Þórshof: a history

Below is an interview with Hofgoði and Spekingr Svan Herul, the hofgoði of Þórshof. This article was transcribed, and tidied up to make it easier to read.

Þórshof was the first second-hof of the Asatru Folk Assembly, and the first second-hof in the world. Óðinshof was a world-historical first. However, for several years, it was simply “the hof”: there was one hof, it was in Brownsville, CA, and that was that. A second hof was barely even imaginable. Allsherjargoði Matt Flavel’s decision to seek the acquisition of what would become Þórshof was a major event in the history of Asatru, and was the beginning of Asatru going from a West Coast affair to something that stretched across the US.

It was also the beginning of the vision of Asatru becoming something done by Europeans in Europe. A second hof would necessitate an internal bureaucratic division of the US and Canada, which would allow for the east-coast division (now called a “hofdistrict”) to have eyes on Europe. The Asatru Folk Assembly had had members in Europe for some time, but with the Communist coup against Allsherjargoði Jörmundur Ingi Hansen of the Ásatrúarfelagið, Asatru had ground to a standstill in Europe, and Goði Þorsteinn Guðjónnson’s vision of European polytheistic revival headed by Icelanders had been betrayed.

Þórshof would be not just a demonstration that this was not merely a passing fad out in the mountains of California, but a spiritual force attainable not just by Americans, but also by Europeans.

-Folkbuilder Chris Savich.

Chris: Who are you? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Svan: Oh, well, Svan Odolf Harrell, I was born in Iceland, in Reykjavik, and my father is American and my mother is Icelandic.

However, my father was stationed there, not with the military, but through the military, with NATO. He was a submarine hunter, and he also learned the language. So that’s why he was up there so long, that multiple siblings were born and raised there.

So, I was born in Iceland, and I was the youngest of the family. My family has a lot of troubled chemistry. Most of us do not talk to each other. Most of us are estranged for reasons I don’t want to get into here. But, yeah, yeah, they were eventually, the military called my father out of NATO and said, “you’re going to have to move back to the United States.”

And I [at the time] had no idea that my father was even American because he spoke Icelandic. And so, when they finally called us back, I came to the United States, and they said, “you need to learn English right away.” And that... I was kind of reluctant. I don’t remember that, but they said I was kind of reluctant. And so, I grew up learning English from teachers that were in a military town. So, even though I was in the South, everybody I learned from had no accent. So, I grew up, Virginia, from about six years old on. Now, it was still in our house, and my brothers and sisters and my mother and my father would talk fluently, but it greatly evaporated for me because I was still much in the school system, whereas my sister was only here in high school for two years, and then she graduated.

And so, as I was growing up, I was taught stories from the Bible. I was also taught stories from the Sagas. And I was deeply interested in religion. I was deeply interested in faith. And from a young age, was having these thoughts. My brother was almost killed in a fire, and at the time, I was going to these churches with my neighbors.

My mother did not find American churches... they were very... she didn’t like them. They seemed too different. So, when my brother almost died from a fire, and then I ended up saying something along the lines of, “oh, the devil was trying to get him”, my mother immediately told me, like, “you’re not going to these churches anymore because they give you this skewed view of the world. This was a tragedy [so do not talk like that].” And, because of my young mind, and the way that they talked, you know these were the same kind of people that said [things like] “the devil invented football for Sundays to keep people away from church”...

Chris: Yeah, he definitely invented football.

Svan: Yeah, it was a Southern Bible Belt Baptist kind of thing.

So, I ended up going away from that, but I still had a very deep yearning to understand how everything works. And [that’s] why I just knew deep down in my heart that the divine was out there. And it was about that: it was incumbent upon me to make that connection. And so, I spent a lot of my time kind of looking around in my early teenage years, and then I came across a rune book about the Anglo-Saxon runes, and [it was] in comparison to the Lord of the Rings that I had been reading at the time: it ignited something in me.

[Initially] I thought that the runes that J.R. Poulsen had written about were his invention. And so, I started studying the runes. And when I did, that naturally led me to Lord Odin. And when that happened, there was an ignition. I had a dream. I still remember it to this day. I 100% believe that it was him. And it started the process. So, eventually, that was probably about 12 or 13 years old. At 14, in the early 90s, I found a book called The Book of Troth by Edward Thorson.

