After reading The Wild Hunt’s recent opinion piece, “No Frith with Folkism,” I found myself agreeing with the surface statement while still feeling that something deeper needed to be said.
Yes, Folkism has no rightful place in Heathenry.
Yes, racism, white supremacy, blood-gatekeeping, and ancestry-as-spiritual-ownership need to be rejected.
But that led me to the harder question:
What happens when parts of modern Heathenry were built, shaped, repeated, or popularized inside the same ideological weather system that inclusive Heathens now say they reject?
That question brought me back to the Nine Noble Virtues.
The Nine Noble Virtues are often presented as if they are ancient Heathen ethics. They are not. They are a modern construction. The Wild Hunt has previously reported that the Nine Noble Virtues were created by John Yeowell and John Gibbs-Bailey of the Odinic Rite in 1974, and that Yeowell had ties to white supremacist and fascist movements. The Troth also states plainly that the Nine Noble Virtues are neither authentically from the Viking Age nor really ethics in the ancient sense, and that they were originally developed by the Odinic Rite.
That matters.
Not because courage is racist.
Not because truth is racist.
Not because honour, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, self-reliance, industriousness, or perseverance are bad words.
But because the package matters. The origin matters. The framework matters. The assumptions matter.
Modern Heathenry, especially in North America, has had to wrestle for years with white supremacist appropriation of its symbols and language. The Wild Hunt itself has reported Heathen voices saying that the tie between white supremacy and Heathenry in America goes back to the beginning of organized modern movements, and that modern Heathens have had to keep fighting the misuse of their symbols by extremists.
So I submitted an opinion piece to The Wild Hunt for consideration.
Partly because I think the question deserves to be asked.
Partly because “no frith with Folkism” cannot stop at rejecting obvious racism. It also has to examine inherited structures, moral frameworks, beginner materials, and community assumptions that may have been normalized through Folkish or far-right-adjacent spaces.
And partly, yes, to see whether this kind of internal critique will be given room.
It is one thing to say “we reject Folkism” when the target is safely outside the door.
It is harder to ask whether the floorboards inside the hall were cut from the same forest.
We shall see.
Below is the opinion piece submitted to The Wild Hunt for consideration.
No Frith with Folkism Means Reckoning with the Nine Noble Virtues
By Kevin McLaughlin
writing as Lugh Sulian
The recent Wild Hunt opinion piece “No Frith with Folkism” says something that needed saying clearly: Folkism has no rightful place in Heathenry.
I agree.
But I also think the statement opens a harder and more uncomfortable question. If there is no frith with Folkism, then what do we do with the parts of modern Heathenry that were shaped inside the same ideological weather system?
The Nine Noble Virtues are the obvious example.
Courage. Truth. Honour. Fidelity. Discipline. Hospitality. Self-reliance. Industriousness. Perseverance.
To many modern Heathens, these are treated almost like a sacred ethical foundation. They appear on websites, beginner guides, social media graphics, teaching materials, kindred pages, and personal practice statements. They are often presented as if they are ancient Heathen ethics handed down from the Viking Age.
They are not.
The Nine Noble Virtues are a modern construction. They were codified in the twentieth century, not preserved as a formal moral code from pre-Christian Germanic religion. The Wild Hunt has previously reported that the Nine Noble Virtues were created by John Yeowell and John Gibbs-Bailey of the Odinic Rite in 1974, and that Yeowell had ties to white supremacist and fascist movements. The Troth has also described the Nine Noble Virtues as the most famous modern attempt at creating a Heathen ethical code, originally developed by the Odinic Rite, while making clear that they are not Viking Age ethics.
That history matters.
It does not mean that courage is racist.
It does not mean truth is racist.
It does not mean honour, fidelity, discipline, hospitality, self-reliance, industriousness, or perseverance are bad things.
But it does mean the package deserves scrutiny.
When modern Heathen communities say “no frith with Folkism” while continuing to treat the Nine Noble Virtues as a central moral framework, they risk rejecting the visible racism while preserving some of the architecture that racism helped popularize.
That is the uncomfortable part.
The problem is not only who wrote the list. If that were the only issue, the solution would be simple: acknowledge the source, strip away the bad actors, and reclaim the useful pieces.
But the deeper issue is the shape of the code itself.
Why these nine virtues?
Why this emphasis?
Why courage, discipline, self-reliance, industriousness, perseverance, fidelity, and honour as the central moral vocabulary?
Where are compassion, humility, repair, interdependence, care for the vulnerable, accountability after harm, ecological responsibility, or the hard work of restoring broken relationship?
Hospitality is there, yes. But even hospitality can be flattened into a performance of courtesy if it is not tied to genuine openness, protection, and obligation toward the stranger.
The Nine Noble Virtues produce a particular moral atmosphere. It is hard-edged. It favours strength, endurance, self-mastery, loyalty, labour, and personal toughness. Those can be meaningful values. They can also sit very comfortably inside authoritarian, exclusionary, and Folkish ideas of struggle, hierarchy, purity, and worth.
That does not make every person who uses the Nine Noble Virtues a Folkist. It does not make every kindred that references them racist. Many inclusive Heathens have used them sincerely, often because they were presented as standard beginner material.
But sincerity does not erase origin.
And use does not make a thing ancient.
A community serious about rejecting Folkism should be willing to ask whether its inherited ethics still carry Folkish assumptions, even after the racial language has been removed.
That is where “no frith with Folkism” must become more than a slogan.
Frith is not merely the absence of conflict. It is right relationship. It is trust, order, obligation, and peace maintained through honesty and accountability. If Folkism has distorted modern Heathenry, then restoring frith requires more than disavowing explicitly racist organizations. It requires examining the ideas, habits, symbols, and teaching tools that were normalized through those same networks.
The Nine Noble Virtues should not be treated as Heathen scripture.
They should not be treated as the Ten Commandments in Viking clothing.
They should not be placed at the centre of beginner Heathen education without context.
At most, they should be taught historically: as a modern ethical construction, emerging from specific twentieth-century Odinist and Folkish-adjacent environments, later adopted and adapted by many people who often did not know or fully examine that history.
That is a very different thing from treating them as the moral backbone of the faith.
If inclusive Heathenry wants to build something healthier, it needs more than a cleaned-up version of inherited Folkish-era ethics. It needs an ethic rooted in reciprocity, hospitality, responsibility, and repair. It needs to honour ancestors without turning ancestry into ownership. It needs to value courage without glorifying domination. It needs to value honour without turning honour into ego armour. It needs to value kinship without narrowing kinship into blood purity. It needs to value frith without confusing frith with silence.
There is an old temptation in modern Paganism to fill gaps quickly. When reconstructing broken traditions, we reach for lists, codes, symbols, slogans, and simplified teaching tools. That is understandable. People want something solid under their feet.
But not everything solid is sacred.
Sometimes the thing that feels like foundation is just old scaffolding from someone else’s project.
The Nine Noble Virtues may have helped some people articulate discipline, courage, and responsibility. That personal meaning does not have to be denied. But personal usefulness is not the same as communal legitimacy. A tool can be useful and still require retirement when its history and limitations become clear.
Inclusive Heathenry does not need to reclaim the Nine Noble Virtues.
It needs to demote them.
Study them. Contextualize them. Critique them. Understand why they spread. Understand why they appealed to people. Understand why they still appeal to people. But stop pretending they are ancient. Stop pretending they are neutral. Stop pretending they are the natural ethical centre of Heathen practice.
No frith with Folkism means no unexamined inheritance from Folkism either.
If the hall is to be rebuilt, we have to inspect the beams.
Not just the banner over the door.
Unplugged Pagan 