Huns attack Goths. Every word that Poul Anderson has ever used to describe a battle is here. Carrion fowl wheel in the blood-red sunset. Later, Ravens circle low.
The Goths win but Dagobert falls and the timecycle appears. The Wanderer cannot intervene in the battle but will attend his son's death. Dagobert believes that Wodan has come to take him to Valhalla. Carl has neither confirmed nor encouraged this belief but what else will the Goths think when a guy looking like him appears on a battlefield? Carl has begun something that he will have to finish.
1 comment:
One thing that recent archaeology has made clear is that battles -- big ones -- have always occurred, like that Gothic-Hunnish clash Poul depicts.
Eg., the Tollense battlefield in eastern Germany, where a fairly massive fight -- armies of several thousand on each side -- took place in 1250 BCE. Nobody knows the names or who the armies represented or why they fought, but given the scale and the fact that one side came from hundreds of miles away, it probably had consequences all across Europe.
Prior to this discovery, a lot of archaeologists had tried to pretend serious violence was rare in the northern European Bronze Age, because settlements were small and scattered and there was no clear evidence of large-scale political organization.
But as the saying goes, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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