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

[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.