The Old Custom
On the summer solstice of 1972, an Icelandic sheep farmer named Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson registered a new religion with the Icelandic government. He called it Ásatrúarfélagið — the Ásatrú Fellowship — and its purpose was simple: to honour the gods of the Eddas, the gods his ancestors had worshipped before Christianity arrived in the year 1000. Iceland, which had been founded by settlers who came to escape the Christianizing kings of Norway, recognized the new-old faith without difficulty. The minister of justice signed the papers. The gods were legal again.
The story was not so simple elsewhere. By 1972, the symbols of Norse religion — the runes, the hammer of Thor, the Valknut, the Black Sun — had been used by the SS, claimed by prison gangs, tattooed on the bodies of white supremacists. The swastika itself, before it was seized, was a common good-luck symbol across Northern Europe, carved into doorframes and woven into textiles. No other pagan revival has had to fight so hard to reclaim its own iconography from the worst people in modern history.
What follows is an honest profile of a tradition that contains everything from Icelandic farmers pouring mead for the landvættir to American kindreds debating the ethics of ancestry, from scholars reconstructing ritual from saga evidence to extremists who confuse Odin with racial purity. The tradition deserves the truth, and the truth is complicated.
I. The Names
Ásatrú (Old Norse: Ása-trú, "faith in the Æsir") is the most recognizable term worldwide for the modern revival of pre-Christian Norse and Germanic religion. The word was coined in the nineteenth century — it does not appear in any medieval source — but it has become the movement's most common self-designation, particularly in Iceland and North America.
Heathenry is the broader English-language umbrella. Derived from Old English hæðen (one who dwells on the heath — the person outside the Christian village), it encompasses not just Norse-focused practice but the full spectrum of pre-Christian Germanic religion: Anglo-Saxon, Frankish, Gothic, Alemannic, and continental Germanic. Many practitioners prefer "Heathen" precisely because it does not privilege the Norse over other Germanic traditions.
Forn Siðr (Old Norse: "ancient custom") is used in Scandinavia, particularly Denmark, where the organization Forn Siðr was registered in 2003. The term appears in medieval Icelandic sources to distinguish the old religion from nýr siðr — the new custom, Christianity. It carries no Romantic-era baggage.
Odinism is the oldest modern term, coined in the nineteenth century, and is now the most contested. Some practitioners use it sincerely — Odin is their primary deity, the Allfather, the seeker of wisdom. But the term has been disproportionately claimed by ethno-nationalist and white supremacist groups, particularly Else Christensen's Odinist Fellowship (1960s) and its successors. Many Heathens reject the term outright. Others argue that surrendering it to the far right is itself a defeat.
The terminology war matters because it is a proxy for the deeper war within the tradition: who are the old gods for? The answer to that question — which this profile will return to repeatedly — is the central tension of modern Heathenry.
II. The Texts
This is what makes Heathenry fundamentally different from Rodnovery, from Romuva, from every other European pagan revival: the texts exist.
The Poetic Edda — a thirteenth-century Icelandic manuscript collection of mythological and heroic poems in Old Norse, many of them composed centuries earlier. Völuspá (The Prophecy of the Seeress) gives the cosmogony and the eschatology — the creation from Ginnungagap, the world-tree Yggdrasil, Ragnarök. Hávamál (The Sayings of the High One) gives the ethics — 164 stanzas of practical wisdom attributed to Odin: how to behave as a guest, how to handle drink, how to keep friends, how to die well. Lokasenna (Loki's Flyting) gives the gods their flaws — Loki systematically insults every deity in the hall, and much of what he says is true.
The Prose Edda — composed by Snorri Sturluson around 1220, a systematic retelling of Norse mythology for an audience that was already Christian. Snorri's motives are debated: was he preserving the myths, euhemerizing them, or writing a poetics handbook? All three, probably. His Gylfaginning (The Beguiling of Gylfi) is the single most important narrative source for Norse mythology. Without Snorri, we would not know the story of Baldr's death, the binding of Fenrir, the building of Asgard's wall, or a hundred other tales.
