Gangleri – bookreviews

The first issue after we moved arrived with some delay, but here we finally have the spring equinox issue, the first issue of the 14th year this magazine is made and also the first issue in the ‘new style’. From this issue on there will be shorter articles by more different writers, more focussed on the present and more variety in the writing style. In short: there will be more participation of members and readers. Fortunately nothing changed about the opening. Herman Vanhove as always opens with a nice and humorous article, this time about his “hammer of Thor”: his photocamera. Next article is anonymous (at least, under pseudonym) and calls for a digital answer to all the rubbish that is published on Youtube and similar canals under the banner of Asatru. Alwin Goethals, our very own mead-brewer, has written an article about mead, its history, its uses and the forms it took. Another pseudonym tells us a bit about the tree as a symbol in our faith and chairman Stefaan van den Eynde does something similar when he describes the habbits surrounding the May-pole in the next article. Founder Koenraad Logghe contributed two texts in a style we are not really used from him. The first is slightly religiously Christian, but makes the bridge to our own beliefs, the second is a “Hávamal” based on a notebook with Western-Flemish sayings that his mother used to collect. Between these two articles by Logghe, there is one of myself about Traditionalism and our Werkgroep Traditie and an interview with Gunther Theys of the Flemish metal band Ancient Rites. Theys takes some distance from the black metal scene, yet the interview is made up with “vintage” black metal kids with “corps paint”… Yet another pseudonym wrote a nice article about the sacred meaning of marriage. Two of the pseudonyms use the metaphor of Taliban to describe certain Christians and also the third anonymous has some quite anti-Christian rethoric. Hopefully this shows us more that some individuals have such feelings while this says nothing about our movement and perhaps it is just because these are the first articles published not written by an almost fixed group of writers.
In any case, the articles are still very interesting, the publication is still about 40 pages and the lay-out looks fine as ever. So, if you can read Dutch and you are interested in “Germanic and Celtic culture and spirituality”, be sure to get in contact with Traditie. To visit the website, click on the cover the of journal.

It usually wouldn’t take me almost four months to read a book of this size (530 pages), but moving from one house to another leaves me little time to read. For some reason Amazon still seems to not sell new copies of this journal, while when issue 1 was published, it was available on every corner of the street. Too bad, because Tyr is a nice read for people interested in Northern European mythology, esotericism or Traditionalism (either or not “radical”). There are numerous articles some of which are longer, others are shorter. This volume opens with some “against the modern world” texts and Michael O’Meare says something about “The Primordial and the Perennial”. Alain De Benoist follows with a magnificent article in which he combines Guénon’s idea of “Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power” (like the article is called) with Dumézil’s tripartite hypothesis and makes a very readable and informative text which -unfortunately- towards the end doesn’t keep the high level. Usual contributors such as Nigel Pennick, Stephen Flowers, Joscelyn Godwin, Ian Read, Michael Moynihan and Collin Cleary contributed alright to very nice texts about a variety of subjects. There is an article about Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson and the Icelandic Asatru federation, a long text about the ancient Baltic religion and Romuva, two lengthy and critical reviews of Mark Sedgewick’s Against The Modern World and many other book- and musicreviews. For more details and ordering go to the website of the publisher. Tyr remains a suggested reading.
Link: Ultra Publishing
Read quotes from Tyr here.