The Nine Noble Virtues | Asatru Ethics (2024)

The most famous attempt at developing an ethical code in Heathenry is the Nine Noble Virtues, originally developed by the Odinic Rite.

One of the founders of the Odinic Rite, John Gibbs-Bailey (“Hoskuldr”), had allegedly developed a code of eight virtues during his involvement with small, underground Odinist groups as early as the 1950s. When Gibbs-Bailey and John Yeowell formed what became the Odinic Rite in 1972, Yeowell added one to make the total nine, a number that is significant in Norse mythology (Heimgest, “Time to Honour an Unsung Hero,” p. 3).

1. Courage
2. Truth
3. Honor
4. Fidelity
5. Discipline
6. Hospitality
7. Self Reliance
8. Industriousness
9. Perseverence

Off Ramp: Ásatrú Values and Ethics

OK if you’re looking for an off ramp from this long essay about the history and development of ethical codes in Heathenry and just want to get to articles on values and ethics, here is your off ramp.

• Two Foundation Stones of Heathen Ethics
• Heathen Frith and Modern Ideals
• Good and Evil in Asatru
• Hospitality and Inclusivity
• Generosity
• Wyrd and Orlog
• Benevolence and Compassion

Are the Nine Noble Virtues the true “Viking Virtues?”

No, they aren’t. Hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but the Nine Noble Virtues were not and are not the ancient code of Viking warriors.

Nothing like the Nine Noble Virtues has ever been discovered in any of the data we have available about the Pre-Christian Germanic world. It’s just not there. They were not found carved in runes on a cave. They aren’t inscribed in the margins of an ancient holy book.

Someone just made the Nine Noble Virtues up in the mid 20th century. We told you that already. But that’s just the beginning of the story.

The Nine Noble Virtues come from a modern interpretation of Medieval Germanic Heroic Literature.

Simply saying that the Nine Noble Virtues are a modern interpretation isn’t saying anything special, because that’s the case for everything. We are modern people and we are interpreting things. We each have our own biases when reading and “cherry picking” is absolutely normal.

That someone is “cherry picking the lore” isn’t enough of a criticism. We all do cherry-picking, and they read and interpreted the text as much as we have. The real question to ask is: which cherries did they pick and why did they pick those cherries?

It’s also not fair to show just this one attempt at codifying a Heathen Ethics because in truth the Nine Noble Virtues is one of many attempts to make a tidy list of behaviors for Heathens to follow. We are going to show every single attempt that we know of and we’re going to tell you where exactly they came from to the best of our knowledge.

But because of that, we need to acknowledge and confront the ugly past of our religion.

Content Warning: to properly show the history, it’s necessary to confront Heathery’s White Supremacist past (and present).

This article is going to contain citations from White Nationalists. We can’t talk about the modern history of this religion without getting into the fact that for a long time, this religion was primarily shaped by the work of White Supremacists, White Nationalists, Nazis and their fellow travelers. And for a long time, there was a “tolerance” between groups that were ideologically opposed on issues of race.

Today, The Troth and other Heathen organizations reject the ideology of White Nationalism categorically–it has no place here and will enjoy no tolerance from us. We do not endorse any particular list of ethics shown here, and we certainly do not endorse those created by Fascists for the purpose of promoting their worldview.

We must accept that our present circ*mstances as people within a faith are shaped by our history. To admit and confront that history, and to work to change for the better, is part of our mission as an organization.

Nothing has approached the pervasiveness of the Nine Noble Virtues, and most other attempts at making a “better version” have failed because they share similar assumptions.

Other attempts at codifying Heathen ethics into a tidy list include: The Aesirian Code of Nine, The Nine Charges, Some Odinist Values, The Sixfold Goal, The Twelve Aethling Thews, the Three Wynns and the Reenheide.

None of them have become as popular as the Nine Noble Virtues. But it’s hard to say that it’s because there is something inherently special about the Nine Noble Virtues as compared to these other lists. In fact, some of these codes were also written by white supremacists as part of their greater rhetorical goals of inspiring a consciousness of “white identity” for the political goal of a white racial revolution.

But even those that weren’t, or didn’t have that intention, they fall prey to the same flawed thinking that underlies the Nine Noble Virtues: that Pagan Ethics can be boiled down to a simple list of suggested behaviors.

Do Norse Pagans have to follow the Nine Noble Virtues?

No, no one does. If you’re looking forhow to practice Asatru you’d want to start here.

That doesn’t quite answer the question. Because it’s one thing to think aboutthe rituals in Asatruor theHolidays in Asatrubut another thing to thing about our spiritual standards of conduct or behavior.

The Nine Noble Virtues were written by British Fascists.

There is an argument about discarding the Nine Noble Virtues which citesJohn Yeowell’s membership in and continued association with Oswald Mosely’s British Union of Fascists and National Socialists as the reason they should be rejected.

