Weald Comics

The Corpse Door! Version 4! “The last” rendition of the tale. There will be a page uploaded every week, with a little bit of commentary too!

This splash page pays homage to the previous covers/title page, all which featured a similar picture stone – showing a warrior, who falls ill, then dies in his house. His wife grieves while his brother and a serf make a hole (“the corpse door”) in the outside-wall and drag his body through it.

The runes at the top of the stone, which were added in ‘The Corpse Door 2′, are not very accurate grammatically speaking. Back-in-the-day the CD2 runes were inspired by an actual picture/rune stone (possible the Berezan’ Runestone). I think they are supposed to say something along the lines of ‘here lies Karl;’ The last word is definitely ‘Karl,’ the middle word is ‘coffin’ (vault – a bit of a stretch) and the first word…well, there may be either a spelling or designated-futhark mistake. There’s a Younger Futhark ‘ᚼ’ and ‘ᚱ’ – but in between is an Old-English-Futhark ‘ᛄ’… unless that should have been written as ‘ᚦ’ or ‘ᚹ’

…this is probably why the draugr comes back. None too happy with the runes on that stone!