The sagas — particularly the Icelandic family sagas (Íslendingasögur), which describe the settlement period (870–1000) and contain detailed accounts of pre-Christian ritual, burial practice, prophecy, and the conversion itself. Eyrbyggja saga describes a temple to Thor. Landnámabók records the beliefs of individual settlers. Brennu-Njáls saga depicts the conversion of Iceland at the Althing in the year 1000 — Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði, the lawspeaker, lay under his cloak for a day and a night and then declared that Iceland would be Christian, but that private worship of the old gods would still be permitted.
The runic inscriptions — the Elder Futhark (24 runes, used until roughly the eighth century) and the Younger Futhark (16 runes, used in the Viking Age) carry invocations, memorial formulas, and names of gods carved in stone and bone across Scandinavia, the British Isles, and wherever the Norse travelled.
The texts are the tradition's greatest asset and its greatest complication. They are real. They are beautiful. They are not pure. Every text we have was written down by Christians, decades or centuries after conversion. Snorri was a Christian politician. The Poetic Edda survives in a single thirteenth-century manuscript (the Codex Regius, GKS 2365 4to). The sagas were composed by Christians about a pagan past. The question for every Heathen practitioner is: how do you reconstruct a living religion from texts that were preserved by the religion that replaced it?
III. The Romantic Thread
The modern revival did not begin in 1972. It began in the nineteenth century, when the Romantic movement rediscovered the Norse past.
In Denmark, N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) — clergyman, poet, educator, founder of the folk high school movement — wove Norse mythology into a Christian Danish national identity. His 1808 poem Nordens Mytologi argued that the old gods were a Danish national treasure compatible with Christian faith. Grundtvig's Norse revival was cultural, not religious — but it established the principle that the Eddas belonged to the nation.
In Germany, the Brothers Grimm, Richard Wagner, and the Romantic philologists transformed Norse and Germanic mythology into a German national narrative. Wagner's Ring des Nibelungen (1848–1874) made Wotan, Brünnhilde, and Siegfried the cultural property of the German-speaking world. The Völkisch movement — the constellation of nationalist, back-to-the-land, anti-modern groups that proliferated in late nineteenth-century Germany and Austria — embraced the runes, the solstice festivals, and a racially defined Germanic paganism as alternatives to Christianity (which they regarded as a Semitic import).
Here the thread splits.
One strand leads to Guido von List (1848–1919), Austrian occultist, inventor of the Armanen Futhark (an 18-rune system derived from the Hávamál rather than historical runic evidence), and architect of a racial-mystical Aryan religion. Von List's Ariosophy — part Theosophy, part Germanic mythology, part racial theory — influenced the Thule Society, which in turn influenced the early Nazi movement. The runic appropriation that would haunt the tradition for a century began here.
The other strand leads to Iceland, where the connection to the Norse past was never broken by Romanticism because it had never been lost. The Icelanders did not need to rediscover the Eddas. They had been reading them continuously since the thirteenth century. When the modern Ásatrú movement emerged in Iceland, it emerged not from Romantic nationalism but from a living literary tradition.
This divergence — the German Romantic strand that leads to the darkest politics in European history, and the Icelandic literary strand that leads to a sheep farmer registering a religion in 1972 — is the fault line that runs through everything that follows.
IV. The Modern Founding
Three founders. Three continents. Three very different visions.
Sveinbjörn Beinteinsson (1924–1993) was an Icelandic sheep farmer, poet, and practitioner of rímur — the traditional Icelandic poetic form. In 1972, he and a small group of friends founded the Ásatrúarfélagið (Ásatrú Fellowship) and successfully petitioned the Icelandic government for recognition as a religious organization. Sveinbjörn was not a nationalist. He was not an occultist. He was a man who loved the poems and wanted to pour mead for the gods they described. Iceland's religious freedom laws, which require the state to recognize any religion that applies, made this remarkably simple. Ásatrú was legal in Iceland before it was organized anywhere else.
Stephen McNallen (b. 1948) was a young American who, independently of the Icelandic movement, founded the Viking Brotherhood in Texas in 1972, later renamed the Ásatrú Free Assembly (AFA). McNallen's vision was more explicitly ethnic: he argued that religion is rooted in ancestry, that the Norse gods "call" to people of Northern European descent because there is a spiritual connection between blood and belief. The AFA collapsed in 1987 over internal disputes — many members objected to McNallen's ethnic emphasis. McNallen re-founded the organization in 1994 as the Ásatrú Folk Assembly, which under his leadership and that of his successor Matt Flavel has become the largest explicitly folkish (i.e., ethno-religious) Heathen organization in North America.
