Baldrshof: a history

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Below is a transcribed interview with Hofgyðja and Spekingr Brandy Fassett, the hofgyðja of Baldrshof. This article was transcribed, and tidied up to make it easier to read.

Baldrshof was the first third-hof of the Asatru Folk Assembly, and the first third-hof in the world. Óðinshof and Þórshof straddled the US, now it was time to fill it in. Unfortunately, Baldrshof would become an extremely large and tough piece of meat to chew. The building was in poor condition, and very quickly persecution by the media and social media institutions occurred. Furthermore, cowardice and the breaking of oaths placed the entire venture in danger.

What had begun as a relatively simple “color in the rest of the states” exercise had quickly turned into a much more dire question: could the Asatru Folk Assembly withstand an attack not just from without, but do so during an internal failure, on top of actually making the building habitable due to the great neglect of the prior owner?

The answer was yes. At great personal cost, a team stepped up, and handled the matter. And handle it they did! When the money for the persecution ran out, and the Antifas went home, the people of Murdock, MN were no longer harassed by Communists and were free to engage with us as neighbors. In Asatru, we are our deeds. In Murdock, MN, the townsfolk love the Asatru Folk Assembly, and Baldrshof, because of the glorious deeds that are done in that hallowed hall. The sole member of the “Murdock Alliance Against Hate” that actually lived in Murdock, MN regularly sings our praises, and tells all who will listen about the hateful and deceptive lies spread by the press.

-Folkbuilder Chris Savich.

Chris: So, let’s start with, who are you?

Brandy: I am Spekingr Brandy Fassett. I am the hof Gyðja of Baldrshof, third hof of the Asatru Folk Assembly.

Chris: How long have you been with the AFA and involved in Ásatru, and paganism in general?

Brandy: I have been involved with the Asatru Folk Assembly since December 2018. I was a folk builder starting in January of 2020. I was oathed as a folk builder in September of 2020, oathed as a Gyðja in March of 2021, and a member of the Witten as of April... I’m sorry, May. April or May 2021.

Chris: I can get the specific dates.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Brandy took her Folkbuilder Oath on 2020’s September 5th, was ordained on 2021’s March 27th, was elevated to the Witan on 2022’s April 21st, and became (official) Hofgyðja of Baldrshof on 2025’s April 4th.]

Brandy: I have been involved in paganism and Ásatrú basically since I was a teenager, so over 20 years. But directly with Asatru around 2011.

Chris: So, [as I understand it] you got involved and then sort of immediately got Baldrshof handed to you in a lot of ways. Do you want to set the stage for where we were at before Baldr’s hof began?

Brandy: Sure. Before there was Baldrshof, there was the Northern Plains region, and there was a large group of us that were celebrating in Minnesota and North Dakota, and we’re looking at getting a hof of our own. And then we were actually slated to be Þórshof. However, they looked at several properties... I believe there was nine properties in total that were looked at. They all fell through for one reason or another. We almost had a property in North Dakota, but if you want to research the community in North Dakota that a gentleman [unaffiliated with the AFA] tried to buy... when they found out who we were, they decided they would not sell us the property because they were afraid that we were going to do the same thing. That escapes me off of the top of my head, Chris, but it was a few years. A gentleman bought an entire community in North Dakota and was trying to make a whites-only community and a radicalized whites-only community.

Chris: Oh, they were like White Black Hebrew Israelite guys, right?

[EDITOR’S NOTE: They were not infact White Black Hebrew Israelites, but were Craig Cobb’s attempt at taking over the town of Leith, to establish a Neo-Nazi stronghold practicing Ben Klassen’s failed religion of Creativity.]

Brandy: I don’t know exactly off the top of my head who he was, but that is the reason that we were unable to obtain the property in North Dakota. So that was the reason that fell through in North Dakota. There were several properties in Minnesota that were looked at, but none of them were up to par. And, you know, I apologize: I wasn’t involved in that process. My involvement with Baldrshof started immediately after we got Þórshof. I got called and told “hey, you know, we’re going to do this: Are you ready? Can you support this?”. And I said “100%, I’ll support this 100%.”.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Þórshof was acquired on 2020’s March 24th, about 5-months before Brandy became a Folkbuilder, and about a year before she became a gyðja. The Baldrshof property was acquired on 2020’s June 20^th, 2-months before Brandy became a Folkbuilder and 3/4ths of a year or so before she became a gyðja.]

