What is Asatru?
Long before Christianity came to northern Europe, the people there – our ancestors – had their own form of spirituality that influenced every aspect of their culture. One expression of this European spirituality was Asatru. It was practiced in the lands that are today Scandinavia, England, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and other countries as well. Asatru is the original, or native, religion for the peoples who lived in these regions. Nevertheless, Asatru is more than just a religion in the narrow sense of the word. It is our way of being in the world; some of us call it the “Germanic Folkway” to underline this larger concept.

What does the word “Asatru” mean?
It means, roughly, “belief in the Gods” or “those true to the Gods” in Old Norse, the language of ancient Scandinavia in which so much of our source material was written. (A more literal translation would be “gaining experience of the ancestral sovereign gods.”) Asatru is a name given to the religion of the Norsemen, but we use this term to include the spiritual worldview of all the Germanic peoples, not just the Scandinavians.

When did Asatru start?
Asatru is thousands of years old (though it is practiced in a modern form today, to meet the needs of our age). Its beginnings are lost in prehistory, but it is older than Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, or most other religions. The spirit it expresses, though, is as ancient as the northern European peoples themselves because it is an innate expression of who and what we are – not merely a set of arbitrary beliefs we have adopted.