Else Christensen (1913–2005) was a Danish-born Canadian who founded the Odinist Fellowship in the 1960s. Her vision was openly racialist — she drew explicitly on Alexander Rud Mills (an Australian who had promoted "Odinism" as an Aryan racial religion in the 1930s) and framed Odinism as the natural religion of the white race. The Odinist Fellowship published The Odinist newsletter for decades. Christensen's brand of Odinism has been the most directly linked to white supremacist movements.
These three streams — the Icelandic (cultural, literary, non-ethnic), the McNallen American (folkish, ethnic but not necessarily supremacist), and the Christensen racialist (openly white nationalist) — set the pattern that the movement has been negotiating ever since. Most contemporary Heathens fall somewhere between the first two. The third is the shadow they all fight against.
V. The Practice
Heathen practice is reconstructed from textual evidence, archaeological findings, and comparative study of related traditions. No unbroken liturgical tradition survives — everything is reconstruction, and honest practitioners acknowledge this.
Blót (Old Norse: sacrifice) is the central communal rite. In the Viking Age, blót involved animal sacrifice — a horse or ox was killed, its blood sprinkled on the participants and the god-images, its meat cooked and shared in a sacred feast. Modern blót is typically a libation ceremony: mead, beer, or juice is poured into a communal bowl (the hlautbolli), blessed in the name of a god or gods, sprinkled on participants and on the ground (or a sacred object — a Thor's hammer, a carved god-pole), and the remainder poured out as an offering to the gods and the land spirits (landvættir). Some groups practice outdoors at seasonal turning points; others hold blót indoors, in homes or rented halls.
Sumbel (also symbel) is the ritual toast. Participants sit in a circle and pass a horn of mead. Three rounds is traditional: the first to the gods, the second to ancestors and heroes, the third to personal oaths, boasts, or toasts. The sumbel is a bonding rite — what is spoken over the horn has weight. An oath made at sumbel is binding. A boast that goes unfulfilled is a mark against the boaster's reputation. The sumbel echoes the mead-hall scenes in Beowulf and the Eddas, where drinking together creates reciprocal obligation.
The seasonal cycle varies by group, but most observe festivals corresponding to the solstices, equinoxes, and cross-quarter days. The most widely observed are Yule (winter solstice, the most important — a twelve-day festival echoing the pre-Christian jól), Sigrblót or Ostara (spring equinox), Midsummer (summer solstice), and Winter Nights (Vetrnætr, around the autumn equinox — the beginning of the winter half of the year, associated with ancestor veneration and the start of the Wild Hunt). The names and dates vary by tradition. Some groups follow a Norse calendar; some follow an Anglo-Saxon one; some frankly follow the Wiccan Wheel of the Year with Norse names, a practice that purist Heathens deplore.
Kindred (or hearth, or théod) is the basic social unit — a small group of Heathens who practice together, typically ranging from a handful of members to a few dozen. Most Heathen practice happens at the kindred level, not in large organizations. This decentralized structure makes Heathenry resistant to top-down control — and also resistant to top-down reform. A kindred that develops racist leanings has no bishop to answer to.
The Nine Noble Virtues — Courage, Truth, Honour, Fidelity, Discipline, Hospitality, Self-Reliance, Industriousness, Perseverance — are widely cited in Heathen ethics. They were codified by the Odinic Rite in the 1970s, not derived from any historical source. Many Heathens treat them as a useful starting point. Others reject them as a modern invention with uncomfortable origins (the Odinic Rite has folkish associations) and prefer to derive ethics directly from the Hávamál, the sagas, and the concept of frith (peace, social harmony within a community) and grith (sanctuary, the peace of a sacred gathering).
VI. Iceland — The Special Case
Iceland is to Heathenry what Israel is to Judaism: the homeland. The place where the tradition is most authentically itself — not because Icelanders are more pious but because the literary culture never broke.