That’s certainly an unpleasant fact, but it’s also a genitive fallacy. It says that the virtues themselves are wrong because of something about the person who created them. You can certainly do it, but it’s not a genuine critique of them. You’ll usually see this framed as “well, there is nothing wrong with the virtues themselves, but a Fascist wrote it so I won’t touch it.”

It’s like rejecting a dish before tasting it because of the chef who cooked it. You might be able to say all kinds of things about the chef, but all the comments you’d make are about the chef, not the dish he made.

Again, perfectly your right to do. But your reasoning might give the impression to some people that the dish actually might be ok to eat in itself, you just don’t like who made it. So let’s not give people that impression. Let’s talk about why the Nine Noble Virtues are bad in themselves.

The basic reason we can reject the Nine Noble Virtues entirely is because they have no grounding in any greater ethical theory. There is no reason to follow them as opposed to any other list of virtues.

That’s where we run into the big problem with the Nine Noble Virtues (and all the other lists of ethics for that matter): there is absolutely no compelling reason to follow them.

Pagan philosophers from Plato to Plotinus all had ethical systems but those systems were often also based on assumptions of metaphysics, logic or epistemology.

For example, Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics followed from the metaphysical idea that everything has four “causes” and one of them is the “teleological” or “purposeful” cause–like how an acorn’s purpose is to become an oak tree. Following that, Aristotle formulated an ethics for people that would best help them achieve their purpose, which he thought of as “Eudaimonia” or “full-souled-ness.” At every step in the process of ethics, we are reminded of the grounding of that ethics in a greater theory of how the world works.

But for one reason or another, as time went on, people started to discard the underlying principles of different Pagan philosophies and simply focus on some of the outputs: the virtues.

Which might lead someone to believe that Pagans just kind of believed stuff without any justifying ideology at all. And Neo-Pagans have worked off that assumption: Pre-Christian people just did stuff. Made lists. Just thought some things were good without having any reason for why.

Which makes for the Nine Noble Virtues ending up just a list of words.

Think about the fact that there were eight of them and then someone said there need to be nine because nine is a better number. How is that for a justifying ideology? It’s not that these virtues were arrived at through logic, reasoning or any kind of grounding at all: it’s just a certain number because we like that number.

Ultimately, it’s a list of words and phrases. Nothing more.

Rejecting the Nine Noble Virtues is the beginning, not the end, of a Heathen Ethical inquiry

The truth is that Pagans all over the world did in fact spend time thinking about moral principles and values, and about how to make ethical choices and live good lives. As John Michael Greer points out (A World Full of Gods, p. 143), the ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Indians, Irish, and other polytheistic cultures produced plenty of sophisticated treatises on ethics and morals.

The ancient Scandinavians were no exception: theHávamális an old poem where Odin in the disguise of a wandering old man gives his unwitting host a gift of wisdom in exchange for hospitality, beginning with anecdotal wisdom and advice about living a good life.

The Icelandic sagas are full of characters of various ethical leanings, who succeed or fail in varioussituations based on their actions. Before the 20th century, most Icelandic children grew up hearing the sagas read aloud, and many of them learned ethics that way. A man who was born in 1861 reminisced about hearing the sagas recited in his childhood (quoted in Jón Karl Helgason, “Continuity?,” p. 71):

Both the older and younger members of the audience paid close attention to what was being read, and at intervals people would talk about the subject; they would often have different opinions, and when the sagas were read people favored different characters. Some people even made excuses for the evil deeds and flaws described in the sagas and tried to argue that this was inevitable, while others contradicted them, and often there was heated debate. This discussion would sharpen our sense of the personalities of individual characters; we could see how they wove their thread of destiny towards fame and valor, happiness and success, or towards disgrace and a fall, life or death. My heart was burning and my eyes were often filled with tears of happiness or sorrow.

There would have been children like him all the way back to the Viking Age, and probably all the way back to the Stone Age. Humans have always passed on the rules of their society by teaching and learning the old stories of the tribe.

The deceased and sorely missed Troth leader, godman, seiðmaðr, gadfly, and friend Rod Landreth was often known to give the advice: “SimplybeHeathen in all things.” This might seem easy to follow when “all things” involves downing horns of mead. But what to do when “all things” includes a modern office job, a home in the suburbs, or other situations and roles that our forebears could never have known and might not have liked?

There is no Ásatrú Ten Commandments

The Ten Commandments stem from the idea that the God of Israel told His people through His Prophet exactly how to live a good life and build a good society. There is no such analogous story in all of Heathenry where a clear set of rules were established by the Gods for humanity to follow.

As we’ve seen, some use medieval literature to create their own ethical precepts (the Havamal is the most popular for that purpose), but there’s nothing approaching some kind of divine law for humankind.

Did the Vikings have a Code of Ethics?

The legendary sagas do present several “Viking codes”: lists of behaviors that are binding on all members of a particular warband.

It’s hard to be sure whether any actual Vikings followed such codes, as these sagas were written centuries after the fact and have probably been “spiced up” to be more exciting.

