Black Walnut

Hail all! For the third Sunday of May, I have another poem for you. It’s about one of my two favorite trees, the eastern American Black Walnut (Juglans nigra). With it, there’s a picture of a local tree at the end, from last summer.

Enjoy!

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Black Walnut

A mighty tree, an American treasure,
is Juglans nigra, the Union’s walnut.
Warm, humid air with welcome sunshine
favors its growth in a fine summer.
‘Tis green everywhere: green are the leaves,
green the flowers and green the fruits.
The inside is sealed by a silver-gray bark;
placed underneath, with pungent scent
is a staining substance — a strong essence —

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The Skaldic Eagle on the Nordic Mythology Podcast

On April 4, I made an appearance on the Nordic Mythology Podcast, where I talked about kraftaskalds, the subject of my PhD dissertation. It runs for about 73 minutes. Now, the recording is available as episode #156 on all podcast platforms for everyone to join. Ones that I have links for in this post are:

Apple Podcasts
Youtube

Note, of course, that with the Youtube version, you also get the video! It’s also available on Google Podcasts, Spotify, and various other major podcast directories. Enjoy!

The Return of the Eagle’s Etsy Shop

After an extremely long hiatus, which included the entirety of my PhD studies and then some, I’ve reopened my Skaldic Eagle Etsy shop. This time around, I’m offering something new: my books. The first two offerings are my Viking Poetry for Heathen Rites (paperback edition) and Eagle’s Mead (the one and only edition in hardback). As I would be filling these orders directly myself, you can also request that it be signed!

That also means that quantities may be limited at times, and things may go out of stock occasionally. More listings are planned in the coming weeks.

You’ll notice that my shop says “Runes in Wood, Carved and Colored.” I used to have rune wands and rune lot sets listed there, but I have no current inventory. If you’re interested in a custom commission for “Runes in Wood, Carved and Colored,” whether it’s a wand, lot set, or something else, please contact me, and let’s work something out.

A Skaldic Eagle in the World

Welcome, Seekers, to a new phase of activity for this blog, and here is my first poem for you all. This is the Skaldic Eagle’s poem about his mission in the world, and so I felt it the most appropriate one for this relaunch, since it is a sequel to my earlier poem, “A Skaldic Eagle Takes Flight,” which launched a previous phase of this blog back in early 2017. If you haven’t already done so, you may wish to read that precursor poem, either before or after this one. Enjoy!

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A Skaldic Eagle must offer his Mead,
must give his gifts, for gain to the World;
the Work is imperative, a wode-filled impulse.
But defending the Center ‘gainst foes and shadows
—that its sacred light illumines unimpeded
a world of darkness—is a woesome task.
And even an eagle must often land,
and life on the ground can get one down,

Update for April 2023!

Wow, I see that it has been just over a year since I updated this blog! Exciting things have been happening, they just haven’t been in this blog. It’s time for a change. But first, the news:

• On April 4, I appeared live on the Nordic Mythology Podcast, where I talked about the subject of my PhD dissertation: kraftaskalds. These are poets in Icelandic folktales who do magic through improvised poetry for cursing, blessing, putting down walking corpses, and much more. Only the NMP’s patrons get to see the shows live, but the recordings become freely available to all several weeks later, on a variety of platforms, both audio and video. When mine pops on various podcast networks and Youtube, I’ll have a post about it here.
  

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• All of my new poetry, audio, and other writings are debuting on my Patreon site, which is here under my name, The Skaldic Eagle. It’s been running now for over a year with updates on the first four Wednesdays of each month. The pattern is now well established: the first Wednesday is a poem, the second Wednesday is an essay, the third Wednesday is an audio recording, and the fourth Wednesday is a poetic teaching. The occasional fifth Wednesday is usually a vacation day or general status update.
  

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• My Patreon site is really where you should join to get my best and latest stuff. Currently, I have started an “Eagle’s Mead Audio” series there for third Wednesdays, as I aim to record an audio collection for Eagle’s Mead that’s comparable to the one I have for Viking Poetry for Heathen Rites. In February, I started a poetic teaching sequence on writing traditional Germanic alliterative poetry, from the ground up, beginning with the alliterating sounds. This sequence will continue for a while into the technicalities of line and meter, and probably stanza forms.
  

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• But I will now start posting here on my WordPress blog more frequently. The plan is regular updates here every third Sunday of the month. Generally, these will be things that have appeared on my Patreon already. If it goes well, I may increase the frequency of content posts here to twice a month. News updates like this post will appear irregularly on an as-needed basis.
  

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• That means that the first of those new posts is next Sunday, and it will be a poem. Audio recordings will appear as well. As for essays and poetic teachings, those may just be excerpts, but we’ll see.
  

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Enjoy!

Eagle’s Mead Anniversary and Patreon Update

Today, March 20, 2022 marks the three-year anniversary of the release of my second poetry book, Eagle’s Mead, in the midst of my PhD studies at the time. In those three years, it’s received three ratings (all five stars) but no reviews on Amazon. In comparison, my first book, Viking Poetry for Heathen Rites, has 34 ratings and six reviews. If you’ve read my Eagle’s Mead, please consider celebrating its anniversary by leaving a review for it. It’s the book that I like most of my poetry publications so far, and it is very much a “Skaldic Eagle” book. (As for VPfHR, its five-year anniversary is coming up in early July.)

