Stephan wrote in compelling style, crafting sentences that often moved as rapidly as the winds, water and spirits he so vividly described.

The great rush of a stormwind howled through the pines like a wolf, sending raven-black clouds scudding along as swiftly as the galloping of an eight-legged shadowsteed. With the wind came the rain, a gray waterfall from the sky that tasted a little of wine or mead, mysterious, magical, and the flickering, fiery laughter of the lightning. Thus Wodan, Hoenir and Loki came to the Middle-Garth, men’s earth, swift as the storm raging between the worlds.

Men make images of their gods, trying to set their might forth into earth, but the true power lies in names and songs. Ygg the Terrifying, All-Father, Father of the Slain, Father of Magic, One-Eyed, Grim, Graybeard, Lord of the Ravens, God of the Hanged, Lord of Ghosts: all these are Wodan, the god of wod-fury and song, whom men of the Middle-Garth, lacking soul-sight, sense in the night wind rushing through the trees. Hoenir is his watery, mysterious mirror; Loki leaps from place to place, sputtering and sparking fire, a dangerous servant, a deadly master, but an indispensable companion. So the soul feels their mights; what the spirit could see became clearer and clearer now, as the gods chose to walk in the Middle-Garth in the shapes of those trees they had once made human with the breath of life, the mead of thought and dreams and the quickening fires. 

— Rheingold

The world of our Germanic forebears was a world of life; woods full of deer, moose, wolves, and bears; seas and lakes seething with whales and fish; sky and cliffs thick with the calls of birds and the sound of their wings. More than that, rocks, waterfalls, and streams, ocean and mountain and field, were home to all manner of beings, whose friendship could bring fruitfulness and wisdom, and whose anger could lead to sickness and dead cattle or sheep. Unseen much of the time, these beings could come to speak in dreams, or they might be glimpsed in the twilight dusk, in the short bright night of Midsummer Eve or with their pale lanterns in procession through the darkness of the Yule nights.

— Elves, Wights, and Trolls: Studies Towards the Practice of Germanic Heathenry

In the dark woodland of the Northern European consciousness, a figure waits: an old man, wrapped in a blue-black cloak. His broad-brimmed hat hangs low, hiding one eye; a sharp metal point glints at the tip of his staff, and two ravens croak from the branches of the ash-tree above him. He beckons: in his hand he holds an ancient drinking-horn, and the scent that rises from it is honey and alcohol, strong enough to set the head spinning with a single whiff. He is a grim one, this old man; his spear is streaked with blood, and the hounds that crouch at his side look more like wolves than dogs. Yet the gift he offers is enough to overcome fear, for the brave . . . for those who are not afraid to die. 

In the search for understanding – of ourselves, of our proper relation to our society, and of our spiritual existence and goals – the way to recover what has been lost is to go back to the point where it was lost: the point at which what had been a traditional culture, where the individual was completely integrated with his or her society, god/esses, and the natural world, ceast to be such and, instead, became a part of the Christian West, and in the traditional culture of Northern Europe, the first step on that road, and its greatest challenge, is the meeting with the old man at the edge of the wood – the old, one-eyed god, whom the Vikings knew as Odinn, the English as Woden, and the Germans as Wotan . . . .

— Wotan: The Road to Valhalla

There are things that can be done in order to bring the turning of the year into your life. Planting and tending a garden, if you have space, is as close to farming as many of us can get in a practical way. Arrange the garden, if you can, so that your last plants to be harvested will finish around Winternights. You can even grow a little bit of grain for ritual use, while flax, that mighty plant of Frija, is often sold as a decorative and sprouts exceedingly well from seed. . . . It can easily be dried and braided or made into dollies and other straw figures in the same way that dried grain-stalks can be. If there is space in the yard and you live in an area where apples will grow well, tending an apple tree or two is a magnificent way to experience the turning of the seasons: flowers in spring, fruit swelling all summer, ready to be picked in the fall . . . .

— Feeling the Harvest: How to Understand Agricultural Rituals in a Technological Society

Rune: Eihwaz