Purpose and Sobriety: An Interview with Jackson Crawford

beautiful it looks good Stan F we're here with Dr Jackson Crawford we're wondering if you could introduce yourself to those who don't know you sure I'm Jackson Crawford um I'm a Old Norse specialist got my PhD in Scandinavian philology some years ago at the University of Wisconsin and I've taught subjects like Norse language North mythology sagas Vikings and modern Scandinavian languages at the University of California Los Angeles University of California Berkeley and most recently University of Colorado B I'm also a translator of North Smiths and nowadays a YouTuber right content creator right right hash content creator nothing nothing like the good old contrast between the uh credentials to content creator I'm going through similar experiences at a much lesser degree might I add but so let's it agree about it it's it's weird because I mean we are not unless I'm mistaken 20 years old you know yeah I meet kids who tell me all the time now oh I want to be a podcaster right I want to be a YouTuber I think this is this is a huge aspiration for tons of kids now and when I was a kid this wasn't a thing no not even remotely it's a whole new career field that people like in intentionally like seek out like in the same way that you know 30 years ago I want to be a movie star you know yeah the new celebrities almost yeah you know a weird fractured way I I still feel self-conscious about introducing myself you know as as a YouTuber because to me it still sounds like come on that's not a right seriously like seriously yeah you know sometimes I'll just say writer or expressor ex- Professor educator or something right it's like I don't want to have this conversation all the time right like right oh YouTube huh yeah especially with older people it's sometimes hard to explain yeah but there's something beautiful about the specialization that is almost necessary for YouTubers to exist like it's just like in a university or anything else where you can choose your discipline and really get into it and create content that is useful or meaningful or valuable or entertaining for all kinds of people and there's because of YouTube like ton of more niches niches and I don't know anything that allows the uh development of knowledge in specified fields and just development of things I really appreciate which is exactly what you're doing and there's value in that that's hard to explain to people yeah and you know we have this notion I think that's baked into us by the educational system that if you didn't pay for it you didn't learn it but in fact YouTube and podcasts and social media in general have been showing for years you can learn pretty damn well without paying a scent for it yeah you know my you don't have to pay to watch my videos and in fact I make my living from people donating to support their continued existence not because they have to right right um whereas teaching at a university people are paying tens of thousands of dollars a year and I'm not seeing that money right the vice principal counselor of whatever is seeing some of that money I'm not seeing it you know this way at least if you donate to support the channel you're actually donating to support the person who's teaching you right and you know they're passionate about it it's not an elective yeah but I was say all the end user sees is just you talking to the camera you know it like from an outsider perspective and so like you're trying to explain it to people and they're like they don't see everything that goes behind the scenes all the work the research that goes into it yeah and as much as I think that this is actually the future of Education I think it kind of has to be because people are eventually going to stop paying as much as they have to cuz I mean I'm still paying back my student loans you know same here and like it is coincidence that I ever got a job in my field right when I applied for the job that I got at UCLA in 2011 there were 98 other applicants right we overproduce highly specialized people and then tell them the only thing you can do is go try to find a job at a university and that's just not sustainable either right but I think part of what's also kind of weird and and like socially about this this sort of pursuit is is it sounds vain right y like there's a degree of that for sure I uh I set up a camera in the woods and I talk at it you know and um look at me yeah look at me and I'm not actually that much of a look at me person so it always feels a little self-c like I have a really hard time making videos with someone else watching right I always go way into the woods or something like I don't just set up at a Viewpoint where there's a ton of people CU it's like I feel really s conscious about like oh there's an influencer right right how do you what are some things that you do to get past that get away from people do it in the woods alone I've I've gotten a little bit better about it over time I mean like hanging out with with really good YouTubers uh I would name in particular Luke rieri who has a channel kind of similar to mine but he mostly covers Classical Languages Latin Greek uh itic and then Ian McCollum are forgotten weapons two guys who are just incredible career YouTubers um they've help me kind of get over some of that self-consciousness um you know a lot of the videos that I've made with those guys you know we were in front of crowds or whatever and and the fact is that nobody really actually pays that much it's not that weird anymore you know it's weird to me because I'm almost 40 but like to younger people it's like oh it's that's just a job it's just like I see somebody working on you know sweeping somewhere it's just like oh they're just doing doing their job they're just doing their job yeah I feel that you know feels feels I feel self-conscious but other people actually aren't that conscious of me so I'm in the camp of just not telling people what I'm doing just just try to avoid it as much as possible unless unless someone ask me what I'm up to I don't offer that information because for these very reasons it's like ah it's not what you think it's not when we say content creation it's it's more than that it's a it's a it's a special niche as you mentioned and a lot of research goes into it so yeah yeah yeah I got lectured on this the other day about you know the difference between a real educator and a mere content creator and I just don't buy it like I am a real educator I just moved from a classroom to a YouTube channel right not to mention there's sometimes this attitude among some people in the University system that oh this is too commercial of an Endeavor it's like give me a give me a break without the I was going to put between a and break right um if they're both commercial Endeavors I'm supporting Myself by people voluntarily deciding they want to support me and you're supporting a lot of other people right we're both commercial it's just that I'm seeing the fruits of my own labors right not to mention people could choose to not support right it's the it's the voluntary action between the right if there wasn't a place for it it wouldn't work yeah and the degree of transparency as well right well and I am I think pretty transparent yeah you are but the when it comes to University it gets a little like where's this all going oh well you know it goes over here and it's like what do you mean specifically yeah well and then you