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The deer was lying in the middle of the road. There was no way he was going to avoid hitting it.

My friend and a buddy were on long haul to a heathen gathering. Flying down the Interstate in the early October dusk, they'd been driving all day; his companion was asleep in the passenger seat. In retrospect, my friend thinks that he'd been on the verge of drifting off himself, when suddenly the deer—as it were—materialized right in front of him.

My friend swerves to avoid it, but it's too late. With an explosive boom, the driver's side wheel ricochets off the deer, and the truck actually rears up on its two side tires. A rollover seems inevitable.

Somehow, my friend manages to wrestle the truck, now careening for the ditch, back down onto all fours. He hauls hard on the wheel, spraying gravel. When he finally regains control, he pulls over and stops, and—his friend now rudely awake—the two of them sit there a long while just breathing, badly shaken.

“I've got to go move that carcass,” my friend says, finally. You don't go leaving dead deer laying in the middle of the road for someone else to hit.

My friend gets out. He checks the front of the vehicle. Oddly, the impact doesn't seem to have done any damage. He checks underneath, where he'd heard the buck's body bouncing; no damage there, either. Looking skyward, eyes closed against the sudden gentle rain, he murmurs a prayer of thanks and kisses the truck full on the hood. Then he goes around back to get a tool to help move the body.

They're on their way to a heathen gathering. The only tool they have with them that could possibly be of any use is a reproduction Viking Age ax.

My friend takes the ax and starts walking. On the way he thinks: A big guy with a big beard in a leather biker jacket, walking down the side of the road, hefting an ax. This is gonna look really good.

He walks for maybe a quarter of a mile before he gets to the deer: once a 300-pound lord of the prairie, now a mess of tangled legs and blood. With the help of the ax, he manages to drag it off of the road.

Saying a few words to send the deer on its way, he spots a broken antler laying in a pool of blood. He picks it up and pockets it.

He walks back to the truck and gets in. That's when the state trooper pulls up.

He leans into the open window. “We had a report of a big guy walking along the side of the road with an ax,” he says.

“That would be me,” my friend tells him. “I hit a deer about a quarter mile back, and didn't want to leave it in the middle of the road.”

“Oh,” says the cop. “Did you boys want the meat?”

No, they didn't. They drive off, and eventually arrive safely at the gathering.

Unpacking, they find that one of the two bottles of killer home-brewed mead that they've brought with them has broken.

His buddy chafes at the loss, but my friend is content.

“When we reared up on two tires, I prayed: Get me out of this, and I'll pour you out a bottle of mead,” he said.

The truck could have been totaled. They could both have been injured, or killed. Instead, the only casualties were a deer, and a bottle of mead.

My friend finishes his story. We both take a sip of beer.

Let's let Professor Tolkien demonstrate.

Take a word from Old English—English as it was spoken 1000 years ago—one that either never existed, or once existed, but didn't survive into modern times: say hol-bytla, “hole-builder.”

Ask yourself: if this word had survived into modern times, and undergone—mutatis mutandis—all the usual sound changes, what would it look like today?

Enter hobbit.

If there is a linguistic term for this process of artificial verbal aging, I for one don't know what it is. Over the years, drawing on the Greek and Latin vocabulary that linguists tend to use to describe matters linguistic, I've coined several names for the process. None were sufficiently utile (or beautiful) to linger even in the memory of the coiner.

(Yes, I could laboriously go back through my notebooks and find them again. I'll spare both you and me the results.)

Recently I asked fellow ledesman (see below) Theodsman Nick Ritter—a better linguist than me, any day of the lunar month—what he would call it.

Anglishing, he promptly fired back.

Anglish is the name given to the conlang (“constructed language”) which asks precisely this question: if the English language had never undergone the type of Frenchification (= linguistic imperialism) that overtook it after 1066, what would it look like today?

One of the foundational principles of Anglish is the avoidance of Romance/Classical vocabulary whenever possible. Hence, my abortive attempts to coin a Greco-Latin term for this process of linguistic updating, wrong-headed from the beginning.

Thanks, Nick: Anglishing it is.

(“How, then, would one Anglish 'Beowulf'?” I ask him.