• The most famous “warrior code” is probably the code of the Jómsvikings. No man could flee from any opponent; each member had to avenge any other member; no one could speak words of fear or bring a woman into their fortress; and so on (transl. Hollander,Saga of the Jómsvíkings, pp. 63-64).
• InǪrvar-Odds saga9, Hjalmar explains the “Viking laws” that he lives by: never to eat raw meat, never to rob merchants and farmers unless he really needs to, and never to rob or abduct women (transl. Waggoner,The Hrafnista Sagas, p. 65). I
• nHálfs saga ok Hálfsrekka10, the members of Hálf’s famous warband live by a code that makes fighting more dangerous, and thus victory more glorious: “they could not have swords longer than one ell [about 18 inches or 45 cm], so that they would have to come close to their enemies. They had knives made so that their blows would have to be more powerful. . . . They never took women or children captive. None of them was allowed to bandage a wound until an entire day had passed. . . . It was another of their customs never to put up awnings over their ships, and never to reef sails before a gale.” (transl. Waggoner,Sagas of Imagination, p. 12)

Unfortunately, codes like this aren’t generally applicable to life outside of a warband or a pirate ship.

While this is all very interesting to look at and makes for entertaining reading, this is hardly a guide for how to live a good life. A tempting thought at this point (and one that you’ll certainly see some people endorse) is that Pagans really had no guide for how to live a good life, ethics were a purely subjective and selfish exercise based on how to benefit one’s own family and power.

This doesn’t seem to be the case either, as people had a very good idea of what was “good” for them and what was “bad” or “evil” for others to do to them–and that this understanding was communally as well as individually understood.

“Thus Did My Ancestors”: The Problem of Using History to Justify Present Ethics

Another way that has been proposed to judge the worthiness of deeds is to look at the ethical codes of pre-Christian societies: “thus did my forefathers and thus do I!”

When the 7th-century Lombards rejected the preaching of the missionary Barbatus, they allegedly “professed that the best form of worship was to respect the law of their ancestors, who they asserted were the greatest warriors and whom they could name one by one” (Life of Barbatus2, transl. Everett,Patron Saints of Medieval Italy, p. 51).

To some extent, this appeal to ancient tradition is implicit in the very foundations of Heathenry. Many Heathens would say that we worship the old gods, inspired by the old ways, because we find that our forebears’ custom, as we understand it, is fundamentally a better thing for us to do than to worship the Christian God, or another God, or no God at all.

But is this appeal to ancient tradition enough to serve as a foundation for ethics? No. It does not.

Tribal Traditions or “Thews” are not a foundation for ethics.

Thew is not codified; it is simply “the way things are done around here.” Thew can encompass everything from the most minor details of daily life to major ethical premises depending on how someone uses them. But “the way we do things” has to also be interrogated. If someone tells you “that’s just the way we do it around here” you can (and probably should) ask that person “why?”

We know that thews varied through space and time; there never was One Arch-Heathen Way of Living.

We also cannot know all the details of ancient thew. Many norms that ancient Heathens knew have been lost forever.

Many of the texts that present ancient thews are biased to some degree; Tacitus, for example, called the Germans chaste and faithful because he was making a rhetorical point about how he felt Rome had lost its traditional family values—not because he’d actually observed the Germans first-hand. Adam of Bremen’s claim of sex-crazed Swedes, written for a Christian audience, may well have been biased in the other direction, emphasizing the depravity of paganism and the superiority of Christianity.

Perhaps most obvious of all: many of the things ancient Heathens routinely did would and shouldget us arrested today.

The sagas relate exciting tales of Viking derring-do in quest of gold and glory—but we have to admit that the modern equivalent would be a gang of Old West gunslingers shooting up a town and robbing the bank: exciting, thrilling, great for movies, but not a sustainable way of life.

The medieval chronicles that show all this heroism and daring also show Viking Age Scandinavians practicing infanticide, trading slaves, and sacrificing humans.

There is no realistic way that we will ever be able to do these things legally and no compelling reason why we should ever want to. Most Heathens today would say that the mere fact that some of our predecessors sacrificed humans, raped slaves, and skewered babies on spears, doesn’t make such practices acceptable for us.

Understanding our predecessors’ ways, and the reasons for them, is important. But following them blindly, for no better reason than “that’s how it was done,” is of limited use. We still have to come up with principles for why some ancient thews should be revived and embraced today, and why some should be left alone.

“I want to be historically accurate” is not a good ethical principle.

It’s a good principle if what you’re doing is trying to re-enact something or pretend to be someone else, but it’s not a good foundational principle of any kind of ethical system.

And it also runs into the problem of “cherry picking” because, at some point, you’ll have to decide which ways of behavior are good to replicate and which ones are not. In that case it brings is right back to our original problem: which cherries are you picking, and why are you picking those cherries?

All you’ve done is avoid the ethical question, rather than answering it.