So, the guy leading the project, he goes out to Murdock. And he inspected the building, and you know, sent pictures back and forth... I had not seen the building before we bought it. I had only seen the pictures. I was under the impression that there was some things that needed to be fixed. And mostly it was just cleaning that needed to be done. And that’s what we were going to do. I said, “okay”, and hopped on board. And I started. Once we had the keys to the building, that started my monthly, which turned into weekly pilgrimages from Southwest North Dakota to Murdock, Minnesota.

Because as it turned out, the hof needed a lot more work. The hof needed a lot more. It was more than just… it was dirty. You know, for example, we were cleaning a wall and my youngest son just got on his tiptoes, put his hand on the wall and leaned on the wall to reach up. And he went through the wall.

Chris: Oh, wow.

Brandy: That’s how bad the condition was of the drywall. There had been a flood down there at some point, which had taken out the heaters, which had, you know, ruined a lot of things down there, had damaged a lot of things.

When I say that every member of my family has had a tetanus shot because of Baldr’s hof, it’s not an exaggeration. You know, there’s literal blood, sweat, and tears of my family in that hof. You know, from stepping on nails to cutting ourselves on the rusty, the rusty wire mesh that was used as, you know, tape and texture back in the day. It was a lot, you know, so it was more than just cleaning. When we first got in there, the goal was to obtain the building in July. And it was said that we were supposed to have our dedication in November.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Baldrshof’s dedication was on 2021’s March 27^th, about 9-months after its acquisition.]

So we got the building in July. We had our first workday in July. And there’s a picture, I have it somewhere on my phone, and you can just see everybody sitting outside and everybody was excited. But there was also just a sense of like, “what did we get ourselves into here?”; “This is a lot”. And you can just see... you can see both the excitement, but you can also see the absolute exhaustion on the face of those people. When we walked into the building, there was a refrigerator with spoiled food that was four years old. There was a carton of milk that had been sitting out for four years. Everything, everything was falling apart. You know, anything that was moldy was falling apart.

Chris: What was the building before we got it, other than a dump?

Brandy: In its heyday, it was the Calvary Lutheran Church with a thriving community in Murdock. Um, that community did, um, what’s the right word... diminish... in population. And they ended up combining with... I think it’s Bethesda Lutheran Church in Murdock. So, the two Lutheran churches combined, they sold the building to an individual who attempted to turn the building into a house very unsuccessfully. Anybody who’s been a part of maintaining that building understands why it would have been such, such a hard thing to do. There was a lot of structural things that he had done that were incorrect.

The best way to describe that building when we walked into it was: if you’ve ever seen the movie Fight Club, it’s the Fight Club house. We were joking that this guy lived in the Fight Club house... it’s just... there’s stuff everywhere, there’s rotten food. It’s like they had a huge rager party one night and just walked away from it. There was a shower, a shower that was built downstairs that he just set up. Like, walls of cement board and he ran a sump pump, so the shower sat over the sump pump and it drained into the sump pump hole. And then he was using a sump pump to drain the water from the shower with a hose and just shooting it out the window.

Chris: What the... what?

Brandy: Yeah, I’m serious. That’s why there’s a hole in the men’s [bathroom] window: because he drilled a hole in the window and he had a garden hose [evacuating] the sump pump. You could take a shower and the sump pump would fill up and then it would just dump out the window. You know, those are the kinds of things that we... that we encountered. The... the heater was a big thing. You know, heat up here is necessary. It’s not something that we can do without. But the heaters didn’t work. We didn’t... we weren’t aware that the heaters didn’t work. But we had them inspected and the... the heaters were shot and we had to get a brand new heating system in there. Jason Gallagher sat downstairs, in the cold while they were installing new heaters and we installed an industrial dehumidifier to take care of the humidity issue, which was the source of a lot of the problems.

There was just so many things. The electrical had to be upgraded in order for us to obtain insurance and even to open because it was old and outdated. So there was stuff we absolutely had to do in order to even get the building open that we did not know about, or at least I did not know about at that time.

