The Word that Means *To Stoop* (Grundle (reprise))

Lyrics

[Intro]
Before the slang, before the joke…
there was a foundation.
A word buried in the cold earth.

[Verse 1]
Imagine Iceland, 1220.
Snorri Sturluson is not yet dead.
A scribe huddles by a tallow candle,
his breath a ghost in the scriptorium.
The ink is made of bone and soot.
On the parchment, he writes a word for the bottom of things.
Not the bottom of a man.
The bottom of a world.

[Verse 2]
He writes *grund*. The ground.
The field where the sheep freeze in winter.
He writes *grundvöllr*. The foundation-field.
The flat stones laid before the first timber of the longhouse goes up.
The thing that holds the weight.
The lineage, the anchor, the start of the story.

[Chorus]
A word is a foundation stone.
Sunk in the mud of a thousand years.
We only see the last layer of moss,
the joke told in a warm room.
But underneath…
underneath is the weight of the house.
The name of the first man who laid the stone.

[Verse 3]
That word traveled on a longship.
It crossed the cold sea.
It kept the sailors steady, a memory of land.
But language wears down like a river stone.
Eight hundred years of water and whispers.
The meaning got smaller.
It forgot the sky and the timber.
It stooped.

[Bridge]
Cousin Hornswoggle hears a punchline.
A body part for a laugh.
But the skald in the great hall, his voice ringing against the rafters…
he heard the bedrock.
He heard the names of his ancestors, carved on the foundation.
He heard the beginning.

[Outro]
Dig past the dirt.
Past the laughter.
The old stone is still there.
Cold to the touch.
Holding everything up.