Chris: The original one.

Svan: [Giddy] The original one with the hammer and space over the book.

Chris: [Giddy] The space hammer, yeah, yeah.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: “A Book of Troth” is the original work by Dr. Stephen Flowers, “Our Troth” was later made by Stephen Grundy, aka KveldulfR Gundarsson, after he failed to obtain the rights to the original book when Dr. Flowers was ousted from the organization. Importantly, “A Book of Troth” states the fact that Asatru is and had always been a Folkish religion, whereas “Our Troth” was a failed attempt at historical revisionism.]

Svan: And that book was instrumental in my change. I read it [once], and then I read it again. And the one thing that stuck out to me was finding out that our ancestors had a religion before Christianity in Europe.

And [that book has] the rite in which you profess your faith. And it’s kind of a reversal of Charlemagne’s denouncement.

Chris: Yeah, the old Saxon baptismal vow and the perennial reversing of it that we always do.

Svan: Right. I, so, not knowing anyone or anything, and I... it was just really a kind of bumbling around, I did that ceremony in my backyard without anybody really knowing. You know, like, I was kind of secretive about it. And I verbally spoke out to the Gods. I verbally, I immediately, like, broke the threshold and just started all in. And the moment that that happened: my life changed. I think in a better way. You know, hardships do make us who we are today. So I wasn’t alleviated of hardships. But I started to understand things.

My brother, at the same time, converted to Christianity. He’s much older than me. He’s 10 years older than me. And me and him locked horns over it, especially at my grandmother’s funeral in Iceland. He was going there to preach and, like, start this ministry thing there. I was on top of the funeral, and I got very upset at him for that being his priority. But, I actually met the Asatruarfelagið’s Allsherjargoði at the time: Jormunger Ingi. I believe he’s still alive.

Chris: I have actually gotten in contact with the group that he now leads. He’s alive, but quite old.

Svan: I actually sat down and had lunch with him.

Chris: Yeah? Tell me about this, this is cool.

Svan: So my family kind of thought it as novel: “Oh, you know, Svan’s Asatru”, and when I went up to the funeral for my grandmother, my uncle, he arranged the meeting with him and said, “hey, you know, my nephew’s from America, and he’s Asatru”. And so I met him at a coffee shop,connected to a Rune Museum. And we sat down and we talked, and at the time, I think his big concern was environmental issues. I was not politically minded at the time, so I didn’t know what kind of environmental thoughts he held. I didn’t know if it was coming from a mor 0national perspective or if it was coming from a global perspective, but he seemed very, very focused on that, and very, very focused on stewardship of the land.

He also told me that there was a giant swastika, or fylfot, that was erected out in the country, and they had to dismantle it. They had already finished it, and it was made out of big stones, and they had to dismantle it because of the, uh, you know, left-wing ideologues of Iceland. They were just finishing up dismantling this holysite and he wasn’t happy about it. Those are the two big things that I remember: this was in 1997? 1998?

After I came back, I joined the military, and was in the Marine Corps. I was Asatru then: I mean, I’ve been Ausatru ever since the profession, right? I held a blót on the Euphrates River, and most of my fellow Marines just thought I was, uh, a strange person. But I did read my runes for certain people, and some of them came back.So I was just kind of seen as the the rune guy, or the weirdo. I fought in three, combat zones, and my last, of course, was Iraq, but, uh, when I came back, I had vowed that I would try to get more into the community and build something, towards the Gods. And so I got back, and I got into touch with people. There’s a lot of stuff that comes between that and Thorshof.

Chris: Let’s elide over that, at least for this.

Svan: Okay.

Svan: I’ll be honest with you: when I got here [back to the US], and back when the internet was still in a fledgling state, the only people I had contact with was the Troth.

Chris: About what time was this?

Svan: 2007.

Chris: And you were on the east coast at that time, right?

Svan: Yes. And I got out, I got out of the Marine Corps in 2005, so there still was kind of an adjustment period. I wasn’t... it wasn’t a right away kind of thing. I was still trying to land jobs and figure myself out and all that, but once I finally got to a point where I started going on to meet-ups, and I made events. I didn’t look for events, I made events so that I could, I don’t know, start doing something. We had a bunch of people getting together and it wasn’t long before I found out about the national organization called the Troth.

