 Greetings and salutations. Welcome to this jule special with my good friend Tom. Welcome back to the channel. Thanks mate. Good to be here. Yeah, good to have you here and we are actually at our special place of the dead. It's a grave field. Yes, this is Orser Grafelt, our cellar urn in Sweden. And it's a very old and very large pagan burial ground with many barrows like these you see here dating. I'm gonna move out of the way so you can properly admire them. Here's two beautiful ones and these probably date to the Iron Age but some of the ones here are more recent from the Viking Age and there's also stone circles, stone ship settings as well here but from that from somewhere between the Iron Age and the Viking Age. So this was used for well over a thousand years as a burial ground for many pagans. Yeah, so we're at the western shores of Mälaren and Mälaren is well a central lake which connects to Stockholm and all around Mälaren you can find a lot of viking burials etc. And obviously I know Tom you've made videos from Uppsala and the thing is that the level of the sea was much higher back in the day so probably where we stand now I don't know how high up we are but with this burial ground is all on a ridge you can do a shot afterwards to show exactly what we're looking at but we're really high up and all these mounds are on this ridge but this ridge used to be an island so what we can see now is feel of like agricultural land surrounding the ridge was of course just the lake and that meant actually the lake itself was more of the sea then because it was connected right out to Stockholm with the Baltic so like all the Viking boats could come up here and then see the burial mounds very prominently as their sailing past because it's like a motorway of those times so people wanted their mounds to be known like runestones that are set like on roads or near to like a waterway so everyone can see the names of the dead or the barrows of the dead so they can be remembered for many years to come yeah definitely so if you are interested in these sort of things and you plan a trip to Sweden the region of Mälaren definitely including Uppsala because that's connected via the waterways yeah so anyway since this is uh jul slash christmas special do you have any any take on jul or christmas as a pagan it's pagan origins i thought you would be the best to answer this question because i know a lot of my subscribers have um have asked this as well well of course you may celebrate your how you choose you may if you're a pagan you may have established your own rights and ways of doing things and that's fine i'm not trying to say there's anything wrong with the way you've chosen to do stuff but let me say what i understand from about how germanic pagan yule was practiced uh both the the anglosaxon and the north sources say that it was two months of yule so that's uh dissent equivalent to december and january but they used a different calendar so it wouldn't be exactly the same times but yeah so two months long two moons and uh in the main big celebration would be in the second month but within the yule time these two yule months there's many celebrations many sacred uh events for different gods so and for different reasons during this holy time the main one which uh is called which is also called yule uh i think that would happen on the new moon following the full moon following the solstice but many people like to just do it on the solstice because now we have a solar calendar but the germanic people use a lunar solar calendar so they use they calculated by both the moon and the sun combined so in any case that main festival was all about odin he was the main person celebrated for that one and it and it began with a sacrifice of a horse or something like that to odin and then many days of drinking that would last and feasting because the word yule was actually used as a kenning to mean feast and other times of year as well because the yule feast was such a big meal so that big celebration of drunkenness and feasting and coming together was the main yule celebration but as i said it's two months long and there are other things one of them is only attested in anglo-saxa sources they say the night before yule they had something called modernicht which means night of the mothers and i think that would be very similar to what the norse had called disir blot which or disir blot because and that was actually at the end of february but the anglo-saxa one was the night before yule and it's about celebrating and worshiping the clan mothers the ancestral mothers of your race so not really just all your not actual you know your great grandmother or whatever but rather like symbolic representatives like divine female like goddesses almost who represent your people and that they you know their help their instrumental in bringing the luck and fortunes of your people so that would be an important and very solemn occasion too and we can see from the fact that odin is the lord of the dead and that we have the modernicht as well which is about ancestral deities or something like a deity there's definitely a connection this time of year with the dead and i think that that is why we should remember our ancestors at this time of year and come to maybe somewhere like this or to wherever you can wherever it's appropriate for where you live and think about the about your ancestors and your people and remember that your ancestors are watching now another thing that most of my subscribers will be somewhat familiar with is the wild hunt because i usually issue my wild hunt challenges and that is to usually something to do with self-improvement that you embrace the embark upon the wild hunt to do something and i do this to get this mystic heroic epic feel but that's connected to the wing results this as well correct uh yeah the wild hunt is is preserved in all different folkloric sources from around europe and i i'm sure that some of them connected to midwinter definitely in england i mostly only know about the english folkloric English folkloric sources where it's definitely associated with winter uh i don't know if it's associated specifically with christmas in england but it may well be in other parts of europe but it's widely agreed although it's over the centuries the wild hunts become associated with different figures like king arthur some local famous person like barbaros or whatever but originally it's probably most likely that it was all about odin and that it the rise from odin and in sweden it's always been connected to odin because they never departed from that original meaning of it all right cool yeah we will actually make a another video in try to find some sort of cafe or some warmer place to talk a bit more about the arthurian legend and the green night because uh yeah that will have to be we'll talk more in in the next video so thank you tom and uh and yeah thank you for watching good yule hail our ancestors