Extra Credits
Published on 20 Apr 2018Sponsored by God of War! http://bit.ly/2FBqVPH
Everything, from the giants’ home of Jotunheim, to the primeval Vanaheim, to the mortal realm of Midgard, is connected by the tree named Yggdrasil, life to all nine worlds of Norse peoples.
April 23, 2018
Yggdrasil – Nine Worlds of the Norse – Extra Mythology
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April 14, 2018
The Danelaw – The Fall of Eric Bloodaxe – Extra History – #2
Extra Credits
Published on 12 Apr 2018After peace was made between King Alfred and Guthrum, the Danelaw was born — a geographic area in England controlled by the Danes, but also extremely reliant on the cooperation by the Anglo-Saxons and the local Christian population.
Sponsored by Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia!
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April 11, 2018
The Aesir-Vanir War – Extra Mythology
Extra Credits
Published on 9 Apr 2018Sponsored by God of War! http://bit.ly/2FBqVPH
One day, a mysterious visitor appeared among the Aesir, one of two races of Nordic gods. An epic and long war began, and yet despite the bloodshed, their war eventually gave poetry to the world.
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April 7, 2018
The Danelaw – Alfred vs. Guthrum – Extra History – #1
Extra Credits
Published on 5 Apr 2018The Vikings moved from Scandinavia to the coasts of Britain, intent on establishing a new kingdom by any blood necessary. What they probably didn’t expect was that one of their own leaders, Guthrum, and the local king, Alfred, would end up cooperating on the creation of a kingdom for the Danes.
Sponsored by Total War Saga: Thrones of Britannia! http://store.steampowered.com/app/712100/Total_War_Saga_Thrones_of_Britannia/
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April 2, 2018
Vikings – did they actually exist?
Lindybeige
Published on 9 Oct 2015The term ‘Viking’ is used inaccurately most of the time. Scandinavia was home to many Norse-speaking farmers, fishermen, carpenters, and cheese-makers, who spent between none and very little of their time carrying out sea raids.
Lindybeige: a channel of archaeology, ancient and medieval warfare, rants, swing dance, travelogues, evolution, and whatever else occurs to me to make.
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March 8, 2018
History of the Vikings (in One Take)
History Bombs
Published on 15 Feb 2018History of the Vikings (in One Take) by History Bombs
THIS IS THE AGE OF THE VIKING…
From the first raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to the fall of Harald Hardrada in 1066, we take an exciting tour through the Viking Age.
The Vikings had a remarkable global impact. Their long boats gave them a technological advantage that enabled them to dominate the sea and establish settlements across Northern Europe.
Ivar the Boneless established Danelaw and controlled central England for many years. Only Alfred the Great of Wessex was able to halt the Vikings advance across England by defeating Guthrum.
To the east, the Vikings were employed in modern-day Turkey as guards to Byzantine Emperors for four hundred years. The guard was called the ‘Varangian Guard’.
The video also includes the intrepid explorer, Leif Erikson, who is believed to have discovered North America some 500 years before Christopher Colombus!
This video was filmed in Northern Ireland and we would like to thank Magnus Vikings for use of their fantastic longboat!
Thank you for watching đ
Cast (in order of appearance): Guy Kelly, Robert Brown, Chris Hobbs, Suzie Preece, Tom Tokley, Richard Sherwood, John Henry Falle, Corinna Jane, Adrian Stevenson, Martin Savage, Richard Soames
Script & Music: Chris Hobbs
Director: Ellie Rogers
Producer: Claire O’Brien
Camera: Ryan Kernaghan
Focus Puller: Matt Farrant
Costumes: Alex Walker
Grade: Jack Kibbey NewmanScript Contributions: Ellie Rogers, John Henry Falle, Guy Kelly, Tom Tokley
Longship supplied by Magnus Vikings: http://www.magnusvikings.com/
Costumes supplied by Hampshire Wardrobe: https://www.hampshireculturaltrust.or…
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February 5, 2018
A brief history of plural word…s – John McWhorter
TED-Ed
Published on 22 Jul 2013View full lesson here: https://ed.ted.com/lessons/a-brief-history-of-plural-word-s-john-mcwhorter
All it takes is a simple S to make most English words plural. But it hasn’t always worked that way (and there are, of course, exceptions). John McWhorter looks back to the good old days when English was newly split from German — and books, names and eggs were beek, namen and eggru!