The Ásatrúarfélagið has grown from twelve founding members in 1972 to over 5,000 in 2025 — making it Iceland's largest non-Christian religion in a nation of 380,000. It is led by Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson (b. 1958), a musician and composer who has served as allsherjargoði (chief priest) since 2003. Hilmarsson is everything the international Heathen movement wishes it could export: learned, progressive, witty, explicitly anti-racist. Under his leadership, the Ásatrúarfélagið has performed legal marriages, naming ceremonies, and funerals. It has campaigned for environmental protection on Heathen religious grounds (the landvættir — Iceland's guardian spirits — demand respect for the land). And it is building a Norse pagan temple — the Hof, a circular structure on the Öskjuhlíð hillside in Reykjavík, long delayed by the 2008 financial crisis and pandemic, but now under construction.
What makes Iceland different is not the temple. It is the relationship between the literature and the practice. Hilmarsson does not treat the Eddas as scripture — he treats them as poetry. The Ásatrúarfélagið does not have a creed. It does not require belief in the literal existence of the gods. Some members are hard polytheists who experience Odin and Thor as distinct beings. Others are animists who experience the gods as personified forces of nature. Others are cultural Heathens — atheists or agnostics who value the aesthetic, ethical, and communal dimensions of the tradition without supernatural commitment. The Ásatrúarfélagið welcomes all of these.
This tolerance is possible because Iceland's Heathenry never had to pass through the Romantic-nationalist filter. The Icelanders did not rediscover the Eddas in the nineteenth century — they had been copying, reading, and reciting them for eight hundred years. The texts are not exotic; they are literature. No Icelander needs to prove that the Eddas belong to them. They do. This security of possession eliminates the anxiety that drives the folkish question elsewhere: if the tradition is already yours, you do not need to build a wall around it.
VII. The Anglophone World
Outside Iceland, the story is more fractured.
In the United States, the dominant split is between the Ásatrú Folk Assembly (AFA) and The Troth. The AFA, refounded by Stephen McNallen in 1994 and now led by Matt Flavel, is the largest folkish organization. It operates multiple hofs (worship halls) across the country, maintains an active online presence, and holds an annual Midsummer gathering. Its official position is that Ásatrú is the "native religion of the peoples of Northern Europe" and that while it is not a racist organization, it affirms that Ásatrú is "primarily a religion" of those peoples. Critics argue this is racial gatekeeping in soft language. Supporters argue it is no different from any indigenous religion claiming a specific ethnic heritage.
The Troth — founded in 1987 as the Ring of Troth by Edred Thorsson (Stephen Flowers) and later reorganized after Flowers' departure — is the largest explicitly inclusive Heathen organization. It publishes Idunna magazine, runs the Lore Program (a structured education in Heathen theology and practice), and maintains a clergy training program. Its position is universalist: anyone called to the gods may answer, regardless of ancestry.
In 2016, in response to the AFA's increasingly explicit ethno-nationalist messaging, over 180 Heathen organizations signed Declaration 127 — named after stanza 127 of the Hávamál ("When you see evil, speak out against it") — publicly rejecting the AFA and its folkish ideology. Declaration 127 was a watershed: the first coordinated, international Heathen repudiation of the folkish position. It did not end the debate. It formalized it.
In the United Kingdom, the Odinic Rite (founded 1973) occupies the folkish end of the spectrum, while The Kith of Yggdrasil, Heathens UK, and smaller groups occupy the inclusive centre. The UK scene is smaller than the American but disproportionately influential in producing scholarship and liturgical resources.
In Australia and New Zealand, small Heathen communities navigate the particular challenge of practicing a Northern European nature religion in a Southern Hemisphere landscape where the solstices are reversed and the native spirits of the land belong to Indigenous traditions, not to the Eddas.
VIII. Northern Europe and Beyond
In Scandinavia, the revival has a different texture. The proximity to the source culture — the rune stones still standing in Swedish fields, the place names (Odense = "Odin's shrine"), the folk customs with pre-Christian roots — makes the revival feel less like reconstruction and more like recognition.
Forn Sed organizations exist in Norway (Bifrost, later Forn Sed Norge, recognized by the state in 1999), Sweden (Samfundet Forn Sed), and Denmark (Forn Siðr, recognized in 2003). These tend to be moderate and inclusive, influenced by the Icelandic model. Scandinavian Heathenry is generally less confrontational about the folkish question — the ethnic connection to the tradition is simply taken for granted, which paradoxically reduces the need to defend it. When the rune stones are in your local churchyard, ancestry is not an argument. It is a fact.
