gonna be extremely on my shit here for a moment so please excuse me

so inspired from a sudden desire to listen to Grendel's Mother by the Mountain Goats, as I often am, I went to read about Grendels mother the character and the wonderful and inscrutable word aglæcwif. This is one of the words used to describe her, and there is no consensus on what this word means. "Wif" is fine, that just means woman (see: wife), but aglæc/aglæca is a real weird one, and speculation on its mening is almost entirely derived from context.

I'm not going to go too deep into etymologies and such, at least not until I can dig into scholarly sources on it, but this got me thinking on the power of ephemera and myth, and mysteries, and specifically how this all comes together in prehistoric art.

Prehistoric art has always fascinated me and he'll it's what I got a degree in. It is a profoundly powerful look into the past, and humanity, and it is the closest we can get to shaking hands with the people of the past, and it is so deeply compelling to me for two interrelated reasons:

1. They meant to say it. They are all intentional expressions of something, and it would have made sense to the people who made it, and sometimes some things are so frequently present that you have to assume they didn't even need to explain them to their contemporaries.
   And 2. We rarely ever know what it means. Most of it is nigh-inscrutable.

And that to me is profoundly beautiful. Sure, yes, there is the appeal of wanting to crack the mystery, but I find that there is something really strangely powerful in the depth of human experience and thought at display. Thousands and thousands of years ago myriads of mythologies and legends and beliefs lived among people, and undoubtedly tales beyond counting were told with all the odd specificity you'd expect of the mythological, and we can today barely scratch the surface of them if that.

BUT

but

We get to see the glimpses when we see the times they needed to express it. Every little Venus statuette, every cave painting, every rock carving, every Lion-Man of Hohlenstein-Stadel, these things want to speak and were made because someone wanted to say them. The breadth of human experience and expression throughout history is outstanding and phenomenal, and every little wispy ephemera we don't understand is profound in its power as a tiny lens into a world we can no longer access.

what were they thinking