SHARI | 2008-03-09
"I have also heard the centuries immediately following the burning of Rome called "the dark ages."-- Shari
I have problems with Brown on that. In order to buttress his concept that the West was a totally new thing, he says that period in the West was like newborn, totally sunk in darkness. He is better than the average historian because he says that in the Dark Ages we lost BOTH our Roman AND our Germanic Civilizations. Unlike the average historian, he admits that there WAS a Germanic tradition.
For the average historian, the Dark Ages reflected a lack of SCRIBES. So accepted history says the Dark Ages were when we LOST the Civilization of Rome, where there were scribes. I was stunned to discover that Icelandic sagas talked about Attila the Hun. We had recorded history.
Accepted history tells us that the only writing in Northern Europe during the Dark Ages was the few runes we find on rocks. To one who gives a little THOUGHT to history, a group limited largely to me, this presents an odd picture. The rock-runes were highly complex. Since writing then, everywhere, did not separate words, the runes were drawn in artistic dragon shapes and so forth.
But there was no runic writings anywhere ELSE.
So here is the odd picture: These rock rune writers wrote in highly complex designs, but they never wrote anything ELSE. That's quite an accomplishment! None of them ever had to PRACTIVE writing, they just carved away in fluency from the word GO.
Now THERE is an example of Nordic Superiority gone wild!
It seems a little more plausible to me that runic writings were destroyed.
Which means there WERE scribes?
We are told that the first representative government was in Iceland. It so happens that Iceland was peopled largely by those who were escaping from the first Christian King of Norway, Harold. Like the rune-writers, history says that they INVENTED representative government when they hit shore there.
We are told that DEMOCRACY was invented by the Greeks, who gathered in their thousand and shouted to each other. This was not representative. ALL citizens were there. Icelanders hit the coast and invented the process of electing people.
When I was coming up, that was as much a fact of history as the idea that no one wrote runes except on rocks and that the idea of Nordics settling America was a laughable myth.
It is more likely that we did not HAVE dictators and the Icelanders escaped from Harold's new kingship and established the form of government they had had long before Athens was founded.
No kings, no emperors, and scribes were not dominant. That is a Dark Age to accepted history.