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Sher's Blog Archive Hits This is What Treason Really Looks Like, Ann White House Prayer Meetings as a Substitute for Ethical Behavior This Ain't Your Grandma's Party! Sher's Ratios: Sex to Scandal and Mischief to Money Fourth Grade Economics Midterm My Pitch to the Club for Growth
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Runes in the Ruins of the Angry Norse Dittoheads Note – all of the persons in this story are real (ancient and modern). The names of the modern are changed to make them funnier. Setting: 1408, Hvalsey Church, North Settlement, Norse Greenland, the wedding of Thorstein Olafsson and Sigrid Bjornsdottir. The official witnesses are Brand Halldorstson, Thorbjorn Bardarson, and Jon Jonsson. (All real people from the real wedding so far). Officiating at the wedding is Bishop Ruhsh, affectionately known as “Ruhsh the Fat” from his special fondness for honey mead (and, to be truthful, any pain-relieving substance he can get his hands on.) As we open our story, Father Ruhsh stands to deliver the wedding homily. “Norsemen and ladies, today we celebrate two blessed events. First, of course, the union of Thorstein and Sigrid, but today is also the tenth anniversary of that fateful day the skraelings, the wretches, finally gave in to our demands to “love our Greenland Norse ways or leave them.” Good riddance to those who would have had us abandon the paths of righteousness and right thinking in favor of the degenerate ways of the heathen Inuit! Imagine if the skraelings had had their way. Instead of our traditional beef wedding feast we’d be celebrating with heathen ringed seals and fish! Can you imagine anything more blasphemous, not to say disgusting? Instead of candles we’d be burning heathen blubber. Gone would be the evening bonfire. How would our men and women meet, stumbling around in the dark? We have a right to be proud that we have not compromised the traditional Norse way of life! What could be more important than maintaining traditional values? Imagine curtailing the summer walrus hunt! Without tusks, how could we trade for the essentials of traditional Norse culture? Where would we get our bells, stained-glass windows, bronze candlesticks, Communion wine, linen, silk, silver, clerical robes, and jewelry for weddings? What would they have had us do instead? Send out our ships for lumber? Can you imagine what would happen to our economy? How could the skraelings possibly say that Norse people, living in the traditional Norse way, could destroy all of the bounty around us? We couldn't destroy it if we wanted to, my fellow Norsemen. That's the ridiculous thing. Just as we can't create any of this, the absolute overwhelming incomprehensible awe of Creation makes it a simple transition to believing that what these skraelings said was absolute bunk, because they assigned to us the power of Creation and destruction. They assigned us powers we don't have. They assigned us abilities we'll never have, and the idea that we can, by living our lives given what was created for us? We use nothing but what was created for us. We have not invented anything that wasn't here for us to find. We haven't gone out and found a poison that wasn't placed for us here to find. We haven't done one thing that is unique or original, and yet the skraelings wanted us to believe that our very existence -- and we are part of Creation and we're at the top of the Creation chain -- our very existence leads to the destruction of Norse Greenland. It just doesn't hold water. It literally doesn't hold water unless you live in this constant cycle of doom and gloom, and believe that the worst is just around the corner every day, and that's what these people told us, those militant skraelings: ‘The worst is just the around the corner.’” Postscript: a few years later, every one of the participants in the Olafsson/Bjornsdottir wedding was dead. In their final days they consumed their calves and their pets. True and faithful Norse to the end, they never defiled their bodies by partaking of Greenland’s plentiful stocks of fish. Some Definitions: |
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