In Germany, the situation is uniquely fraught. The appropriation of Germanic symbolism by the Third Reich means that any public expression of Germanic paganism carries automatic political freight. German Heathen organizations have worked harder than any others to distance themselves from the far right. The Eldaring and the Germanische Glaubens-Gemeinschaft promote an explicitly non-racist Heathenry, and some German Heathens deliberately avoid the term "Ásatrú" in favour of "Firne Sitte" (ancient custom) to escape the associations.
The tradition has also spread far beyond its Germanic heartland. Heathen groups exist in Brazil, Russia, Spain, Japan, and across Latin America. The question of what it means to practice a "Northern European" religion in São Paulo or Tokyo is one the tradition has not yet fully answered — though the universalist wing argues that gods who can travel from Asgard to Midgard can certainly travel to the Southern Hemisphere.
IX. The Folkish Question
The deepest fault line in modern Heathenry. The question: are the Norse gods for everyone, or only for people of Northern European descent?
The folkish position holds that religion is organically connected to ethnicity — that the gods of a people are the gods of their blood, their land, their ancestral memory. Stephen McNallen coined the term metagenetics to describe this: the idea that spiritual inclinations are transmitted genetically alongside physical traits. The folkish argument is not (usually) that non-Europeans are inferior — it is that they have their own gods, their own traditions, and that the most authentic spiritual life comes from following the path of your ancestors. A Japanese person should follow the kami. An African person should follow the orishas. A Northern European should follow the Æsir.
The universalist position holds that gods call whom they call — that ancestry may be a common path into Heathenry but cannot be a gate. A Black Heathen, a Latino Heathen, an Asian Heathen who has been moved by the Eddas, who has stood in front of a god-pole and felt something real, is no less Heathen than a Swede. The universalist argument draws on the texts themselves: the Norse world was cosmopolitan. The sagas describe trade, intermarriage, and cultural exchange across vast distances. Odin himself is a wanderer who values wisdom over lineage.
Between these poles lies a spectrum. Some practitioners identify as tribalist — they believe Heathenry has an ethnic core but welcome sincere practitioners of any background. Some are arch-Heathens who attempt rigorous historical reconstruction without ideological investment in the ethnic question. Some are eclectic pagans who blend Norse elements with other traditions and find the entire debate exhausting.
The folkish position would be a purely internal theological disagreement — comparable to debates within Hinduism about caste and access to scripture — were it not for the shadow that falls across it from the outside.
X. The Shadow
No other living spiritual tradition carries a heavier political burden than Norse Heathenry.
The Third Reich did not invent Germanic paganism, but it weaponized its symbols so thoroughly that the symbols still bleed. The SS lightning bolts are Sig runes. Heinrich Himmler built the SS as a pseudo-religious order modelled on an imagined Germanic warrior cult, complete with solstice rituals, rune ceremonies, and the castle at Wewelsburg as a cultic centre. The Ahnenerbe (Ancestral Heritage organization) funded expeditions and research to prove the superiority of "Aryan" civilization using fabricated Germanic cultural evidence. Karl Maria Wiligut — sometimes called "Himmler's Rasputin" — designed SS rituals drawing on fabricated Germanic traditions. The Black Sun symbol, now associated worldwide with white supremacism, was designed for the floor of the Wewelsburg castle.
After 1945, the symbols migrated into supremacist subcultures worldwide. Thor's hammer — the Mjölnir pendant, worn by Heathens as a religious symbol equivalent to the Christian cross — appears on the bodies of neo-Nazis and prison gang members. Valhalla rhetoric ("dying with honor," "warrior culture") has been adopted by white nationalist militias. Norse symbolism appeared among the extremists who stormed the US Capitol in January 2021.
This creates a double bind for sincere practitioners. Every Thor's hammer pendant is potentially read as a hate symbol. Every Heathen gathering faces the question: are you a religious community or a front? Every public expression of Norse identity requires a preface: I am not what you think I am.
