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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

“Dark ages” was limited to the leftover sphere of influence of the western Roman Empire, 200 AD is considerably too early as a start for the period.

There really was a steep decline in civilization, cities emptied, many completely, literacy rates in the tank, many many people regressed to subsistence agriculture.

No it wasn’t the whole world, the successful successor states to the Roman Empire didn’t experience it. It was also not complete, but don’t make the naysayers mistake of overstating the contrary evidence.

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It's a lot about what you value. Most of my ancestors were subsistence farmers, probably yours too. Doesn't mean their lives were all dark.

I read a local book about violin makers. I was shocked at how many there were, in the almost entirely rural community around here. To me, making a violin requires some pretty serious, specialised woodworking skills. But they document hundreds of local farmers - subsistence farmers - apparently having those skills. And they don't even count those who "just made a fiddle or two".

Which isn't to say there can be no such thing as dark ages. When there's so much war and chaos that no one has time to build much of lasting value, whether materially or culturally, that's pretty dark. Yet the few things that come out of such times and places (the English border ballads comes to mind, or the hymns of Paul Gerhardt) can be all the more beautiful.

I always thought that "dark" in "dark ages" refers to the lack of written evidence, i.e., more "dark" as in the lights have gone out and you can't see what's happening than "dark" as in grim.

I'm interested in such things; what was the name of the book?

"Felemakarar på Nordvestlandet", F.F. Birkeland, 2008. ISBN 9788292082041

My favorite tidbit from history class: We can track slavic migration into Europe by when churches stopped sending updates to Rome.

I recently heard an interesting take that the view of this time of Europe might be an intentional slight to the influence of the byzantine empire as it presented an alternative form of Christianity to the roman Catholic one.

Acknowledging the byzantine empire means that you have to deal with an unbroken line to Rome and also Christianity

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