Historical Setting: 793 C.E. Jutland
This elder seiðr and I are walking north along the shore. I was hoping we would only be talking about the nature of runes so that I might learn of the meanings of these markings and learn more about this time. She carries a walking stick engraved with runes. My walking stick is a broken branch I found along the way. Mine doesn’t speak stories of heroes and history or offer any legacy. It only mentions a tree that withered in the forest. But the seiðr questioned my oddity of life and life again, based on simply taking notice of my awareness of past things, like aurochs for example.
She interrupts the thoughtful quiet of this walk.
“Here, we chisel our gods and the heroes’ tales into rocks and stand them by the pathways. I know Christians try to capture stories with inks. But here, in the trusted way of eternity, we pass our stories from kingdom to kingdom as stories that are spun around the names that are chiseled into pillars of stone and those don’t change with whims or winds.”
“You’re right about the inks.” I answer, “With Christians, we keep our stories of faith as gospels written and added on to the ancient tradition of Jewish writings. It is all copied again and again and bound as books or rolled into scrolls.”
“I’m well aware that different gods have different ways of keeping the stories. But, Christians, with all their books, can’t explain how this one Christian man right here can speak from his memory of seeing an auroch?”
“It was actually two aurochs we saw that day.”
“So, let me ask you, have you ever listened to a stone?”
“You are taking me on this long walk so that we can listen to a stone?”
“Inks aside, it is a stone that speaks of forever. In the runes carved in the stones are the names and the battles and the intrusions of the gods. From the runes, the stories are drawn to life, fat and fleshy, breathing, thumping with life as only a mortal can speak them.”
“But then can you also say the stones would be silent, without a mortal seiðr to read the runes and speak for the stone? Don’t the runes need a translator?” I wonder.
“A storyteller.”
Walking a winter beach with shoes still dry is something I am accomplishing in this trek, at least until now when we come to a river.
(Continues tomorrow)
Lazarus Ink 