I built the place I needed when I first began.

My name is Keele Fishel. Within this work, I teach and write as Nanna Seiðborin. Voice of Seiðr is not built around the idea that I possess all the answers. It is built around a way of approaching the questions honestly. Throughout this site, you will see the work divided into three parts:

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What We Know

This is what can be supported through the surviving poetry, sagas, inscriptions, archaeology, historical language, and related scholarship. The sources are incomplete, and they do not always agree. What survives was recorded in particular places, during particular periods, and often after the conversion to Christianity. When the evidence is limited, I will not quietly turn possibility into fact.

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What We Think

This is where interpretation begins. We compare sources, look for patterns, examine cultural context, and consider what may reasonably be reconstructed. Scholars may disagree. Modern practitioners may reach different conclusions. Some interpretations are strongly supported, while others remain thoughtful possibilities. Those differences deserve to remain visible.

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What It Means to Me

This is where I speak from lived practice. I may explain how I understand a story, how a concept has shaped my work, or how I carry something into modern life. That understanding may be spiritually meaningful without being a preserved Viking Age teaching. Personal experience belongs in the conversation. It simply should not be disguised as historical evidence. That distinction is at the heart of Voice of Seiðr.

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Why This Place Exists

When I first began searching, the information was scattered everywhere. Academic material often assumed that the reader already understood the language, the sources, and the arguments surrounding them. Modern spiritual writing could move in the opposite direction, presenting personal interpretation as ancient certainty. Social media reduced entire traditions to symbols, aesthetics, simplified gods, and a handful of comforting keywords.

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I wanted a place where someone could begin without being spoken down to, then continue learning without being asked to surrender discernment. Voice of Seiðr brings history, story, worldview, spiritual practice, and modern life into the same conversation. The purpose is not to recreate the Viking Age. It is to understand the worldview deeply enough that we can recognize what it still has to teach us.

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A Worldview Worth Remembering

The old stories are not important merely because they are old. They carry a worldview concerned with ancestry, consequence, courage, reputation, hospitality, obligation, land, community, and the relationships that make a life possible. They rarely divide people into perfectly good heroes and conveniently evil villains. Choices carry costs. Wisdom is often earned badly. Even the gods live with consequence. That worldview is sincerely lacking in much of modern life.

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We are frequently taught to think only in terms of individual desire, personal fulfillment, and immediate comfort. The Norse worldview asks different questions. What do you owe? What are you carrying forward? What happens to the people around you when you act? What kind of ancestor are you becoming?

I do not believe every answer belongs in the past. I believe the old worldview can help us ask better questions now.

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Who I Am

My formal background is in psychology, mind-body work, and clinical hypnotherapy. Much of my professional life has been spent studying trauma, identity, memory, belief, and the ways people build meaning from what they have survived.

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That background shapes how I read the old material. I am interested in what a belief does inside a person’s life, how stories organize identity, how inherited patterns move through families, and how ritual can either deepen our relationship with reality or help us avoid it. I am also a Seiðr practitioner, cultural educator, storyteller, maker, and always a student of the Norse worldview.

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My practice is spiritual and lived. My teaching remains careful about the difference between evidence, interpretation, reconstruction, and personal experience. Those distinctions do not weaken the sacred. They keep us honest about what we are carrying.

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Why Nanna

Nanna is what my grandchildren call me. It is also the name by which I sit with my students and the wider community that has gathered around this work. For me, Nanna is not a claim to rank. It describes a relationship.

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A Nanna teaches, remembers, tells the stories, answers the questions she can, and admits when the answer is not available. She keeps something useful within reach for those who come after her. I use the name Nanna Seiðborin within this work. Seiðborin means Seiðr-borne, or born through Seiðr. It describes the way the practice has shaped my life. It is not a historical title, an inherited office, or a claim of authority over the tradition. It is a name tied to responsibility.

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The Stories We Give Our Children

I am also a children’s author. I do not write stories that stop every few pages to announce a tidy lesson about kindness. Children are more intelligent than that, and stories are capable of carrying far more.

I write to awaken imagination and place meaningful questions inside it. My stories explore courage, consequence, identity, choice, responsibility, and the ways people learn to live within a larger world.

The lessons are carried through what happens. Children encounter the choices, feel the consequences, and reach understanding through the story itself. That is also part of Voice of Seiðr.

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The old stories did not usually explain their worldview in a list of rules. They showed people acting inside it. They allowed the listener to see what courage cost, how betrayal traveled, why hospitality mattered, and what happened when someone placed desire above obligation. Stories teach us how a world works before we have the language to explain it.

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How I Approach the Work

The surviving Norse material is incomplete. Some figures appear across many sources, while others are known from a name, a brief reference, or a fragment of poetry. Practices such as Seiðr are described from the outside more often than they are explained by practitioners.

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There are places where we can speak confidently. There are places where careful reconstruction is possible. There are also places where the honest answer is that we do not know. You will find all three here.

Voice of Seiðr includes:

• Clear introductions for people who are beginning

• Deeper examinations of Norse history, worldview, and cultural practice

• Teachings on Seiðr, Galdr, runes, ancestors, spirits, ritual, and the Norse understanding of the person

• Practical ways to bring belief into the home without pretending modern life is medieval Scandinavia

• Open distinctions between what is historically attested, thoughtfully reconstructed, and personally lived

This is educational work, but it is not detached from human life. The questions beneath the sources still matter because people are still living with grief, betrayal, courage, longing, obligation, belonging, and the need to understand their place in the world.

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What I Believe

Tradition deserves honesty. Scholarship should be allowed to challenge us without stripping the sacred from everything it touches. Spiritual experience should be respected without becoming immune to thoughtful questions. A living practice should be allowed to grow without disguising every new branch as something ancient. I do not sell access to gods. I do not promise secret initiations or claim that one modern method is the only authentic path.

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I teach what I have studied. I share what I have practiced. I explain how I reached my conclusions, and I remain clear about the places where certainty is not available. Some of what you find here may confirm what you already believe. Some of it may ask you to look again. Both are part of learning.

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Begin Where You Are

You do not need to know every god, pronounce every word correctly, or arrive with a completed spiritual identity. Begin with the worldview. Follow the subject that continues to draw your attention. Read carefully. Ask stronger questions. Allow understanding to develop before rushing to claim certainty. This is the place I wish I had found when I first began searching. So I made it.

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Nanna Seiðborin
Cultural Educator, Seiðr Practitioner, Storyteller, and Children’s Author