know there's so much status jockeying it's it's such a a hierarchical system in the University you know like oh you can't call yourself Professor because you don't have that title but then if somebody asked me what I did I'm a professor I teach at a university it's a job description to 99.99% of people within the university system oh God you can't say that because that's actually like you know that's you know the top layer of the priesthood right so I got tired of that that kind of hierarchical system which isn't as bad at some it's not as bad at Colorado is it is it like Berkeley at Berkeley it's really bad oh I bet it's a completely different game there oh yeah like tenor professors who wouldn't even talk to me at brookley really how much did the uh University dictate your curriculum like not that much not that much so you still had a large degree of discretion on what you wanted to teach yeah that's good at least there was that um I always wrote my own syllabi uh anybody who tried to interfere just got ignored nice um and I definitely had that occasionally happen but uh no I taught pretty much not neily the class that I would want to teach like at uh at all three universities I would teach a class called vikings sometimes and I never really quite got what that was supposed to be right it's like is this a history class is this a anthropology class is this a literature class so I kind of made it all of the above right right without encompassing all Best of Both all worlds yeah that always felt like a really unfocused class to me but at any rate the actual that I would draw for classes was always my own nice and I would use my own materials um often my own books once my books got started to get published um because I was always very conscious of how much students had to pay for their textbooks and I said I want my students to pay for $15 books there's no reason for students to pay for these $500 books right right $15 books are not worse typically so right anyway so all in you have a a much greater degree of your own personal autonomy well and now I certainly do yeah that's what I mean now yeah but I always practiced a certain amount of autonomy within the system too I mean I wasn't necessarily somebody you would have expected to find in grad school in some ways and I feel like we do it a service to students by kind of like we as a society we talk about overcoming stereotypes we still have a lot of stereotypes we have stereotypes about who the smart people are and it's like you can actually be from a you know a cowboy culture background is not what one Associates with intellectual Pursuits right but I always felt like kind of being myself and not being shy about what my own cultural background is that way kind of helps show people like you can be anybody and be interested in this you don't have to be a stereotypical professor and you don't have to be a wannabe Viking right right because I'm definitely not that I'm not going to dress up I'm not going to grow my beard two feet long and right you know although it'd be cool but you're not I don't know the jury still out on that one get all the rune tattoos and all like that that's just that's not who I am I don't need to pretend to be that right so I think there's some value in kind of showing people that you can be anybody and and and also that you don't have to do a conventional career path with it right I did for a while but all the successes that I've had teaching have been from doing what people told me not to do right that that's something I picked up on you like very early on I was like oh yeah he's uh not pretending to be anybody but himself uh and that's when I started to make some of the connections and and you've sometimes explicitly sometimes not implicitly uh the like the cowboy haval for example like always making that connection between uh the country background but also with the old Norse lifesty style or culture whatever you'd want to call it and so that was something that attracted to me to attracted me to you like right away I was like oh it's a good old boy know what he's talking about well and I think part of what I was trying to do with the cowboy haval which I guess I should clarify for anybody who might listen to this and not know what I'm talking about um papal is a poem preserved in one manuscript the main manuscript of the poetica a collection of myths about the Norse gods and heroes written down in Iceland in the 1200s and PA them all is the longest of those poems contains kind of the proverbial wisdom of the god oen and it's a lot of just everyday very practical advice little bit of a cynical Edge to it right um or if I want to split hairs a skeptical Edge not not not too trusting of other people very independent minded and it always reminded me of my grandfather's advice and what I had the funniest experience because you know he was certain you know the man I admire most in the world but he certainly never got why on Earth I got interested in the stuff that I got interested in him and pursued it as a career just totally outside of his world right but it was so funny to me because anytime I read this thing in Old noris I heard his voice it was him right just talking from a different place in a different time MH and um in 2012 I ran across a blog post you remember blogs yeah I sure do there was a uh a a Norwegian blogger who had made something called hav themal for dummies so he had taken all of these wise sayings and he just turned them into one or two words MH so like one one that's about just like not talking too much he just turns it into shut up kind of thing to the point just just and it was it was funny it was good it wasn't it wasn't a throwaway effort it was actually really well done and um so I made some comment on his blog and he responded and and somewhere in this conversation he said and you know I think you would have to be a Scandinavian to have this kind of personal relationship with Halal to do something like this with it and I thought no not at all I'm not scan even at all and I absolutely have this relationship and I know exactly what I'm going to do with it and I sat down and in the space of one night I translated Halal from Old Norris it wasn't from my English translation it was from the original into the cowboy hul which is hul in the voice of my father mhm and uh it's always kind of been to me like the most me thing that I've ever done right yeah that's uh that sounds quite meaningful very fulfilling in your life bucket if you will yeah and I was flattered that my publisher wanted to include it in my translation of the poetica nice so my translation of the poetica and of haval which is a standalone book U includes the Cowboy Hall it's just kind of a like yes you can translate it more literally but I think in terms of of its Spirit the c h is a spiritually more faithful translation because it's not dry everyday English it's it's the wisdom of experience that comes through the the kind of the scarred voice of an old man imparting some sometimes futile imparting some wisdom to his grandson you know right sometimes futi yeah but that's the uh that's exactly so I'm I'm a city boy I grew up in the suburbs uh but within the last couple years I've like totally done a 180 and I'm just obsessed with uh uh just country culture and living a more simple lifestyle and calling a spade a spade when you need to call a spade a spade and um and so that's what attracts attracts me to Old Norse mythology