antiquarians:

it’s so…intensely weird to me that the divine comedy was written fiftyish years after the composition of the prose edda and almost simultaneously with the saga of the volsungs, that king edward i of england and king jaime i of aragon and the saint-king louis ix of france and kublai fucking khan all sat on their respective thrones during dante’s lifetime, that while he was living at lucca robert the bruce was crowned king of scotland, that he was five years younger than princess khutulun, that the children of hamelin disappeared when he was nineteen. all these events seem so remote and titanic that they’re semi-legendary in our cultural perception but he was contemporary with them, he lived in the same world that saw the collapse of the song dynasty and the founding of tenochtitlan, and that’s just. really strange to me.