Drank up all that hemlock, here I am just reading the leaves

[sovay]

I had to get up very early for a doctor's appointment; the rest of the day has been work, exhaustion, and steadily pouring rain. Last time I looked at the news it was all burning swastikas and incel terrorist attacks, so here is the one horrific thing that haunted rather than upset me to read: the excavation of the 5th-century massacre at Sandby Borg.

Such an aura of horror clung to the site that when archaeologists went in to uncover the gruesome facts, local people warned them they should keep well away from the green mound within the low stone wall.

It's the namelessness and the persistence that haunts me. No folk history of the killings themselves, no known and remembered dead, but fifteen hundred years later still the echo, strong enough to warn strangers, of the place as wrong. I keep thinking of the phrase quoted in the article, "like a shipwreck but on land." And now you dig into that mound and you take out the dead of that violence whose reputation outlived even the people who committed it. I will be amazed if they don't get draugar.

Comments

[asakiyume]

Holy crap. That's mind boggling. Nothing remains in oral or written literature, just a millennia and a half of dread. The fact that no one came and buried the people--no one from any of the other hill fort towns. The fact that the treasures were left there, no plundering (except maybe for weapons). There's some dark story behind it all, that's for sure.

[sovay]

Nothing remains in oral or written literature, just a millennia and a half of dread.

Yes. That. Like the story that you tell when the place and the fire and the prayer have been lost, except here not even the story is left. Just the dread.

(Abandoned so instantly there was still half a herring beside the fireplace. Not even to bury the dead, not even to loot the graves. You start to wonder if there's no story because it couldn't be forgotten fast enough, if even knowing about what happened was enough to scar and stain.)

[conuly]

Abandoned so instantly there was still half a herring beside the fireplace.

There's a detail to stick in the mind. It's worse than when my nieces and I read about the Late Bronze Age collapse, about how sometimes the invaders came so quickly that people stashed their valuables wherever they could - and we know this because they didn't come back later and fetch them.

[moon_custafer]

(Shivers) I’ll trust the archeologists found evidence this was caused by human agency, but usually when I read a description of a site like this, the cause was a what rather than a who (like the lake of skeletons who turned out to be pilgrims struck down by a massive hailstorm/angry goddess.)

[sovay]

I’ll trust the archeologists found evidence this was caused by human agency, but usually when I read a description of a site like this, the cause was a what rather than a who

According to the original paper, the injuries are consistent with human violence, just not with battle: hence the designation of "massacre." I agree with you that it would be less unsettling if it were a volcanic explosion or an asphyxiating lake. This is something people have to have done that was as bad as a natural disaster, to make everyone else stay away.

(like the lake of skeletons who turned out to be pilgrims struck down by a massive hailstorm/angry goddess.)

I don't think I know about that one.

[lemon_badgeress]

Lucky ten thousand!

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-skeleton-lake-of-roopkund-india

[sovay]

Lucky ten thousand!

"Among Himalayan women there is an ancient and traditional folk song. The lyrics describe a goddess so enraged at outsiders who defiled her mountain sanctuary that she rained death upon them by flinging hailstones 'hard as iron.' After much research and consideration, the 2004 expedition came to the same conclusion. All 200 people died from a sudden and severe hailstorm."

Oh, wow.

As always, pay attention to folk songs.

[moon_custafer]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roopkund

[sovay]

Roopkund

That's amazing. I would love to know who made the connection between the skeletons and the legend.

[phi]

I wish I hadn't clicked that link. I feel cold dread just reading about it (during a particularly boisterous intermission at a performance of On Your Feet which is perhaps the least melancholy piece of performance art I've ever had the pleasure of watching)

[sovay]

I feel cold dread just reading about it (during a particularly boisterous intermission at a performance of On Your Feet which is perhaps the least melancholy piece of performance art I've ever had the pleasure of watching)

I am sorry! I hope the second half of the performance art is just as boisterous and better to be around.

[nineweaving]

Chilling. That feels like a storm of demonic malice, a chthonic hurricane. What mortals leave worked gold unplundered? The half herring is like Pompeii.