too especially like the when I saw that you did the cowboy hav M I was like oh my God yes I'm seeing that too someone else sees the connection there cuz it is at least to me like it is very reminiscent of like an old Grandpa cowboy who just like cut the crap this is what it is this is what you need to know this is the the wisdom if you will but that cynical element is definitely present and yeah yeah it's you know at hul there's there's a line um you can never be sure of where you stand in someone else's heart so it's best to have wisdom in your own um and like like I said cynical might be split I might be splitting hair is when I say skeptical rather than cynical but it's there's something about that in that kind of country atmosphere in our our country too you know like there's there's a big cultural overlap I think between Frontier Iceland and Frontier America right because I was a viking age Frontier m one of the big differences is you don't have a an indigenous population that the nor are supp planting there's not that element in the frontier story um but otherwise you have a lot of you know people in an untamed land right uh you know very spread out populations there's no population Center in medieval Iceland uh you have a a marshall culture everyone is armed people are very willing to solve disputes uh in in in duels be they with axes and shields or with six shooters right um you know to me I always kind of thought well this is the sagas are their westerns and in fact the sagas are ridden in a very similar time frame relative to Western for us so you know you look at the time when westerns really got huge on the screen for us I I would say like the 50s it's not Western yeah it's it's not an unvi time in its own way you know a lot of the people making these movies are world World War II Korean vets people who saw serious violence that's not the violence they're showing on screen the violence they're showing on screen is over quickly it's clean right right the people fighting are honorable they look each other in the eye it's not like the actual violence they saw m and the sagas are much the same way the sagas are written down in the 1200s during a period of Civil War in Iceland and we know from contemporary Chronicles you know people are cutting other people's ears off and stuff like that I mean it's gruesome that doesn't happen in the sagas the sagas are clean honorable fights you know mono Amano and I think yeah culturally this is serving much the same purpose for them as The Westerns having our own time right there there a a romantic look back at a time that was not less violent but that was like better violent yeah even if it really wasn't it gets painted that way right and I think that's a a real parallel so do do you think then with that being said that that it was a better violent in a way that any of these old Norse myths Legends scripture whatever you want to call it um do you think that they taught common Old Norse like daily life commoners how ought to act like like the person they ought to be like in their daily life myths and beliefs shape that I think a little bit I think halul is definitely intended that way right oen is definitely imparting lessons directly right you ought to do this and you ought not to do that I think if you look at the so is it's a little bit harder to find quote unquote morals in them and when you do they can sometimes be a little bit foreign more foreign to what we would impart so for example there's a saga Harel Saga which is about this CH who has made an oath and of course they take Oaths and Promises very seriously he's made an oath that no one can ride his best Stallion and that he'll kill anybody who tries to ride a stallion mhm well he has a Shepherd sheeper boy uh from a poor family who you know works for him in the Summers and rounds up a sheep and he loses some sheep and he's afraid you know to go back to his boss and tell him oh I've lost some sheep and he thinks I need to grab a horse so I can you know cover some more ground and find the Sheep only horse anywhere close is the stallion he thinks he won't no but of course after he's ridden the horse the horse gallops off to Haren kill and he's all sweaty and Haren kill knows somebody rode him asks around and people have seen the kid riding him so he regrets it but he made an oath he goes to this kid and he says and it's and you can kind of hear the hesitation even in the old noris he says did did you did you ride Ro and kill did Ro and kill the hores called Frey foxy did you did you ride Frey foxy a little and the kid admits it he says you know I swore that I would kill anybody who rode the horse and it kills him kills this teenage kid who works for him buries him feels bad about it but he made it promise right he goes to the guy's dad And he says you know I hate to tell you I killed you kid but I made a promise that I would kill anybody who Rod my horse I just want to tell you I feel so bad about this I'm going to set you up for life right I'm going to pay for your your kids marriages and I'm going to make sure that you're well fed for the rest of your life like I I really want to kind of make this up to you it's like this this is insane from our cultural perspective right listen man I killed your kid and I feel bad about it let me let me pay your rent for the rest of your life is that a fair exchange you okay with that and and the dad doesn't feel it is right the dad says no I don't care what you offer I'm suing you which the sagas are full of legal battles I'm suing you I'm going to make the state take this out of you I'm not taking this as a gift from the guy who killed my kid and so it turns into a huge I mean you know several years of back and forth between this family and and this Chieftain but at the end the guy who comes out on top is the chieftain and it's because he's a guy who keeps his word you know people know where they stand with this guy it's like yeah he says he's going to kill someone who rise his Source by God he's going to kill first and so he winds up being a more successful person than the family that comes after him for killing their son you know there's a lesson there maybe a moral about keeping your word but told in a way that's extremely hard for us to stomach if we think about it in our present day time right so you know I don't want to I don't want to overstretch the similarities between these cultures right but there's a little bit of moralizing it's just not necessarily what we would moralize right just a different context different time yeah yeah absolutely well there's no police power right right so people Sue each other but then they have to enforce the the penalty I see so they did not elect people from their Community to uh enforce laws it's there's no self-sufficient enclosure each individual there's the thing they their their legislature SLC court and you go and you can sue people and and they can and the the jury can say yes so and so o so and so however many sheep or however many you know reams of cloth or something like that but you have to enforce it you have to go to the guy and get that stuff there's no police that are going to collect there's no prison so do do you also see that kind of self-sufficient attitude cultural attitude uh just permeating the entire culture as a whole just like self-sufficiency in terms of your shelter in terms of your Oaths in terms of the law in terms of whatever yeah absolutely I mean in a society