You know what is some absolutely funny shit? The Nine Noble Virtues. On the surface, a codified set of ethics isn’t something to really laugh at. Why, it sounds quite upstanding and forthright! “By Woden’s beard we heathens SHOULD have a listing of our ethics, our virtues, and our guiding principles that allow those new to our ways to know what is proper and good about our faith!” and Ye Olde Greybearde would be absolutely correct. Just one problem.

What kind of ethics is it when the people proposing it are either from “British Union of Fascists and National Socialists”, or from a group of people that espouse “”our own racial ideas and traditions (not those of others) are our best guide to health and national strength” and that “racial preservation and promotion” can only be achieved by keeping their bloodlines pure? “The problem with miscegenation is that it sees crossed allegiances, crossed loyalties and confusion arise – to which side is the child to be loyal to, his English father’s or his Chinese mother’s?”- Their own fucking words. OR! Whatabout a guy who is the proponent of an idea which he named “metagenetics”, that religions are connected to genetic inheritance, thus arguing that Heathenry was only suitable for those of Northern European ancestry? That fucking guy eh? You want to draw ethics from a well of people who swallow this racist poison and absolute bullshit idea about racial ancestry and who has divine right of blood? Like we’re some medieval class of inbred gentry waxing their wood over whose daughter has the proper pedigree to secure an alliance with the barony of York? I say thee nay!

That’s the motley crew of jokers, tokers, and aryan-polesmokers who brainstormed the Nine Noble Virtues together. The moment you start taking in the ethics putogether by people with that kind of ideological background, you should be immediately asking “What are they meaning?”. Why? Because a sentence can have a whole variety of meaning between three people who read the same line, and that is not accounting for the person who originally wrote the script and what meaning they were operating off of.

Walk with me for a minute here. With the NNV, we have it’s listing as such:

Courage
Truth
Honour
Fidelity
Discipline
Hospitality
Self Reliance
Industriousness
Perseverance

Pretty easy to follow, very simple maxims at first glance right? That’s intentional. It’s easy to digest, easy to understand, easy to have repeat in your brain after you read it. Makes you feel good when you read it right?It’s a vessel, and in that vessel can be loaded what ever is meant by the term Courage. Therein lays the rub. It’s when you sit with them for a minute that you’ll start to see why there are problems with using this list as put forth by dudes who are groovy with fascism and racism. First, Courage. Whose idea of Courage? How are we defining courage? What is going to be considered courageous behavior? More often than not this idea of Courage, when explained by these guys who are big into what the Odinic Rite or the AFA or other sympathetic parties talk about, is intertwined with an idea of Heroism, and with Heroism we must take direct swift action! And failure to take swift action is cowardice, and cowardice means death! We don’t have time to reflect on our actions, to ask if our choices were made with the appropriate foresight, we must act! If any of what I said bothers the hell out of you then congratulations, you’re paying attention. We can keep going with each line, picking apart how their vagueness imposes questions about who is defining these traits, how these traits are considered virtuous, and just whose virtues are these exactly. Some of these ideas are good sounding like Hospitality, Perserverance, and Honour but you cannot trust the people who came up with these lists of “virtues”. Going back to Courage for a moment, Courage (OE mōd, OHG muot) is a great virtue, but “excessive courage; over-courage” (OE ofermōd, mG Übermut) means “recklessness; pride; arrogance,” and it is not depicted as a virtue in the lore. To a Fascist and Racialist, honour and hospitality have very different understandings than to you and I who AREN’T facists or race worshippers. Them dudes are fucking WEIRD.

Now, aside from the poisoned well of where this shit came from, there is another big problem and really a problem that Heathens keep running into when attempting to put together a codified set of ethics for new people and the casual laity to read, grok, and work from. There is no reason to follow them as opposed to any other list of virtues.

Philosophers of Polytheistic religious backgrounds from Aristotle, to Cato, to Plato, to Lao-Tzu, to Ptahotep, and so on all had ethical systems, but those systems were often also based on assumptions of metaphysics, logic or epistemology. There was a greater connective theology that helped illuminate their ethics.

A famous Example, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics followed from the metaphysical idea that everything has four “causes” and one of them is the “teleological” or “purposeful” cause–like how an acorn’s purpose is to become an oak tree. Following that, Aristotle formulated an ethics for people that would best help them achieve their purpose, which he thought of as “Eudaimonia” or “full-souled-ness.” At every step in the process of ethics, we are reminded of the grounding of that ethics in a greater theory of how the world works.

