The Rise of Charismatic Heathenism

Heathenism has changed. In the 2010s, the global popular culture market saw a surge in the production and consumption of Viking-themed and Norse-inspired media products, with music, movies, television series, and video games shaping public perception of Vikings, Norse mythology, and its often-presumed links to contemporary Heathenism. In this book, scholar of religion Jane Haug Skjoldli, Ph.D., traces and analyzes self-identifying Heathens' experiences of entering their religion, their encounters with deities they hold dear, their experiences with Norse-inspired music, movies, television series, and video gamesand the roles such media products play in their religious conversion and practice. Using her innovative religious interaction framework to analyze Heathens' visual and aural practices, Skjoldli demonstrates how the influx of Norse-inspired media productsparticularly musicgive rise to charismatic authority as Heathens mix their religion to remix their reality. Offering an original way of critically studying Heathenism that challenges conventional wisdom in Pagan Studies, and to analyze links between aesthetics, media technology, and power dynamics within religious groups, this book is a must for scholars and students interested in the complex relationships between religion and popular culture.

In-depth discussions of Viking-themed popular culture Analysis of Heathens' relationships with said popular culture Examines the consequences of religious-commercial collaboration for religious hierarchies

Autorentext

Jane Skjoldli is a Professor in the Study of Religion at the Western Norway University of Applied Sciences. Her research interests are contemporary Catholicism, Charismatic Christianity, and Norse-oriented contemporary Paganism, as well as analytical approaches relating particularly to material religion, religion and digital games, and religion and popular culture more broadly. She is Principal Investigator of the research project Back to Blood: Pursuing a Future from the Norse Past, which is funded by the Norwegian Research Council. She defended her Ph.D. in the study of religion at the University of Bergen in 2018, and published her thesis with the book World Youth Day: Religious Interaction at a Catholic Festival (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2021). She has also co-edited an anthology about Charismatic Christianity in Finland, Norway, and Sweden with Jessica Moberg (Gothenburg University), and published several articles relating to religion and popular culture in both English and Norwegian. Skjoldli often combines research methods and analytical concepts in her work, preferring to draw on eclectic bodies of theory and methodology to find new ways of approaching relevant subjects. As such, her articles cover diverse topics, such as the aforementioned book on the Catholic Festival World Youth Day based on archival research and fieldwork where she drew on theory in digital games studies as well as material religion, media analyses of South Park and Viking-themed series and movies, to the development of new tools for analysis by building on existing concepts such as Bron Taylor's dark green religion. For this book, Skjoldli combines research results from a digital survey, follow-up interviews, and participant observation, approaching contemporary confluences of Vikings and popular culture with an interpretive framework she has developed over the past five years and continues to develop in this book: religious interaction, interface, and immersion.

Inhalt

Chapter 1. Introduction.- Chapter 2. Mixing Religion, Remixing Reality.- Chapter 3. Conversions of a Lesser Kind?.- chapter 4. Where Did the Horned Helmets Go?.- Chapter 5. Ludic Temples.- Chapter 6. Rune Music.- Chapter 7. Runic Vision.- Chapter 8. The Rise of Charismatic Heathenism.- Chapter 9. Conclusion.