where people are really spread out where you know there's very little use of the written word some use but very little use of it you know your reputation is everything and you have to keep up a reputation of being uh self-sufficient of being strong of being ready to defend your family if someone insults or takes something from them and uh you know those those those insults to one's capabilities to do those things often start the conflicts in sagas right um because of course if your reputation is on the line your entire social life was on the line all right someone says that you don't keep your word well maybe you need to go kill that guy because if you say you're going to kill anybody who insults you you've got to kind of live up to that um in fact they even hold you to Oaths that are that you make when you're drunk oh really that can be a yeah that would also be culturally a problem today yeah in fact um they have kind of a an equivalent to Christmas SL New Year at roughly the winter solstice okay big drinking festival and also kind of like New Year's for us a time for swearing Oaths or resolutions right your Oaths made during this celebration are extra sacred but you're probably pretty drunk probably right I mean this is according to the Saga how the famous Ragnar lothbrook died as he swore at one of these New Year's Ule celebrations while drunk that he would conquer England with two ships all right which is insane yeah but you know he wakes up the next morning says oh crap what did I swear an oath to do like he swore to conquer England's two ships like well all right you know it's it's it's it's part of being a danger and this is the ultimate Norse compliment or D and gr R it's um it means someone who's recklessly courageous and sort of recklessly honest in that way like you don't swear something that you don't mean to do right I mean the the greatest of the north Saga is the Saga the volon a lot of the action is is hinged around Brin Hilter a valkyrie who swear she'll never marry anyone but the the only man who doesn't know fear well she winds up marrying a man who does no fear to make a very long story short um someone else marries the man who knows no fear and so she says well now I have to get the man who knows no fear or sigar there I have to get him killed because I'm not married to him I have to like it's it's that sounds a little insane to us too but the the drama is just you know she was forced to break her word now she has to extract a violent payment for it there's something it seems to be a theme that the truth is Paramount above all else which is common in a lot of societies absolutely I mean you see that in in Zionism is huge on Truth versus the LIE maybe bigger than the Norse are but absolutely keeping your word which in a lot of rural societies is also a big deal right if if your five neighbors are the five people that you can get resources from they have to know that you're going to pay them what you say you're going to pay him right yeah 100% right so you had uh you had mentioned uh keeping those o even o that you make while you're drunk that's another parallel that I see is like uh like Saloon culture in the frontier right drinking always drinking uh uh it it's very reminiscent of these drinking Halls you know yeah a little bit I can see a similarity uh I don't know if there's a cowboy afterlife where you have a saloon fight every day which would be pretty much the equivalent of ball hole but that's a funny idea you know yeah um there are also societies that deal a lot with drinking problems oh really right I mean there are problem drunks and the sagas just as there are you know filling westerns or or filling the lives of real you know look at Buffalo Bill's life right um you know it's it's weird to observe that today this very day I'm seven years sober [Music] mentioned seven years today uh first off congratulations uh I personally have I know several people who are uh recovering and or have been sober for some time now and that family members close family members means quite a lot to me I know it's extremely difficult for somebody to be able to recover from whatever it may be alcohol or any kind of substance I know it requires a why in a way if I may ask it could you synthesize what gets you through challenges hardship to maintain your even kill and sobriety and well uh sure uh let me start off by talking a little bit about how I got sober uh because that may play into this a little bit um so I worked at UCLA for 3 years which is actually really wor my problems started um I was to make a long story short doing someone else's job and getting a lot of just it was was a bad scene had a had some kind of abusive stuff going on there felt pretty powerless felt a little directionless like you know well I teach where I have to teach you know because I got a stupid degree you know I started feeling worse about what I've was doing professionally it's a long time before any of my public education efforts um you know just felt like I was kind of at a dead end and I was in California which is where a lot of people want to be but it's not where I wanted to be right good old boy we talked about it yeah la was not really for me um it's better than Berkeley in some ways uh anyway um I developed a pretty bad problem and I have a weird uh pituitary thing where I don't have the hormone that keeps water in your body oh really so I can put a lot of liquid through myself so uh you you haven't seen the beginning of it uh especially when I don't have I have a medication that replaces the hormone now but I didn't then so I got to where I could drink two bottles of whiskey in a day and of course you drink that much whiskey you start needing it yeah and um you know I was functional in fact extremely few people knew that I had a problem I was drinking alone right I wasn't going to bars I was just going home and just you know nursing bottles of Jack right um but then my job at UCLA uh seize to exist which is a long horseshit story um and it was late in the school year and I had to get something so I applied to all these jobs in Colorado and Wyoming because I figured if I can't do something with my professional background I might as well be somewhere I like like got a job at a little Museum in Wyoming did that for a year then I got hired at Berkeley in 2015 went out there and actually took a huge pay cut from my museum job in Wyoming so all of a sudden I have this really expensive drinking habit and no way to support it right because I'm making 1,600 a month and I'm paying 1,200 a month for rent right and the kind of drinking I was doing was a lot more than 400 bucks a month and then I have to eat right so I thought priorities yeah so I'm like crap I better cut back so I started I had this weird attitude toward you know it's funny looking back on I was kind of like well let me do this scientifically so for 10 days I said I'm not going to change how much I drink I'm going to measure it and of course when I actually measured it I said oh wow I might be an alcoholic which should have been obvious but you know I kind of making that realization it was a little bit scary right I thought okay you know what I'm going to do is I'm since I might have a dependency on this I'm going to cut back uh like a cup every week okay yeah right I'm gonna cut myself off a little bit less every week gradual challenges you know yeah unfortunately the first week I did that I developed DTS oh you know it was