From: evc@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Edward Van Cura)
Newsgroups: alt.pagan
Subject: re: Lithuanian Folk Religion Revival
Date: 5 Sep 92 05:14:08 GMT

>popec@korova.uucp (Mr. Charlie) recommends:
>Lithuanian myth, ect.
> *Of Gods And Men:  Studies in Lithuanian Mythology*
>  Algirdas julien Gremias
>   This first translation of Apie Dievus Ir Zmones is a brilliant 
>   Convergence og Greimas' historical and folklore studies.  As both 
>   story teller and explicator, he gives rise to the cultural memory of 
>   his people by deciphering the symbolic world of lituanian mythology.
>
>  Available November $35.00 cloth
>
>Don't know if Thor Finn or for that matter Ciaran Benson, (was that the 
>person who was Lithuanian, as stated a few post back?), are THAT 
>interested, but there you are.

Wait a moment...Thor Finn ---> Thorfinn...Ahhh...much better.   8)
Thanks, I'll look into it. My primary study is Germanic folk religion,
but I am finding out that neighboring folk religions make great secondary 
sources. For example, someone earlier mentioned a Lithuanian folk religion
revival called Romove (sp?). While scanning the index in *Gods and Myths 
of Northern Europe*, by H.R. Ellis Davidson, I found an entry on
Romove on page 87:

"Groves which the Germans held sacred to the gods are mentioned by
Tacitus at the end of the first century. Later on, a number of
Christian missionaries---Boniface, Jerome, Bishop Otto,
Willebrord---counted the felling of a tree sacred to a heathen god
among their achievements in the cause of Christ. There is a mention of
"Jupiter's Oak" more than once. The Prussians remained heathen long
after Germany as a whole had been converted, and in the sixteenth
century writers who visited them described sacred woods in which they
made sacrifices and sacred springs which Christians were not allowed
to approach. The chief of these sanctuaries was at Romove, where there
was a holy oak, in whose trunk were placed images of the gods. Before
that of the thunder god, Perkuno, was a fire which was never allowed
to go out. The fire was surrounded by curtains, forming a shrine which
only the high priest might enter to commune with Perkuno. The name of
this god is linked with the Latin word for oak, "quercus", and it is
probable that Donar too was worshipped in sanctuaries of this type. In
England there are a number of Anglo-Saxon place-names in the form
"Thunre leah", the meaning of which is "grove, or forest clearing of
Thunder". One example is the early form of Thundersley in Essex.
Similarly in Scandinavia Thor's name is linked with "lundr", "grove",
and place-names in this form are found in Sweden, west Norway, and
Denmark. The Forest of Thor on the north bank of the Liffey outside
Dublin existed in the year A.D. 1000. In that year King Brian Boru
spent a month destroying it, burning down the undergrowth and
demolishing young trees, until, as we are told in an Irish poem, "the
great trees and the lordly oaks alone stood upright".  "

The streams of the Germanic peoples and the Baltic peoples appear 
to flow from the the same fountain of origin.

Be Sprinkled With Blood,
Thorfinn Einarsson

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"...and if in these works there is any underlying poetic themes, it
must be looked for in the supreme tragedy of renunciation, the 
abnegation of the will, which is shown there as necessary and 
unavoidable and alone capable of achieving redemption." ---Wagner
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