Chris: So I guess asking you about the realtor involved wouldn’t be all that useful then because you weren’t aware of that stuff.

Brandy: No, I personally was not, no. We bought the building as is. It was, uh, it was a... it was a deal, you know, it was not a lot of money. I mean, compared, compared to the turnkey hofs we’ve purchased since then, it was a fraction of the cost.

Chris: What did the community think about this place? Cause honestly, it sounds like it was a dump before we came along.

Brandy: It was falling apart. Yeah, it was falling apart. So, the community came by day one, literally day one, the community came by, and the old president of the Calvary church board actually stopped by. And she had talked to us and we explained who we were. And, you know, she had asked us, “well, what are you guys going to do with the cross? The cross that was in the sanctuary?”. She, and she was very worried. “What are you going to do with the stuff?”. And I actually talked to her and I said, “I will give you everything and anything that you want from this building.”. We had found like, 25th anniversary teacups that the church had had made for their 25th anniversary. We gave all of that to her. We packed all of that and gave it to her. We packed up documents that we found, a cemetery plat map: those are things that she had wanted.

And then we also gave her the cross off of the sanctuary wall. And we actually took it down and walked it over to her house. As far as like, the cross on the steeple, we didn’t have a plan to get that down yet. So, but we did let her know. She said, “we would like that for the cemetery”. I said “absolutely: when it comes down, we’ll get it to you.”. And we did that, she came and picked it up and we made sure everything was done respectfully, and made sure that they got what they wanted from that building. Cause that was... if that church was even a quarter as important to them as it is to me, I understand why they wanted it.

Chris: So just to recap: it used to be a church, they downsized, they ended up selling it to some guy who mistreated it. Why didn’t they take the stuff out when they sold it to him?

Brandy: That I don’t know. With all the things that we’ve... with all of the work and the time that we’ve put into that building, all the work that was done on the building prior, like the siding, the roof, the painting, all of the stuff that had been done. And even the basement being built, that had been built by the congregation of that church, from my understanding of talking to the people that used to go there. They put in the work, like we’re putting in the work now. So it would have been heartbreaking [for them] to lose that church.

Chris: So why they didn’t take all of those things?

Brandy: I don’t know. That’s a really good question. It wasn’t packed full of stuff, right? But there were things that were still important. And I think that with us not being Christian, her initial concern is “what is going to happen to the Christian things in this church?”. And I think that we made a good impression on her by being respectful and making sure that it went back into their hands, versus throwing it in a dumpster on the side of the road, or like burning it in a public display or something.

Chris: Exactly. Exactly. There might’ve been some kind of church politics going on where it was like “well, pastor says we got to sell”. So this was before the hoopla. Is there anything you want to say about this period? Anything more about that period before we get to the hoopla?

Brandy: I. Will. Never. Forget. The. Smell. And I think anybody you talk to, they will always talk about the smell. You’ll never forget the way the place smelled, and it’s not a good memory. Taking a shower after you were working there, you were slimy. I mean, like literally, it was like you were showering in oil. And everybody was saying that when we all came back the next day. Everybody’s like, “were you guys slimy when you showered?” and everybody was talking about it. It was a conversation piece. There was like literal slime on us from cleaning that building. And it was something that was kind of jarring to everybody that had been there.

Chris: How many people was that at that first workday during this initial period?

Brandy: I say 20 to 25. Without looking at pictures and seeing for sure, that first work day was the biggest work day we’ve ever had. And to be a hundred percent honest with you, Chris, I think that walking into it and seeing that... I think that that had an impact on some of those people because they’ve never been back. The building is beautiful and we’ve put a lot of work into it. And it is really... it really is a temple for Baldr. And I wish that those people would come back and see the difference. Those that saw the first time, and never returned... I want them to see that. It really is a temple. We did it. We did it guys, come see.

Chris: So before we move on from this period of grossness, but relative calm, what did the locals think of us at that point?

