It is noon in the valley, and the whole world is asleep in the sun.
A young warrior lies on a bed of juniper, as if he had stopped to rest on his way home and the warmth had overcome him. His golden helmet is turned up to the sky. His red cloak is spread out beneath him. The meadow leans over him with its flowers, and a white water lily has settled in the eye of his helmet, as gently as a hand closing someone's eyes.
Travellers who pass along the road lower their voices so as not to wake him.
He was raised on the old war songs, the ones the poet Tyrtaeus sang to the men of Sparta: never turn to flight; hold your own life hateful, and the dark spirits of death as dear as the light of the sun. He did not turn to flight.
Look again. The juniper was always the plant of the dead; in the old faith they laid it in graves and burned it at funerals to keep the spirits away. The cloak beneath him is not only red with dye. And the lily does not rest on a sleeping man.
"He sleeps in the sun, his hand upon his chest,
at peace. There are two red holes in his right side."
— Arthur Rimbaud, The Sleeper in the Valley (1870)
The day half of a diptych with Draugr: the dead man taken for sleeping, and the dead man who will not sleep.
(Fine Art Photography. Created in July 2024.)
