A great year for the Northern Folkway

By Baz Bardoe

Anyone who has studied archaeology or anthropology over the last few decades would be familiar with the politically motivated version of human evolution which we are told is the only acceptable explanation of who we are and how we got here.

According to this version of events we are all descended from a bloke who lived in Africa about one million years ago. (Of course he wasn’t a ‘bloke’ in any sense we could now understand the term. He was a proto human and wouldn’t have looked in the least like Denzel Washington, or Nelson Mandela, or in fact anyone we might now tend to think of as being uniquely ‘African’.) This distant ancestor supposedly had plenty of children and over a period of thousands of years these early pre humans spread out of Africa, and across the rest of the world, gradually turning into the different racial groups we see today, albeit all of the same modern human type. About five thousand years ago complex socialisation started to emerge in the ‘Fertile Crescent’, and from there ‘civilisation’ spread to the rest of the world. Us Northerners were always presented as being backward throwbacks on the periphery of civilisation, who didn’t really do much until a few hundred years ago when we built a vast navy, conquered almost the entire world, and set about inventing almost every modern technological widget imaginable from concrete to televisions, anaesthetic to jet engines. Late bloomers in the context of civilisation if you like.

Anthropologists tend to pride themselves on not being racist or political in their observations, but when it comes to anything about Nordish people, that rule goes right out the window. The explanation for the origin of Nordish peoples was that we are ‘mutants’ who popped up a mere eight thousand years ago as a result of Afroid people not getting enough UV. The fact that this flies in the face of all the evidence says a great deal about the success of the Left’s ‘long march through the Universities’ in the 1950’s, 60’s and 70’s. Enemy number one was the then dominant Anglo paradigm, and nothing would stand in the way of demolishing it, including facts.

Over the last few years however we have seen some pretty significant finds that are causing some gnashing of teeth amongst the baby boomer socialists, and a sigh of relief from anyone genuinely interested in anthropology, archaeology and all that sort of thing. Nordish mummies dating back at least 8000 years have been found throughout Western China, and their clothing and personal effects provides tantalising circumstantial evidence about the true origins of that nation’s complex socialisation. Nordish DNA is also found in the male upper caste Indians, suggesting a small band of males lent their DNA to the region. (The fact that India now has a caste system and the Norse also had a caste system, albeit a ‘meritocracy’, is also a tantalising piece of the puzzle.) More recently the remains of early ‘Aryan’ civilisation have been found in the Ukraine, complete with plenty of swastikas daubed on the walls, and proto runic scripts. (Relax people, the swastika is an ancient holy symbol….) All across Germany ‘observatory’ sites have been found dating back at least 8000 years. Archaeo-genetics now shows us that over 80% of the population of the UK are descended from the same few hundred ancestors who travelled to that land on foot some 13,000 years ago, making the British one of the world’s oldest indigenous peoples – a remarkable feat considering the subsequent cultural overlays.
Fossil evidence also now indicates that as recently as 30,000 years ago there was at least three quite different modern human types, and that the people now occupying Africa may well have remigrated there. It paints a picture of human evolvement that is more complex than previously admitted, and in terms of Nordish anthropology, vastly more ancient.

A look at the basics of how Nordish physical characteristics are passed on also supports this. Blue eyes are a ‘recessive’ gene for example. Two blue eyed people must have a blue eyed child, but if a blue eyed person has a child with a brown eyed person, that child will always be brown eyed unless the brown eyed person is carrying a blue eyed recessive gene. If this popped up just 8000 years ago as a one off genetic ‘mutation’, how is it that homogenous blue eyed communities exist, and how could they have come into being in such a (relatively) short space of time? The current ‘explanation’ suggests that a one off mutation almost instantly resulted in a large amount of similar, culturally homogenous people, even though their genetics are recessive. It doesn’t make sense. A longer period of time and a strict exclusion of non recessive genetics is the only explanation. Quite how this all happened may never be known. Some have suggested selective breeding which is certainly not unknown in the ancient world.

Why is all this important? For most people it isn’t but for anthropologists and their ilk, the pursuit of truth is supposed to be at the core of our discipline. And for those who follow the Northern Folkway, there is a belief that we carry the ancestral consciousness of our people within us. Anthropologists may call it ‘cultural DNA” and indigenous peoples may refer to the spirits of the ancestors and the sacred connection between the present and the past. But for us, the past is carried within us. What our ancestors did, what they achieved, and the antiquity of the cultural and spiritual aspects of the Folkway are important truths that need to be recognised. For a long time now there has been a double standard in place. We are encouraged to respect all other indigenous cultures and to delve into their antiquity with objectivity, but when it comes to my own…..it has been politicised and treated very poorly. Ultimately it is simply about unravelling layers of truth and attempting to gain greater understanding of our origins and place in the world.

Many Nordish peoples now find themselves on a path of cultural and spiritual rediscovery, and some refer to this as ‘Odinism’ or ‘Asatru’. We find the remnants of the ‘old’ Gods under the Christian overlay which has existed for a millennia, but long before the Iron Age pantheon there was an even more ancient strand of culture and belief that continues to this day and shows itself in myriad customs, values and traditions. Long before the Iron Age Gods, there were other, more primal Gods who have existed in the consciousness of the Nordish people for millennia. Stories of a ‘war’ between the Asa and Vanir Gods point to an overlay of the Iron Age pantheon over something vastly more ancient. 8000 and more years ago the ancestors painted the holy symbol of the sun, the swastika on walls, and no doubt placed evergreen foliage around their dwellings as a symbolic invocation of the forces of spring and renewal, so yearned for in midwinter. At this time of year especially it is worth pondering how Nordish ‘mutants’ have been doing very similar things for thousands of years.

The origins of the Northern Folkway lie somewhere in the vast expanses of time between 8000 and 40,000 years ago. Incredibly, much of what was done thousands of years ago, is still being done today. And if evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller is correct, our brains are still much the same, and we process things in much the same manner. Mobile phones may be new, but our ‘worldview’ if you like, hasn’t changed that much.

This was at the core of my decision to establish Ull’s Hearth, in an attempt to pass on the smatterings of knowledge I have inherited, and form a focus for a greater sense of antiquity than often presently exists. Rune warriors, a merit based caste system, the two main warrior cults, and our system of shamanism all stem from the stone age. Archaeology is starting to reveal more and more of what a handful have been teaching all along. Overall it’s been a great year for the Northern Folkway.