“We Are Our Deeds” has pretty much cemented it’s place as a seminal text of modern heathenry, despite being less than a hundred pages excluding prefaces, appendices, etc. As with essentially everything about modern paganism, there’s a fair bit of politics surrounding the text, and while I’m far from an objective observer, I’m going to leave this for readers to look into themselves if they’re so inclined and focus primarily on content.

“We Are Our Deeds” is essentially a short exploration on Anglo-Saxon morality from a mostly historic perspective. As opposed to purely textual or comparative analysis, the text is about 90% etymology, and good etymology is always something we could use more of. I’m not much of a philologist myself, but I did do a bit of fact checking (not always easy with indo-european words, unfortunately) and it all seems fairly sound, by my reckoning. Some words will be recognized as staples of modern heathen “lingo”, like maegen, whereas others will come across as foreign to newbies, such a Wihaz. Regardless of how long you’ve been heathen, the “wordhoard” or dictionary in the back makes a handy little reference, although I’d like having one a bit longer on my shelves.

For those coming from a more eclectic or less traditionalist pagan culture, one is likely to find a fair bit that contradicts idioms frequently espoused by demographics like Asatruar. The book discusses heathen sin, the delineation of the sacred and profane, and the implications of things such as bodily illness in terms of morality. This is a treat for me, because I am a bitter old hag, who likes making people stammer and cry. From all this, it would become clear that this is a reconstructionist work even if one is unfamiliar with the name “Wodening”. I would want to complain about the oversimplification of the strict definitions of words in some places, but I recognize that brevity is one of the book’s virtues and a pedantic analysis of vocabulary would probably detract rather than improve.

I took issue to the listing of the “thews” in the later chapters, but even Wodening recognizes the futility of the exercise, and is pretty hand-wavy regarding any sort of authority or objectivity in them. If these were presented as a bit more absolute, I’d likely rage and rage, but as they are, the list provides a good, succinct reference. They aren’t worth using as some kind of list of “heathen commandments”, and as a code aren’t much better than the Nine Noble Virtues, but ultimately make a useful simplification to pick up the ideas at a glance.

The text is very good at establishing a coherent worldview. It tends to follow threads back to their source and then on to other threads, weaving the tapestry of how all these little heathen concepts interconnect and build off one another. It gives passing mention to other concepts like wyrd and luck, while introducing others that one might not be as familiar with. While the specific scope of the book can be seen as a bit narrow, lending to the brevity of the work, it overall manages to work its way into a much wider historic narrative.

Those of you who are writers or editors yourself might find this one a difficult read. It’s loaded with grammar and spelling mistakes, and it can honestly be very distracting. I make the same mistakes constantly, but the sheer volume of of errors is pretty disconcerting. As far as I’m aware, there aren’t mistakes in the Old English terms that are translated, so the issue seems to be primarily legibility and not practicality.

Overall, “We Are Our Deeds” is a book definitely worth picking up. It’s almost required reading at this point, recommended almost as often as Culture of the Teutons. It’s fairly cheap and a light read, so money and time shouldn’t prove much of an issue. I would recommend grabbing some aspirin for the headaches and some other authors to double check the relevance of anything that doesn’t seem applicable, though.