Vikings

[poliphilo]

We were leaving Preston yesterday and we came across this little group of stone Vikings (on the slip road leading to the motorway.) I don't know what they're doing there but they've got bits of metal embedded in them and holes in odd places, which suggests they've been salvaged from some building or other.

I did some research (I Googled) and it turns out that Preston is on the Viking highway that runs down the Ribble valley from Jorvik (York) to the Irish Sea. The biggest Viking treasure hoard ever found outside Russia was dug up nearby (at Cuerdale) in 1840. 

 

 

Comments

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I used to love the Easter Island heads as a kid... So calm and comforting, somehow. Reliable, enduring...

I suppose I don't need everything to have an explanation.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

It was the lack of an explanation that terrified me.

It was as if they'd came from some other dimension. I used to fear that I'd turn round in bed to find them looming over me.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I've always like the unexplainable...

I grew up on a street called Elverdalsvej; that translates into the Street of the Valley of Elves... Basically our back garden (some 50 meters long) had a 5 meter drop down into the (admittedly less-than-mythical-looking) Valley of Elves! Sometimes I'd sit down there on a summer evening, hoping the elves would come out and dance. (Though, of course, in Dansih folklore the elven maidens will catch any male who spies on them and make him dance with them 'till he drops dead, so it was probably for the best that I never saw them...)

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

These days I enjoy the unexplained.

But back then it drove me crazy with fear. I wouldn't have had the courage to look for the elf maidens. I'd have gone out of my way to avoid setting foot in that valley.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

I liked them, even if they had holow backs and were potentially lethal... :-)

It was nice to have the image of them dancing on the lawn on light summer nights... They didn't seem scary at all!

(The hatch to the attic, on the other hand... God; was I ever scared of the nisse in the attic!!! A nisse is something akin to a gnome or a leprichaun, only it lives in human dwellings. It's kind of a guardian being for the house/farm and the household, but if they're not treated right they can be horribly spiteful and wicked! There's a Danish tradition, fast dying out, as more people live in flats without attic or are just reluctant to keep such superstitious traditions alive, that on Christmas eve you put food, traditionally rice porridge for some strange reason, in the attic so the nisse will remain friendly. Anyway; the point of this story was that I was terrified of that hatch in the ceiling, and so when I needed to pee at night I'd rather go through the back door and piss in the garden than go to the bathroom that was off the hall with that scary hatch!))

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I was scared of the dining room.

It was a cold room and we only used it on special occasions- like Xmas dinner. I don't exactly know why it frightened me, but it did.

When I went by it- as I did every time I went to the kitchen- I hurried past and kept my face averted.

Perhaps it was haunted.

Or perhaps I was just being silly.

[sorenr.livejournal.com]

Actually I find that many English dining rooms are slightly scary, since they are just these formal, un-used rooms. In my parents' house the dining room was the hub of the house; you HAD to go through it to go anywhere in the house, and we had all our meals there, did all our arts and crafts there, our homework, everything. Whereas the traditional English dining room is dead, abandoned, barren... I can imagine being scared of a room like that.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

We had a big kitchen- or big enough- and we ate most of our meals in there- off formica.

The Dining room was quite small and the gate-legged oak table pretty much filled it.

If something had trapped you in there at the far end, you'd have had a terrible job getting out.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

I used to fear that I'd turn round in bed to find them looming over me.

And it is the blankness of their gaze. No human connection. Alien.

:) You thought the Eastern Island Men would appear in your bedroom, looming over you?

It's that alienness: they are outside human rules. They appeared on Easter Island, didn't they?

How they appeared there, the moment of their appearing, is the stuff of Blackwood's stories--

and to a child who is still working out what is real and what is not bound by the rules of real, why couldn't that moment of appearing happen again, a result of (the horror!) his thinking about it...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's exactly the psychology of it.

My parents had a copy of Thor Heyerdahl's Kon-Tiki, with photographs of the statues. I suppose that's where I first met them.

Silly old Erik von Daniken argued that they were literally alien.

[jackiejj.livejournal.com]

Oh, that strange von Daniken! How I wanted to believe him about his Chariots. It was just too much a stretch.

I loved Kon-Tiki.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I remember seeing a film about his "theory" in the cinema once. This was back in the days when it was still normal to have double feature programmes. It seemed to open such amazing vistas of possibility.