Lesson by John McWhorter, animation by Lippy.
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November 14, 2017
Why the Vikings Disappeared
KnowledgeHub
Published on 17 Feb 2017The Vikings were infamous in the Middle Ages for their raids against the coasts of Northern Europe. Their age however was quite brief in the span of time, only 300 years. What caused the end of the Vikings?
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October 3, 2017
Viking warrior women?
ESR posted a link to this article by Julia Dent on the much ballyhoo’d “discovery” of the grave of a Viking woman warrior:
You may have heard of LâAnse aux Meadows, the discovered Viking site in Canada (because I repeat, Vikings actually settled in North America, even if it didnât last long), but did you know that they uncovered another Viking site only last year? If you listen to Dan Snowâs History Hit podcast (which I highly recommend), you may have heard about it, but I only saw a couple of articles about the discovery. This finding is further proof that Leif Eriksson and his fellow Vikings actually settled in North America years before Christopher Columbus was even born, so it isnât insignificant in the least.
But Leif Eriksson was overshadowed once againâthis time by an unknown womanâs grave. However, thereâs more to the story than meets the eye. Iâve written about the danger of people leaping to conclusions before, and it appears that itâs happened again. While there may have been female Viking warriors, there isnât strong evidence that this Viking woman was actually a âhigh-ranking officerâ or even a warrior. University of Nottingham professor of Viking studies Judith Jesch burst everyoneâs bubbles with an article going through the âevidenceâ from the grave site and contesting it all. I highly encourage you to read her analysis in full, but hereâs a quick summary of some of her points about the authors who published the âevidenceâ that the grave site was for a female Viking military officer:
The authors listed on the article donât include a language specialist, even though it starts with referencing âânarratives about fierce female Vikings fighting alongside menâ, and concludes with a quotation from an Eddic poem in translation.â The authors even referenced one of Jeschâs books but not the book where she actually writes about women. The authors also make a lot of references to âhistorical recordsâ without specifying which ones theyâre talking about.
The authors pretty much decide that this Viking woman is a high-ranking officer based on what she was buried with. The grave contained ââa full set of gaming piecesâ which apparently âindicates knowledge of tactics and strategyââ and ââthe exclusive grave goods and two horses are worthy of an individual with responsibilities concerning strategy and battle tactics.ââ There isnât even any conclusive evidence that men buried with those items were military leaders.
This gravesite was actually excavated over a century ago and things werenât labeled well, so the female Viking bones may not have even been buried with all those items. Someone even commented on Jeschâs article that there was a third femur found with this womanâs bones, but the authors just ignored it. There were also no signs of harm to the bones, which means she was either one heck of a warrior who never got injured, or that she wasnât a warrior at all.
So the authors assumed this female Viking was a military leader without any actual evidence and they ignored evidence that didnât go along with their theory. Like many people today, they leapt to conclusions, and everyone was eager to agree that this woman was definitely a military leader because that suited a contemporary narrative, not a historical fact. This doesnât mean that people in the future wonât find hard evidence that female Vikings could be military leaders, but you canât âconfirmâ that this Viking was a military leader quite yet. Even if there werenât female Viking warriors, women in Viking times were actually well-respected and enjoyed many rights and freedoms; they could divorce their husbands, own land, and could even have government representation. Women like Freydis and Gudrun had a significant impact on their societies, even if they didnât lead troops into battle.
