Alan (on December semi-hiatus) Teder’s Reviews > Silverwhite: The Journey to the Fallen Sun > Status Update

The Estonian word for German, saksa, formed in the same way. Originally, it was used for the Saxon tribes in the area around present-day Schleswig-Holstein, which they controlled until their invasion of England in 448 (SKES 4, 952). The Saxons have long since become the Anglo-Saxons, aka English, though Estonians still refer to the residents of Germany in our rather surprising old way.

Tacitus first recorded the aestiorum gentes, the Aesti tribes, in the year 98. Aesti, Eesti, Estonia. But were Tacitus’s Aesti really Estonians? Names wander, peoples wander, and name-forms can be passed down, inherited, and borrowed.

For reasons lost to the sands of time, the Blackheads switched patrons and St George relinquished his place to St Maurice, commander of the Theban Legion of Rome. As church legend goes, Maurice refused to fight against fellow Christians, was executed by order of the Roman emperor, and was later made a saint. Maurice was black, ergo the name Blackheads and a black head on the Brotherhood’s coat of arms.

In Estonia, the first documented Christmas tree was set alight in Tallinn in 1441 (Amelungen and Wrangell 1930), though as part of an ancient ritual with roots reaching back to prehistoric folk religion. In the strictly regulated medieval city centre, only the Brotherhood of the Blackheads had permission to perform such an act. The Brotherhood would celebrate the end of shipping season with Yuletide feasts.

Writing was invented by the tax collector, and the tax collector invented creative literature for his own defence. The history of the taiga survives in unwritten literature, customs, and rites. Conceptions of the human afterlife are the most lasting – better hunting grounds where one continues one’s everyday activities with one’s bow, arrows, boat, and favourite dog.

Pytheas’s gnomon most likely stood in the centre of the market square on the Vieux-Port de Marseille, a natural inlet nearly 700 metres south of the present-day sea mark. He erred by 8,600 metres, 4⅔ arcminutes, when ascertaining Massalia’s location. This is an outstanding level of precision that would be unsurpassed for several centuries, and marks the birth of modern navigation.

Paul Ariste believes it likely that a common proto-European substrate exists in Baltic-Finnic and Celtic languages. If this is true, then it is hard to dismiss the similarity in sound between our tooru/taara and the Celtic Taranis. Tooru/torum can be traced back to the proto-Finno-Ugric language.

The iron contained in the Kaali meteorite, about 450 tonnes, was of immense value, totalling more than the entire world's annual iron production. We might assume that attitudes towards Saaremaa changed with the dawn of the Iron Age: notions of terror and catastrophe were complemented with fairy tale-like themes of wealth, ultimately blending and overwhelming the earlier reputation.

Baltic Finns’ relationship to snakes is conspicuously contradictory and does not seem to fit the global myths in which a snake represents evil, downfall, and death. Instead, Baltic-Finnic folklore reveals a friendly and tenderly caring attitude towards the reptiles. Snake worship persisted in Estonia until the 20th century,

There are in this sea many other islands, of which a large one is called Estland […]. Its people, too, are utterly ignorant of the God of the Christians. They adore dragons and birds and also sacrifice to them live men. (Adam of Bremen, 1073–6)