Lithuanian Gastronomical Heritage - Gira (Kvas)

Like many other countries known for their traditions of winemaking or beer brewing, Lithuania also stands out in the area of beverages with its own national drink - gira.

Gira is a fermented drink widely believed to have originated in Eastern Europe, known as kvas amongst Slavs. However, it has a far reaching history in Lithuania with recipes and use being recorded in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

Lithuania is special in this sphere for its rich heritage of gira recipes, a number of which have been dated back to as far as the 16th century AD. Over a hundred of such original recipes survive today from basic rye and bread gira, to more exotic cloudberry, honey and even milk gira.

Gira is not only a popular staple in modern day Lithuania, but also a valuable and longstanding piece of Lithuanian heritage, with a long history of use in folk medicine, traditional drink and popular refreshment throughout our history.

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The Erlkönig and the Forest Traditions of Northern Europe:

In many older traditions, forests were places where the unseen might be encountered.
Forests have long held a place of mystery in the traditions of northern Europe. In many stories they were places where travelers might encounter something beyond the ordinary.

One of the most well known examples appears in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Der Erlkönig” (1782). In the poem a father rides through the night with his child as they pass through a dark forest. The child insists that he sees a mysterious figure calling to him from the trees, while the father hears only the wind and sees only shapes moving in the mist. By the time they reach home, the child is dead, leaving the reader to wonder whether something truly followed them through the forest.

Stories of dangerous encounters in lonely places also appear in earlier Scandinavian folklore. The Danish ballad “Elveskud,” preserved in Danmarks gamle Folkeviser as DgF 47, tells of a knight named Hr. Oluf who meets elf maidens before his wedding and dies the next day after refusing their invitation. Traditions like these suggest that forests and wild places were often imagined as dwelling places of elves and other unseen beings.

The name Erlkönig later appeared in German literature during a time when writers were collecting older folk traditions. Later writers such as Jacob Grimm noted that the word may be related to the Danish elverkonge, meaning “elf-king.” Stories like these remind us that in earlier traditions the forests of the old world were never simply empty land, but places where mystery and the unknown were never far away.

Mortiz von Schwind: Erlkönig, 1849 (Prague: National Gallery)

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Anti-Intellectualism vs Academic Worship

Disagreeing with a popular academic does not make someone anti-intellectual. There is an important difference between rejecting scholarship and refusing to treat a scholar’s interpretation as unquestionable authority.

Academics are investigators. They gather evidence, analyze sources, and present interpretations of the material. Those interpretations are often shaped by particular methods, assumptions, or schools of thought within their field.

To question an interpretation is simply to examine the reasoning behind it. One may disagree with the method used, the assumptions guiding it, or the conclusions drawn from the evidence. That is not opposition to academia. It is engagement with the same critical process that scholarship itself relies on.

Scholarship advances through debate, criticism, and competing interpretations of the evidence. Challenging a conclusion is not rejecting intellectual work. It is participating in it. In the end, any theory is only as good as the evidence that supports it.

Art: The School of Athens by Raphael (1509–1511)

It becomes a problem when academia itself starts being treated as the ultimate authority rather than as a field of investigation. I see this often, especially among people who lean more progressive, where someone will cite to justify the claim that there were transgender Vikings. They then treat his interpretation as settled fact, while ignoring the actual source material and the broader cultural framework that informs us about what heathen religious life looked like.

Academics propose interpretations and theories, but those interpretations still need to be measured against the historical texts, archaeology, and the cultural context in which those societies existed. Treating any single scholar’s interpretation as unquestionable authority misses the point of scholarship entirely, which is supposed to be a process of investigation and debate.

The difference between Platonists and folkish pagans becomes very clear when you look at what their objections to Christianity are.

The Platonist objection to Christianity is that it subordinates reason to revelation and eternal truths to historical events. True religion should center on timeless metaphysical realities, like the eternal forms or "The Good", rather than on historical contingencies such as the incarnation or the resurrection. Christianity is too particular and not universal enough.

The folkish objection to Christianity is that it is a universalist and anti-tribal faith that undermines ethnic, cultural, and ancestral identity. It breaks with native traditions and replaces them with foreign ones. It is deracinating, globalizing, and spiritually homogenizing. It undermines rootedness, blood ties, and local customs. Christianity is too universal and not particular enough.

Platonism accepts Christianity's framing completely. Platonism sees how Christianity challenged and undermined ethnic religion and says that it didn't go far enough.

Platonism is the enemy of ethnic faiths and it is a mystery how it continues to have any association with paganism at all.

@folkishworldview

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