I was that dependent on it wow so I was actually in my office at Berkeley when I just suddenly went you know tunnel vision and like you know shrimp up and was shaking and stuff like like oh [ __ ] this is this is delirium trim so I clawed my office door open thankfully ran into nobody in the hallway pushed the elevator button went down you know like this is all funny in retrospect sure in retrospect but at the time I was kind of scared right you know like went over to the clinic on campus and um said you know they look at me pretty weird I said uh I'm an alcoholic trying to quit and I feel really weird like oh crap you know they put me down on a stretcher and you know they tie me down and stuff like oh apparently my vitals look pretty bad and I wind up in the ER they get me settled and the doctor says so um someone told me you looking to quit and I said yeah and he said you want some help with that I said absolutely and he said okay well I can advise two different programs it's the one everybody likes there's the one that seems to get people sober and I said give me their number right so I went to this rehab facility in Downtown Oakland definitely no vacation Downtown Oakland okay nice nice but I haven't had a drink since that day and that was October 9th 2015 thank you for sharing this day with us yeah well you know I feel like actually part of the positivity that I can do in this world is you know like I'm nothing special there's nothing special about the fact that I got sober it's if I can do it anyone can but it definitely you know I don't know rehab is a weird scene I'm not in touch with any of the people that I was in rehab with like you're really close while you're in there and then nobody wants to talk after right so I don't know where any of them are how many of them are doing I know a lot of them were there because they were court ordered to be there okay and those people never seem to me to have the kind of resolve that it would actually take as when you say I have a problem I need to get it dealt with so you know it's a classic AA thing to and I'm actually not an AA but it's a classic AA thing to say well you have to start by admitting you have a problem you absolutely do but part of what's kept me going is just saying you know I'm going to have problems in my life and I'm going to deal with them better if I'm sober right drinking never actually helped the problem it maybe let me ignore it but it actually added to my problems eventually I was going to have some serious health effects from drinking as much as I did right I have family members who definitely have health effects from drinking that much um and you know every time that I get tempted to and I've been tempted to within the last week you know it's pretty freaking easy to get a bottle of whiskey um convenient very convenient to get it so liquor swore right there MH um you know the thing that always stops me is this is not going to make it better M and there's other things that taste good right I might as well have a glass of lemonade cuz it's going to make as much difference right right right and I'm serious as Pat and plain as that sounds that's what gets me through is just saying it's not going to make it better it's the problem is still going to be there and I'm just going to be less equipped to deal with it m and I've had moments where I've been real close but that has been somehow what gets me through it and then a little bit of what gets me through to like maybe 20% of it is every day there's a little bit more Pride right like there was Pride it's like yeah I made it a month then like today I've made it seven years like I don't want to [ __ ] with that yeah excuse me if I'm cussing we don't care we're all about it but it's like you know I don't want to I don't want to mess with that that's a good Street yeah it's pretty great Street that's a record to be proud of yeah and it's like I don't want to mess with that like I you know if I take a drink and it's like okay I stayed sober for seven years and now three days or whatever it is like that that I don't want to I don't want to be there if I am actually here's a weird thought if this helps anybody dealing with substance abuse I've I told myself day one of quitting if I have a relapse I'm going to forgive myself for it that's interesting and that sounds like I'm making a permission structure for it it's actually the opposite because if I say I feel like this is actually something that screws up a lot of people on the recovery path is they say like like they any lapse it's it's this attitude of like okay if I let myself be talked into a drink basically I've let myself be talked into 40 drinks CU that's about where I was at some weekends but I feel like if I ever let myself get talked into a drink I'm actually I I feel ready to stop myself there and forgive myself and say this doesn't have to turn into 40 drinks but I think on something happens where people say well if I have one drink I might as well just go back to where I was at it's like no I don't feel that way all right there is forgiveness uh for myself I can't say yeah one drink it's too bad but I forgive myself I'm back on the path right and to me that's actually the opposite of the create I feel like the whole like All or Nothing is actually the opposite All or Nothing is a permission slip for all um but I'm also a huge anti High perfectionist oh yeah really perfect is the enemy of the good it's one of my favorite cliches but it's true I see it in grad students all the time in a totally different context the people who never get their phds because their dissertations aren't perfect but nothing's ever perfect yep um we have a s similar sentiment we say perfection doesn't exist yeah perfectionism is is is is it's it's an excuse for not doing I see it in language Lear learning people who say I'm not going to speak this language until I can speak it perfect you're never going to speak it perfect unless you're making mistakes speaking it imperfect right I like that advice I personally am one that has an issue with that a little bit of a perfectionist because I'm going to get Frozen in making decisions or making things final there's something about it that just uh is difficult for me so when you say that I really like that advice it resonates with me um doesn't come natural that it's something I have to work at doesn't come natural um you know actually it's it's it's not like I'm some wise individual who came up with all this I I know who's wiser than I am and I have have tended to listen to people who have learned from their experiences um you know a lot of what I say is maybe redigested from my grandfather uh or from my late best friend actually who was uh you know when we were in high school was a a great anti-pr and in fact when he he died when we were in high school uh 20 miles from here um and I think that there was a huge sense in me when he passed the like he pointed the way toward living more and he would have lived more than I had by this point but like he pointed the way toward just life is short and for him it was incredibly tragically short uh right Perfection is the enemy of of of living those days I'm not trying to say that I let myself off with shotty work I don't but you know I I was willing to let my dissertation go after three years like it didn't need another year right um I was willing to you know publish or have published a translation of the poetica knowing that I was going to