In my mind, the Troth was the book of Troth, like they had organized together. I was very, very ignorant as to the world around me and what was going on. So, I reached out to them and showed up at one of their national events and at the time, there wasn’t anything strange. [Back then] the Troth was more neutral, and there were folkish people and universalists, kind of all mixed in with each other, and by 2009, I went to a Troth moot in Ohio, and this was the first place I ever heard Steve McNallen hailed at a sumbl.

Chris: And AFA membership just sort of spiraled out from there?

Svan: Oh, that’s a whole story, I could go on about it.

[Some time later, after covering about a decade of personal history]

Chris: So, for clarity on the timing: Thorshof was dedicated on 2020’s July 18th. When did you become a goði, and when were you elevated to the Witan?

Svan: I became a goði in very early 2020.

Chris: I can look this up later.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: It was 2020’s March 14th]

Svan: And for the elevation to the Witan, I wanna say it was the Midsummer of 2020. Chris: I have here on the Registry of Rites: Midsummer, 2020’s June 13th. Svan: Yes, it was the Midsummer celebration in California. Now, I had already gotten the [building for the] hof before then.

Chris: So, you had a huge amount of stepping up in a short period of time.

Svan: Correct.

Chris: So we had Odinshof, we’d been doing stuff with it for awhile: what was the process like regarding the next one? At the time it was like: we’ve got Odinshof, the Allsherjargoði says “let’s get another hof”, what happens next? As I understand it, he initially wanted what is now Baldrshof to be Thor’s hof, correct?

Svan: Yes, yes. I had wanted their hof to be Thor’s hof. I like patterns, and I wanted California, and then the middle, and then we would have been Baldrshof, moving east to west.

Chris: Okay, cool.

Svan: So, everybody was kind of working towards looking at a church building in Minnesota, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, and it was all part of that. I was actually scouring places, looking for them, to get them stuff. So, Brandy and the people around her out there are looking around, and I’m looking and sending them stuff, and there was this thunderstorm that happened, and thunderstorms early in the year are super rare for us [out where I live]. So this thunderstorm comes, and I am just like: “please Thor, we need to find a spit there. We are attempting to get the first temple to you, and I ask you with the utmost effort if you can help me find a place for them”.

So then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a member in North Carolina who had his own kindred calls me up and says, “hey, I know they’re looking for a church up in Minnesota, but I’m thinking I found a place for the third one that maybe we could by oruselves and then either give it over to the AFA”. We didn’t even know how that would work, but still. So I was like, okay cool, I’m coming down. I was 5-hours away, so I drove down there and I met him and I saw this really old Christian church building.

As far as “Thorshof” goes, it was the only one that we looked at, and it had a modern [home] building next to it, and we couldn’t get inside, but he was so excited and to be honest, I was kind of excited too, ut I was kind of hiding it from him. I didn’t know what to make of this and again, the purpose was finding a building in the North Midwest.

So I didn’t know if this was just preemptively kind of jumping the gun. We ended up contacting the realtor that was listing the place, and having a look inside. So as we’re doing this, I noticed that my friend, he’s calling me his brother, and he’s like, “brother, we’ve been talking about this ever since I met you at Winter Night’s that first time, and we said that we needed a hof”. And he started out as like “I know a guy who could come in here and do this and by the end of that day”.

But as time went on, he was like, you know what, maybe we shouldn’t talk to someone close by, and I was like, “oh no: he’s scared”. And that fear just got worse. So, I ended up handling it all myself, and talking with the real estate agent some more. The initial price was $125,000, or $155,000, I can’t remember, something like that. But I talked with the realtor, and he said “you know, I bet you could talk them down to $75,000 and they would take it”. And I was like “Really? Really?” and the real estate agent starts talking about how he would like to go to Iceland to fish. I wasn’t like, buttering him up deceptively, but when I told him that I was from Iceland, because I have a strange name, he was like “ohhhh, I would love to go fishing in Iceland” and so on and so forth. And then all of his defenses dropped. And I told him that we were intending on keeping this a church building, and he’s like: “that’s good. There was a biker gang tring to buy it and blah blah blah”.

Chris: Who was the previous owner? Was it like, a pastor?

Svan: No, no, it was a congregation: a Methodist church in North Carolina. The Methodist church was getting too old to maintain it and they moved to another building.

