Sources and preserved wording

A modern list and older literature

The Odinic Rite attributes the codification of its nine virtues to John Yeowell and John Gibbs-Bailey in the early 1970s, drawing on Hávamál and Sigrdrífumál. This is the organization’s own account, rather than evidence that an ancient Norse community shared one nine-part code.

The Odinic Rite’s account

The Troth discusses the list as a modern interpretation of medieval literature and critically examines its history, including exclusionary ideologies. It rejects white nationalism and represents its own organization’s position. This reference does not adopt ancestry as a measure of worth or treat any one organization as speaking for all Heathens.

The Troth’s discussion

The earlier site’s exact explanatory precepts have not been established as the wording of either organization or as translations of particular ancient lines. They remain attributed to the preserved earlier website. The older verse and sagas have their own literary histories; the later novels and Morris’s nineteenth-century retelling add distinct perspectives.

Reading the named English editions

Each excerpt was compared with a retained transcription of the named edition and read with its surrounding paragraph or stanza. Hávamál stanza numbers follow Bellows; his caesura bars remain, while stanza numerals and inline page and footnote markers are omitted. No new translation or specialist authentication is claimed.

• Traditional anonymous Eddic poems — The Poetic Edda (Henry Adams Bellows (1923), translator).
• Anonymous (Njáls saga) — The Story of Burnt Njal (George Webbe Dasent, translator).
• Anonymous (Grettis saga) — The Story of Grettir the Strong (Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, translator).
• Anonymous (Völsunga saga) — The Story of the Volsungs (Eiríkr Magnússon and William Morris, translator).
• Homer (traditional attribution) — The Iliad (Alexander Pope, translator).
• Homer (traditional attribution) — The Odyssey (Samuel Butler, translator).
• William Morris — The Story of Sigurd the Volsung and the Fall of the Niblungs.
• George Eliot — Silas Marner.
• Elizabeth Gaskell — North and South.
• Anthony Trollope — The Warden.

Speakers and narrative voices are identified on each page. Their revenge, class, gender and status assumptions sometimes require a critical note; retaining a quotation does not endorse every position within it.

Preserved earlier-site wording

Courage

To acknowledge and live ones beliefs.

Truth

In order to uphold a code of honor, one must be brutally honest with oneself and others.

Honor

On the outside it is reputation, on the inside it is a sacred moral compass.

Fidelity

Faithful to God and to the ways of ones ancestors.

Discipline

The exercise of personal will so it upholds honor and other virtues.

Hospitality

Treating each other with respect and acting together for the good of community as a whole.

Self Reliance

Being able to make your own way in the world and not to have to lean on others to fulfill ones physical needs.

Industriousness

To work hard in order to achieve goals; to work with care and pride in all that we do.

Perseverance

To be willing to keep doing whatever it takes to complete what we set out to accomplish. Through imperfections, through frustrations, through failure, through it all.

A contemporary reading

These pages develop ordinary voluntary choices around welcome, truth, worthwhile commitments and useful work. They preserve religious meanings where relevant while requiring no religious assent. They remain a reference collection; historical context does not by itself make a heading a personal practice to adopt.

The original site material remains preserved. The unverified inherited quotation pools and the uncredited overview translation are not presented as authenticated historical words in this edition.