want to revise things I have revised things since but what I put out was good right it's better now it probably would be better now if I had done it now right but I did it when it was needed right you know and I think this holds people back in now I'm getting preachy this holds people back in relationships too like there's not really the perfect person yeah that was that was a hard one for me to learn yeah yeah like that's it's it's something that movies y infect us with the idea of but it's like no there's there's good there's no perfect no perfect yeah there's there's a solid match but not patch that yeah I had to learn that one the hard way that took me a while to to get over that I was like oh the perfect woman doesn't exist this imaginary person doesn't exist we're all just imperfect humans and I'm not the perfect man yes and I'm no no no no no I'm an insufferable man I am insufferable and I should be weary of people who are interested in me that's how insufferable I am yeah that's me learning the hard way I yeah so do you mind if we shift gears real quick yeah I got to preachy anyway no no not not at all no this is this what it's meaningful for you and that's we're after that sort of stuff those valuable lessons that you learn throughout life are those are important to us you caught me on a philosophical day and and and also like having just like had this unsolicited email criticizing my particular Pursuit it's like I'm I'm I'm simultaneously like philosoph pseudo philosophical and defensive hey that's fair it's it's good to take a break from the stoicism you know really let it all out I don't think of myself as as this this stoic I know I know but it's interesting to me that people read that I I hear that word all the time I'm like okay I think it's just the the calmness and uh the steadiness throughout all that interactions and activities and daily you just even kill if that makes sense I think that's where it comes from like Cowboys like real rough and Tumbl Cowboys who have been through it they have a similar attitude I guess I mean I'm not that old but it's as Indiana Jones says it's not the years it's the mileage right I've seen I've seen things maybe Old At Heart yeah maybe and just uh you know I'm sure a lot of it also was just I wanted so bad to be my grandfather when I was a kid and I think even if I never became the substance of him in so many ways it became the style of him right so sir uh talking about no's mythology if we may could you give us an overview about uh the origin story and then maybe we just start there like just a brief introduction of go ahead sorry I was G to say perhaps for simpletons like myself because it I listened to it and I was like ah there's a lot going on here so the Norse creation myth you mean so yeah let me let me do a little bit of Bas setting about sources so I mentioned there's the poetica so these are poems written down in the 1200s and Iceland during a period when icelanders are really interested in their Frontier past now of course their Frontier past is pre-christian and there's a lot of interest in even Christian Iceland in that pre-christian religion it's a small country people aren't as judgmental or well they're not as condemnatory about their past beliefs like people are pretty Frank like yeah our grandparents our great-grandparents believed in other gods it's not the same like witch on atmospheres in a lot of Europe M so someone was passing down these stories orally in poems long enough for them to be written down in the 1200s about 200 years after the conversion of isim so these stories are surviving a pretty long time we're actually pretty confident that the stories are much older than the 1200s because language changes over time right so if you think about how your own language probably differs from your grandparents language you know mine does maybe mine does less because I was a grandparent worshipper and I did pick up some weird grandparent features but one thing my grandparents would do that just about nobody does anymore is they would say the H in words like which and what and where yeah very few people do that now so if you to to make an analogy if you have a poem using alliteration right starting with the same sounds and somebody in English alliterates which and house for most speakers today those which doesn't start with an age it starts with a w so you would say this poem is probably from early 20th century or before this isn't from the 21st century even if it's written down in the 21st century same thing you see something written by Shakespeare it might be published in the 21st century but you see words like thou and thee and you can say this is from a much earlier Century so the same thing we're seeing with these poems which use alliteration sometimes the alliteration actually doesn't work during the time it's written down right the language has changed it's moved on but the alliteration would work 200 3 years before when the country was Pagan so we think on linguistic evidence more than anything else of these poems are in fact as old as the pre-christian religion they're not just made up in the Christian period by people trying to you know make entertaining stories about the old God there's also a book called The proetta which you know I hate how similar the titles are but I don't control this stuff this what we call these books in English um this guy snor steres who was a scholar in chiefton and iand in the 1200s knew a lot of these poems and knew a lot of poems that didn't get written down in the petta knew a lot of the ones that did get written down there but he tried to turn them into one cohesive story and that'sa it's written out in Pros right in ordinary language but but based on some of those old po so it's those two sources primarily that were that that we use and what we get from reading a combination of the poric and the proetta is that at the beginning there is a vast empty space gunga Gap the yawning Gap and there's a hot side of it and there's a cold side of it water flows out of the cold side and freezes in the cold empty nothingness in between but as it drifts toward the hot side U which is Moose spell salmon it melts and out of the dripping melting ice in the void is formed the first living being this man giant anti-god actually the the the real mythical texts are much vager about like who is what species or kind of being than than our comic book interpretations are he is just a a being uh although he is of the family that becomes the anti-gods or Giants the enemies of the Gods so he's formed from that of course he has no mate but his sweat creates some children children grow in his armpits and one of his legs mates with the other and that creates some children and that's the first living intelligent beings uh there's also a cow that is created out of the dripping ice and um she's named AUM and she licks another uh man God being out of the ice and that's uh buy and so the male descendants of Buri are the gods and the male descendants of imir are the ynar which is usually translated Giant in English but they're not a different scale from the gods they're the same height they all look human they're the same species if you will they're just kind of rival families and they inner breed quite a bit so in fact you know depending on who you count as what you could consider oan like three4 a giant which is really not reflected in our our like comic book versions of it yeah the Giants like in