Jesse Lee
The plaque read “Viking Age Female, Ninth Century A.D.”. She lay in state, surrounded by her trinkets and a miasma of climate-controlled air. The tinny voice of the audio tour told me that she was estimated to have died of an illness around the age of twenty-five to thirty. She was of Scandinavian origins, buried in in English soil, possibly a settler in the Danelaw. I paused the recorded monologue.
Her clothes were varying shades of rotted brown, fading into the dry parchment color of her bones. Small locks of tinder grass hair clung to her shrunken scalp; her hands gently folded over exposed ribs. A glance at the display above her resting place revealed an artist’s loving rendition of what this woman might have looked like in life. The recreation had a stern face surrounded by elaborate blond braids. She wore a grey shift under a woad blue apron dress with amber beads strung about her throat. I wondered if it was accurate.
I twirled my own braids between my fingers. Did she fight to make her plaits neat, as I had fought this morning, even with the aid of modern hair tools? Did she choose the amber beads to draw the eye of a young man in her village? What kinds of jokes made that stern expression crack into a laugh? Her last meal, examined during an archaeological autopsy, contained berries. I licked my lips, tasting the remnants of the blueberry jam from my bagel. I wondered if blue was her favorite color. It’s mine.
Centuries of time and inches of glass separate us, but we tell the same stories, fractures in our bones, tears, smiles, and whispered wishes. I look at the hammer pendant resting in the hollow of her throat and reach up to touch the runestone necklace resting in my own. We have shaped the same names with our lips. Thor, Tyr, Freya, Odin. Fireside tales and historical research, reaching hands across the gap of centuries and cultures. We heard stories of the same heroes. We have watched the same stars.