The real estate agent mentioned two, no three other potential buyers. One was thinking about renovating it and turning it into a house. But the community center next door was throwing them off, so they didn’t do it. Then there was a Black church that was willing to go in, but they didn’t have the funds, especially to renovate it and fix up the older building. And the third was the biker gang. He said “biker gang”, but I don’t think they were like, 1%ers.

Chris: Yeah, just a bunch of boomers on their hogs.

Svan: Right. Or maybe Christian Bikers? I dunno. But I exressed to him no, we’re fully intending to keep this as a church building. And he was like, you know what, I just want to get the sale done because it’s been so long, I bet you could throw out $75,000 and they would take it. And I was like “oh, you know what, alright, I got nothing to lose, but there’s no way that this is happening”. But, y’know, I said “send them that offer”. And they took it! My jaw hit the floor when he called me back and was like “I told you!”. I asked “are you kidding me?” and he’s like “nope!”.

So I called the Allsherjargoði and I am ECSTATIC. And I’m telling him, like, I just locked us in a place for $75,000, and he said “well we have a certain amount of money that we can put in. But we need to find more elsewhere”.

And that’s when we had another providence moment. So, I had a family friend of mine who is not religious, but is fairly wealthy because he received inheritance from his mother and his aunt, or sister or someone, at the same time.

Chris: So what did he do with it?

Svan: My wife had instructed him to invest in stocks. My wife is pretty money savvy. So, she got him a broker and a manager and all of that. And his money grew! So, when he found out that we were looking to get some finance, he said that he would absolutely loan us some. He just found out in passing that this was something that I was up to! So, he fronted the money, I believe that it was about $50,000, and the Allsherjargoði authorized the remainder. We, as a church, used the rest of the money to buy the Baldrshof building.

Chris: Wow.

Svan: Yeah. That’s how we got two in one year! I absolutely 100% believe that it was divine providence by the holy Gods, and a little bit of my good luck.

Chris: That’s so cool.

Svan: Isn’t it crazy? And then we paid him back! His broker was FREAKING OUT, like, “DON’T DO IT! Churches are not a stable investment!”. But no, our church paid him back in, I think just over 2-years on a 5-year loan.

Chris: I will confirm the dates.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: On 2020’s March 24th, the Asatru Folk Assembly was deeded the property that would become Thorshof.]

Svan: My family-friend was very happy. He took a bit of a hit in the market crash that happened, so his money being elsewhere, and then getting repaid with interest, helped him out. It was amazing: Chris I cannot even tell you, man, just, like, what was going through my mind. It’s always wonderful when a good deed ends up paying you a profit.

Chris: So how did the Baldrshof-Thorshof decision get made?

Svan: At first I suggested “well, why don’t we put Thorshof out west, and North Carolina can have Baldrshof”. But no, the Allsherjargoði said that the second hof was going to be Thor’s, and he said especially because “you prayed to Thor and he answered your prayers. I’m definitely not going to go against what he [, Thor,] had planned”. So that was it, it was locked down.

Chris: So you kind of had this dropped in your lap, but then people around you walked out and left it up to you.

Svan: Yeah, so, one of the guys that I was relying on, he ran. He left in the middle of the weekend, at like, I think it was like 12-o’clock at night. He quit! He quits and leaves all of the chat groups, and I don’t find out until Tuesday, partially because I’m very bad at scheduling and communication that’s not face-to-face. But, so, I called him and I’m like, “Where the $#^* are you?! What the ($*% is going on?! Why would you do this?!”. So we just bought this building and I need all the help that I can get, and he said “I know. But I’m scared of the media. I gotta think about my family and I’ve got three kids”. All of his kids were grown! And it’s just making me more and more angry, because I’m all alone now, and Baldrshof kind of overrides what I’m dealing with, because of the stuff in Murdock and the energy that was being put there.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: This is in reference to the media persecution faced by the faithful in Baldrshof.]

Svan: So I quietly accepted my place and concentrated on fixing things up. So, eventually, I am told to go talk to these members at an event we were holding in South Carolina, and the Allsherjargoði, he said “go talk to these people”, and basically ask them for help because they’re in the vicinity. They were with a kindred in South Carolina, and they’d kind of back and forthed about AFA membership, and those of them who chose loyalty had come back to the AFA, and came to this event. And that was Daniel and Heather Young. And they came to that Ostara, and bear in mind they didn’t know me from anybody, and the Allsherjargoði had said “I wan tyou to go and talk to them, and I want you to convince them to help, because you’re all alone [out there]”.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: The Youngs would go onto become ordained clergy of the Asatru Folk Assembly, but were not ordained at the time of the story being relayed. They are untitled as such for that reason.]

