Odin~
That's a great perspective to have. Hopefully someday recognizing parallels will be commonplace and we won't have to fight over who was first/superior/inspiring/correct/absolute with their ideas and concepts.
When it comes to the part of Hávamál that talks about it being better to be alive than dead, I am reminded of Ecclesiastes, 'Better a live dog than a dead lion.'
thanks as always Dr Crawford - very wise words
Thanks!
very interesting to see that stanza about the alcohol and what it does to men and the wise, and then on top that odin doesn’t eat and only intakes wine. does this perhaps suggest that the knowledge he gained was to great to bear?
Outstanding. Thank you.
Amazing video like always, thanks a lot to share your wisdom and knowledge
In new zealand there are many examples of old men that have gone the opposite way...I've met 12 year old with more grace and maturity than most of these guys. (They're usually city dweller/townies) When you met a truly wise man though; he changes your life :)
Tusen tack för dom kloka orden. Kram och solsken 🌞 N
Sweet True Detective Reference
I'd love to see a full video comparing the two literary notes.
Thanks for the video Dr. Crawford.
I enjoyed it a great deal. :) Thank you :)
You are so interesting. I listen for hours sometimes, driving or doing projects or house work. Thank you for enriching our lives!
happy Tíwesdæg!!
3:15 I think the lesson here is not necessarily a pure dichotomy between being wise and unwise.
There is a middle ground one might call common sense. It is neither wise, nor unwise, but rather a baseline of expected behavior to keep you out of trouble.
The unwise may lack the common sense of cows to stop eating when full, but the alternative (having this common sense) does not necessarily make one wise, it just makes the /not/ unwise. :)
Those we consider wise are simply sharing experience, often hard-won through past unwise behavior.
Heed their warnings and learn from their mistakes.
How powerful must light be that it pushes back the darkness at that speed 🤷♂️ you can flip that phrase pretty easily to a more optimistic view. Seems more fitting to me.
I'm stuck thinking about the self-sacrifice of Odin and the self-sacrifice of Siddhartha Gautama. Both were self-centered sacrifices to try to obtain wisdom through suffering. When I read through the Havamal, my question isn't, "Is the Bible in this?" but rather "This has a faint whiff of Buddhist thought and Eastern wisdom."
I'm kind of stuck thinking about the Buddha statue found at Helgo. Any thoughts on this?
makes sense to me
Just goes to show how similar people are.
Odin leaves his signature in a way that can be read from aeon to aeon. That signature is a reoccurring story that he leaves behind in each lifetime so that humanity can see the work that he has been doing. Odin and King Solomon are one and the same. Thanks for the video.
@ Jacknight Lodge Winters Interesting , I see that you are a Fellow traveler, or am I mistaken?
I am always on an Odin kick LOL.
Dat intro
9:54 that's in AC!
Any word on the progress of your childrens book?
interesting that even 1500 years ago the Norse looked askance at Al K. Hall
Maybe I am only paraphrasing what you said, but I think that phrasing proverbs in the negative accomplishes something else. By spotlighting the attributes and actions of "the lesser man," the speaker is including the listener in the group of beings who are (again negative) not of the group that includes "the lesser man": Us against Them. The speaker, by virtue of that inclusion, is inviting the listener to contemplate wisdom and to seek it merely by assuming that the listener is already doing so. To me, it has the flavor of an inside joke but the intention (or effect) is that of a Keeper of The Way, or more properly, a Torchbearer Toward The Way. The line in the sand has been drawn; the listener must then choose the side.
Well said.
Loved this! Super interesting video. I especially like how you find connections and resemblances between wisdom literature from different epochs and places, where there seemingly have not been any exchange (of ideas, or trade, or anything else). The parallel between the Christian sacrifice of Jesus, son of God (emphasizing OF God, i.e. God Himself) for the benefit or purchase of something (redemption, of fallen mankind) and Odin’s sacrifice of himself to himself is obvious; not least in the manner the sacrificial ritual is carried out. It’s one thing that there might be this age-old pattern in human life since before history that you need to let go of something of value in order to gain something of HIGHER value (that’s the sacrifice). This wisdom pattern could then pop up in different religious and spiritual traditions around the world. But why this particular parallel between Odin and Jesus? The sacrifice could have been carried out differently, for any of them. Why not throw yourself off a cliff? Why not being burnt alive? Or eaten by wild animals? Dying (and then rising again) is not enough; you have to die a certain way (on display, with an audience, at least in the case of Jesus) and then this hanging-on-a-piece-of-wood-thing. Or maybe it was just the common way of executing people, by ways of hanging, in both the times of Old Norse Myths and 1st century Jerusalem (with the exception that neither Odin nor Jesus were ’people’ according to their respective mythology). Also, the chronology confuses me here: why assume that Christianity influenced Old Norse Mythology when it probably was the other way around? Or possibly both ways? Does the Christian timeline and mythology stretch further back than the Old Norse? Some of the core ideas and concepts and rituals could have been there before written time, or maybe most of them. What’s to say that the idea of Odin, god, sacrificing himself to himself (God to God) on a piece of wood could not have trickled down southwards through the ages, and ended up in 1st century Jerusalem (or anywhere else for that matter 🙂). It’s an intriguing thought, not even counting the spiritual possibility (that Divinity has revealed itself in different times and different places but in similar fashion). Greetings from (modern) Sweden.
