Edmund Devine
Have you ever had a fight with your sibling? Insisted you were right, and they are wrong? Well, people groups can do so as well, especially when they are family by blood. After this short break, we can answer the question stated above on exactly what the War of Accommodation was, and how did the Aesir and Vanir get along. Join me your host Edmund Devine in another episode of… The Historians Archive.
The War of Accommodation. Finally, I can speak a bit about it after referring to it multiple times during the last few podcasts. When you think of that title, it may spring to mind that this was a physical conflict of strength of arms. But in fact, this ‘war’ was more a conflict of tradition between the Aesir who were patriarchal, and the Vanir who were matriarchal. Join me in delving further into the… War of Accommodation.
What exactly was the ‘War of Accommodation’ that I refer to in the Vanir and Aesir podcasts? To answer that we must return to days long forgotten and known little by the people of our modern world. Think for the moment along the lines of Darwinian thinking, when two populations occupy similar ecological niches, compete for the same food sources, and are roughly equivalent in physical prowess and mental cunning, one will find that most often these two groups cannot settle and interact smoothly. Now, of course, humanity is not just an animal, we are endowed with reasoning skills that allow us to supersede the baser instincts of our minds. As such when the Vanir and Aesir met, the grand scale of human mental interactions took place, for as one might ponder with some accuracy, these peoples were in fact many, many tribes bound together by blood and similar oratorical stories. Unlike their ancestors and the Neanderthals, they were similar enough culturally, physically, and directly related enough to not immediately foster hostility and aggression as a default. Over time these tribes learned that their abilities complemented one another, the Vanir being sea-going metallurgists of Iron and known the world over, and the Aesir who were herd masters of the highest ability, who were also metallurgists of high degrees though more attuned to gold, silver, and bronze as opposed to the bog iron of the Vanir. Over the course of centuries, these tribes competed, intermarried, and hybridized in Europe, eventually coming out of this period of conflict and intermarriage as one people, who set out across the world both upon land and seas.
Over the remainder of the Grand Climate Optimum, these peoples settled across the world, tribes forming wherever they could put down roots successfully. These people influenced the Inca, Aztecs, Maya, Egyptians, Scythians, Hellenics, Persians, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Various North American tribes, the Germanic peoples, the Celtic peoples, and the Slavic peoples. Few races on this earth have had such an integral, omnipresent, and long-lasting effect upon the course of human history as the Vanir-Aesir. Yet now in our modern day, we think of them only as myths. So, I put this to all of you listeners, what else that we dismiss as ‘myth’ from the writings of our forebears and ancestors is truth covered by millenniums of legend, suppression, loss, and retellings?
