In Nottinghamshire lives an Odinist cult. We meet the charming, not very Nordic, Viking obsessed men of the Odinist Fellowship of Newark-on-Trent.
There was a brief window, back there in the twenty-teens, where, if you wanted, you could buy something on Amazon and – thanks to Amazon’s now-defunct Smile programme – have 0.5 percent of the purchase price donated to the Odinist Fellowship of Newark-on-Trent.
This is the kind of quaint anachronism that comes up fairly often in the Odinist game. These stewards of a pre-Christian Nordic religion operate out of an old almshouse chapel not far off the A1 (down Beacon Hill Road, straight on past the skatepark and it’s on your left, round the bend). The Fellowship is Registered Charity 298688, and its official objective is ‘the continuation and promotion of the organic spiritual beliefs and religion of the indigenous peoples of northern Europe’.
As the only active pagan worship building in the UK, the Odinist Temple is a site of minor local interest. It’s open to the public on Wednesday afternoons, and welcomes visits from the town’s schoolchildren: ‘Following the recent school visits by the eight and nine-year-olds of ___ Primary School, I was delighted to receive a very generous donation from the School,’ temple director Ralph Harrison posted in summer 2022.
So far, so wholesome. In a world of bewildering full-tilt change it is perhaps a comfort to know that in a quiet corner of England some holdouts still honour ‘the gods of our Folk’.
‘Odinism’ is a contested term for a strand of revivalist religious belief – or perhaps reconstructionist, as there wasn’t much left to revive – that purports to derive from the beliefs of Germanic people in pre-Christian Europe. So that’s the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and related Nordic societies, between around the 4th and 8th centuries.
Because these Germanic societies constituted a pre-literate culture, it’s very hard to know much for sure about who they were and what they did, let alone what they really believed (or what ‘belief’ even meant to them, what religion even was). Did these people really extol ‘the Nine Noble Virtues’ – courage, truth, honour, discipline, and so on – as the Odinists maintain? Well, who’s to say they didn’t?
And there’s one other thing the Odinists want to make clear.
‘The Odinist form of paganism is ethnospecific,’ the website says.
This is a religion for white people.
‘We do not discriminate against people on the grounds of ethnicity,’ Ralph Harrison told me, carefully, when I emailed him to enquire (registered charities are expressly forbidden under the 2010 Equality Act from limiting access to their services on the basis of skin colour). No: what happens is, ‘were we to receive a request to administer the Odinist Pledge of Faith to, say, a Japanese or a Nigerian, we would encourage that person to embrace his indigenous form of heathenism’.
Naturally I had follow-up questions, but Mr Harrison was not impressed by my credentials and was even less impressed by The Fence, and declined my request for an interview. So I went to Newark anyway.
It’s a nice place, Newark, roughly midway between Nottingham and Lincoln, a classic market town, neatly turned-out, all red brick and big skies, proud of its church (the tallest in Nottinghamshire), under-resourced but still managing to keep a bit of bustle going: a poster in the carpark advertises a paddleboard race, a Morris ‘day of dance’, a vegan market and a steampunk festival.
The Odinists are not the only occultists in town. A pub I call in at (‘Cheapest pints in Newark!’) turns out to be the HQ for a biker club called the Heathen Horde. At the Magick Witch Shop I get talking to Sinéad, a young pagan who explains that paganism is an umbrella term for groups united by a belief in spirituality – even in a small town like Newark, she says, the different divisions don’t really have anything to do with each other. She doesn’t know anything about the Odinists, or for that matter the Heathen Horde.
When I get to the temple and step inside – it’s a tiny place, around the size of the average front room – I’m greeted politely by a well-spoken and somewhat effete man in late middle-age. He’s wearing a baggy pullover and drinking a takeaway coffee. This is Ralph Harrison.
Harrison has sometimes taken the name ‘Ingvar’. He’s a former editor of the right-wing magazine Right Now! and has been described by Hope Not Hate as ‘a longstanding far-right activist’. On Facebook he uses his middle name, Michael, to post on the Odinism UK page about ‘Communist-inspired wokery’, ‘Londonistan’, ‘anti-British haters’ who ‘must be purged’, ‘left-wing agitators’ (the Bishops of Dover and Croydon), the ‘treachery’ of ‘leftists and jihadists’, the ‘good sense’ of Vladimir Putin and ‘Communist Oxfam’.
You don’t have to go far back through neo-heathen history to find the origins of the Odinist Fellowship in the Odinic Rite, and to soon find yourself waist-deep in good old-fashioned fascism. There isn’t a huge amount to be learned by playing that sort of I-danced-with-a-girl-who-danced-with-a-boy-who-danced-with-Baroness-Birdwood game. Similarly, it doesn’t take a lot of googling to identify the many points at which modern Odinism crosses paths with modern far-right groups, both here and overseas.
I wasn’t there to interrogate Harrison, anyway. He’d rejected my approach as a journalist and you can only get so inquisitive as a passing sightseer without breaking cover: ‘Yes, yes, interesting, what a fascinating find, of course I will sign the visitors’ book, but first could you please tell me exactly what you mean by ‘“ethnospecific”’.
I just sort of stood there while he talked about the Norse gods whose portraits were ranged around the temple walls. That was about all there was to talk about in the room, give or take a few unappealing books and a plain altar with some sort of horn on it.
The pitch seemed well-practised. Odinism is a common sense religion: no miracles, no mysteries, a very modern outlook, which is certainly one way to spin a mid-20th-century nativist reinvention of a 4th-century mythology. And of course it’s a nature religion too. Harrison handed me a flyer lamenting ‘Man’s abuse of nature and the environment’ and touting ‘the native religion of our forefathers’ as ‘a solution to the … crisis of the West.’
I wonder if you get to choose which forefathers you venerate when you sign up. Why stop in the 4th century? Why not keep going back? Perhaps the solution to the crisis of the West is to be found in the simple faith of our late-Cenozoic forefathers. Or perhaps forefathers are overrated.
Part-way through all this another man came into the temple. He was stern and fit-looking, with cropped grey hair, wearing shorts and some kind of RAF-looking bomber jacket. I half-expected Harrison to say ‘here is our paramilitary wing’, but he was just introduced as ‘one of our comrades’. He was friendly enough. Why did you become an Odinist? I asked him, and he said ‘because I hate Christians.’
‘They slaughtered us, to make room for them,’ he told me, and it sounded like he was still furious about it.
This, essentially, is the Odinists’ stab-in-the-back legend, the pagan origin story that continues to nourish their anti-immigrant, white-supremacist ideology. The motivating narrative is all about what ‘we’ had, and what ‘they’ took from us. It’s still, always, all about invasion and replacement.
I didn’t stay long. On the drive home I kept thinking about the school visit.
Vikings are cool, obviously. If you’re eight or nine years old it must be practically impossible to think of anything more cool. One of the paintings in the temple showed the god Tyr getting his sword-hand bitten off by a magic wolf.
I expect with Year 5s they just stick to fun gods and a bit of ancient history. I don’t suppose they get into the ethnospecifics of it all till a bit later. I wonder if any black or Asian kids have been along on a visit (Newark is about 95 percent white, so it’s not impossible that none have) – I wonder what they got told, if they have. Then I wonder what the white kids got told. I wonder about both these things all the way home.
ODINISM FEEDS THE SOUL, reads a post on the Facebook feed, below a picture of a father and son and a golden field of wheat. Feeds it what, though, exactly, is the question.
