THE MC GUFFIN NEWSLETTER
January, 2007
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MORE NEWS FROM
"A People's History of Iceland," by Dr. Forkar Pylup
How True Are the Sagas?
It appears that the myths concocted to provide an autocratic prehistory of Iceland--the last settled country of Europe, in which no artifacts dating earlier than 1500 have ever been discovered--were, at best, metaphorical relignments of existing power relations in perennially fractured Norway, where disputes were settled by tribal warfare, usually involving arson, rape, bludgeonings with primitive metal tools, and incestuous alliances between factions.
Let's consider briefly the case of Ulf, son of Bjalfi and Hallbera, "the daughter of Ulf the Fearless." Hallbera is said to have been the sister of Hallbjorn Half-troll "from Hrafnista, the father of Ketil Haeng." Ulf, reputedly, "was so big and strong that no man was a match for him; and he was still only a youth when he became a Viking and went raiding."
My own research, based on parchment records from a dozen monasteries rather than the so-called runes, tells us quite a different tale indeed. There are abundant empirical reasons to conclude that Ulf amd Ulf the Fearless were the self-same individual--ergo, the biological son of his own grandmother. There is, furthermore, no record of Hall-trolls residing in Hrafnista; Ketil Haeng's father, as appears on his baptismal record, was none other than Glam of Putzig, an ice-fisherman and beserker, who figures in Grettir's Saga as a long-persistent revenant whose living form had drowned in a neighbor's cesspool, where he attempted to elude local authorities, after charges of wanton bestiality and poachery had been filed against him.
Glam's manure-bloated corpse, discovered several yards from the cesspool in which he met his end, proved more troublesome in a postmortem state than the rapist and pilferer of domesticated fowl had ever been in Glam's overlong and squalid life. "He was dead," Grettir's Saga asserts unequivocally, "and his body was dark-blue in colour and swollen up to the size of an ox." The people of Putzig "were horrified and shrank back from the corpse. However, they tried to carry it down to the church, but they could drag it no further than down to the edge of a ravine a little distance away…A little later the people found that Glam was not lying quiet. Terrible things happened; many men fell unconscious at the sight of him, and others lost their sanity. Soon after Christmas, people began to see him walking about the farmhouse and were terrified by him; many of them fled away. Then Glam began to sit astride the roof at night and beat on it so furiously with his heels that the house came near to breaking."
While many of Glam's exploits must be taken with a pinch of salt, there seems no doubt that the cunning ice-fisherman and abductor of hens and chickens was the product of incest, a common enough occurrence in Putzig and most of the settlements nearby. Attempts to obscure the parentage of many a Putzig maiden, and most of the Putzig berzerks, are flagrantly belied by the ubiquitous surname of "Half-troll." For even in Putzig and its surroundings, the incest taboo exerted a powerful though by no means restraining grip on the local imagination.
The discovery of Iceland later in this period not only did nothing to curb the tendency of fathers and mothers to sire offspring by their own children, but exacerbated the problem tenfold. So few Norwegians chose to settle in this new land that exogenous mates of child-bearing age were available to the women of Iceland, and few were the patriarchal males capable of resisting the nubile blandishments of their daughters.
The lamentable results of this inbreeding can be widely detected in Iceland even in the present day. Mental disorders and physical anomalies abound throughout this fecund yet doleful country, where a complete record of genetic information has been compiled on virtually all the inhabitants. The DNA findings are distressing in the extreme. Not only are all native Icelanders closely related; a large majority cannot be differentiated by examination of the genomic chain.
In the following chapter, I shall correlate the incidence of severe alcoholism in ten sample Icelandic villages with the multiform confusion that exists concerning which inhabitants are offspring of their grandparents, which were the progeny of aunts, uncles, first cousins, and siblings; I will also examine the instances in which unclassified mammals have emanated from the mating of Icelanders with their swine and cattle.
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The Institute's long-promised, undelivered Encyclical of Pius XI has once again been delayed, owing to the discovery of still another document in which Pius XI cites numerous specific incidents of well-poisoning and infant sacrifice on the part of Poland's Jewish population. These findings will be promulgated as addenda to the Encyclical, "Concerning the Murder of Our Savior Jesus Christ By the Perfidious Hebrews and Their Continued Defiance of Legitimate Papal Authority in the Remantns of the Papal States, Praising the Efforts of the German Chancellor to Rid the Earth of these Cosmopolitan Lice."
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Until next time,
Very truly yours,
Velma Darwin
Velma Darwin
Acting Director
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