In Norse mythology, the kings of the Norse people were often seen as divine figures who possessed great power and wisdom. One of the most prominent Norse kings was King Ragnar Lothbrok, a legendary figure who ruled over the Viking lands during the Viking Age. What set Ragnar apart from other kings was his ability to communicate with the gods using Viking runes. The Vikings believed that runes were more than just an alphabet; they were sacred symbols with magical properties. Ragnar, being a skilled warrior and a wise ruler, understood the power of these runes and used them to his advantage. Ragnar's connection with the gods enabled him to make important decisions and predict the outcome of battles.
Ragnar's connection with the gods enabled him to make important decisions and predict the outcome of battles. He would consult the runes before embarking on a campaign, seeking guidance and wisdom from the divine. The runes would provide him with insights into the future and help him strategize his actions accordingly.
Burning Feast in The Magical City
It is a wet summer in Bogota. In this town, at 2,700m high altitude, people get home early at night to avoid the sudden rain or wind gusts pouring down from the high mountain ranges. Green peaks surround the town like giant dark figures slowly besiege small town corners below. From the high ground, red-brick houses stack up, keeping up with the rising terrain, consuming the sun behind the tree fortress afar. The night slips in like a secretive neighbor.
Streetlights are soaked in a fog blanket.
My friend Adrien texts me that he will be home after 7:30pm, but his friend will arrive earlier at about 7pm. He asks if I can open the door for the friend. I look at the phone. I still have one hour to absorb more of the magical city.
In 1948, Bogota fractured in a decade of violent outbreaks; that I know of through a photo exhibition by the main plaza. A naked man was dragged on the main street, his face crushed with brick marks; thousands of people kicking, yelling, and stomping. The swarm of anger left him then already a mangled meat bag by the roadside. After a while, another body, another person, collapsed on the machete’s waving paths. The massive thirst for destruction lasts several decades.
An era of human body piles is featured from dark to light, from old films to colored movies. The city water line was contaminated - a note was put next to a photo featuring a little boy standing next to his father’s rifle heel. The gun was taller than the boy, covering one of his eyes from witnessing the pure massacre rotten in front. I walk the light, tracing the invisible liquid flowing down the drainage system in decades, that same fluid fluxing through Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s book “Living to Tell the Tale,” “A group of men were dipping their handkerchiefs into the pool of warm blood to keep as historical relics.”
Those people evaporated. My thick rubber shoes clash on the old, twisted cobblestones. The liquid runs and dries until every leftover body is pushed back behind the history barricade. Water drizzles down on my head. Bogota rains. Water sweeps clean particle by particle until the rotten smell is no more, and I can’t trace it back anywhere.
A guy wearing a red beanie with a two-horn monster face is smoking a joint when I cross The Hippie Park. Some girls wear thick makeup, putting their hoods on, laughing, and sipping beers. The drizzles fly and drop on their lips, my hair, and the guy’s hemp paper. Adrien texts me again to remind me our friend is coming. I trail the uphill path back to his apartment. The wind rushes into my face, slitting through my down jacket hood, nibbling on my neck and face. The cold air scrabbled my neck, causing an odd stir in my head.
“The friend is outside.” Adrien’s text beams on my phone screen.
“Yeah, I am here. The door is open.”
His apartment sits right next to the skylight of the building. The wind drops and follows the opening door, landing on the floor where I take my shoes off. It blows my jacket helm, causing a waving, fluttering movement. The coming air is crispy cold, dyed in the bright orange light inside the living room. I stab the worm into the wooden cork of a carménère wine bottle and pull it out. The cork cracks in the middle and erodes into two pieces. One part drops on the floor. I bend down to pick it up. I felt someone behind, looking at my embarrassing posture with my ass high up. I stood straight up to say hi.
No one is there but something is looking at me. The door is as empty as when I opened it ten minutes ago.
“Where is your friend?” I sent Adrien another message.
“He is there.”
.
“Pour some wine. I am near home."
*
I pour some wine and start sipping. The warm liquid roots out the strange disturbance behind my neck. From the immense glass window of Adrien’s apartment, I can see Bogota glitter in night light. I gulped a big sip. The carménère is subtly powerful. The first glass dries up. I pour another. I can hear a faraway voice, “Oh Lord, powerful things! Save me!”
The voice continues murmuring, “Powerful things! Save me. Save me,” until it becomes so far away I can barely discern the words. I can feel his breath, heavy feet dragging on the street, and the noise of voices mixed in the waves of confusing languages and conversations. The street below the apartment turns empty as it shrinks into another layer beyond my time. A group of men wearing black suits, some with tarnished construction jumpsuits, some in dark green corduroy shirts, their arms waving, some holding on metal poles and flashing blades. Their faces are eerie and hard to make of details, their eyes focusing on some hollowed targets in front, toward the uphill side of the street.
“It will be fine," Adrien's voice is behind me.
I look back at him, shrugging my shoulders. I want to ask him what they are doing down there, why other windows are flickering on fire. He seems too calm for such a situation.
Adrien pulls half the curtain in to cover the burning blocks; now, fire is everywhere. I hear children shrieking through the glass.