Nine

[sovay]

What mortals leave worked gold unplundered? The half herring is like Pompeii.

That's the line that keeps recurring for me: "A single event that made time stop—like a shipwreck but on land."

If they were killed by outsiders, then why didn't the killers loot the site? It's one thing not to bury bodies; it's another to leave material wealth where it lies. If they were killed by their own hands, then what happened to the weapons? The original paper mentions a settlement like Sandby Borg would normally have been armed. It feels like a riddle. No good answers.

[thisbluespirit]

Thanks for the link - simultaneously both horrible and completely fascinating at a distance.

(I hope tomorrow may be a little better for you. <3)

[sovay]

Thanks for the link - simultaneously both horrible and completely fascinating at a distance.

It has too many loose ends to make any of the ordinary shapes; what's left over feels like it must be terrible.

I hope tomorrow may be a little better for you.

Thank you!

[selkie]

The NYT story had a detail I had missed or passed over or whatever my brain; a man of 60 -- so likely the oldest person going, however things worked in post-Roman Scandinavia -- had had sheep's teeth pushed into his mouth after he died. So someone wanted that person to look evil, or like an idiot, or something; and they've found other sheep -- presumably good, viable sheep! -- that had starved to death in the aftermath, so the sheep's teeth were carried in by somebody to be left as a message. (Not looting the livestock is just bad Dark Age policy.)

Augh, is what I'm saying.

[poliphilo]

It's been haunting me too. I want to know what happened. You feel someone ought to have written it up as a saga.

I love how the locals warned the archaeologists to keep clear- just like the rustics in a classic ghost story.

[sovay]

It's been haunting me too. I want to know what happened. You feel someone ought to have written it up as a saga.

The fact that there doesn't seem to be one is part of what makes it uncanny for me: it's a haunting by absence, the Mary Celeste, the Flannan Isles Light.

I love how the locals warned the archaeologists to keep clear- just like the rustics in a classic ghost story.

Yes! And you hope it doesn't go the same way as a classic ghost story for the archaeologists, but on the other hand you wouldn't be surprised if it did.

[selkie]

I've just updated my list of BAD TERRIBLE IDEAS. I mean, 'opening barrows' was already on it. Just in case you wondered. But regular people don't scythe through their neighbors and leave gold and sword-beads and the dinner.

I wonder if it was the settlement that went wrong, or something outside it.

LET'S SUPER NOT TRY AND FIND OUT.

[sovay]

I wonder if it was the settlement that went wrong, or something outside it.

I have also thought about that. Especially since it looks not quite right either way.

LET'S SUPER NOT TRY AND FIND OUT.

WE COULD ASK THE LOCALS.

[selkie]

Just. Everything they willingly left. Did you see those beads? I think they're pretty, and we have mass production and synthetic dye! It was effort and capital and if you could take it, because everyone was dead and you'd fixed it that way yourself, then what cursed those things that you didn't take them?

What were they doing behind that wall that the neighbors didn't like it?

[lauradi7dw]

I love barrows, and don't believe in ghosts. But after a complicated 1987 day trip from Copenhagen (train to Roskilde to rural bus to long walk) to see what was probably this one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pEMJN9Bmwl4
I couldn't make myself go in. My husband did, and was unharmed, but I had an unshakeable feeling that it would fall and crush me (and my fetal child).
I just now had the weird thought that *she* was the one who was spooked. Can a fetus worry about stuff like that? When we went to visit Knowth in Ireland when she was seven years old, she refused to go in, waiting outside while we went in. And used up most of a roll of film, taking pictures of the surroundings, so it was just being inside that worried her.

[sovay]

I just now had the weird thought that *she* was the one who was spooked. Can a fetus worry about stuff like that? When we went to visit Knowth in Ireland when she was seven years old, she refused to go in, waiting outside while we went in. And used up most of a roll of film, taking pictures of the surroundings, so it was just being inside that worried her.

I don't know, but I see why you wonder.