So I went there and talked to them and asked them. Now, I didn’t know about their situation, and I’m like “I’m gonna be frank with you: I need help at Thorshof, and you guys are 2-hours away, and I’m 5-hours away”. And they were like “Well, I don’t know, we have to talk about it”, and I was like “no, that’s fine, talk about it. But I could really use your help”.

And then later on that event, they were like “do you know our history with the AFA?”. And I was like, “no and I don’t care. You’re here now, and I need your help. You’re here now, grab a rifle and get on the berm”. And they were like “Okay”. So they started showing up and as we were fixing things, and as we were cleaning things, and as we were doing things, I learned about they, and a friendship budded there between us. So I lost a friend, but I gained two. The tradeoff was just... there’s no amount of... yeah.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Þórsof’s dedication was on 2020’s July 18^th.]

And during that time was when I started on the murals. The Allsherjargoði was here, and like, he sees the space up on the dais at Thorshof, and I’m like “we should get a statue and put the statue in there: that would be so cool”. But he was all “I don’t know...”, because there’s a light above it. And then he’s like, “I got a better idea. I’ve seen you do some drawings on Facebook, like sketches. I want you to do a picture of Thor in there”. Now, I’ve never painted, and I’ve never worked on a giant space at that scale. And I was like, “I’ll give it a try, but if it looks like garbage we’ll paint it over with white and you should get a statue.”.

And so every day he was calling to me, and talking to me, and I was texting him through the whole process, as I was watching videos on how to paint murals, and watching Bob Ross videos on how to like, make mountains and waves.

Chris: So you literally painted the Thorshof mural from scratch.

Svan: A lot of people don’t realize that the Thorshof mural is from ZERO. I am... you give me a piece of paper and a pencil, and I’m a sketch artist. But an 8’ by 12’ space? Really, I don’t know...

Chris: That is so cool.

Svan: So I started out by outlining his body with painter’s tape to kind of get the proportions right, and then I started sketching, and that I felt really comfortable with. But the moment that I moved to paint, it was very scary, and the paint looked very basic. So I went in and solved that with oil pastels to blend and shade, and I formulated the process, right then and there.

There was a moment when I was working on the mural, and there was a kind fo sound, like static: what it was was actually the wind blowing through the trees. So I come outside and I see this gigantic storm right in front of the Christian church building across the street, in the field, and it’s coming in from a pressure drop, and I immediately knew who it was. So I opened the door and I stepped off to the side and this storm’s just getting closer nad closer, and I’m like, “I don’t know why you did what you did. I don’t know why you started what you started. But I’m not a God: I’m just a a guy. But I’m really kind of flopping around like a fish in there, and I hope you like what I’m doing, and if you don’t, just bear in mind that I’m trying my best”.

And all of a sudden, this wind comes in, and a soft rain hits me, and I was like: “I’m hoping that this is a sign that you’re pleased”. And I said, “I gotta get back to work”, and just said “thank you”, and I went back to work, and kept going. Daniel and Heather were so crucial to that. Like, there were times where they were cleaning the pews or scrubbing the floors while I was up on the ladder nad they would help me, and hand me paints, and we really got to know eachother. It really forged me and the Youngs together.

And the mural, you know, was tweaked and worked on and then finally, I’ll tell you you’re going to be talking about the runes and the idea of utilizing the runes to pass information via the murals and what we thought we should use and what rules we should use and my suggestion was to use all the Futharks to create a Futhark that had every rune or not every rune but a rune from one of the Futharks and he really liked that idea so the folk Futhark was born from that

Chris: So real quick: can I ask specifically for the Thor mural: what kind of paint is it? Is it like acrylic, is it oils, ...

Svan: Oh no so it is acrylic: I learned on YouTube from someone there was the way to make or soften acrylic. To blend they used pastels, oil pastels. So it’s a combination of sketch acrylic paint to fill in all the big areas and then oil pastel to do the blending and all of that stuff, because I’m not good at all, like I can’t... I’m not a painter.

