Table of Contents
What is Sidu Anyway?
Sidu — the word is usually translated as “custom” or “tradition”, but this understates it considerably. In the Old English corpus, sidu carries full moral force. It is not habit or convention. It is right conduct — the way things are properly done among a people who take their obligations to one another, to the Gods, and to the world seriously. Folcsida is literally, “the customs of the people”.
The evidence is unambiguous. In the Old English translation of the Pastoral Care, siodo names one of three things the kings of England maintained — alongside sibbe (peace) and onweald (power) — and is translated flatly as morality. Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, uses hæþene unsida — Heathen un-sidu — as a term of moral condemnation, not mere cultural description.
A useful modern parallel comes from Dutch, where doe normaal — literally “just act normal” — carries similar weight. It is not a specific rule. It is an appeal to shared communal standards that everyone is expected to have internalized. Sidu works the same way. The direct Dutch cognate is zede, from the same Proto-Germanic root *siduz. Volkszeden — the customs of a people — is the direct equivalent of folcsida.
Sidu is also closely related to the concept of þeáw — its negative form unþeáw denotes vice in the fullest moral sense, and gnomic poetry uses þeáwas to describe praised conduct and character worth emulating. The two words appear in the same contexts and carry the same weight. We use þeáw to refer to personal conduct and ethical character generally, and sidu to refer to the specific customs and expectations of the tradition.
Fyrnsida – Our Historical Roots
Our living customs do not emerge from nothing. They are grounded in the Fyrnsida — the Old Ways — the body of pre-conversion customs we can attest through primary sources: what the Anglo-Saxons, Frisians, and their neighbors actually did, recovered through archaeology, literature, and the inadvertent testimony of the Church documents that sought to suppress those very practices.
The relationship is one of continuity and accountability. The Fyrnsida are the root. The sida are the living growth from that root. When we establish a modern sidu — how we conduct worship, how we practice hospitality, how we relate to the Gods and the land — we ask whether it grows naturally from what is attested, or contradicts it. The Fyrnsida are always in view as the standard against which our customs are measured.
This does not mean every sidu requires a direct pre-conversion precedent. The Fyrnsida themselves were never static. But we do not depart from them lightly, and we say so when we do.
The Sida of the Ingwina Ferræden
These are the enumerated living customs of our tradition. Each grows from an attested Fyrnsidu. Each has its own page where the evidence, the practice, and the philology are laid out in full.
Gield — (Sacrifice) Sacred reciprocity: the offering of gifts to Gods, ancestors, and wights in the expectation of relationship, not transaction. The core mechanic of Heathen worship and the foundation of our ritual life.
Bigang (Living Heathenship) — Daily practice: the living of Heathenship outside of formal ritual. How we conduct ourselves when no blót is happening. The religion as it exists on ordinary days.
Gestlíðnes (Hospitality) — The sacred obligation to receive guests well, to extend generosity, and to conduct ourselves toward strangers and members alike with the honor that obligation demands.
Friþmǽl (Rule of Frith) — The article of peace: the binding frith obligation that every member of the Ferræden accepts upon joining. What we owe one another, and what happens when that peace is broken.
Gildscipe — Community: the terms and spirit of membership — inclusive, bound by frith, and grounded in the Ingvaeonic understanding that strong communities are built from good character, not bloodlines.
Ǽfæstnes (Honoring the Gods Rightly) — Piety: right relationship with the Gods and wights, and the reverence that relationship demands in worship. Which beings we welcome, which we do not, and why.
Ieldra Weorþung (Ancestor Veneration) — Veneration of ancestors and wights: the honoring of the honored dead, the elves, the idese, and the other beings whose presence shapes the world we inhabit.
Eorþan Weorþung (Veneration of the Earth) — Veneration of the earth: the recognition of the land, its features, and the living world as sacred — not as backdrop to human activity but as participant in it.
Arweorþnes (Cultivating Personal Honor) — Honor: the cultivation of personal worth through the seven cardinal virtues — Heáfodmægnu — as they can be recovered from the heroic and wisdom literature of the Anglo-Saxon corpus.
Riht-endebyrdnes (Keeping true to our Tradition) — Right order: the tradition kept coherent and genuinely itself — neither frozen nor dissolved into the spiritual eclecticism of the modern age.