Does Adrien not see all of this happening? Or is he just too indifferent?
Adrien pours wine into the two empty glasses. We sit at the small dining table. His friend hasn’t arrived yet. I have been waiting all this time.
“I don’t see him arrive,” I try to correct him that his friend is not here.
“ He is here ,” Adrien toasts with me, and the glass of no-body quietly stands beside us.
*
Adrien moved to Bogota five years ago as an engineer working for an oil exportation company. During his first year here, he stayed in a small apartment in the center, where he could walk from Botero Museum, sit at the square, watch the closed windows of the parliament house, and then walk again to the Juan Valdez coffee shop on the first floor of Gabriel Garcia Marquez House. It was his typical weekend: a bit of cold weather, nice wine, some smokes, and falling asleep.
“Then I get to know him,” Adrien moves his chin toward the wine glass of “his friend.” It is empty now. Adrien fills the glass halfway.
This city is filled with “wanderers” - the spirits . They walk next to you coincidently. They search for someone listening to their parts of the story. They find a companion to spend the night in the rain. It is nice to sit inside when the gust of wind rushes and blows. It is nice to show others your sorrow after decades of fermentation. Like anger, sorrow brews the drunken wandering path. They are confused. Do you know what it means to die and confused about why and how you died? You can’t walk away afterward, as if you demand to untie the knot that imprisons your spirit in this edge of life.
In this edge of life, Adrien waves me toward the window. Below, the men are climbing up the windows and throwing out chairs, bottles, and furniture. White papers spray out like water. Someone tosses cases of paperwork out of the window.
It was the day he became a wanderer.
He was walking into a drugstore to find some fever tablets for his son at home. He was standing and looking at the name of the drug that the pharmacist offered. Then, it was the sound of a glass door bursting into pieces. Some powerful hands thrust into his ribs. He could feel the smell of sweat, concrete, gas, then bricks. Brick smells like dirt but bolder. Then warm liquid. Many hands grabbed his collars. The fabric tore itself, departing from his body. The hands got upset because they thought he tried to thrash away.
“You killed him. We kill you. You killed him. We kill you.”
He heard the chants. Word screwed into his ears and his throat. They stuffed his mouth with words. He couldn’t correct the information that they spilled out. He couldn’t fact-check with those dragging him like a rag. He swallowed his tongue, he thought. That was why he didn’t try to correct the wrong information.
Maybe it was too fast, and a moist layer forms on the glass window.
His son didn’t get better. The kid didn’t get the fever tablet in time and had a seizure. The man’s collar was torn; he slipped off the people’s grab. The mob thought that he was trying to break free. It was enough of a performance. They smashed bricks on his face until it was not a face anymore. The kid felt the father’s heartbeat silenced. His heart exploded in sorrow. He went silent himself.
Dead people are supposed to reunite with their loved ones after they cross the realm. In theory, they then become similar matter of existence. But a dead person should understand why they die. The son knew he died of a fatal fever seizure. He continued his journey afterward. But the father was incapable of comprehending his death.
In deep ignorance about one’s fate, one can’t walk the path of light. One unconsciously demands an answer for one's unjust fate. He wanders into the magical city that dips his blood and drains his veins. He listens to what Marquez has to say about the brief morning, trying to persuade himself that it is a comprehensible narrative. Yet he refuses to accept that swift account, leading to the crowd of wanderers forming into a dirt blanket of the city.
Adrien pours the second one for that invisible guest and himself.
“Do you know his name?” I chewed a dry walnut and felt its crumbs get less sweet and rougher on my tongue.
Adrien shakes his head. The wanderer shows up at the weekend, having a wine, performing the part of the life he saw through the window glass. Adrien counts the number of men walking on the pavement with machetes and axes. Adrien observes that if the man hadn’t walked into the drugstore to find a tablet, he might not have died because the group was following a policeman who took a guy into the same drugstore and disappeared. The crowd grew agitated and fed their hunger in a public revenge performance. The wanderer was within their reach.
What if he hadn’t walked into the drugstore?
I grab a fever tablet pack on the medication shelf and run down the street. There the burning building is changing its color from glowing red into a bruised tone, hiding the human moans underneath the neat surface of red bricks. No one is climbing up the ladder. No one holds onto the balcony beams. No fierce arms wave and smash second-floor windows. No man pours paper into the foggy air. The gloaming windows of nearby neighbors are closed in pitch black. My lungs quiver, nagging for more of the violent scene I just watched minutes ago. My grip tightens the tablets until some crack in their plastic cases.
I look up at the window where Adrien is standing. A blurred figure of a lanky man stands next to him. The figure shakes his head slowly and turns his back toward me. He walks into Adrien and becomes one with him.
The street light flicks, making this realm's existence suspectedly unrealistic.
Adrien did try to reverse what happened. He struggled to find a way out. He traced old documentaries and compared photos to locate the drugstore where it all started. It is still a drugstore. He secretly left some packs of fever tablets here and there inside and outside, under the bench’s legs, at the electric pole. Adrien hopes his friend might tumble into one of those, running home and giving the kid the drug in time. He didn’t need to enter the store and wandered another seven decades.
