I just completed a long, roundabout journey through the internet, accidentally stumbling upon one thing after another. In the approximate order of my stumbling:

- While trying to find The Deceiver's exact words he says in response to the Barbarian who mumbles a spell to awaken him I happened upon the fact that Bungie's Myth series, like Destiny, also had a group called The Nine. Myth's "The Nine" were powerful Avatara (magic users, some of which were very much like LotR wizards and others who were fighters and warriors with magical powers) lead by Alric, the king who in Myth II probably brings an end to the cycles of Light and Dark ages.

If the current Nine are anything like Myth's Nine then they would be military leaders who were some of the most powerful beings in our solar system. Unfortunately, that doesn't do much to help us decide which, if any, of these descriptions of The Nine are true...

- By one theory, there are four known ages in the Myth series: An Axe age, a Sword age, a Wind age, and a Wolf age. Master Rahool will sometimes mumble about "...a Wind age... a Wolf age..." if you stand near him.

- The names for these ages almost certainly came from an old Norse poem called Völuspá. It talks about everything from the creation of the earth and the heavens, to a Golden Age that is destroyed by three powerful maidens from the race of Giants (do recall that Oryx and his two siblings we have yet to see were originally female) and a bunch of other stuff.

- A good deal of that bunch of other stuff makes up the naming conventions of Rasputin's response to the arrival of the Darkness. Notably, VOLUSPA seems to be the term Rasputin used for some sort of military force or military plan he activated to combat the Darkness. Other terms from Norse mythology used by Rasputin / Humanity during the collapse include: FENRIR (a great wolf that kills Odin) and SURTR (a Giant with a flaming sword whose fire engulfs the Earth).

While I don't think we can really piece together Destiny's story from Völuspá, though I'd love to see someone try, it's kinda neat to perhaps piece together where the Norse theming of words in Rasputin's logs came from. It also seems clear that writers at Bungie made an effort to subtly reference the mythology and mysticalness of some of their past games like Myth and Marathon. It continues the great Bungie tradition of having a few background elements from past games that are familiar to us Bungie fans... as if they were from an old dream. :)