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nimblermortal · 3 years

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Everyone should read The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson

Prologue, as translated by Michael Meyer

Many restless men rowed north from Skania with Bue and Vagn, and found ill fortune at Jörundfjord; others marched with Styrbjörn to Upsala and died there with him. When the news reached their homeland that few of them could be expected to return, elegies were declaimed and memorial stones set up; whereupon all sensible men agreed that what had happened was for the best, for they could now hope to have a more peaceful time than before, and less parceling out of land by the ax and sword. There followed a time of plenty, with fine rye harvests and great herring catches, so that most people were well contented; but there were some who thought that the crops were tardy, and they went a-viking in Ireland and England, where fortune smiled on their wars; and many of them stayed there.

About this time the shaven men had begun to arrive in Skania, both from the Saxons’ land and from England, to preach the Christian faith. They had many strange tales to relate, and at first people were curious and listened to them eagerly, and women found it pleasant to be baptized by these foreigners and presented with a white shift. Before long, however, the foreigners began to run out of shifts, and people wearied of their sermons, finding them tedious and their matter doubtful; besides which, they spoke a rough-sounding dialect that they had learned in Hedeby or in the western islands, which gave their speech a foolish air.

So then there was something of a decline in conversions, and the shaven men, who talked incessantly of peace and were above all very violent in their denunciation of the gods, were one by one seized by devout persons and were hung up on sacred ash trees and shot at with arrows, and offered to the birds of Odin. Others went northwards to the forests of the Göings, where men were less religiously inclined; there they were welcomed warmly, and were tied up and led to the markets in Smaland, where they were bartered for oxen and for beaver skins. Some of them, upon finding themselves slaves of the Smalanders, let their hair grow and waxed discontented with their God Jehovah and gave good service to their masters; but the majority continued to denounce the gods and to spend their time baptizing women and children instead of breaking stones and grinding corn, and made such a nuisance of themselves that soon it became impossible for the Göings to obtain, as hitherto, a yoke of three-year-old oxen for a sturdy priest without giving a measure of salt or cloth into the bargain. So feeling increased against the shaven men in the border country.

One summer the word went round the whole of the Danish kingdom that King Harald Bluetooth had embraced the new religion. In his youth he had done so tentatively, but had soon regretted his decision and recanted; this time, however, he had adopted it seriously. For King Harald was by now an old man and had for some years been tormented by terrible pains in his back, so that he had almost lost his pleasure in ale and women; but wise bishops, sent by the Emperor himself, had rubbed him with bear’s grease, blessed and made potent with the names of apostles, and had wrapped him in sheepskins and given him holy herbal water to drink instead of ale, and had made the sign of the cross between his shoulders and exorcised many devils out of him, until at last his aches and pains had departed; and so the King became a Christian.

Thereupon the holy men assured him that still worse torments would come to plague him if he should ever again offer sacrifice or show himself in any way unzealous in the new religion. So King Harald (as soon as he had become active again and found himself capable of fulfilling his obligations toward a young Moroccan slave-girl, whom Olof of the Precious Stones, the King of Cork, had sent him as a good-will present) issued a proclamation that all his subjects should get themselves christened without delay; and although such an order sounded strangely from the lips of one who was himself descended from Odin, still, many obeyed his command, for he had ruled long and prosperously, so that his word counted for much in the land. He meted out especially severe punishments to anyone who had been guilty of violence against any priest; so that the number of priests in Skania now began to multiple greatly, and churches rose upon the plain, and the old gods fell into disuse, except in times of peril at sea or of cattle plague.

In Göinge, however, the King’s proclamation was the occasion of much merriment. The people of the border forests were blessed with a readier sense of fun than the sober dwellers of the plain, and nothing made them laugh so much as royal proclamation. For in the border country few men’s authority extended beyond the limit of their right arm, and from Jellinge to Göinge was a long march even for the mightiest of kings to undertake. In the old days, in the time of Harald Hildetand and Ivar of the Broad Embrase, and even before that, kings had been wont to come to Göinge to hunt the wild ox in the great forests there, but seldom on any other errand. But since those times the wild ox had died out, and the kings’ visits had ceased; so that nowadays, if any king was bold enough to murmur a complaint that the people of those parts were turbulent or that they paid insufficient taxes, and threatened to journey thither himself to remedy matters, the answer would be sent to him that there were, unfortunately, no wild oxen to be seen in the district nowadays, but that as soon as any should appear he would at once be informed and a royal welcome would be prepared for him. Accordingly, it had for long been a saying among the border people that no king would be seen in their country until the wild oxen returned.

So in Göinge things remained as they had always been, and Christianity made no headway there. Such priests as did venture into those parts were sold over the border as in the old days; though some of the Göings were of the opinion that it would be better to kill them on the spot and start a good war against the skinflints of Sunnerbo and Allbo, for the Smalanders gave such poor prices for priests nowadays that it was hardly worth a man’s trouble to lead them to market.

#the long ships

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notjustla · 4 years

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Abandonment Myths

Christ might have also been one of the first prophets without an abandonment myth in his backstory.

At least in popular consciousness, a large part of Christ’s appeal seems to derive from the image of the pious, loving family around him, carefully marked out in the figures of Mary and Joseph. The God-son’s human parents are implied to have been good Jews, devout but unzealous, hardworking but poor (too poor for the corruptions of wealth, at least) and apparently affectionate toward their son to the last, despite his having chosen such an unconventional career path.

The story of a god-son with a trade-skilled, steadily employed father, and a mother of (literally) virginal piety, definitely seems to argue, implicitly, for a more emotionally and psychologically balanced figure than we find with, say, Moses, Sargon, Gilgamesh, Zeus, Paris, Perseus, Oedipus, Romulus, Remus, Aeneas, Germanicus, Siegfried—or any of the numerous other mythological founder-heroes whose testimonia all begin with an account of the infant’s abandonment on a mountain, in a river, cave, desert, etc...and then proceed to paint the psychological portrait of some seriously tormented offspring, apparently grappling with the commands of parent-Gods whose own childrearing styles have ranged from cruel negligence, to physical and sexual abuse, to all-out infanticide.

...

The Buddha also represents a notable inversion of this theme, as the prince born to parents who, in some accounts, were so overbearing that they prevented their son from ever leaving the pleasure palaces specially constructed for him to remain isolated from the ugliness of the outside world. In the Buddha’s story however, it is he who abandons his own family, but does so according to holy tradition of the “Going Forth” [Pali: pabbājana] whereby the act of abandoning the family is allegedly undertaken for the sake of enlightenment, and by extension “for the good of all beings”. In most versions of the Buddha myth, the wife, child, parents, and friends he left behind all eventually leave their own worldly lives to join his monastic community, joyously reuniting, as it were, in the transfiguring field of the dhamma, now seemingly freed from the snares of attachment, non-acceptance, and jealousy that manifest their distorting and destructive forces in pretty much every family that has ever existed.

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