Else Christensen

Else Christensen (born 1913, died 2005) was a Danish-born activist who became an early figure, described by some as controversial, in North American Heathen revival circles. After experiences in Europe during the mid-20th century, she emigrated to North America and, in the late 1960s, launched a small publishing and networking effort that became known as the Odinist Fellowship. Her newsletters, pamphlets, and study groups reached a modest but influential audience among people who sought a racially and culturally framed form of "Odinism" in the North American context.

Christensen’s work is significant for several reasons. First, she provided organizational models—newsletters, study circles, and mailed liturgical materials—that helped incubate a distributed revival at a time when face-to-face networks were sparse. Second, her particular emphasis on Odinism as a worldview with ethnic and cultural implications placed her within what scholars later identified as "folkish" or völkisch currents: streams that tie religious identity to ancestry or perceived racial heritage. Her writings and networks thus contributed to an early strand of American-based Heathenry that became a focal point for later debates over inclusion and ideology.

Her legacy is complex. On one hand, she is remembered as a committed organizer who maintained interest in Germanic ritual and mythic traditions outside Europe; on the other hand, many contemporary Heathens and scholars critique the ethnic essentialism present in parts of her oeuvre. The contested aspects of Christensen’s influence became more visible in the 1980s and 1990s as organizations and communities deliberately addressed questions of racial exclusivity. In some respects Christensen’s career illustrates how organizational entrepreneurship in a nascent religious movement can exert long-term cultural influence—but not always in ways that later adherents endorse.

From a scholarly perspective, Christensen is a case study in the transnational circulation of revivalist ideas. Her movement-building drew on both European cultural memory and North American opportunities for religious entrepreneurship during the 1960s and 1970s. The Odinist Fellowship’s materials and networks pre-dated—or ran parallel to—the formation of other contemporary Heathen groups, and they fed into the patchwork topology of modern revivalist activity.

Biographically, Christensen’s life story—migration from Denmark to North America, editorial work, and small-group organizing—reflects a broader pattern in the modern Pagan revival: charismatic or driven individuals often act as nodes that link dispersed interest to concrete institutions. The subsequent debates over how to interpret her legacy show how modern religious revivals are not historically neutral but carry social and political valences that later generations have addressed.