Being a record of certain phenomena found in the environs of the Lost Quarter.

Form and Function

There has been much written about the mourning boxes that inhabit so many homes in the Quarter, enough to fill several volumes, yet their innate mysteriousness persists. Even those who possess them and have some inkling as to their origin do not understand the meaning of the objects. They are merely heirlooms, passed down through the family, occupying a place of importance and display in everyone’s homes.  

What they are called, of course, seems to offer a tantalizing clue as to their origins and original purpose, and yet the one thing everyone is certain of with the regards to the boxes is that their name and origin are unrelated. In the Quarter, as elsewhere, the dead are buried in the earth or burned on pyres. Any ashes are placed in urns, not within the mourning boxes, which are always empty and cannot be opened. Aside from being passed down from generation to generation, the mourning boxes have no apparent connection with ancestors or the dead. So why the name? It must be in reference to something. 

The latest research offers a suggestion. Most mourning boxes, especially the oldest, are marked with engravings. These have historically been seen as mere decoration, though it has been noted that the engravings follow similar patterns within families and regions. This was assumed to be because the artisans who made the boxes had a particular style they followed, but it has also been frequently noted that they share certain commonalities with various runic alphabets. A recent comparative analysis of the engravings of 5000 mourning boxes noted a number of repeating motifs that they argued could represent letters. Most of these shapes are angular and there are few horizontal strokes, typical of early runic alphabets.  

Yet the individual runes, if that is what they in fact are, appear to have no connection to any known alphabets and it seems impossible that those coming to the Quarter would suddenly take up an alphabet centuries after their ancestors had abandoned it. In every other facet of their lives they utilized the latin script we are all familiar with, except in this one instance where people of the region used a now forgotten alphabet that had no connection to any used by any of their distant ancestors. Could some runic symbology have somehow passed hidden through the centuries, only to become visible in strange, purposeless boxes in a forgotten and forgettable region inhabited by so many disconnected peoples? 

It is the emptiness of the boxes that I always return to. They are all built hollow, with the form of containers, yet without the function. I am of the belief that the mourning boxes were built to contain something, contents that were never to be disturbed given they were sealed in their construction. Nothing has been discovered inside any of the boxes, but there are few remaining that are more than a century or two old, and by then the meaning of the boxes had already lost, forgotten like the letters that mark it. As with so much of the past, we have the maps to mark the territory, but that is not the same as walking the roads that once crossed there.