Historical setting: 588 C.E. Forest Primeval
Druid Largin rules a truce, “Very well, Dietrich and Theodoric are one king with two peoples saying his name each in their own way. In this legend Theodoric has conquered the Huns, and now he takes on Sigebert.” The crowd howls and chants against King Sigebert!
So what if legend is made of pieces of actual history? Druid argues with Druid over details of name because they have no ink or scribe to set it down once and declare historical fact. When heroic name migrates from one tribal fire to the next possibly speaking of it sounds different, and it’s possible the foe becomes a known tribe at one fire, while a mythical antagonist is at another.
By my strange circumstance I happen to know Sigebert was a 6th century Merovingian King, the son of Clothair who always seemed to be in civil war with another son of Clothair, Sigebert’s half brother and Count Bertigan’s royal endower, Chilperic. Now here that name Sigebert or Sigurd .[Footnote] is called out as a devil before this riled horde. And in some way the hero of this story is named Theodoric the Great, who fought the Huns, or maybe, made peace with the Huns, or maybe mingled all of these people with the Huns, all the while Attila and his horde were blazing through the dust clouds of war in the 5th Century.[Footnote]
Christians and Jews and even the old Romans and Greeks use parchment and inks to set notables into a form of facts onto which we pin our histories. But in this world we can only depend upon one day having it said by a poet or sung as a song to set things in place.
In this telling souls gathered up in the wild hunt are a nameless scramble of the lost, neither sinners nor saints, they are taken up to the world above as a lot unsorted by any virtue or sin. I can hear echoes as cosmic, communal omelet, but this is not that nameless heaven, so much as a nameless grand finale of souls. It seems by shear random chance that one is taken up and another left behind.
And all this starts me wondering of the times like these before something is scribed as fact. How many names and places swirled into the porridge of the ancient story while the tale was wandering freely as myth? And really, does it matter? Indeed, it does matter because it is the story that makes us one people together.
[Footnote] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigurd, retrieved 6-4-21
(Continues Tuesday, December 28 2021)
Lazarus Ink 