the Marvel movies are the huge blue things but they're just human looking things at the same scale as the gods so uh the grandchildren of Buri so Buri has a son boor I don't know who he mates with maybe one of the leg or sweat children of imir and that's actually another thing is our sources don't answer all the questions we would want to see answered there's a ton of I don't knows that the med eval audience apparently either didn't care about or didn't remember but Buri has a son Bor who has three sons oen fil and V they kill umir the original living being and they tear apart his body and they make the world out of it so his blood becomes the sea his flesh becomes the Earth his bones become the mountains his teeth become the rocks his brains are the clouds his skull is the is the the sky etc etc and um the world that is made thereby is actually the world that's kind of shared by all these beings we we have often our our 21st century conception is that these are all different planets like there's the Gods on one planet humans on one planet Giants on one planet but it's really one planet right medieval people don't have a conception on multiple planets right right that's a very modern conception yes good point it's humans live in MTH gur which is the middle enclosure so it's kind of picture picture the Atlantic as this vast interior ocean surrounded by a ring of land right Europe Africa and the Americas this is actually by the way this Mythic understanding of the world is part of why they thought there was land across the Atlantic that kept them going west till they found Greenland and eventually North americ well Iceland Greenland North America uh so that's an interior ocean surrounded by a ring of land but they conceive there being uh an outer ocean around that ring of lamb and so at the outer edge is a huge uh fence it's made of amir's eyebrows beyond that is the exterior ocean where the Great Serpent yman Gander lives and yman Gand encircles the planet and swallows its tail at the end and beyond that exterior ocean is yoten hear the homes of the Giants I really like the term anti-gods they're of similar stature to the gods just opposed to them that's where they live somewhere high up and it's very inconsistently described is it at the top of high mountains is it in the sky somewhere very inconsistently described it's where the gods are and O the god incl okay and they come to our world fairly frequently especially the God oen but uh of course return to their own world uh where where they have their Halls where they Feast uh you know they eat they drink they sleep they die just like we do uh which is fairly different from some Mythic systems and of course at the end they're going to be defeated by their enemies by the anti-gods of giants which I think is also a pretty unique feature of North Smith the gods are eventually going to die they will be defeated they are not uh triumphant in the end right is that in Ragnarok yeah Ragnarok yeah sorry not mad on that I'm sorry so question for you um in the origin story The the North and the South the cold and the hot if I'm not mistaken and and the void is there anything substantial or significant to you about the contrast between those two worlds and their combination in the void I mean is that that I think maybe a little bit um you know to the north cold and the direction of North tend to be negative which might not Shock you considering that living in Scandinavia of course cold is more often an enemy than heat yeah um yeah although you know this Summers can be pretty hot um and it's actually interesting to me read in the sagas you do get pretty realistic depictions of uh it was too hot to wear armor right and that makes sense to me of course um I don't know that I don't know that it's a particularly Elemental mythology right your heat your cold your water your air your fire earth it's not at least in the sources as we have them preserved it's it does not deal with a lot of Elemental uh absolutes right um and the gods themselves are not particularly Elemental in terms of like the their embodiment you know we always want to say so and so's god of war god of fire god of love whatever it's really hard to pin those labels in the Norse gods they're much more personalities than roles like I have a great sense of what it would be like to sit down and talk to Thor I have a great sense of what Odin's motivations are what their like powers are much harder to say so so it's not necessarily Elemental per se so would you would it be accurate or would it be more accurate or more inaccurate to say um that it's not Elemental but it's it's an analogy for something else perhaps uh an analogy for example of how ought to act you know like maybe there's this contast before like the north symbolizes something the South symbolizes something else and the ideal is to be in between those things um but something more akin to like a motif like if it was like a film like what's the motif of the film like is there anything resonating there well I don't think that you want to behave like the gods gods are actually not great examples of behavior you know oen is a liar in fact in halal he asks himself who can trust oen right it's one of my favorite quotes who can trust oen oen um I like his style I like his style well he's he's a liar he's uh he wants to get people killed in battle because of course oen knows thanks to prophecy that he's going to die at Ragnarok so he gets men killed in battle it's the only way they can come to his Hall is if they die in battle and of course he wants to build up the best army that he can in his own Hall to help him fight his enemies at Ragnarok he is in a sense although probably better than his enemies he's kind of an enemy to our happy lives on Earth you don't want oen in your life when oen shows up in a saga someone is going to get killed it's going to be pretty bad right because he wants to harvest you when you're young too you know we're most of us are not Tom Brady right yeah uh we there's only one Tom Brady [Music] you know oen or Loki is a a wizard right they have magic powers they can use uh it's not always very clear what those powers are but they come up as the story demands right you know Thor is strong that's his power and he's actually not even strong enough on his own to lift his own Hammer right he has to wear his special belt and gloves to increase his strength and actually lift his own weapon which is weird in a way yeah it really is and then you think about the fact that the gods are all permanently injured one way or another o is missing an eye Handel is probably missing an ear tear is missing a hand Thor has trapnel in his head all the gods are injured right they're marred they're not perfect specimens they've been they've been hurt badly they can be injured like humans like us mere mortals and it lasts you know there's no magic solution to it there's no you know tier doesn't regrow a hand or get something built for him or you know out of out of some magical substance or something it's just gone right well so um Odin sacrifices his eye for wisdom right yeah and there's some that's substantial I think that there's uh something some sort of meaning behind that like uh story as to why the eye would be lost for wisdom what about the other gods are their injuries related to their powers or related to something substantial about their story yeah they're all relevant um you know oen is obsessed with gaining wisdom because