Divinity is our human consciousness coalesced, and distilled into a thought form. What we ascribe as divine is broad and thematic emblems, descriptive our experiential concerns. That is why time and distance cannot separate our shared questions and our shared attempts to answer them. The use of pain, ritual, and psychotropics to induce visions and spiritual experience is common across many early cultures. Shamans were the first 'priests' of animistic religion. Even the war between the Aesir and the Vanir can be see as the superceding of an older religion with a new one bought in by new migrating peoples, just as the Aesir would fall away from the onslaught of Christianity. The only constant is change.
Odin didn't kill the first thing explicitly, just the first jotunn. Wolves, snakes, and other hostile things are presumed to be older. It's interesting that both show up so much in the lore, perhaps as a callback to those primeval powers, but I'm likely overthinking it.
Any links to the Egyptian and Sumerian sources mentioned?
Eth and thorn are used interchangeably. Their pronunciation depends on whether they are used initially, finally or medially in a word. If at the beginning or end of a word, they are voiceless as in "thin" and "thick."
If in the middle of a word they are voiced as in "thus" or "then."
This reminds me of Jantelagen in some ways
What was that comment about Odin sacrificing himself in something like ... Brunathal? What is that word?
So, would you say, to an extent, that pursuing less wisdom would be wise?
eg skulle ynskja allfader var på twitter
Is there a Norse word dictionary? Just asking 👍
I think the reason age is associated with wisdom and why the wise old man archetype exists is because for the majority of human history you'd be lucky to get to 40 so someone in their 60s or 70s must know a thing or two.
40? That's too low, honestly. I expect most could make it to 50 or 55, at least.
We're really not as special as we like to think, so if someone's significantly older than you chance is they've gone through the same troubles you face, maybe even more than once. It's simply foolish to disregard all that experience.
Hej mr. Crawford, have you been to Europe to see the language you studied and teach? any interest in archeology or to see the runes in person?
Ruben Terlouw He’s mentioned being in Iceland and Norway before I believe
Do your books contain the untranslated texts too?
How do you keep your sweat off that hat?
He's so chill that he never sweats.
Odin continually good Leadership. He walks his talk and has the scuff marks too prove it. Hard Experence is one way to acquire Wisdom or Brain Death. Cinch up your head gear!
Do you have an episode that speaks of Odin's 3 drinking Horn's of wisdom?
Is the grandfather you reference in some of your videos your mother's father? I ask that to ask this...what is his surname? Do you have Norse roots from that side of your family?
I don’t know about the grandfather thing, but I do know that he has repeatedly mentioned that he has no know Norse ancestry
@@user-bl3fo7dz3o Oh, ok. I'd never heard him approach the topic before, so I didn't know. I have mainly German and Scottish, but also some Danish and Norwegian ancestry, and it would've been cool to have been related lol....
@@merlith4650 I didn't mean literally related, as in he and I being family. I was just being silly about possibly having ancestors from the same country in Europe. Lighten up please.
@@merlith4650 That's true, but what most native Europeans tend to either forget or not think about whatsoever is the fact that they likely share roots from as many different regions within Europe as do most Americans of European descent. Not that it even matters, but it just annoys me how 9 of 10 native Europeans claim that all Americans are a big mixed gene bag but they themselves claim to be mostly homogeneous when it's just simply not the case. Anyway, have a nice rest of your evening.
9:30
No s_-T..
Any word on the Textbook Introduction to Old Norse?
lost it at "spineful as a whale"
Wisdom is Odin😶
Well, technically we use writing, the wheel, the clock... literature and what not because of the Sumerians. We all are heavily (although indirectly influenced by them). Even though we live in 21. century our live is so much influenced by the Shumerians, more so perhaps than by any other people, at least any other non-European.
You are ready for a rodeo show Jackson that's my opinion and comment you guys went and recognize fossils if you had them in your hands I brought your colleagues some real stuff up there the other week. And they were real they're out for lunch and on good drugs. I would love to have your PhD for your degree and challenge you on these items that I have. They need to be x-rayed seriously. But you guys are out for lunch all the time and can't see what's real in front of you. I wished I got paid good to walk around and look like a genuine cowboy.
First?
My Gods you must have been miserable at Berkeley.....
third
Indo European wisdom influenced the bible. Norse stories influenced the bible
I've never met a wise man who thought he was wise.