While ordering some Rohloff spares on syscycles.co.uk I got a bit click happy and added a Rohloff t-shirt (https://www.sjscycles.co.uk/casual/l-rohloff-rohloff-t-shirt-black/) to the basket. Curious about the artwork. I recognise the sprocket, of course, but what about the rest of it? My best guess is that it's something to do with Huginn and Muninn, the pair of Ravens that (according to Norse mythology) flew all over the world and brought information back to the god Odin. But, if so, why are they in skeletal form?
You've come to the right place, Beagley. Odin was my ancestor. He was a real person who lived roundabout AD 200 in Odinshalle, his Hall, at Odin's See, his seat, cf a modern bishop's seat or command or district, now the Danish island and city of Odense. He was a warrior (what else?) and a singer, meaning a poet. He led a tribe called the Jutes, and a quarter millennium later the Jutish brothers Horsa and Hengist founded Anglo-Saxon Britain, the Angles and the Saxons being johnny-come-latelies invited by Hengist to come share the spoils after Hengist established his Kingdom of Kent; Horsa died fighting in the landing on the Isle of Thanet. Odin was, unsurprisingly, worshipped as a god by the Jutes, the Angles and the Saxons, in short, everyone who mattered in the British Isles, until the triumph of Christianity several hundred years later.
Some of the historians in my family knew a lot about Odin, and now I wish I'd listened more carefully to these boring old men when I was a boy, but my brother and I were mainly interested in Erik Bloodsword (5 or 6 centuries after Odin, 3 or 4 after Hengist), who fed a fat abbot from the monastery, of which the ruins survive a nice ride down the road here, to his hunting hounds for the impertinence of not stepping off the road fast enough when the pack approached; Bloodsword's descendants, my ancestors, not satisfied, sailed up the estuary, where we sometimes ride, to sack the abbey at the head of the water three more times over the next three centuries. Us boys called him Red Erik the Bolshie. I never heard a single word from the professors of history about
skeletal ravens, though leaders of Odin's time were often said, even by themselves, to be capable of calling up dark forces from the underworld, and the legends are replete with stories of skeletal beings. (Without doing too much research in dusty libraries, you can see a period-true depiction of the ancient story of the three brothers given a wish each from the Devil in one of the Harry Potter films. Note how skeletally the brothers are depicted even while alive).
Now skip forward to this century. There's a Swedish writer of airport fiction who died young, his surviving mistress who has a beef with his surviving parent and sibling inheriting all his money and his book rights, his publishers and his critics, seemingly everyone else. The mistress holds a pagan ceremony to condemn all her "enemies", presumably including me for my book STIEG LARSSON: MAN, MYTH & MISTRESS, to perdition -- and a raven flies over, which, according to her own book MILLENNIUM, STIEG AND I (I'm translating from the Swedish), she believes was a message from her dead lover sent via the god Odin's own Raven. When I cracked that, "Since I'm Odin's descendant, that's my Raven sent to spy on Eva Gabrielsson," after my lawyer stopped laughing, he said, "Larsson's Swedish publishers are already threatening legal action against you, the British and Americans are probably restrained only by your fearsome reputation for lashing back, and Gabrielsson's a fanatic who is therefore unpredictable, so don't write anything about it being your raven, not her bloody raven."
Of course Ravens sent back from the dead are skeletal! Why has no one else noticed that before?
Thanks for the memory, Beagley!