Overtime, the nuts and bolts of these systems started to fall by the wayside as people were drawn to and focused on the larger, more malleable ideas. Those ideas? The Virtues. And that is the problem. To get to the virtues, which are the result of the involved systems of ethics and metaphysics and epistemology, you have to follow along those systems. The virtue alone doesn’t give justification for doing it, which is why you see Christian writers who studied the older philosophers taking these virtues but attaching them to their Christian modes of understanding, thus providing justification for adopting these “Virtues”. But now the Virtue has changed, as the Aristolean idea of Virtue has wholly different roots than the Catholic idea of Virtue.

“So, if the NNV are a dunce, then what in Hel’s pale smile are we to use as ethical guidelines?”

Why friendly heathen seeker, I am glad you asked that question. Allow me to direct you to these choice suggestions!

1.) The Hávamál is an old poem where Odin in the disguise of a wandering old man gives his unwitting host a gift of wisdom in exchange for hospitality, beginning with anecdotal wisdom and advice about living a good life.

2.) The Icelandic sagas are full of characters of various ethical leanings, who succeed or fail in various situations based on their actions. Before the 20th century, most Icelandic children grew up hearing the sagas read aloud, and many of them learned ethics that way. A man who was born in 1861 reminisced about hearing the sagas recited in his childhood (quoted in Jón Karl Helgason, “Continuity?,” p. 71)

-On the topic of the sagas, some do present several “Viking codes”: lists of behaviors that are binding on all members of a particular warband.

It’s hard to be sure whether any actual Norsemen followed such codes, as these sagas were written centuries after the fact and have probably been “spiced up” to be more exciting. However, they are food for thought.

The most famous “warrior code” is probably the code of the Jómsvikings. No man could flee from any opponent; each member had to avenge any other member; no one could speak words of fear or bring a woman into their fortress; and so on (transl. Hollander, Saga of the Jómsvíkings, pp. 63-64).

In Ǫrvar-Odds saga 9, Hjalmar explains the “Viking laws” that he lives by: never to eat raw meat, never to rob merchants and farmers unless he really needs to, and never to rob or abduct women (transl. Waggoner, The Hrafnista Sagas, p. 65).

In Hálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka 10, the members of Hálf’s famous warband live by a code that makes fighting more dangerous, and thus victory more glorious: “they could not have swords longer than one ell [about 18 inches or 45 cm], so that they would have to come close to their enemies. They had knives made so that their blows would have to be more powerful. . . . They never took women or children captive. None of them was allowed to bandage a wound until an entire day had passed. . . . It was another of their customs never to put up awnings over their ships, and never to reef sails before a gale.” (transl. Waggoner, Sagas of Imagination, p. 12)

So you can see, there are varied ethics that Vikingr used to guide themselves, and each set presented their own understanding of the views of the Vikingr following it. Now, these rules don’t work well outside of a warband or ship, but they are examples to be understood and learned in the Sagas. The most important thing to take away in learning about these ethics, and the ethics of the people presented in the sagas, is to understand that there never was One Arch-Heathen Way of Living ™.

A big takeaway in understanding ethics and theology from a study of works like The Sagas, Eddas, The Havamal, and similar works is in the understanding not just ethics from a personal view, but also the traditions that ye olde heathens kept to. I want to be clear, Tribal Traditions or “Thews” are not a foundation for ethics in and of themselves. Thew is not codified; it is simply “the way things are done around here.” Thew can encompass everything from the most minor details of daily life to major ethical premises depending on how someone uses them. But “the way we do things” has to also be interrogated. If someone tells you “that’s just the way we do it around here” you NEED ask that person “why?”. NEVER TAKE SOMEONE’S WORD OR DEED AT FACE VALUE.

Understanding our predecessors’ ways, and the reasons for them, is important. But following them blindly, for no better reason than “that’s how it was done,” is of limited use. Times change, people change. Old thews must adapt, or die out. A lot of traditions from the elder days didn’t survive as they were. They changed, shifted, grew and adapted. If you look hard enough at folkways you’ll see those thews from the past looking at you. And that behooves us as Heathens of the Modern Day to adapt as well.

So what would ethics as Heathens of the Modern Day look like? Well, join me next time as I have some thoughts on that.

Til next time dear readers, SAME BAT TIME! SAME BAT CHANNEL!!