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

[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.