“On this International Migrants Day, we must reaffirm our commitment to the nearly 300 million migrants around the world. We have to mobilize to ensure that their inalienable rights, threatened by the various global crises, are respected.”
Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO

Today is International Migrants Day.

The UN wants both to highlight the contributions made by migrants to society and raise awareness for the challenges they face.

Mixed feelings

Many modern heathens are very settled and established. For those who are settled and established, migrants often evoke very mixed feelings. They may be seen as a source of cultural enrichment, maybe also as welcome workforce in the social sector, sometimes as guests of which the Hávamál tells us to treat them well. But quite often they are also seen as some kind of threat to the achieved status quo, the own accumulated riches, the own cultural identity.

At the same time, many well settled, modern heathens adore the Vikings.

Vikings

Some of the big sagas of the Vikings, especially the Völsunga Saga, are rooted deeply in a time still known as Migration Era. Modern technology may have lifted migration to a globalized level, but throughout human history migration was a very usual way of living.
And of course the Vikings themselves were very migratory people. They are revered for their long travels, spanning over Eastern Europe down to Constantinople and Sicily in the East and South, and up to Greenland and Vinland in the North and West.

So, let‘s face it: The modern migrants are much more Viking than most of us well established heathens! Let us pay them the respect they deserve.

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