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Guttermouth's avatar

There's a Viking myth- not a story from Viking mythology, mind you, but a supposition about Viking culture that was completely false but believed for a long time- about a thing called the Ättestupa, pronounced "atteshtup," where elders were allegedly guilted into jumping or forcibly thrown off of certain sacred cliffs to spare their families the burden of caring for them, and that this was seen as a deeply honorable sacrifice.

The problem is that it never existed at all. Quite a few aspects of Norse culture are deeply distorted by deliberate rewrites from later Christian scholars who were often the only ones who could translate the old stories, which they then highly editorialized or reframed for updated morality. The notion of Ättestupa was based on ONE parable story about a legendary family that was so greedy that the elders killed themselves instead of being forced to spend money on giving hospitality to guests.

There is no evidence that anything like a real-life Ättestupa ever happened.

Most cultures do not regard homicide as a solution to "useless eaters," even the ones we tend to think of as harsh or brutal.

Okay, China.

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