Chris: You could have fooled me and a lot of people though.

Svan: Like, yeah my only experience is tattoo art, and you know a lot of that is black and white, and sketches, and small, and on horizontal surfaces. So yeah that was my first one.

Chris: So Baldrshof got attacked pretty heavily by the media, and I don’t want to say the people of Murdock, but there was a lot of like, on the ground struggle by people brought in from outside of it, that they had to go through.

Svan: It definitely wasn’t the people of Murdock, it was outsiders. Here, it was one woman and she was drawing in an outside element regarding the Linden area and the media

Chris: Was there any kind of upset at the hof or in the media?

Svan: None that I was aware. We had a little bit with the city government. I eventually talked a woman in it, and she was really happy because she went to this church building when she was a kid, and by that time we had found the grave of Philip Bethea, and I was shocked to find out that it was there. I was like “hey, you know there’s a grave on the ground”, and she was like “there’s a grave?”. So like the previous people that owned the building did not even know that there was a grave there: it was really sad, and so I told her: “we’re trying to fix things up; we’re getting a headstone”. I got the headstone, I ended up finding a way to do the life rune and death rune, and all of that, and of course the Allsherjargoði was telling everyone like “he needs us to do this: it needs to be better than what he had” so you know, the Allsherjargoði was really pushing for us to be respectful and to make a statement that we care, even though this guy was Christian and from a long time ago. But that didn’t matter.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Philip Bethea, distant relative of Folkbuilder Tyler Bethea, was buried on the lot that is now the Thorshof building’s. He grave was not taken care of by the prior Christian owners, and was left to languish.]

And she loved that. She was like “I didn’t even know that” and she was like “wow that’s really good”. So everything was great, and then she comes to the hof one day while we’re turning on the water and doing all that and she’s just kind of gushing with the fact she’s so happy that we’re keeping it a church building. And I told her we are a church we’re keeping it a church, but after the opening I met back up with her to ask her for help about food drives and getting food, and the tone was very different. She said that Antifa had been calling her.

Eventually the press did catch wind and they interviewed a bunch of people in Fayetteville and it fell flat on its face. There was some nonFolk people that they interviewed: there was a Black guy and he was like “I don’t care: they stay in their lane, I stay in mine. As long as they’re not trying to hurt people”. And then one of the local landowners, he told the reporter off; “if it was an all Black church you guys wouldn’t even be here! Leave them alone!”. We had some support in the community. But the city goverment isn’t so supportive of us. I don’t know if it’s because we’re not Christian or because they got harassed by Antifa. But by now I think we have proven our tempo.

What we’re doing, who we are, what we’re about, so and a lot of people... Heather Young got her way into the Linden safety [Facebook] page and there was a hoopla there, but eventually you know, it calmed down and a lot of those folks are realizing that as far as they’re concerned we’re just doing food drives. We’re just doing stuff to help people out. Their prejudices against us have been diffused, they have not had any issues, and thankfully we’ve not had any real problems. The reporters were actually coming around after we had opened up but we were still renovating and because both me and Daniel and Heather weren’t there whenever they came by, they got nothing.

Chris: So before we talk about the Turks and then go into local hof spirituality, hof hero, and your role as a hof gothi, I just want to ask real quick I have it in my head you and Matt talking about like something that happened at Thorshof and then you guys got defended by what I believe was called, like, “the sweet Black lady church” or something like that?

[EDITOR’S NOTE: They do not, in fact, go on to talk about the Turkish state media’s hitpiece.]

Svan: This might actually be Baldrshof that you’re thinking of. Yeah I’ve met a couple of Black women during the food drive and they talked to us and they were very nice. I mean obviously we had no problems with them, but I don’t think to my knowledge there was... I mean it could be us but I just don’t know.

Chris: It must have been Baldrshof then. I can ask Witan Fassett. I know we’re going to have to do like six separate interviews for all the crap involving Baldrshof because there’s just so much that was a mess.

Svan: I just, again, I felt a little saddened because the very victory that happened kind of ended up being the reason why I was like... Thorshof was overlooked: Baldrshof was in the way. They were fighting the good fight, they needed things, etc, etc, and [to the media] I was kind of like “But I’m here too! [Take some of their burden, give it to me!]”. But you know Thor’s guidance is... you know, “get the job done: don’t complain about it”. And everything did work out in the end, so I mean I’m fine with it but it was just at that time I remember really feeling kind of forgotten about.

