Our story starts way before the Internet and all its glorious weirdness, in the 12th century AD.
A magical time when passionate and unrepentant idiocy was much more of a global phenomenon. It was then that somebody discovered a whole set of mysterious ancient inscriptions on a rock in Blekinge, Sweden.
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| Ancient 'runes' of Blekinge, Sweden. |
Much of Europe was enthralled by this discovery, and the King of Denmark sent a crack team of his best translators to analyze and interpret these words of the ancient Nordic world. These wise men on their celebrated royal quest got to the location, but after much effort and time, came to the conclusion that it was impossible to read or translate. They informed their King that the inscription was in some obscure form of ancient Viking tongue that they had never encountered before. One assumes the King was disappointed.
Anyway, now we skip forward to the 17th century.
For about four hundred years, the ancient runic inscriptions had been considered an authentic and important piece of history by the European scholars. Too bad nobody could translate it, they thought. Have no fear, fate must have said, because there came a Danish collector by the name of Ole Worm to make another historic attempt at translating the inscriptions.
Yes, his name was Ole Worm. For real.
Anyway, Mr. Worm tried his best too but couldn't make any real progress. He only succeeded in making out one word from the whole thing.
Lund.
This was an actual town in southern Sweden. Unfortunately, that's about all that got 'translated'.
The hilarious wheel of time kept going round and round. Man made a lot of progress in the next century or two. And in the early 19th century, another great man stepped up to translate the now legendary ancient runes of Sweden.
You'll be surprised what happened next. He did it!
Yes, this master of the words, Finnur Magnusson of Iceland managed to decipher and translate the whole goddamn set of inscriptions. He, and only he, in nearly 700 years had been able to do it.
Genius.
He translated what turned out to be a whole epic poem, about an 8th century battle in which a warlord named Harald Wartooth had defeated the Swedish King. Not much was known about this particular battle at the time, save that it had happened. The whole scholastic community of Europe was again thrilled by this sudden bolt of enlightenment in the matter.
But there were also some that were skeptical. After all the centuries of nothing happening with it, one man accomplishes the whole thing? Yes, this raised some questions. Remember all that progress made by mankind we talked about? Well, Sweden sent its own team of scientists to verify this whole business with the epic poem.
Guess what they found out...
They realized after some studying of the inscriptions, now called Runamo, that Finnur Magnusson was mistaken. How could the genius that is Magnusson be mistaken, you might be asking yourself.
Turns out the ancient Nordic runic inscriptions of Blekinge was not that at all. Turns out... the whole damn thing was actually just fissures on the rock surface!
Fissures! Not any language or runic anything! Just cracks that appeared naturally on the rocks over the course of time.
Well, it only took 700 years, but we got to the truth, didn't we. Well done us. Pats on our collective backs.
Really begs the question though... what the hell was wrong with Magnusson?!
