>>1656
My queue is long but I finished reading it a couple of weeks ago.
He has some interesting ideas but I think most of them will not sit well with the average hard polytheist heathen. He retells a bit of ancient Germanic myth from the perspective that it developed from an ancient matriarchal society which developed into a patriarchal society after the discovery that sex is the cause of conception. He describes a transformation of pre-ancient Germanic mythology into the mythology we know today, involving the reversal of some deities from male to female and vice versa. But this is a smaller part of a section where he recounts a lot of the Germanic lore with some commentary. Then he proposes some ideas about the May Queen and the concept of kingship in the context of early Germanic society.
I think that it is valuable for heathens to affirm that our mythology was not handed down whole and left with us to preserve, slowly decaying over the years. I definitely endorse his perspective that Germanic mythology comes from within the Germanic people and that our gods are manifestations of our race-soul and our weltanschauung, and that this does not diminish the reality of our gods in the slightest. That said, I think a lot of his theories are kind of goofy. One exception is his proposal that Freya and Frigga likely have a common origin in the earliest proto-Germanic religion, which I know a lot of folks here look up on dimly.
In the second half of the book he gives a fairly standard rundown of rune lore, no better or worse than the mainstream rune lore most of us know. From that he leads into a full translation of the Voluspa, which is interrupted each stanza by what I found to be a nonsensical and forced attempt to align the Voluspa with a repeating cycle of the Elder Fuþark… which haphazardly crams two or three runes onto the same stanza sometimes, and then terminates kind of abruptly halfway through Freyr's Ætt on the third or fourth loop. I enjoyed his translation of the Voluspa but I don't think the proposed connection to the runes works at all.
He does make a pretty good case about the Germanic concept of time being cyclical, to the extent that it is a sort of fractal cyclicity of loops within larger loops. But this is a fairly standard heathen view and will probably not blow anyone's mind.
If you're looking for a real eye-opening, seminal text on Odalism, I don't think this is it. It's an interesting read but is not groundbreaking. It represents one man's view of the lore and of our place within the nine worlds. But I do think that's valuable and it's a short read so I can't say too much negative about it. For the most part, he's discussing the same concepts in his video series on heathenry, so if you're following the Thulean Perspective channel on Youtube you're not missing anything if you don't read it.