Brandy: The neighbors next door were very wary. But that did change. And the reason they were wary is because [even that early] there were people running around town telling them that we were dangerous. Especially, that we were especially dangerous to people of color. They said that we were dangerous to anyone who was not a White heterosexual man or woman. We were a menace. We were dangerous. And a lot of people were very careful. They were curious, but they were careful. Some people avoided us altogether, but in the end, we did have conversations with each and every one of the neighbors over the course of a few months. Some of them took a couple months for us to make contact with, because they were very unhappy that we were there because of the lies that they had been told. But our neighbors now, we don’t seem to have any issues with them. We talk to them on a regular basis. We drop food off to them when there’s leftovers. At Freyfaxi, I gave them each, uh, zucchini muffins saying, “Hey, I know we’re obnoxious. We’re obnoxious when there’s so many of us here. Have some muffins!”. Just trying to keep the frith between the neighborhood, you know?

Chris: So those people who were spreading lies, and this gets into the hoopla: were they locals or were they outsiders?

Brandy: They were outsiders. Well, sort of except for one: the main one was Victoria and she actually grew up in Murdock, but she no longer lived in Murdock.

Chris: Okay. So, let’s get started on the hoopla. This is a period where my understanding gets really murky.

Brandy: The initial upsets started... it was stressful because the articles started coming out in [2020’s] July.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: A month after the hof was acquired.]

Brandy: So as soon as they found out who bought the building, the Blue Prairie News, I think, were the first people to report on us. And they were kind of just a small blog, you know? And the first thing they did was start attacking people. They tried to create fear as the press does. And then from there, the media really started [persecuting us]. When we went that first day, we were staying at the super eight. And I remember sitting in the hotel room with some other AFA people, and they were reading the paper, and there was a lot of concern from that group of people. Some of them had a lot of reservation, a lot of concern.

So then we had another workday in August, and there was not near as many people in August as there was in July. And some of the work crew in August were already complaining, like, “you can’t expect me to be here all the time.”; “This is so far away.”; and there was already rumblings of problems from the people there. I, on the other hand, had gone out there more than once. I went out there one weekend completely and totally by myself, just to go because I wanted to be in the building.

There was grumbling through August and September. And then we did Fall Fest, and within a week, like it was that week, a kindred quit. A lot of the people who we had been relying on, or expecting to rely on, for the hof were with that kindred. I did not get a call from any of them. I got the call from Allsherjargoði Matt. The Allsherjargoði called me, and told me what happened. And we were in a spot: we have a hof that’s not ready, and this is like, the most awful thing that can happen right now. What are we going to do?

And from that moment on, it was just the most important thing that happens, right now, is that this hof opens, that it gets dedicated to Baldr, and that it succeeds. That was my only thought. That, and to calm the members of our folk. So, I called Jason (Gallagher) and Anna (Plourde), and told them what was going on. There was fear, Chris. There was a lot of attitude of “holy crap, what are we going to do?”.

But there was never any question at all on whether or not we were going to continue and whether or not we would be successful. That was not the question. The question was simply, “how were we going to do that?”. I remember telling Jason and Anna, we were on a conference call, “no matter what, we hold the line. No matter how we feel, no matter how scared we are, no matter how angry we are, no matter how much this hurts, this temple is the most important thing right now. We are not going to drop this.”. And they agreed.

And Allsherjargoði Matt asked us to come on to the Witan call, and kind of talk to them about how we were going to move forward. We came on the Witan call and we tried to be as confident and reassuring as possible. The people who left, that hit the Witan pretty hard. I wasn’t worried that they were going to shut us down. I wasn’t worried I was going to lose the hof. I was worried if the members of the Witan were okay. I mean, at this point I have just been oathed as a Folkbuilder, I’m in the Goðar program, but I don’t have a lot of interaction with those men. I was concerned about them because I could only imagine what they were going through right then.

But there, there was never a question on whether or not we were going to succeed. It was just a question of “how” and of making sure that we were moving forward no matter what. We were not going to lose this hof. Not on my watch.

Chris: So talk about the media.

Brandy: The media was insane. I was receiving death threats.

Chris: From journalists?

Brandy: No, from people because of the media attention. And I wish I had saved that stuff, [as it got deleted]; we hadn’t been shut down on Facebook at the time. That didn’t happen until... like when President Trump got kicked off of Facebook. I got kicked off of Facebook with President Trump, by the way. I just want to throw that out there for notoriety’s sake.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The AFA has been kicked off of Facebook in several rolling banwaves.]

