Runic Audiologues

somebody hold a spot until olympius returns

Runic Audiologues

I've been listening to the excellent Fall of Civilisations podcast recently, a high-production-value history podcast, like a less cranky Hardcore History. As the name suggests, it covers the collapse of various civilisations, events which are by their nature often somewhat mysterious, a fascinating topic that's also the subject of one of the better recent Mountain Goats albums. One anecdote the guy tells in the Greenland Vikings episode—I can't find the original source from a cursory search but presumably it's in the primary sources he lists on the site—particularly interested me:

A saga tells the story of a Norse Icelander named Loden, who got himself the nickname Lik-Loden, or Corpse-Loden, because he made his living sailing up and down the east coast of Greenland, exploring its caves and coves, and gathering up the corpses of men shipwrecked there. Ships were always wrecked in this ice from the northern bays. Lik-Loden would search the waves to the north and bring back to church the bodies he found in caves and on rock ledges. They had come there from the drift ice or wrecked ships, and near them they often lay carved runes about all the events of the misfortunes and sufferings.

Back in the day, shortly after Bioshock invented audiologues when everyone started getting sick of them, every games journalist and their mum was complaining that it was unrealistic that people would be recording their last moments in this way. Vikings did one better—they didn't just record it, they wrote it down. I've just started Assassin's Creed: Valhalla—these had better be in there somewhere.

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