Adventures in Phantom Time
Charlemagne, Charlemagne, where did you go ?
Where is your kingdom and afterglow ?
Where is the Bede now, or Alfred the Great ?
Wherefore the burgeoning Byzantine state ?
What of iconoclasts spoiling the feast ?
What of the Slavs who are ruling the East ?
What of the Vikings’ unstoppable force ?
Just when will Lindisfarne fall to the Norse ?
Three hundred years, and none of it happened.
Three hundred years, and all lived in one day.
All of that history, artwork and trappings
Are nothing but forgeries, fooling away.
Nothing but myths and mistakes in the dating,
With stories conflating,
And years gone astray.
Charlemagne, Charlemagne, where is your reign ?
Where are the Arabs all storming through Spain ?
Where are the monks and the plainchants they sing ?
When will they bury the Sutton Hoo king ?
Where are the famines and smallpox and worse ?
Where is your Beowulf writing his verse ?
Where are they building their towers of bells ?
Where are they gilding the Vellum of Kells ?
Three hundred years, and none are correct –
Just three hundred years in the stroke of a pen.
All of that history – tattered and wrecked –
It’s either invented or happened elsewhen.
Nothing but legends and lack of hard data,
To make us all later, millennial men.
But three hundred years…
How many lives in those three hundred years ?
How many folks with their hopes and their fears ?
How many lovers, and soldiers, and seers ?
We shouldn’t ignore them, we shouldn’t mistreat them,
Or else we’ll be doomed to forever repeat them.
The Phantom Time Hypothesis is a conspiracy theory that purports that the period of history in Europe between HE 10614–10911 did not actually exist.
Complete bollocks, of course. Take away those years and the positions of the planets and the dates of eclipses as recorded in antiquity, and calculated backwards from today, wouldn’t line up. Oh, and the ancient Chinese would have to be in on it as well.
Rhyming Couplets 