Welcome to Weird Web Radio!
This episode features Christopher Alan Smith,author of Icelandic Magic: Aims, tools and techniques of Icelandic Sorcerers, and also known as The Mad Englishman Wednesday. He’s here to talk about Icelandic magic and the tools of the trade. You also get a trip through lore of the dead, undead, Icelandic Zombies, and even the legendary Necro Pants aka Corpse Britches!
Fasten your seatbelts! This is one hell of a ride!
Christopher Alan Smith was born in Nottingham in 1954. He has travelled widely and lived in the Netherlands for five years, where his innate talent for languages enabled him to speak fluent Dutch within a few months and work as a logistics coordinator for a major transport company. His travels also include three visits to Iceland; on the second visit, he stayed in the country for 8 months and worked as a volunteer at the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft in Hólmavík.
Christopher’s interest in magic began when he was a student at the University of Sheffield, at which time the main emphasis in the available literature was on the Western Tradition of Kabbalistic magic. However, his taste for travel, languages and a restless search for knowledge clearly indicated Woden as his example, leading him within a few years towards Rune Magic and ultimately to membership of the Rune Gild. His Fellowship Work for the Gild, “The Icelandic Tradition of Magic” was published in 2012 as part of the collection “Occult Traditions” (Numen Books). In 2014 he was awarded the title of Master in the Rune Gild for his Master-work “Icelandic Magic in the Early Modern Period”, which forms the basis of this book.
As he wryly comments in the introduction, “As my sixtieth birthday was approaching, I realised that I should perhaps have started on this project about forty years ago, beginning by studying Icelandic
and folklore at university instead of politics… but one has to start somewhere.”
Today he lives in North Yorkshire and, when not practising and researching Icelandic magic, he works as a freelance translator.
Show Notes:
Buy the book in multiple formats here: http://avaloniabooks.co.uk/catalogue/norse-viking/icelandic-magic/
Music: The Intro music was ‘7’ from the album ‘Ghosts’ by Nine Inch Nails under a Creative Commons License.
Voice Over: Intro production and voice over by Lothar Tuppan
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