Oh! The other thing! So, the Allsherjargoði was saying he wanted to again create Bifrost bridge back to Asgard, and since I was now the newly second temple he was like “you need to like choose colors” and I was like “okay well Odinshof is red, and it’s like that fire engine Macintosh red”, so I said “you know what I’m gonna do orange, like an autumn orange, burnt fall orange”, and my hope was that Baldrshof would take yellow

Chris: Oh that’d be kind of cool.

Svan: Yeah, but and especially with Baldr being the Lord of Light etc. But they didn’t because they already had everything in, you know the blue and white, and they already had the hof figured out so that was kind of a funny thing. Like I was saying, I love the patterns and I love how things connect and I wanted it to be like that. But, the Allsherjargoði was like “no the color isn’t about the rainbow, the hofs are just kind of like each strand of the bridge we’re building back to the Gods”.

Chris: To be fair, California, then jump to the east coast, then have one in the middle: that is kind of a pleasing pattern.

Svan: I see it now especially with the idea of like, with war, and with territory you want to expand to your furthest reaches and then build within, and I totally get that, and but at the time I just I was so hell bent on helping them get second one. When I was praying to Thor I was not praying for me, I was praying for them. I’m fine with it now everything’s worked out as it as it has been decreed.

but um yeah so that kind of set me in the position of making the murals and as more hops are coming about you know I’m actually an integral part of that like hey we’re working on the wall and the rest of the hop might not be finished but we got a space for you Swan and thankfully my job is very very loose and my life is very very flexible and being able to let me you know run away for yeah you know and work on these um how much more time do you have by the way we are in the same time zone because I only have a few more little bits here to ask and we can expedite this oh no I’m good we’re after no I’m I’m fine we could go all night if you want uh I no I I don’t want to do that no offense but yeah no you got you had your time um but

Chris: So does Thorshof do any kind of charity or community stuff different from any of the other hofs that you know of?

Svan: No. We do the food drive, and we follow the the model that Odinshof does. Well no, we do... I don’t know if they do this, but we do a toy drive, and a coat drive during Yule.

Chris: That’s cool.

Svan: Yeah I mean that’s kind of outside of the norm but for I remember I remember Folkbuilder Ashley Erlandson doing something about Toys For Tots or whatever like last year, so I don’t know, but maybe she’s trying to get it going. Ours is strictly local and there’s no [outside] organization. Like I would love to work with Toys For Tots because you know they’re connected with the marines, but no we do it locally and it’s been a big success. We have people come in, they’re very timid, they don’t know if they’re like, gonna get ambushed or something, and then we just give the kids toys, and we give the parents toys for their kids.

Chris: So tell me about the hof hero.

Svan: Oh yeah: I specifically asked for Alexander Rudd Mills.

Chris: Why?

Svan: Well because he was doing something aesthetic. I’m the aesthetic minded member of the Witan you know, and one of the big things for me was that he was doing something that no one else was doing at the time. He was not LARPing as a Viking, he was making the Anglican Church of Odin, or rather it was the “Angle Kyn Church of Odin” with his his little idiosyncratic spelling of Anglican

He wore a suit he did not present himself as someone trying to attempt to be a viking, or of that agem and in reality I don’t even think that was very popular back then: he was just he was a man of his age who was saying “we need to relinquish ourselves from the subtext of Abrahamism, of Semitic religion, we need to get completely out it and wake up”, and I loved that it. It just sang to me. He was just being that kind of ultra pioneer, ultra DOING stuff that no one else was doing really. I guess that is our milieu of breaking barriers and thresholds is Thorhof, and I that was I think my main drive and motivation behind it.

Chris: Do we have any of his written works available?

Svan: Yes actually we have a book [in the hof]. So that’s another interesting thing: right after he was chosen to be the hero, the Allsherjargoði ran into somebody on the interwebs who reached out to him about the fact that they had a physical copy, a print, of one of his books, but it got even deeper than. Inside the book was a personally typed and signed letter from Alexander Rudd Mills, and it was written from who lived in Australia to this English general. And this was just on the onset of World War II, like so, this this English general shared, you know, views of nationalism and such and was a fan, and he [A. Rudd. Mills] gave him a personal copy. It is a blue book, a seat box on the cover

Chris: So what is the book called?

