Ringlorn: The Longing for the Grandeur of the Past

Why can’t life today be as exciting as it was in history?

John Koenig’s “Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” has been serving up the Internet slews of new, completely self-made words, since 2009. Most never made the leap beyond the website. A few, such as sonder, opia, and anemoia, are quickly becoming accepted additions to the English language. One, introduced just earlier this year, seems to me to capture perfectly the state of many — maybe even most — people today. This, of course, is Ringlorn, defined by Koenig as —

“the wish that the modern world felt as epic as the one depicted in old stories and folktales — a place of tragedy and transcendence, of oaths and omens and fates, where everyday life felt like a quest for glory … rather than an open-ended parlor game where all the rules are made up and the points don’t matter”.

On the surface, it might just sound like the kind of pointless historical fantasizing you’d expect from nerds or Nazis. But there’s something deeper here than just the fictionalization of the past and the yearning of bored office workers for the glory of a blood-soaked sword. It’s not a secret that history wasn’t always as exciting as Arthurian legends and religious epics made it to be. Everybody knows the past was dirty, difficult, and oftentimes unspeakably brutal. But what’s just as widely known is that there was a tangible sense of wonder and mystique in the past that we today are forced by circumstance to miss…