According to the saga, after Egill placed Böðvarr in the family burial mound, he locked himself in his bed-chamber, determined to starve himself to death. It is preserved in a few manuscripts of Egils saga Skalla-Grímssonar, ch. The work laments the death of two of the poet’s sons, Gunnar, who died of a fever, and Böðvarr, who drowned during a storm. (But you, Invictus, are right about the potential time table! Remember: two centuries is but a short while, compared to the great stretch of history.Sonatorrek („the irreparable loss of sons“) is a skaldic poem in 25 stanzas by Egill Skallagrímsson (ca. there will be a China, and (barring brief periods) it will be great and powerful. But here's the thing: the Western economy is also a mirage. Critics of the "China-as-a-superpower" narrative rightly point that out. Currently, their much-talked-about economy is mostly a mirage. I would not be at all surprised to find a future where they are the East to our West. China will be China, as it has always been. Maybe, if they started easing the whole continent off foreign aid right now, a lot of people could be saved. then (I shit you not) two-thirds of the population of sub-Saharan Africa will die. If (or rather: when) the West runs into severe problems, and that aid ceases. Believe me, I've been there, right in the middle of that process. Why? To put it bluntly: Western humanitarian aid. Africa has seen a population explosion. (Which René Guenon would find regrettable, because the long-shot scenario would validate exactly what he was suggesting.) It's more probable that Islam is pretty screwed in the long term. It will basically do what Christianity did previously: fade out of the East, and adapt to (and dominate) the West. For that to work, though, Islam has to become fairly European. If that happens, it is possible for Islam to take over Europe, and to be the highly traditional religion that establishes order. Follows the exact same pattern, but is predicated on the idea that America self-immolates. There is an alternative scenario to what I have previously outlined for the West, though. I agree with that the "oil states" are screwed in the long term. The above makes prognostication difficult, as it pertains to Islam specifically. But they never got to fight their Thirty Years' War properly, because some jerks (that's us!) started bossing everybody around. To clarify: I think that Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab was an Islamic version of someone like John Calvin. Their counterpart to the Reformation was delayed, and when it did take place, it suffered from the fact that Western powers were throwing their weight around. I've thought about this for a long time, and my personal suspicion is that the Islamic culture (which actually precedes the West, mind you Mohammed lived before Charlemagne) has or had a stagnation problem.
The Islamic world is a tricky thing to place for a lot of people. They are certainly aware of it, though, and have prepared for precisely this reality. Whether it is here to stay remains to be seen. One Emperor."Ĭlick to expand.- Israel has not yet existed as long, presently, as the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
So in "our" time (really our grandchilden's time), I would not at all be surpised if the really conservative Catholic, Protestant and Eastern Orthodox Christians figure out that they have more in common with each other than they do with any progressive club. They do invent some of those "old tradition", of course. After an increasingly un-traditional period has ended in carnage, people really do return to tradition. The early Empire is also a time of religious revival - state-backed. (Few people realise just how close it came to that, in the early '90s.) So I would certainly entertain the possibility that European Russia ends up in the "Western" sphere, while everything beyond the Urals is beyond the Empire's reach. Now, I don't give Russia post-Putin very good odds for stable governance. The Romans took the Western, Hellenised bits of the Seleukid Empire, and the final border ended up further East.
Click to expand.Expanding on this a bit (because I'm the sort of person who always has more to say, go figure):