what he wants is to find out a way to avoid his death at Ragnarok right he's he's trying to learn how to to escape this fate he knows he's going to be swallowed by the wolf so there's a well um and there's actually conflicting stories about this um in sn's proetta and an a saga that snor wrote um but there's a well owned by a being called mimir uh who is just aead um and if you drink from the well you become wise so of course oan wants a drink Meir says the price is your eye so oen has left and eye it never says which one in the well in exchange for a drink and we don't know specifically what he learned but hopefully something worth his time right and his misery Agony um we don't know how H dollar lost his year and it's only kind of hinted when the witch says a poem called volpa in the putica which is where we actually have the prophecy of Ragnarok when the witch is talking about how she knows where Oden's eye is hidden she makes a similar cryptic remark about H Dollar's hearing which suggests H dollar is also missing an ear in a similar way but we don't know what the story behind that is or what he might have gained but he is the Watchman so maybe he has extra good hearing so he had to give up an ear to hear better out of another I don't know wa that's just speculation right Thor had a dual with a uh an anti- goter giant named herir they threw their weapons at one another th threw his hammer and herir threw a wetstone the hammer smashed the Wet Stone in midair and a fragment of it embedded itself in Thor's skull so of course he was fulfilling his role as defender of the Gods um and that's how he got injured so that's fitting right and then tier uh actually a god who's not well known within our original sources if you look his name up on the internet you'll find all kinds of things but in our original sources there basically one story about him which is that when the GU so Loki and um an evil woman one of the Giants or anti-g goddesses named anarod they had three children um a one of them is the snake that encircles the world one of them is Hell the half corpse woman who rules the world of the dead and one of them is the wolf fener notice this is not mandelian genetics right right uh it's not like they both had a recessive gene for Wolf M you know and it's it's it's very weird but these humanoid beings have non well two out of three non-humanoid kids it reminds me of Loki turning into the horse and then yeah having having a baby horse and it's like yeah but the horse but that one has eight legs for some Reon yeah yeah um they know thanks to prophecy that this wolf is going to kill oen at Ragnarok but the wolf is born inside Oscar they're inside the God's enclosure and of course they sworn an oath that they won't draw blood inside Oscar so they can't kill it so what are we going to do with it well it's binded up forever because they also can't I guess they can't like cheat the rules and like Take It Outside and kill it so they try to bind the wolf up with chains but the wolf is so strong that it can break any chain so the gods go to the dwarves and they say you need to make a chain that is so strong that even the thing that can break all chains can't break it right they the silk thing right yep so they make a an apparently silk thread but what it's made out of is things that don't exist CU it has to be strong enough to be broken by the thing that can break anything right so they make it out of women's beards and fish's breath ah and the roots of mountains and the senu of a bear cuz apparently you know if you watch a bear like it kind of doesn't look like it has muscles it just look one One Carpet okay um all my favorite things yeah all of these things and the and the sound of a cat walking and um very pleasant I feel like I'm forgetting one but there's but it's just it's it's things that don't exist so they the gods bring this chain to the wolf and they say well they've been kind of having a game with the wolf at this point like hey Breck out of this and it always breaks out so well break out of this and the Wolf looks at it suspiciously right like maybe he sees some fish's breath in there you know I don't know he's he's suspicious of it and he says I don't know maybe this will bind me up forever I need one of you to put his hand in my mouth as a pledge that this won't bind me up forever and so of all the gods it's only tier who steps forward and puts his right hand in the wolf's mouth as a pledge that this is not being done nefariously in in false premises of course it is a trap it is treachery it does find the wolf forever so it bites off TI's hand so you know he pays a huge price for uh for lying which you can see a big current of of that that that Truth Versus Falsehood again right I like that of course he's a heroic figure for doing that but he pays a huge price and and and snor when he tells the story in the prosa he actually says everyone laughed but teared with good reason good reason so yeah all the gods are named in some way um and I think that's so different from how we think of gods typically or think of them in a Greco Roman or Christian context as as if not perfect very close we appreciate the time very much of course thank you much for your time it's been a pleasure to talk to you yeah likewise yeah this has been pretty insightful and a generally good time so thank you I don't know if you want to plug your how to find you how to easy enough to find um my YouTube channel is just my name Jackson Crawford if you search that you'll probably find me Dr Jackson Crawford right just want to make sure everybody knows some people insist on that I I insisted on that for the first few weeks after I got a PhD but eventually you get tired of saying no I'm not a medical doctor oh yeah yeah yeah right so just Jackson Crawford across all the sites y easy to find and uh my books my translations at The foretta Saga pretty easy to find search for my name very reasonably priced as well reasonably priced true yes although we uh this year for the 50th anniversary of my publisher hacket publishing um they've created a special limited edition box set oo yeah which are all signed would make great gifts they would make great gifts uh the first printing they made 400 and those sold out surprisingly fast so we're doing another printing of 800 wow probably by Christmas cool very cool I'm still I'm actually in the middle of signing all of these one by one one by one but it's with the doctor no I've never signed that that's that would be weird I just I just feel like outside of a classroom if you're not a medical doctor doctor is saying I want to create distance between you and me I have something you don't and I am not a better person or a smarter person than someone else because I spent more time Ino but that's oh no I'm just saying what my attitude is toward it right like I I feel self-conscious about it like it's I'm not I'm not a big deal right you know because yeah none us are I don't I don't need to throw that around unless it's relevant right right awesome well thank you again Dr Jackson thank you what you want appreciate it standing plan over and out sweet all right [Music]

Channel: Jackson Crawford

Views: 11,719

Keywords: education, norse, old, old norse, norse myth, norse mythology, odin, Óðinn, edda, havamal, hávamál, wanderer's havamal, wanderer's hávamál, viking, vikings, norse god, norse, gods

Id: rszhadRBAjs

Length: 65min 51sec (3951 seconds)

Published: Fri May 17 2024