See, our first mistake was trying to have a civilization in northern Europe between October and February. The darkest three months of the year should be for staying home under the blankets, midwinter festivals, and getting blind drunk when the sun goes down at 4 pm like the bog gods intended.
boss calling me asking why I left work early, and I’m sitting in the peat bog with the slime up to my neck. no, I’m not coming in tomorrow, I say. the ghosts of my Paleolithic ancestors are whispering to me. fine, I say. yeah, I’ll get a doctor’s note. a skeletal hand erupts from the depths proffering a swamp-blackened chunk of birch bark. someone has scratched a perfectly filled out Arbeitsunfähigkeitsbescheinigung in an unknown pre-Indo-European language. it’s for a whole week off, which is nice. i pour a little of my whiskey out into the bog, as a token of appreciation.
i speak to the bog in halting proto-germanic bc it’s as close as i can get, but that’s like six thousand years too late for most of the bog gods, who haven’t been paying attention to mortal affairs since the Neolithic. the corpse of a dead Wendish prince translates for me. he’s spent a lot of time with other bog ghosts, and picked up a pretty stunning variety of languages. but sometimes he has to ask the others for help for tricky concepts like farming or the internet that the bog gods don’t have words for. O Gods of the Bog, i ask, what wisdom do you have for escaping the ennui of modern life?
there are distant ululations and strange misshapen figures stir in the mist. sacrifice your king to the bog, the reply comes. strangle him and throw his head into the mire, with offerings of iron and gold. i sigh. It’s no use trying to explain we don’t have a king anymore. That’s their answer to everything.
