You get a lot of these as euphemisms for the devil too - in danish sometimes people will say "for Søren" instead of "for Satan"

I'm about 200pgs in and it made me think of your Pynchon episode. It seems to be Eco reflecting on the paranoia of the Years of Lead via the Templars/Rosicrucians, from what I've seen of your work I think it'd be up your street (it's also got some very well observed sketches of conspiracy theorists)

I know state justice systems are usually fucked, but there should be a middle ground between them and Hrothgar the Horrid demanding all your sheep because you looked at him funny

But holmgangs were ritualised! You couldn't just take someone out and claim it was fine! I also read somewhere that even the Norse didn't like them so much because they knew that a big horrible bastard could challenge a rich merchant and get some easy money off beating them

To your point about innocent in-group people, I think one of the reasons the Norse stopped resolving every issue with trial by combat was because there were guys who'd challenge people over made-up insults so they could "legally" get them to pay them weregeld

I guess this person is confusing ritualised combat trials (which did exist, but usually got abstracted quite quickly) with just randomly taking out someone who annoyed you a bit

Gutted to miss this - turns out the exhibitor pass doesn't cover the talks 🫠

I like Skamby (Shame town) in Fyn too - Skidby is in England tho, in the old danelaw so lots of Scandi town names

I don't think so, "skid" seems to just turn into "shit" in English (sk becoming sh and d becoming t is quite common), i also feel like you need underwear to get a term like skidmarks, which implies its more recent to me 😅

Incidentally, there's a village near Hull called Skidby which is danish for "shit town"

I think also worth pointing out is that the Rwanda policy came from Denmark (under the Social Democrats), so the last time the UK copied DK immigration policy it was a disaster

Mostly Pratchett, Banks, and Tchaikovsky, but I've hit the point where I'm mostly rereading them - then again, Discworld & the Culture are places I'm always happy to visit

I'm also a fan of ulykke, an unhappiness

The non-animal (which is a fun difference from English, where beast implies too much animal)

I guess my point is that they're all very specific words in their own languages - like you couldn't call something "canny" in that context in English