Svan: See that’s the thing, there’s no title on the front, it’s just a collection of poems.

Chirs: Oh wow.

Svan: We’re working on getting it copied down, I can’t recall the name that we were calling it by as we did so. He did write quite a few books, and this one is, again, poems, and it’s filled with sentiments that I had about how, you know, Christianity is Semitic and how the European Germanic Folk will not be free unless they remove themselves from the Semitic religion, and there’s also things about like Viking raiders, and a poem about them going up on shore and fighting, and a lot about nationalism, and the spirit of the Anglo people, and how they must save themselves, so it’s it’s really, really good stuff.

Chris: So tell me about local hof spirituality. I know that the Thorshof ladies do the red lady cloaks right?

Svan: Thorsof’s got the three ladies in red, with the bundle of special herbs that are thrown into the fire. The smoke [from it] is to bless the Folk. It’s a Nornanótt sort of thing. To be honest a lot of people don’t... coming into Asatru and seeing that people [outside of the AFA] all over the United States don’t know what to do with certain holidays... I mean May Day is a given with the Maypole, but [outside of the AFA] they didn’t really have a lot of idea why they were doing things, and when I became a gothi people would often come to us with that ignorance and so the idea was to lead by example. Not to say it, but instead do it, and show people how it is good. I think our hof is very forward in the innovation of our church.

I don’t know if you saw all the plows during Charming of the Plow, but people were taking pictures of them. And now Baldrshof a plow, now Odinhof has a plow: that started because of me and my practice of Asatru with the kindred, before we got hte temple, and how we we had a physical plow. Not everyone had a physical plow! I have that same plow at the hof now that I’ve been using for... years now almost, a decade and a half, so there was ritual refinement that I think our hof is doing. We’re not doing it solely other people: no, what we’re attempting to do is give things substance.

[Hofgyðja and] Witan Fassett, she has a very extensive religiosity as well. A lot of the stuff that Baldrshof does emanates from [Witan] Brandy [Fassett] and a lot of the stuff that Thorshof does emanates from me. It’s because we both have a very long history of religiosity in the faith, but I come from a solitary practitioner, to constructing kindreds, to kind of constructing these things on my own, and she has more of “I have been taught this” kind of background.

I don’t know if you know about this but the well springs with the water, and the women carrying the water: that was me and her discussing precepts of building Goddess worship in our Church so me and her really do a lot of that. Here’s a good example: this weekend we’re going to be doing the stick fight and people on VNS were asking about it. That’s something that we want to spread throughout the church, to do at house blót or Winter Finding. That absolutely comes from me and my old kindred back in the day, and what me and one other guy kind of worked on and what it eventually morphed into was the turning of the equinox and the fight between the light and the dark, and the land spirits, and also the ultimate end of the fight determines whether we’re going to have a soft winter or a cold winter, and so that’s entirely from me but I don’t want it to be like a “Svan thing”. I also don’t want it to be a Thofshof thing: I want uniformity across the church, and I think it’s a matter of convincing people whether or not it’s good. I’m getting some headway there so I think that’s going to become more prevalent as we go hopefully.

Chris: So Thorshof is kind of like the experimental hof right now, in a certain sense.

Svan: Yeah, doing things, placing them forward, and allowing other people to see them so that we can add more consistency throughout our hof. I mean [Gyðja] Sheila [McNallen]’s very, very receptive. So like this last Sigrblót at Odinshof they had the men with swords, and swords are kind of a thing I’ve been trying to push. I’ve been trying to get our children to associate simple things with the holy tides, you know Easter eggs for Austra, and swords for Sigrblót, and brooms for Nornanótt, etc. I’m laying it out for the AFA, plus tweaking it to fit the temple, and larger groups, and so on. My whole motivation is “what would this ceremony look like if we were living in a Folk nation where everybody was Asatru, and we had 100-500 people doing everything together as a rule”. I think that my stuff is a little bit more simpler than [Witan] Brandy [Fassett]’s, hers is very complex and I think I feel like it’s built towards the practitioner kind of testing themselves. It’s very much more like a Rune Gild kind of thing, and mine was more like community building.

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