The tradition has fought back. Declaration 127 was one response. Many inclusive Heathen organizations now include explicit anti-racism statements in their bylaws. The Troth requires applicants to affirm that they reject racial discrimination. Heathens Against Hate, an advocacy group, monitors extremist entanglement and provides resources for practitioners who encounter white supremacists in Heathen spaces. The Southern Poverty Law Center distinguishes between legitimate Heathen religion and white supremacist groups that use Norse symbolism — though this distinction is not always visible to the general public.
The honest assessment: the shadow is not entirely external. It is not simply that bad people stole good symbols. The Völkisch movement — the intellectual ancestor of the Third Reich — was itself a Germanic pagan revival. Guido von List was a Heathen. Else Christensen was a Heathen. The line between folkish religion and racist religion is real, but it is not always bright. The tradition's most painful ongoing work is to hold that line, openly and honestly, without pretending the darkness came from outside.
XI. The Scholars
Stefanie von Schnurbein (Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism, 2016) — the definitive scholarly history of the modern movement, from the Romantic period to the present. Schnurbein traces the full arc from Grundtvig through the Völkisch movement to contemporary Heathenry, with particular attention to the German context and the political entanglements. Essential reading.
Michael Strmiska (Modern Paganism in World Cultures, 2005) — comparative framework placing Heathenry alongside other pagan revivals worldwide. Strmiska's work is valuable for seeing Heathenry not as unique but as one expression of a global phenomenon.
Jenny Blain (Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic: Ecstasy and Neo-Shamanism in North European Paganism, 2002) — ethnographic study of seiðr (Norse magical practice) in modern Heathen communities. Blain documents how contemporary practitioners reconstruct and experience trance, prophecy, and spirit-work from fragmentary textual evidence.
Mattias Gardell (Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, 2003) — the most thorough study of racist Odinism and its relationship to white supremacist movements in the United States. Gardell's work is unflinching and essential — it maps the networks, the theology, and the prison pipeline that connects Norse symbolism to racial violence.
Jeffrey Kaplan (Radical Religion in America, 1997) — early study of the intersection between Norse paganism and far-right politics in America, particularly useful for understanding the Christensen/McNallen era.
The scholarly literature is growing rapidly. The field has moved from treating Heathenry as a curiosity to recognizing it as a significant religious movement with complex internal politics and real social consequences.
XII. The Texts Remain
What keeps Heathenry alive is what has always kept it alive: the texts.
The Poetic Edda is one of the great literary achievements of medieval Europe. The Hávamál is a genuine ethical masterpiece — a wisdom tradition as practical and humane as Ecclesiastes or the Daodejing. The Völuspá is eschatology as poetry: the seeress sees creation, the golden age, the twilight of the gods, and then — the world rising again, green, from the sea. The gods die. The world is reborn. The pattern repeats.
No other European pagan revival has this advantage. The Slavic revival has fragments. The Baltic revivals have folk songs. Heathenry has Snorri, has the seeress, has the Allfather hanging nine nights on the wind-swept tree to win the runes. The texts are real. They are beautiful. They are there for anyone who reads them — and that last fact is the reason the folkish argument will ultimately lose. You cannot build a wall around a book. You cannot tell the gods who to call.
The tradition's future lies in its willingness to hold the tension: between reconstruction and innovation, between ethnic rootedness and universal welcome, between the inheritance of the Eddas and the shadow of the Völkisch past. The Icelanders point the way — not because they have the right answer but because they have the right question. Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson, asked what Ásatrú is, replied: "We are not a religion that asks you to believe. We are a religion that asks you to experience."
The texts remain. The gods remain. The question remains: who are they for? The tradition is alive because the question is still open.
Colophon
This profile was researched and written for the Good Work Library by the New Tianmu Anglican Church, 2026. Principal scholarly sources include Stefanie von Schnurbein (Norse Revival: Transformations of Germanic Neopaganism, 2016), Mattias Gardell (Gods of the Blood: The Pagan Revival and White Separatism, 2003), Michael Strmiska (Modern Paganism in World Cultures, 2005), Jenny Blain (Nine Worlds of Seid-Magic, 2002), and Jeffrey Kaplan (Radical Religion in America, 1997).
The Living Traditions section profiles spiritual communities that are alive today — not as museum exhibits but as breathing, arguing, practicing groups of people. This profile aspires to accuracy, honesty, and respect for a tradition that contains multitudes.
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