Killing the Elderly

[marja erwin]

On Thu, 2014-01-30 at 08:17 -0800, the_lothian at yahoo.com wrote:
>   
> Hello All,
> 
> I am reading "Barbarian Rites" by Hans-Peter Hasenfratz.  In his
> chapter on Society and its Values he writes
> 
> The practice of killing the elderly, which is attested among the
> eastern and northern Germanic peoples, was probably connected to the
> idea of sparing "useless mouths" from the fate of a straw death.
> 
> The straw-death referring to dying in your bed. 
> Can anyone help me confirm this before I put it into my novel?
> 
> Thanks,
> Tom

This is the firs I've heard of it. This would, if true, show up in
funerary archaeology, so it should be testable.


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/gothic-l/attachments/20140130/981cc377/attachment.htm>