Brandy: I was receiving Facebook messages, I was receiving emails, I was receiving death threats. They were taking pictures of my children and posting them on blog posts saying, “look at the Nazis in training.”: my children are minors. They were threatening to lock us in the hof and set the building on fire. There was all of these horrific things that they were threatening to do to us, and many of us got personal threats as well.

Chris: Did we get any outside help in terms of funding or anything like that, that you know of?

Brandy: In regards to getting the hof?

Chris: Yes.

Brandy: Yes, but I don’t know who. I know that Svan was involved? It had something to do with Þórshof.

Chris: I can ask the Allsherjargoði.

Brandy: Actually, Svan secured the funding. It was Baldrshof and Þórshof at the same time, and Svan got the funding.

Chris: I’ll ask him for clarification.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: A family friend of Hofgoði and Witan Svan Herul lended the AFA money, in what turned out to be a profitable investment due to the market conditions at the time: that money, plus the AFA’s existing funds, allowed for the purchase of both hofs at once.]

Chris: Did we have anyone who came out in support of us, either before the media freak out, or during, after?

Brandy: Believe it or not, Louis Farrakhan.

Chris: Really?

Brandy: He sent an email to Matt saying “keep on keeping on: you’re doing the right thing.”.

Chris: That’s, that’s pretty cool.

Brandy: There was also messages of support: “don’t let it stop you.” kind of stuff. “If you let it stop you, then you will succumb.”. I had random messages of support from people I had never met. Like, on Facebook: from randos on Facebook. “Keep doing what you’re doing.”; “you’re not doing anything wrong.; “Don’t let them stop you. If you let them stop you, then, you know, if, if you let them stop you, they’ll stop us all. I really remember the message that said, “if they stop you, they’ll stop us all.”. I mostly ignored the threats of violence and the condemnation and the ugliness for the most part.

I’m not going to lie: I was more careful. Because they were like, “we found where you live; we’re coming to your house; we’re going to separate your Nazi head from your Nazi neck and put it on a pike.”, you know, I mean, all kinds of stuff. So we were just more careful, you know? But the media itself just became an echo chamber. And after a while, it got ridiculous after a while. The media got ridiculous and it was almost like tabloid. You know, they were saying that we were doing bloodletting at the hof. And, um, I think it was The Sun... if you can find the articles from the Sun, they were tabloid worthy. So we started making jokes about it. We were talking about that, like “we’ve got Hofa buried in the basement and Batboy lives in the steeple.”. We had to make light of the situation. You had to make light of it. You had to make light of actual slander and libel to not get bogged down by it.

I mean, that’s how we coped, you know, when they would say something ridiculous. We would joke about something even more ridiculous. Like, there’s a, there’s a picture of AFA Leadership standing there facing off with knives at each other, preparing for their bloodletting.

Chris: There were a lot of goobers and buffoons that came out to “protest” us: is there anyone in particular that you want to talk about?

Brandy: Now, when I say I was out there every single weekend, it’s really not an exaggeration. I was out there all the time and I ended up moving, uprooting my entire family from Southwest North Dakota and moving to Minnesota so that we could better support the hof. And my family was out there picking rocks, painting walls, building stairs, every weekend. We took one weekend off in August and [the media] were following us on social media... They had to have been because they coincidentally chose the one and only weekend that we were not out there doing construction on the hof. And we announced it every single week on Facebook, right?

So we’d be like, “We’re going to be out there this weekend, doing this: Come on by!”, “We’re going to be out there this weekend: Come on by!”. Come on by. Come on by. Every weekend. The one weekend we’re not out there is the weekend that these people chose to haul their asses out of their parents’ basement, put on their face paint.

Chris: Like... Injun war paint?

Brandy: They put on their war paint and come up to the hof and stand on the steps and say “down with the AFA!”. Now, after that happened, we have cameras, so, I got a notification live, like real time. I’m watching this happen, right? And it was just like, “what is going on?”: our neighbor behind us called me because we have each other’s phone number. We talk and he says “hey, there’s people at the hof. What do you want me to do?”. I told him, Let them be there. As long as they’re not destroying the building, let them be.”. You know, because he’s like, “do you want me to go run them off?”. I told him not to do that, to just leave them be, to not make a scene.

