On top of that, “honeymoon” has nothing to do with drinking mead after you were married. The word “medicine” is not derived from a type of mead. Vikings did not drink out of skulls. Oh, and mead might be the oldest fermented beverage, but we have no evidence of that.
Have you ever wondered why we relentlessly seek to debunk “facts” which could help us sell and promote our product? Almost any meadery in America will spout several of the above fallacies as part of their “tour.” We do not.
Also, let us state for the record: we don’t think that misinformed people are jerks or liars. Some people actually know the truth, but eschew the facts for a better story. We don’t have a problem with them either.
So, again, why are we so obsessed with debunking the “facts” that everyone knows about mead and the Vikings?
The answer is that we are staffed almost exclusively by scientists, mathematicians, and epistemology-focused philosophy majors. In other words, we believe that facts can build on facts, but a system of knowledge built on falsehoods is doomed to crumble.
For example, we source almost all of the food for our mead hall locally, but sometimes we need to buy things from Costco, Webstaurant, or a mill in the Midwest. If we wrote a story about ourselves in which everything was local, we would be tempted (most of the staff is human after all) to lie to you about the provenance of our ingredients. Instead, we tell you honestly that we do the best we can to get things locally if we think it’s in the best interest of our community, but sometimes we just can’t. The story isn’t as compelling, but at least it’s honest.
If we told people that mead was the oldest beverage on earth, what would that achieve? Sure, you’re drinking a piece of history, but the same is true when you drink any beverage. When you drink beer, you’re part of a lineage which built the pyramids! That’s amazing!
The Greeks, Vikings, Celts, and the Zogwe Dynasty all celebrated with mead, but it’s only one part of the amazing story of human civilization. Beer, mead, and wine are all kin in the lives of humanity, they have all been life-sustaining and ritually bound. Mead’s amazing, but so is Scotch.
Next week, we’ll tell you why all of this matters, but for now, suffice it to say that Vikings were horny in only one sense of the word, and our passion for historically accurate garb is only a pretext for a much more important discussion.
