Dr. Marija Gimbutas, who died on Feb. 2, 1994 was born and grew up in Lithuania. Originally intending to become a doctor, she switched to archæology. She had already observed that many of the peasant customs in her native land were thinly-disguised paganism, and this set the tone for much of her career.
World War II interrupted her studies, so she spent much of it in the countryside with her husband, sheltering a group of Jews. After the war she made her way to Austria, then Germany, and continued to study in Tübingen,. She moved on to Harvard, where she met with a lot of sexism and was eventually granted a full professorship by the University of California at Los Angeles.
Her major contribution was her work on the origin of Indo-European languages and the way in which they spread.
For nearly 30 years, she argued that the 'Indo-European homeland' should be placed in the Pontic-Caspian steppe and identified the Proto-Indo-Europeans with her Kurgan tradition -- a series of cultures occupying the steppe and forest steppe of the southern parts of modern Russia and the Ukraine around the 4th millenium bce. The name is taken from the form of barrow burial common to them.
She traced the movement of these people, or of their culture, by mapping changes in the mortury traditions of the surrounding people. In a society she identified as sexually egalitarian and peaceful, burials identical to the steppe burials begin to appear accompanied by symbols of male power, weapons and indications of the practice of suttee. The matrifocal status of the earlier society was evidenced by the numbers of female statuettes found. She also interpreted a number of pottery decorations as feminine symbols.
She proposed that the remnant of this society survived as the Minoans of Crete. One of her more famous interpretations was of the Minoan double axe, the Labys. Pointing out the exaggerated curve to the blade, she suggested it was actually a butterfly.
She was a prolific writer and as close as is possible to an archæological superstar whose work is of the highest relevance to the Neo-pagan community.
Sveinbjorn Beinteinsson Allsherjargothi, the Icelandic farmer, poet, "kvaedamadur" (poetry "singer") and head of the Icelandic Àsatruarsofnudurinn passed away on the 25th of December 1993 at the age of 69.
He is perhaps best known as the Allsherjargothi (supreme head) of the official Icelandic Àsatruarsofnudur (or Àsatru-sect), devoted to the survival of the heathen religion of pre-christian Iceland. Amongst others things, Sveinbjorn got Àsatruarsofnuthurinn officially recognised as a religious body in 1972 after a long battle with the Ministry of Justice & Ecclesiastical Affairs -- the first non-Christian group to receive such rights. He served as the Allsherjargothi from the start.
Apart from the farming the main bulk of Sveinbjorn's work lay in the Rimur and other poetry with the older Germanic form and metre.
Rimur is a kind of "sung Poetry" and is closely related to the epic singing traditions of early Europe. Rimur singing is similar to vocal chanting from the Middle East, but the forms are not related and unlike the Arabic counterpart the "sung poetry" of Iceland has no tonal scale but is a free-form wave of sound. It's a strict form of expression with stability in the volume, pitch, tempo and length of syllables.
Using Rimur singing as a basis Sveinbjorn almost single-handed re-created the art of epic singing used by Scandinavian poets of pre-Christian times, who created such masterpieces as Voluspa and Beowulf (Bjolfskvitda).
As the Nordic intelligentsia had dismissed his singing as "the primitive groans of farmers", Sveinbjorn turned to a younger generation of listeners with his offerings. In the late seventies and early eighties he performed with new wave, industrial and punk artists like Psychic TV, Theyr (members later in Psychic TV, Killing Joke, Kukl, Sugarcubes & Frostbite) and Purkur Pilnikk (whose members later started Kukl & the Sugarcubes) -- earning him the respect and admiration of younger music fans and the disrespect, hatred even, of self-appointed "cultural moguls" and poetry/literature scholars. His records where published by independent rock labels, rather than the expected classical or early music specialist labels.
Sveinbjorn's vocalization of the lays of the Elder Edda (Eddu Kvaedi) are available from the English record company "D.U.R.T.R.O." (United Dairies) as "Current 93 Presents Sveinbjorn Beinteinsson : The Eddas".