Customer Reviews

Goddess of the North

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Lynda C. Welch writes her book from a Wiccan perspective. She attempts to bring her reader around to her idea that all of the Asynjur (Aesir and Vanir Goddesses) are really just different perspectives of one Goddess. The Wiccans believe that in the final analysis there is only one God and one Goddess. While there is nothing wrong with having such a belief system it is shameful to try to underhandedly misrepresent your belief system on those seeking knowledge of the Goddesses of their path.

As an Asatrur this book is highly offensive for the above reason. The Asynjur found in the Eddas are named and their deeds are written for all who wish to honor them.

As a Gydhja (Asatru priestess) I would recommend that any who seek to learn of the deeds of the Goddesses not waste their money on this book.

Lynda C. Welch states the introduction that the purpose of this book is to present factual, intuitive, and spiritual evidence for the existence of a primordial Norse goddess."

And indeed, Ms. Welch does make references to what would be considered respectable sources of information, including Jakob Grimm's Teutonic Mythology, Snorri Sturlusson's Prose Edda, and Hilda Ellis-Davidson's Northern Goddess, to support her ridiculous conclusion that all of the Norse goddesses can be lumped into the Maiden, Mother, Crone mold of the Wiccan Goddess. Of course she calls it the "primordial Norse goddess" and that these aspects are "Grandmother, Mother, Daughter", Fjorgyn, Frigg, and Freya respectively.

This work is particularly contrary to the work that many of us who follow the Norse pantheon have been doing in trying to sieve out the functions and lore of the individual goddesses of the Norse pantheon from what little literary evidence has survived from the pre-Christian period in Northen Europe.

Her opinion of monotheistic religions from the very start is hostile, and she perpetuates the claim that Asatru is a racist religion.

The bibliography is definitely the highlight of this book - it lists some very good primary and secondary sources for the study of Norse mythology (avoid the Llwellyn titles, of course). But overall, this book is not worth the paper it's printed on.

then this book is for you! A refreshing insight to the Goddesses of the Asatru. Lynda reinforces traditional views while at the same time exploring different insights of how the Goddesses may have been seen or can be seen. This is NOT a Wiccan book and Lynda is no Wiccan. This is about the Goddesses of the Northen ways and Lynda asks many important questions and makes the readers think for themselves, something fundamentalists of all religions hate for they want you to be spoonfed to believe like they do. In the Asatru religion less than half of the lore survives and to constrain all thought about the religion to what is available is ludricous at best. Just as in all old ways, each person's pathway and insights will vary for each person is unique. Lynda allows her readers to reach their own conclusions without spoonfeeding them how to believe. If you want to explore and look at the Goddesses of Asatru on an intelligent and refreshing way then get this book. If you, however, don't want to think for yourself and want to accept what a few narrow-minded self-proclaimed scholars want to spoonfeed you then this book is not for you. Great job Lynda! This book is in the true spirit of Asatru: free, independent and leaves one to draw their own conclusions. A 5!

I began reading this book with much hope and exitement. As I read through the first chapters I told myself to "give it a chance". The further into the book I got, the more it became clear that this book is laughable, at best. Many of the correlations and progression of so-called logical conclusions are ridiculous. The author claims to have researched her subject, but once you begin reading you see that any research she may have done was thrown out the window in favor of her feministic opinion.

I kept waiting for the grand discovery of the Primordial Northern Goddess that she claims to have found. I was disappointed. She merely listed a bunch of Norse Goddesses, and attempted to lump them and their attributes all together into one triple-faced (maiden, mother, crone) being.

The way she tried to convince the reader that many of the ancient gods were (in her opinion) actually female, again was laughable!

The author makes a mockery of respected authors such as Thorrson and Sturluson by referencing their works in correlation with her faulty line of thinking.

If you want a book about the Northern Tradition, this is *not* it.

In the foreward the author states that she was inspired to write this book by the birth of her first child. This should have been a tip-off. I was very intrigued by the concept of this book and deeply disappointed by the shallowness and subjectivity of the content. This book is a classic example of an author thinking with her glands instead of her brain. There is no scholarship here, no research, just a lot of breathy pnuematic opinion stated as fact and dressed up with charts that assign Goddess correspondences in a more-or-less arbitrary manner. It isn't even feminist in the true sense, merely an emotional cathartic spew. It's fine that the author's new status as a mother inspired her to explore the feminine divine. It's too bad she didn't just keep a diary instead of inflicting her unsubstantiated theories on us.

As someone who is deeply interested in the Norse Mythos, I dove into this book with lots of enthusiasm, and it left me, well, not deeply impressed I guess.

I felt that anything pertaining to actual mythos was pretty good, but I felt the author become badly repetetive towards the end, and also became quite preachy.

