Nino Migliori | Da “ Herbarium “ - 1974

Gullveig's Return

"Burned, broken, but never lost. She speaks in embers and sees what the gods fear."

They called her Heiðr, the Shining One, yet her fate was forged in fire. Three times she burned, and three times she rose—each time stronger, her veins filled not with blood, but with the molten whispers of Seiðr magic. Now, clad in blackened ceremonial armor, adorned with golden runes, and flanked by two crows, she walks the line between prophecy and defiance.

She is Gullveig reborn, a forgotten Vanir sorceress who sees the unraveling threads of fate, knowing that the gods themselves fear what she might reveal.

She carries the Scroll of Ash, an artifact that holds the rewritten history of those who tried to silence her. The words on its pages shift and burn, revealing truths only to those who dare to seek them.

In the fields of battle and the halls of kings, her name is whispered in awe and fear.

welcoming greens

It is evening. The moon is small and new. There are stars, and a stream's sound, and I can hear the wings of insects in the dark. I think what gifts we are given, such gifts - every day.

Susan Fletcher, Corrag

'Troll' "by Theodor Kittelsen, (1857 - 1914)

Younik by Valery Slauk (Belarusian, 1947 - )

Gilt bronze fragment from "the Temple Pyx", Germany, mid 12th century

from The Burrell Collection, Glasgow

In reading direct anecdotes from people who believed in vættir, back in the 1800s, there is this sense that the vættir were already endangered before these people were born, and that the vættir are all but gone now. They speak of their grandparents' experiences, of things they saw in their childhood and stories that everyone knew about, but which took place a generation or more ago. They talk about how vættir "used to" live in that hill over there, or how the old house down the road "had" a vættr in the attic before it was torn down. It feels post-apocalyptic. Like they lived through an extinction event and are left to tell the tales of mammoths and aurochsen. The great enlightenment lit up the dark woods and farms and hills of rural communities and killed off the vættir en masse, forcing the last ones to retreat to the attics of madmen and storytellers.

"No live organism can continue for long to exist under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." -Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

Kostir ro betri heldr en at klökkva sé, hveim er fúss er fara; einu dægri mér var aldr of skapaðr of allt líf of lagit.

'There is always a better choise than cowardice, if you have an issue to handle; one day, long ago, my life was already shaped, and my fate was fixed.'

-- Skírnismál, st. 13