Work
Christensen was one of the earliest advocates of revitalizing Germanic paganism in the modern age. She was preceded in the 1930s by the Australian Odinist pioneer, Alexander Rud Mills, whose writings she frequently quoted in her journal The Odinist.
Her writings greatly influenced many of her contemporaries in groups like the Asatru Folk Assembly, the Asatru Alliance, the Odinic Rite, Comunità Odinista. Christensen is probably best known for her successful lobbying to get Odinism and Asatru recognized by the prison system in the United States, as well as her networking and letter writing campaigns. For several years, Else's photocopied and stapled Odinist newsletter was the only thing linking the scattered Odinist community across North America.
Else Christensen had a great importance on the formation of neo-paganism in Spain, in recognition within the Odinist orthodoxy the Spanish Odinist Circle, which became the Comunidad Odinista de España-Asatru, that got official acceptance in 2010, i.e., full recognition and equality with other faiths recognized by the Spanish state, was considered by her followers in Spain as "Mother Folk. " The day of her death is an official day of worship in the Odinist faith in Spain letter by Else Chistensen to Odinist Spanish Circle in 1981
Else was very well regarded for helping many ex-convict Asatruar and Odinists reintegrate as functional members of society, as well as corresponding with hundreds of inmates who adhered to Asatru. Christensen herself, later spent 36 months in a Federal Prison over a narcotics related conviction, allegedly because she had been manipulated into being a drug mule without her knowledge. Christensen was a Canadian citizen, and after serving her prison sentence, she was without transportation, homeless and totally destitute.
The Asatru community held a fund raiser to help her get re-established in British Columbia. She resumed her involvement with The Odinist Fellowship and continued publishing The Odinist as the Midgard Page newsletter. In 2005, at the age of 91, she retired from running her organization. Else died a few days later, on May 5.
Read more about this topic: Else Christensen
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“We have not the motive to prepare ourselves for a “life-work” of teaching, of social work—we know that we would lay it down with hallelujah in the height of our success, to make a home for the right man. And all the time in the background of our consciousness rings the warning that perhaps the right man will never come. A great love is given to very few. Perhaps this make-shift time filler of a job is our life work after all.”
—Ruth Benedict (1887–1948)
“The slightest living thing answers a deeper need than all the works of man because it is transitory. It has an evanescence of life, or growth, or change: it passes, as we do, from one stage to the another, from darkness to darkness, into a distance where we, too, vanish out of sight. A work of art is static; and its value and its weakness lie in being so: but the tuft of grass and the clouds above it belong to our own travelling brotherhood.”
—Freya Stark (b. 1893–1993)
“There is no mystery in a looking glass until someone looks into it. Then, though it remains the same glass, it presents a different face to each man who holds it in front of him. The same is true of a work of art. It has no proper existence as art until someone is reflected in it—and no two will ever be reflected in the same way. However much we all see in common in such a work, at the center we behold a fragment of our own soul, and the greater the art the greater the fragment.”
—Harold C. Goddard (1878–1950)