Chris: So, at that time, even through this persecution, we did have support from the community in Murdock.

Brandy: Yes. The next weekend that we were out there, we had people stopping by telling us about the ridiculousness that they watched. There were people in like, fur pelts, and they... one local lady was very confused because they said that they were there to fight racism, so she didn’t understand how they’re fighting racism while wearing blackface. A couple ladies stopped by the hof and parked and came out and talked to us and were laughing at them, literally laughing. And they said, “we knew it wasn’t you because you guys dressed nicely.”.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Some people wonder why we in the AFA dress nicely. This is why.]

Chris: So, the community now. Tell me about the community now and them kind of coming around to us after it dies down.

Brandy: I won’t say the entire community supports us because that would be incorrect. But we do have many families that we feed. We have people that come over and talk to us on a regular basis. We try to keep good relationships with our neighbors. And I’m almost afraid to, like, point out which neighbors are who.

Chris: No, no, don’t do that, I get it.

Brandy: We’ve had members of the community who, when we’re not there, and when media people come out and they try to film the hof or they’re snooping around the building, and then they stick microphones in people’s faces, they’ll tell them, “you need to knock it off; they’re not hurting anybody.”.

Chris: So, Else Christensen is the Hof Hero. Could you talk a little bit about that?

Brandy: We had a deep admiration for her commitment to the folk. For her service to her people. For the love she had. We were actually the first hof to have a “hof hero”. That was us. We’re taking credit.

Chris: She seems like a good fit. I understand that you guys do a lot for that town there. But, so you guys are the first ones to have a hof hero: tell me about local hof spirituality. What makes Baldrshof’s local cult, non-pejorative, different from other hof’s? What’s unique about it?

Brandy: I think, personally, that we are a trendsetter for the church. I believe that there’s a lot of things that we try at Baldrshof, and a lot of the things that the Goðar from it bring from their personal practice and teach the folk to complement what it is that we already do. You know, reviving things from the broader pool of European tradition in general. Whether you come from Germanic heritage, or Irish heritage, or Slavic heritage or, Nordic heritage, your blood memory is going to remember it because we actually utilized it in the creation of the traditions that we have at Baldrshof. We’ve made a point that a lot of the things that we do should be recognized by your blood memory.

We very much utilize Proto-Indo-European information. You know, like the book “Deep Ancestors” was inspirational in alo of the culture that we have. When we first got the hof, we didn’t know how to celebrate inside. We’re used to celebrating outdoors and Baldrshof has a very restricted conditional use permit. So, you know, we can’t have outdoor celebrations at night. We have a lot of restrictions on us that meant that we had to improvise and we had to find a way to still make that recognizable. I think that we’ve adapted a lot of things.

We’ve also created a lot of hof traditions that have spread forward into the AFA. For example, the Kulning is something that started in Baldrshof. The exchange of the knife and the starting of blót started at Baldr’s hof: the separation of men and women before blót. There is actually a ritual that the men do downstairs, the rune dance that we do. The ancestral dedications, the dedications that we do before every service, those are things that we have worked really, really, really hard to make a standard. It happens at every single event, and we also have a very good play on the cooperation and balance of the masculine and feminine where they are separate, but they come together for worship.

Chris: Is there anything more that you want to say about this?

Brandy: This is the triumph of withstanding the media attack. We stood strong, and have flourished because of it. We have a saying at Baldrshof, Chris: that nothing’s easy at Baldr’s hof. And that’s the truth. Every year, nothing’s ever easy, but we have a spiritual explanation for this, would you like to hear it?

Chris: Go on, this is good.

Brandy: Nothing is ever easy at Baldr’s hof because nothing was easy for Baldr. No matter what Frigg did, no matter how hard she tried, the spear still hit Baldr. Baldr still descended into hel. So, Nana followed him. However, while these things happen because nothing is ever easy, we always remember we always are victorious afterwards. No matter how bad it’s gotten here, we have always risen better and stronger. And that’s because Baldr ascends from hel in the golden age.

For more about the Asatru Folk Assembly, visit our website!

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