I Have to Dream

Everyone has aspirations for how we would like the future to pan out, and I am no different. I have a vision for the future and that vision is what motivated me to start this blog, and this website.

I have named my particular form of Heathen practice “Frumcræft” and the fundamental concept upon which Frumcræft is built is community, in the form of the hearth and the strȳnd. My dream is, simply put, to have a strȳnd that my hearth is a part of.

What makes a strȳnd a strȳnd, as opposed to any other form of community is proximity and homogeneity. In other words, a collective of people of like mind living close to one another so that they can interact daily in the real world.

What this really means is that I want a village. Specifically, I dream of a small village of Anglo-Saxon Heathens who all share in each other’s joys and woes, celebrating together and helping one another.

The benefits of such a village are numerous. A village is more likely to be able to raise and maintain a proper hof, as well other ritual and holy structures. Like-minded people living close to each other more readily foster a sense of in-group identity and prevent the feelings of alienation and anomie. This sense of belonging has been shown to improve people’s mental health as well as reducing the rate of various forms of crime.

A village also feasibly falls within the range of something called “Dunbar’s Number”. Dunbar’s Number is a “suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships — relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person”. It was proposed in the 1990s by Robin Dunbar, who set the number at roughly 150 individuals. Other studies have suggested potentially higher numbers, but they agree that there is a limit on how many relationships a person can comfortably maintain.

Another advantage to the villagers being of like mind is that they will more easily embrace shared celebrations. Consider the different forms of Heathendom, broadly categorised by which particular tribal culture is their primary focus: Anglo-Saxon, Continental Saxon, Frankish, Norse, etcetera. Each of these cultures has not only different names for gods, but gods not attested to in the other cultures. In a mixed group, some compromise has to be made, so as not to offend any of the participants – or their gods. By being homogeneous in public belief, a village can sidestep this issue and can be socially stronger for it.

Further to this, when a village is on the same page, it is easier for visitors (a healthy strȳnd is not insular, but welcoming) to get a sense of what is going on. This means that those invited to share in the village’s celebrations can be treated as fictive cȳþþ – part of the strȳnd whilst enjoying the hospitality of the village.

My goal, ultimately, is to live as part of a real, functioning strȳnd that is able to entertain guests from other Heathen villages. Other villages because I hope I am not alone in my dreaming and that other Heathens will build their own communities.