Beowulf's people, the Geats, also fell out of memory, as did the hero—whose name means “bee-wolf” (i.e. bear) himself. But Nick, of course, has a ready answer.

Hail and welcome, Bolf the Yeet.)

Old English had two different words that could be translated “tribe” or “people”: théod and léod. Without a detailed study of the words in their original context, it's hard to say what the difference in denotation between the two might have been to the English-speaking ancestors.

With the demise of tribal identity among speakers of English, neither of these words survived into modern times—13th century scholars had to borrow the Latin word for the concept—but, via the wonders of Anglishing, we can say that, had they survived, we would today say thede and lede.

So, what's the difference these days? Easily told: the people writ small, and the people writ large.

Example #1: While regarding themselves primarily as Athenians, Spartans, or Corinthians, ancient Greeks would all have regarded themselves as Hellenes.

Example #2: Speakers of Anishinabe (“Ojibway”) share a larger sense of kinship with other speakers of Algonquin languages, the larger linguistic family that includes Anishinabe and various other related languages.

Example #3: Modern-day Wiccans: Witch by thede, Pagan by lede.

Lest anyone think such linguistic nativism unique to speakers of English, let me hasten to assure you that there's an entire movement out there to revive Gaulish, the extinct language of ancient Gaul.

Heathenry includes many different traditions. Most major heathen sects derive their holidays from a specific country, time period, and / or language, but American Asatru tends to be more eclectic because its members tend to be of various ethnicities. Even when trying to replicate Icelandic Asatru holidays, American Asatru sometimes sets them on different dates due to different methods of calculation. Iceland celebrates Þorrablót on the Friday after the 9th of January. American Asatru celebrates Thurseblot on the full moon of January.

Each of the many heathen peoples of history had their own calendar system, and calculating modern dates for ancient holidays requires not only knowing what date the celebration was actually held-- which isn't always completely obvious from the available evidence-- but also doing the math to convert the old calendar system to our new one, often with a stop midway into the Julian calendar because correspondences between it and various ancient calendars are sometimes provided in written lore.

One of the many ancient calendars was the metonic calendar, which is now used by Theod, a heathen sect based on Anglo-Saxon culture. The metonic calendar months for 2019 are:

Æftera-Geól Jan. 8 – Feb. 5
Súlmónað Feb.6 – March 7
Hréðmónað March 8 – April 6
Éosturmónað April 7 – May 5
Þrimilci May 6 – June 4
Ærre-Líða June 5 – July 3
Æftera-Líða July 4 – Aug 2
Weodmónað AUg. 3 – Aug. 31
Háligmónað sept. 1 – Sept. 29
Winterfylleð Sept.30 – Oct. 29
Blótmónað Oct.30 – Nov. 27
Ærre-Geól Nov. 28 – Dec. 27

Although not all ancient heathen peoples celebrated solstices and equinoxes, many modern heathen sects and groups do. For 2019 these dates will be:

Spring Equinox March 20 Summer Solstice June 21 Fall Equinox Sept. 23 Winter Solstice Dec 21

A few more heathen or heathen related cultural holidays in January 2019 are:

Jan 1:

Yuul ends (Urglaawe)

Julfest ends (Germany)

Jan 8th:

The Whittlesea Straw Bear Festival in Whittlesea, England is celebrated the Tuesday following Plough Monday. Plough Monday is the first Monday after Twelfth Night (by the Gregorian Calendar.) In 2019 the Tuesday after Plough Monday is January 8th.

Midwinterhoorn Blazen ends (Overijssel, Netherlands)

Jan 9:

Day of Raud of Strong (American Asatru, Odinist)

Jan 11:

Þorrablót (Icelandic Asatru)

Jan 21:

Thurseblot (American Asatru)

Frequently Asked Question: Why do some American heathens hate Loki?

My Answer: Most Loki-haters hate him because other people taught them to. Of course that begs the question, how did the original teachers of Loki-hate decide to hate Loki? Some of them had bad experiences with Loki or Lokeans, some of them based their opinions of Loki on lore, some of them based their opinions of Loki on a mistaken impression that every pantheon has a Satan figure in it, and some have other reasons. Recently at least some hatred toward Loki and his followers is because of a perception that they are Marvel fangirls and therefore are not serious about heathenry.