raiding party was large enough to kill whole fort before victims knew what was going on
children not sparred
no valuables taken indicates that time—the need to get in, kill, and get out—was desired more than easy wealth
attempts at burning
left alone ever since, even today what is remembered is that it is a “bad place”
The rest of the island massacred them and bounced because they feared what was in there would kill the whole island. Then they quarantined the area forever. This fort was either hosting a plague-level virus, or they were imagined to be supernaturally cursed. Maybe both (edit - as in mistaking plague for witchcraft.)
/armchair
I’m going with more cursed and less contagion, because they took weapons, but no other valuables. Or else they just really pissed their neighbours off.
The skull filled with sheep’s teeth is interesting. Might be a clue as to what the neighbours were pissed off about.
ETA: if it’s so cursed to this day, who built the fence right across it? Look at the first photo in the article, or just on Google Earth. Somebody has been there in the last 1,500 years.
Ooh, if you go on Google Earth and look up Sandby Borg, there are four Street View spots that link to panoramic photos of the archaeology dig, as people were working on it.
ya, some kind of charm against the witchcraft, maybe like putting a stake thru the heart of a vampire. Or, wasn’t there something about putting a coin in a vampire’s mouth?
It doesn’t read like any power struggle I ever heard about. You kill the guys in charge and their heirs, tops. Not their entire neighborhood. This reads like fear, the early medieval version of “nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure.”
Vampires don’t show up this early, and not in Sweden.
Teeth in mouth… sounds like they’re saying the person is like a sheep, or is a sheep. So, docile, not very smart, and not worth as much as a human. I found a PDF written by a Swedish academic (can’t copy the link on my phone) which points it that while there are several references to goats in pagan Norse mythology, most notably the named goats which pull Thor’s chariot, sheep are only vaguely mentioned.
No, not a vampire, just the idea that adding a charm to the offending body neutralizes whichever supernatural power they attributed to said body.
Or not. But, just assuming my larger conjecture happens to be right, why raid and then seemingly immediately abandon a fort, but take time out to add sheep teeth to a body unless you felt it was necessary to the mission?
But the qualities of a sheep you point out does read like the teeth were meant as an insult to the vanquished. That would seem to back up the power struggle hypothesis in the linked article.
A nativist kind of science that turned it’s back in things like “education.”
After Hörbiger’s death in 1931, the followers of WEL came to the conclusion that given the changing political situation in Germany, aligning the idea with National Socialism would eventually lead to its acceptance; WEL had already been heavily and successfully promoted as the “German antithesis” of the “Jewish” theory of relativity in the late 1920s. And so the movement became more and more pro-Nazi, with WEL supporters saying things like: “Our Nordic ancestors grew strong in ice and snow; belief in the Cosmic Ice is consequently the natural heritage of Nordic Man.”, “Just as it needed a child of Austrian culture – Hitler! – to put the Jewish politicians in their place, so it needed an Austrian to cleanse the world of Jewish science.”, and “the Führer, by his very life, has proved how much a so-called ‘amateur’ can be superior to self-styled professionals; it needed another ‘amateur’ to give us a complete understanding of the Universe.”
a asteroid near neptune shows evidence of once having liquid water, indicating that it may have migrated outwards during the “grand tack”. The Grand Tack hypothesis posits that Jupiter formed close to the sun, and migrated outwards towards its present position.
This video predates Juno, but it explains the Grand Tack hypothesis and its rival the Nice model.