Particularly near the end she starts criticizing modern civilization for not keeping the ways of the Norse, and then in the same chapter, make amazingly condescending remarks about them.

I felt this was an interesting read, but she needs to keep her emotions out of it.

A good book because it goes against modern Asatru current.

Let them/us be offended. They'll/we'll get over it. They/we don't own the god/esses regardless of what we/they'druther believe.

Its good for a different persepctive,it's good because once in a while you need to rethink things and it's good because it gets Asatruar angry. That from an Asatruar.

My main complaint is that, like most Asatruar, the book is a bit warm and fuzzy. But I can get past that.

Lynda C. Welch in Goddess of the North makes the mistake of many authors in which they set out to prove a theory and everything they find proves their theory no matter the stretch. I was going to recommend this book up until about 3/4s of the way through. Now that I have finished this book, save your money and your time for better material.

Someone once told me to look for the pearl among the poo. There are pearls in this book. Welch divulges a lot of material. Good material even. In my opinion, its not worth it though with amount of books available that are worth the time. Too many books even so why waste time. Listen... go read something good. :)

What is the book about? Welch seeks to prove a primordial Goddess. Why?

"The purpose of this book is to present factual, intuitive, and spiritual evidence for the existence of a primordial Norse goddess. Before we begin, however, we must address the motivation behind this task. Why, indeed, is the need for a primordial Norse goddess so important? For many years, the Nordic worldview has been seen as male-dominated by many academics, heathens and pagans alike, so why should we even bother to explore the ostensibly negligible feminine aspect?

The answer to both of these questions is fairly simple. First, the search for the primordial Norse goddess is of utmost importance as She indubitably exists. She has been forced into the dim shadows of our thoughts by ill-used words that have caused many misconceptions and misinterpretations. This situation has gone on far too long, and it is time to join others in re-examining the long-ignored facts." (p. 3).

I do not believe any culture needs a primordial Goddess to make it a valid spiritual practice. I do not believe that every culture has had a primordial Goddess. Why do so many pagans feel the need to apply rules to the spirituality of our forebears? Why can't the Norse have believed what they believed and we can appreciate it for what it is?

Welch spends almost half of the book distilling the female spirits (Goddesses, Valkyries, Disir, etc...) down into 3 roles. Daughter, Mother, Grandmother. It feels as Welch goes along that she is seeking to prove that the primordial Goddess is found by further distillation. Does she do that? No.

I actually had to laugh at this part. She then switches tracks and talks about the World Tree. Yggdrasil. It isn't named. That's because... it's the primordial Goddess. Right before she makes this announcement she mentions it as Odhinn's horse. Hrm... maybe because shamanic cultures often call their method of journeying their "horse", i.e. the many cultures in and around the Norse lands that call their drums their horses. Odhinn's hung himself upon Yggdrasil in a classic vision quest to receive wisdom (runes). Hello? Lynda C. Welch. grrrr....

Academically the purpose of this book is a failure. The Goddess isn't involved in their creation stories. It isn't needed. I do not feel de-valued as a female of Germanic origins for not having a primordial Goddess. And I don't feel her wonderful correspondences of the many female spirits of the Norse is worth the unreliable and incomplete stretches in her theories.

I read crap all the time. Crappy literature. Decent material from a crappy writing style. I can't think of the last book I've read that I would NOT recommend in some way. And I read a couple to a few hundred books a year. (Or I have over the last few years with my past health issues.) Now, by no means am I an expert on books or books on the Norse, but as an avid reader.... read something else.

I really wanted to like this book. From the first though, the author made assertions she declared as truth when they were only opinions. Her declarations that other writers were "obviously wrong" (my quotes) were annoying.

The only real benefit to this book are the lists and descriptions of the Norse gods and goddesses. Even then, when historical or oral records weren't clear, the author statements of certainty that her interpretations were correct and other interpretations were nonsense.

As I said, the lists are useful as is the bibliography but the rest is tedious.

This book tries to present itself as an academic study into the Goddess in Norse tradition. The cover, typefont and lay out with footnotes all try to ooze 'academic research' but it is not. What it is, is a work that tries to construct a primeordeal Norse Goddess from a tradition that is - perhaps even more than any other western pagan tradition - polytheist and animist.
The bibliography contains too many titles by Llewellyn to be taken seriously as an academic research. From an academic research I expect original material, from disciplines like theology, history, archeology, antropology, but not work that derives from popular science.

Some lines of thought - like those concerning Ygdrassil - are interesting, but generally I think it's rather too much wishful thinking and constructionwork. The conclusions that the author draws from her data are not as selfevident as she would have them.

I am not convinced