POETRY: ‘The Old Gods Return’

Contributed by: Keith Parsons, professor of philosophy

Note: For the first time in 1000 years, a temple to the Norse gods is being built in Reykjavik, Iceland.

 

We rowed with you in the dragon ships,

Pulling the oar beside you,

When winter waves towered like mountains,

You gasped our names, begging us

To save you from the sea’s frigid embrace.

We stood at your shoulder in the shield wall,

When arrows fell like hail,

And berserker blade flashed and plunged.

We stiffened your sinews

And gave the ax arm strength.

Ours were the names you called in travail,

When you labored new life into being,

Crying to us to honor your pain with children fair and strong.

We sat with you around the fire in the iron winter,

When the wolf wind howled.

And you told great tales of us,

How we broke the pride of giants,

Bound Fenrir with a magic cord,

And Odin All-Father hung from Yggdrasil

For nine days,

Giving up an eye for wisdom.

And Valkyries, immortal shield maidens,

Bore the slain heroes to Valhalla,

To fight and feast and await

The dread day of Ragnarok,

When even the gods must die.

We were closer to you than your shirt

Of shining mail.

You drank us deeper than mead.

*          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *          *

Now for a thousand years we have slept.

You bowed to a foreign god,

A god of a people not your own,

A god of dry rock and desert,

Not of fierce fjord and surging sea.

A god of bishops and books.

A god of popes and dogmas.

A god of hell and damnation.

A god of death, not life.

And we slumbered while you prayed

To your strange foreign god.

But always we were there,

On the cusp of memory,

Vague ancestral shapes,

Waiting to take form again.

Know then, children of the North,

That we come again.

We return,

Not in wrath at your folly

But to reclaim what is our own.

We, the ancient ones,

Mount to Asgard once again.