When Kings Were the Shield

Before longships ruled the seas,
before sagas carved names into memory,
there was a line of kings known as the Shieldings.

They did not rule through conquest or spectacle.
They ruled by standing where danger gathered —
absorbing threat so others could live in peace.

From the arrival of Scyld from the sea,
to the rise of great halls like Heorot,
their story reminds us of an older truth:

Peace is never permanent.
Order is never inherited.
And leadership is not glory — it is burden.

The Shieldings did not fall to invasion,
but to complacency and forgetting what the shield was for.

These myths endure because the lesson still applies.

Someone must stand watch —
or the dark returns.

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