The Anglo Saxons, by contrast, were a thoroughly miserable lot. Life was short, fate was cruel and arbitrary, and nothing you did mattered because everybody and everything dies and turns to dust.

sir are you sure you have your germanic tribes straight because it sounds like you are talking about the GOTHS!!!!!

ba-dum-TISH

Oh. Ouch.

Actually I kind of love anglo-saxon fatalism. I mean, possibly it's something we've invented because there's so little writing still extant - I mean, here we are fretting over The Wanderer and The Seafarer and The Wife's Lament (in which an anglo-saxon mourns their crappy lot and points that all lots are crappy, actually, beacuse we're, like, all gonna die and where the fuck has the horse gone?) but perhaps the bulk of their poetry was about really parties and balloons and cute fluffy rabbits.

To be fair, I think there are some riddles still about. You know, that "cunning" litle poem that recurrs in all historical periods in which you THINK the poet is describing a penis but ACTUALLY he's describing a key. D'ya see.