Adrien asked No-body to tell him the day from beginning till the end, hoping a comprehensive narrative might resolve the unconscious defiance of his fate. He searched for people who saw or got involved that day and peeled stories from their angles. Every recount might help him continue the journey . Every recount brings a closed wound back to bleed.
An old woman described the vivid street where her husband was trampled until his face disappeared behind thousands of legs and feet. She collected pieces of him hours later. She collapsed by the end of the story.
A one-arm hardware store owner removed his prosthesis arm, showing old knife marks trying to cut his joints, leaving vicious injuries. The wooden and plastic arm dangled between the unreliable moments of this city.
A tinto vendor stuffed himself into a crack between two buildings. He stood there a whole day in one posture while the anger storm hypnotized and smashed the street. When he was exhausted and fell on his knee, crawling out of the concrete wall, many bodies were burnt at every corner.
What I did just now was also one early idea Adrien tried out. The story gets clearer from year to year, with more voices, breath smell, sweat tastes, noise and screams, tales told by others through Adrien’s gatherings. The scene No-body brings to life becomes as vibrant as life is. He constructs that day everywhere. Inside Adrien's head, outside Adrien's realm, vaporing and surrounding Adrien's trivial moveabout. He walks people to his path. Sometimes, he left them at a loss and sprinted away. The ghosts are walking among the living, decisive not to be erased. The living stray their track in forgetfulness.
The wanderer put the shattered window pieces into their places. He makes the faces of the mobs (they are often unfaced in documentaries), men and women, looking over the victims’ shoulders and raising their beaters. Their hands are equipped with bricks, glass bottles of Molotov Cocktails, rust or shiny machetes. They climb. They break into. They blow emphatically. Their sharp kicks. No-body gives out his passion for the reconstructed memories he was swept away from.
In his theatre of devastation, we are spectators.
Adrien, No-body, and I stand from his window watching a woman swinging by the window; her hair was hung by three unfaced gathering above her. I can't hear what she is screaming about, but her mouth is open as black and deep as the black hole of this universe.
"Can we help her?" my heart races when her hair starts burning by a torch from one of the unfaced.
"You can," a hoarse voice echoes behind my earlobes. Warm.
Adrien's hands grip my neck. Many hands force my neck, shoulders, and back from behind. They push me through the window glass. Pieces of glass splash on me, sinking me in the heavy gravity behind its invisible hold.
Now I know: The wanderers’ breath shares the smell of their fading bodies, intertwining their conclusions with our fates.
Their lips taste our wine of peace.
Their longing for the lost path leads them to us on a crispy cold night, with rain or no rain.
We walk with them to the path of light.
The light stinks.
We sip in the city’s spirit.
We sink into their grips.
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Dead people are supposed to reunite with their loved ones after they cross the realm. In theory, they then become similar matter of existence. But a dead person should understand why they die. The son knew he died of a fatal fever seizure. He continued his journey afterward. But the father was incapable of comprehending his death.
Not only did Ragnar use Viking runes for divination and decision-making, but he also had them engraved on his weapons and personal belongings. These runic inscriptions served as a symbol of his power and connection to the gods. It was believed that by having these runes on his possessions, Ragnar could harness their magical energy and gain protection in battle. Ragnar's use of Viking runes set him apart as a king and leader. It showcased his belief in the mystic powers of the Norse gods and demonstrated his deep understanding of the ancient traditions of his people. This, in turn, earned him the respect and admiration of his subjects, who saw him as a divine ruler chosen by the gods. In conclusion, the Norse king Ragnar Lothbrok was a remarkable figure who possessed the ability to communicate with the gods using Viking runes. His use of these sacred symbols not only aided him in making important decisions but also acted as a symbol of his power and connection to the divine..
Reviews for "The Sacred Language of the Norse Kings: Unlocking the Mystery of Viking Runes"
- Sarah - 2 stars - I found "Norse king with viking runes" to be rather disappointing. The story lacked depth, and the characters felt one-dimensional. The writing style was also subpar, with numerous grammatical errors and awkward sentence structures. Additionally, the plot was predictable and didn't offer any surprises. Overall, I was not impressed with this book and wouldn't recommend it to others.
- Mark - 1 star - "Norse king with viking runes" was a complete letdown. The author seemed to have a weak understanding of Norse mythology, resulting in a story that felt contrived and poorly researched. The dialogue was stilted and unrealistic, making it difficult to connect with the characters. The pacing was also inconsistent, with slow moments dragging on and important events being rushed through. I was highly disappointed with this book and regretted spending my time reading it.
- Jennifer - 2.5 stars - I had high hopes for "Norse king with viking runes," but unfortunately, it fell short of my expectations. The plot meandered aimlessly, lacking a clear direction or purpose. The characters were underdeveloped, and their actions often seemed illogical and inconsistent. Additionally, the writing style was dull and lacked finesse, making it a struggle to stay engaged. While there were moments of potential, they were overshadowed by the overall mediocrity of the book. I was left feeling unsatisfied and wouldn't recommend it to others.