#properly reference the sagas and poems it cites. no page numbers! i know you're allergic to books you little goblins | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

notasapleasure · 3 years ago

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Archaeologists and historians of religion: nah, it’s cool, I understand literary source criticism, I know you guys get annoyed when I don’t reference things properly or take into account the vast differences in the chronology and geography of our respective sources. I promise. I’ve learned from my mistakes and I will only use the written sources in the most responsible manner.

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Archaeologists and historians of religion: SO as you can tell from one line in this high medieval legendary saga written in Iceland, these bits of person thrown in a bog in iron age Sweden were undoubtedly a sacrifice to Odin. And this chess set in a highly controversial grave? Well according to a poem from Orkney written down two centuries after this burial, chess was important to leaders. So yeah this lady was basically captain of the Swedish army. What do you mean weapons don’t make a warrior grave? Haha, don’t cite my own discipline’s rules to me! Haven’t you read Hervarar saga?

#dear archaeologists: when you find weird shit that's probably human sacrifice or ritual killings that's very cool but please #do your own work contextualising it first #don't just go running to the texts saying 'look look sacrifice existed and it existed like this!'#yeah? across the entire northern hemisphere for the best part of a millennium it didn't change at all huh?#religious practices and beliefs remained static and everyone worshipped the same deities in the same ways?#what i'm saying is: those bits of person in the bog sure are weird and sure are probably evidence of ritual killings #but you can explain that by noting how weird the find context is. how did people normally treat their dead?#not like that! how did they normally decorate their houses? which bogs *don't* have bits of person and horse and weaponry thrown in them?#please i am begging you to give the archaeological context for the weird stuff. set it in its actual location and period of history #before you come rampaging through the texts with only a cursory 'yes but!'#tbh my annoyance at this is really capped off by the fact this chapter i'm reading is also too fucking lazy to #properly reference the sagas and poems it cites. no page numbers! i know you're allergic to books you little goblins #but when you cite from them you have to give the page numbers!#i am a medievalisn't #i love academia honest guv #wfh wfhell #i am not unfriendly towards archaeologists but i am BEGGING them to leave the sagas to the experts good god #i'm not going to go out and dig up a grave and say 'well this person's mouth was full of soil so i guess they loved eating soil'

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