Smile When You Say ‘Tradition,’ Partner

Last week I found in my campus mailbox the first (only?) issue of Tyr: Myth-Culture-Tradition, a new journal focusing on Asatru-Odinist-Heathen thought. It’s quite a bit like The Pomegranate started out to be for the more broadly defined Pagan community (including A-O-H), before The Pom morphed into a peer-reviewed scholarly journal. The first issue of Tyr was dated June 2002. I cannot find a web site to link to, but here is one online review. (UPDATE: Link is dead, so I removed it)

I’m always interested in what Joscelyn Godwin has today on esoteric subjects–here, he writes about the man who put the T in Tradition, Julius Evola–and on the evolution of the followers of the Indo-Europeanist Georges Dum?zil. But the trouble is, you never know when you are going to step over the edge when reading Tyr. Turn the page and someone is claiming that the his Heathen rock band’s music “resonates” with people of European origin because “DNA will out, you know.”

Uh, yeah. I once thought that that was why I was so thunderstruck the first time that I heard bagpipes playing when I was a child–my sliver of Scottish ancestry. On the other hand, I always liked blues music too–even did a blues show on my college FM station. Maybe my banks-of-the-Mississippi River ancestry is more important than DNA? Who knows? This “blood and soil” stuff so easily can be warped.

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