Inherited Cultural Grief and Women

We inherit everything from our ancestors. In Old Norse this is called oorlog. As cultures go through changes due to environmental strain, war, and other traumas, the mothering of children necessarily shifts. If our mothers endured great pain, they often preserve it in stories, songs, and old wives tales meant to instruct against danger and indicate who the children should trust. If they were abused, they often abuse their children or become addicts to numb the pain of their oppression rendering them unable to develop emotional maturity. These things are passed to their children and dysfunctions are perpetuated across the culture throughout generations in this way.

Women's self esteem, emotional maturity, and healthy family and community relationships are proportionate to the self esteem, emotional maturity and healthy family and community relationships their mothers had. The kind of fathers they chose depended greatly upon their ability to make functional and emotionally mature choices. Things that limit this ability include loss of legal rights, lack of community support and education, incidence of rape (the cultural acceptability of rape, female mutilation and infanticide) and family of origin issues such as addiction and abuse. These limiting factors manifest in cultures who have undergone oppression, occupation, and genocide by outside cultures. The Native American community in the United States has been working on this very issue since the understanding of colonialism's impact on the existing culture became a study! Every culture in the world has experienced this. It is universally the women of the oppressed culture who most suffer and continue to suffer the brunt of oppression and degradation, which then is passed to their children.

The women of Northern European descent lost their rights, freedoms, and respected positions in community with the coming of patrifocal (father centered) culture. The history of it lies in the words each successive generation used to describe women within the culture and how they are depicted in the songs, and stories our mothers and grandmothers taught us. Historically, as their legal rights and cultural status changed with incoming patrifocal cultural influence, the words used to describe them changed from words of esteem to words of degradation.

I began my journey towards a healthy self esteem as a European American by turning to the oldest known word for a woman of high spiritual and cultural esteem, Volva, Old Norse for staff carrier. I deconstructed two major works left to me by my ancestors, the Voluspa Edda (prophesy of the staff carrier) and Kjerringe med Staven (Dear lady with a staff). The poem Voluspa was written down in the 1100's ACE and has its roots in oral tradition. The antiquity of the Volva Tradition is attested to in the Archeology and Petroglyphs dating to the Scandinavian Bronze Age circa 2000 BCE where the richest grave finds in Scandinavia belong to staff carrying women.

The second work, Kjerringa med Staven, is a well known Norwegian folk tune dating from the 1800's or earlier.  Kept alive in the United States through oral song tradition, community dances, and Sons of Norway and other preservation societies. In the US, the word Kjerringa still has it's pristine meaning of endearment.

While in Norway (May 2009) filming the Norwegian reality show "Alt for Norge," I had the opportunity to explore the current meanings that volva and kjerringa have in modern Norwegian culture and whether Norwegians still had a cultural memory of womens traditional power. I found that the word volva has become equivalent to cunt, said in a socially demeaning way rather than a socially uplifting way. Kjerringa said with a certain inflection has come to mean bitch, said as a demeaning and mean spirited put down of women.

As an American Volva, it was a bit shocking to find this.Yet, in a way it was no surprise. Following the example of America, many nations have allowed the focus on cultural healing to drift in favor of commercialism and global corporate interest. Cultural healing must begin with women's self esteem, legal rights, and ability to raise the next generation with emotional maturity, strides which Norway leads the world in! Yet let us not forget to reclaim the words, songs, and stories - and thereby the history of our traditional ways as women. Releasing the grief of generations of Nodic women whose gifts to the community have been shamed, disrespected, or completely ignored and half forgotten heals the oorlog of my culture.Uplifting women and respecting their humanity is the key to healing the world.