Freemasonry in Viking times
19 August 2016
The Norwegian Freemason Arvid Ystad published a book with the title “Frimurerne i Vikingtiden”, or “Freemasonry in Viking-times”. This is potentially interesting, but it looks like there is no translation and the original book is even pretty hard to get outside of Scandinavia.
No need to repeat what has been written elsewhere. Some more information about the book can be found here.
3 Comments
Just read linked post about the book…eh…I could see how maybe some of the old rituals might have been adapted into free masonry but from what I could find the earliest origins of the freemasons are dated at around 100 years after the conversion of Scandinavia, which itself was only official after extensive interaction with Christian Europe which had already been chipping at the old religion for quite a while. And that is one of the earlier estimations of their founding.
It’s an interesting theory from what I can gather, but seems unlikely. Especially given that most of the Viking rituals cited are “according to” the author of this book and don’t appear to have an external source. :/
But who knows? Weirder things certainly happened in history, it’s not *impossible* it just seems implausible given what we know about the time line and some rituals (I.e. Vikings didn’t use coffins for burials until the end of the era/the conversion, so it’s odd to claim that any Masonic ritual involving coffins would have Viking origins)
Thanks for sharing even though I’m nitpicking it! It’s fun to hear Viking related theories like this. 🙂 Too bad it’s not available in English, there’s a lot of the theory we’re missing out on.
Tahni, thank you for your thoughts. The little text on Gangleri.nl is just what I could find on the internet and threw through the Google translator. I do not know the book. Heck, I haven’t even found a way to get to outside Scandinavia to just try to see what I can make of it. There is close to nothing I can say about Ystad’s theories but the few very superficial “coincidences” that the newspapers chose to pick out. The reason to post the article was to make the non-Scandinavian audience aware of the publication, since it seems to cover ground that I sometimes thread on Gangleri.nl as well and this Masonic Heathens blog does as well.
That said, I doubt that Ystad is going to claim that there is a direct link between the Vikings and Freemasons. That does not mean that there cannot be a link between the two. The Dutch author Frans Farwerck Ialso mentioned on Masonic Heathens), had as theory that there were esoteric (and initiatic) men-societies (“MännerbĂĽnde”) who took on the Christian form of guilds when Christianity came. These guilds grew into the guilds that would eventually be the ground for Freemasonry.
Judging your profile you would be better adapt to judge Ystad’s book since you can probably actually read it. For now and for me, this seems to be another investigator with a similar field of investigation.
Tahni, totally forgot to let you know that meanwhile I read the book and wrote a few things about it:
http://www.gangleri.nl/articles/750/frimurerne-i-vikingtiden/
http://www.gangleri.nl/bookreviews/2191/frimurerne-i-vikingtiden-arvid-ystad-2016/
Unfortunately I haven’t found a way to contact the author yet (nor does he seem to have found my texts) so I can ask him some more questions.