In other news, my Patreon launch continues to go well, and I have twelve patrons at this time. So far, there have been three main content posts on each Wednesday of this month, plus a few extra tidbits. If you look back to my post of January 23 this year, you’ll see mention of something called “Book 3”—the first preview of a tiny portion of it will be coming to my Patreon site this Wednesday, March 23, for my patrons at the Feed the Eagle tier. The post will look at some of the Norse gods associated with poetry.

Launched! A Skaldic Eagle on Patreon

With the new moon on this Woden’s Day, I’ve launched my patreon site! Here’s the link:

https://www.patreon.com/theskaldiceagle

You’ll also see that the link has been added to the sidebar.

The launch poem, “A Skaldic Eagle in the World” is available as the first post-launch poem for patrons at all tiers. And this just the beginning. I’ve got lots of other exciting things in the works—see my patreon site or some of my earlier posts this year for details or hints.

I’m going to fly quite a distance with this. Will you be joining the journey?

Less Than 10 Days Until My Patreon Launch!

Today I have an update about the kind of content and tiers that I’ll be launching my Patreon site with, on March 2 in the early afternoon, and, of course, eagle themes abound.

“Ready the Roost” is the first of three tiers, at $3/month. For my “Roosters,” I’ll be posting poems and audio recordings of poems.

“Build the Nest” is the second of three tiers, at $6/month. My “Builders” get those poem & audio recordings, plus my essay content, both esoteric and academic excerpts. Note that the essay content is especially unlikely to ever appear on this blog.

“Feed the Eagle” is the third of three tiers, at $9/month. My “Feeders” get everything mentioned so far, plus access to exclusive posts in which I teach what I know about writing “Viking Poetry” in English in today’s world. These posts certainly won’t appear on this blog, and they probably won’t appear anywhere else until they’re collected into a book in a some years’ time.

For those unfamiliar with Old Norse poetry, the name of this final tier comes from kennings used in skaldic poetry, where to feed an eagle, wolf, or raven is a metaphor that means killing enemies in battle, since corpses are food for these creatures. You can see examples of this in the kennings for “corpse” that are listed on the Skaldic Project’s website. But for $9/month, you can feed this Eagle without having to kill anyone in battle. And there are still “corpses” involved, it’s just that they are pictures of dead people on green pieces of paper. 😀

Those are the main tiers and what will comprise the regular content posts. I’ll probably have the occasional off-topic posts also.

My Poetry Is in a New Rune Poems Anthology!

That anthology I mentioned a few weeks ago has now been announced by the publisher:

The Rune Poems: A Reawakened Tradition
Edited by P.D. Brown and Michael Moynihan
Published by Arcana Europa / Gilded Books

It is now available for preorder at the publisher’s website. I have contributed the following three rune poems to this anthology:

• The Elder Fuþark
• A Tally of Staves
• Rúnagaldraljóð

I proofread the whole thing for P.D. and Michael, so I have already seen first-hand how truly amazing this book is. My fellow contributors are a very august company to be printed with. The 15 contributors include writers, poets, musicians (including three lead singers in renowned neofolk bands), occultists, artists, and scholars (five PhDs, including myself).

Part 1 of the book includes the well-known traditional ancient rune poems (Old English, Old Icelandic, Old Norwegian, Abecedarium Nordmannicum) with excellent new translations by Dr. Michael Moynihan, with an abundance of helpful notes. There is also much new material on the little-known and little-studied Early Modern Swedish Rune Poem, complete with a translation.

Part 2 is where the magic is, with a collection of new modern rune poems that reawaken and continue the rune poem tradition. There are 19 written poems, 15 of which are written in English, with one poem each in German, Polish, French, and Old Saxon, all with English translations; plus 1 visual poem, consisting of 24 wood-burned images. I’ve seen the original 24 woodblocks of that visual poem, and while black and white photos ultimately cannot do it justice, I think this book treats us to the best possible black and white capture of it. The written poems are all profound, deep, and overflowing with the Mead of Inspiration.

The cover art of this fine volume is by Dawid Rudziński, who also made the above-mentioned visual poem and the stellar artwork that graces the covers of my Eagle’s Mead.

This is a must-have volume for anyone who seeks esoteric wisdom through either the Runes or the Mead of Poetry.

My Patreon Launch Date: March 2

The date is set! I’ll be launching my Patreon on March 2—the first Woden’s Day of the month and a new moon, as is appropriate for this sort of thing. Thereafter, main content posts will be on Wednesdays—at least the 1st and 3rd Wednesdays of every month, but I’ll aim a bit higher and post on the 1st through 4th Wednesdays of March, and hopefully April as well, and see if it is sustainable from there. For the months that have a 5th Wednesday, I think I will do something different.

What strange wonders lie straight ahead
in this unknown realm of online work?
Who among you is the Mead calling
to join this journey on its joyous start?

As a sneak preview of what’s coming up, here are some of the possible names for the various patron tiers that are planned:

• Incubate the Eggs
• Feed the Eagle
• The Wind Beneath my Wings
• The Sky that Supports Me
• The Sun that Guides Me
• Give Mead to the Eagle

I suspect there will be at least three tiers to start, and it’s pretty much certain that “Feed the Eagle” will be one of them. 😀