Origins

Rather than take up a lot of space in the Anglo-Saxon Paganism post - which remains unwieldy anyway - I thought I would take up the idea of origins here. We spoke of Anglo-Saxon and Norse paganism has having a common origin, based on similar names of deities and some evidence of similar calendar observances and burial practices, which often indicate something about religious beliefs. Also, we know that other parts of their culture (language, economy) show similarities, and now know that they share genetic affinities as well. That's fine as far as it goes, but we base it off something of a false picture of origins. We can argue a lot about previous and subsequent influences, but for many religions, we do have an origin point: Buddhism originated with the Buddha; Christianity originated with Jesus; Islam started with Mohammad. Let me switch to an analogy from geography and culture, which would not be inappropriate in discussing language and religion anyway. 

There is an American idea of freedom, and it is distinguishable from Pakistani or Japanese ideas about freedom. When you push it hard enough, it is even distinguishable from Canadian or English ideas of freedom, though those have greater similarities. There will be Venn diagram overlaps throughout, as not all Americans agree on what freedom is. Economic freedom? Sexual freedom? Religious freedom? But where does the American idea come from? Well, it doesn't come from anywhere, it emerged in colonial times as a development, combining and recombining elements from first, various regions and generations in Britain, but subsequently Native groups that were not themselves the same, and then different neighbors from Europe - French from Canada, Spanish in the south and west, Dutch in New York, and beyond that immigrants who came from diverse places. Central Europeans, Jews, and Chinese did not go equally to all regions of America. If you look for an origin, you can't say it's John Calvin or John Lock. You can't point to a particular tavern in Philadelphia (or London). Whatever ideas it started from, those were somewhat separate to begin with, moved to different environments, bumped into different peoples, and did not even interact with each other equally.  In particular, the coastal residents of colonial America had much more contact with each other than even their own literal cousins twenty miles inland. Boston was not Sudbury. Petersburg was not Yorktown.

(Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

It's more like the Danube Delta, above. What thread of water are you going to call the real one? Even the source of a river is seldom as clear-cut as we pretend. By convention, it is based on tracing back main channels and measuring greatest distance from the mouth.

There is no single  origin of the Indo-European language. If we could trace back in time even with exactness there is no spot we could say "There! This little village right here is really the starting point." Because we would have to say that it was only 20% of the starting point, and a village a ways away that had a lot of captured wives from a raid east three generations ago another 20%, and a third one quite a distance out, that had a lot more contact with Uralic languages, was another 18% etc. There was never a time when all of those spoke quite the same language. It was an I-E-ish area of pretty good mutual understanding and exchange of goods and marriage partners.

We can usually do pretty well identifying things in the negative. We can at least say what things aren't. We can see deities that are more identified with Celts than Norse, even if there is some mix. We can say that another was not originally Yahweh, even if the Christians of that area adopted in some aspects later. Unfortunately, we are often up against data that eludes our definitions. Is this type of metal disc worn on a helmet an animistic, shamanistic, or polytheistic practice? Not only can we not tell from here, we might not even have been able to tell if we were there. Yet we can often say "This was new in that time period, and looks deeply related to discs on helmets from this other culture they had recently come in contact with." 

In terms of the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse, they have at least a couple of deities they do not share.