ESR also commented on the more direct physiological arguments against the “warrior woman” theory:
Accessible treatment of why to be skeptical of the recent media buzz about female Viking warriors.
My wife Cathy and I are subject-matter experts on this. We’ve trained to use period weapons and have studied both the archeological and saga evidence. And we can tell there’s a lot of PC horse exhaust being emitted on this topic.
On average, men are so much faster and stronger than women that what would happen to women using using lethal contact weapons on a pre-modern battlefield is highly predictable. They’d die. They’d die quickly.
The mean difference in physical ability (especially at burst exertion and upper-body strength) is so great that it takes a woman way over in the right tail of the Gaussian to stand against an average male. My wife is one of those exceptions, but we don’t fool ourselves that this is the typical case.
See also the U.S. Olympic women’s soccer team being defeated by a squad of 15-year-old boys. That is what’s normal for humans.
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July 5, 2017
The BBC visits LâAnse Aux Meadows
Allan Lynch visits L’Anse Aux Meadows National Historic Site in Newfoundland, in search of Viking history:
General view of L’Anse Aux Meadows, Newfoundland. Photo by Torbenbrinker, via Wikimedia
It is here, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, that a significant moment in human migration and exploration took place.
In the year 1000, nearly 500 years before Christopher Columbus set sail, a Viking longboat, skippered by Leif Erikson, brought 90 men and women from Iceland to establish a new settlement â the first European settlement in the New World.
Eriksonâs party arrived at low tide and found themselves stranded in the misty shallows of Epaves Bay. When the tide returned, they moved further inland, navigating up Black Duck Brook to the place where they would establish their stronghold in their new-found land.
By modern sensibilities, LâAnse Aux Meadows can seem a harsh place, with fierce coastal winds whipping across the remote landscape. But for people who just travelled across the unforgiving North Atlantic in open boats, it was perfect. The forests were rich in game; the rivers teemed with salmon larger than the Norse had ever seen; the grasslands provided a bounty of food for livestock; and, in some places, wild grapes grew, prompting the Vikings to name this land ‘Vinland’.
The settlement didnât last long, however; the community abandoned the settlement after less than a decade after repeated clashes with the islandâs native tribes, known to the Vikings as âSkraelingsâ.
For more than 100 years, archaeologists in Finland, Denmark and Norway used ancient Norse sagas to guide their search for Eriksonâs lost settlement, scouring the coast of North America from Rhode Island to Labrador.
The site remained undiscovered until 1960 when a husband-and-wife team of Norwegian archaeologists, Helge and Anne Stine Ingstad, heard from locals of LâAnse Aux Meadows â the town for which the site was named â speak of what they believed to be an old Indian camp. The initial excavation of the siteâs mysterious seaside mounds revealed a layout similar to longhouses found in confirmed Viking settlements in Iceland and Greenland. Then, the discovery of a 1,000-year-old nail indicated that ship building had taken place here.
âAs kids we played on the curious mounds,â said Clayton Colbourne, a former Parks Canada guide at LâAnse Aux Meadows. âWe didnât know anything about the Vikings being here.â
H/T to Never Yet Melted for the link.
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May 23, 2017
Top 10 Reasons the Byzantine Empire Was Among the Most Successful in History
Published on 2 May 2017
Youâd see a lot of changes when looking at a map of present day Europe and comparing it to a 30 year old one. Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine and the Baltic States were all part of the USSR. Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia were still states. Go back even further and the map looks even stranger. Putting all those different people under the same banner and keeping them that way was and still is next to impossible. Many have tried and most have failed, but the first to even come close were the Romans. Their inheritors, the Byzantines, managed to keep it together for over 1100 years, thus creating the longest-living Empire on the continent. Hereâs how they did it.
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February 27, 2017
“Dumb Norsemen go into the north outside the range of their economy, mess up the environment and then they all die when it gets cold”
Debunking the Greenland myth in the Smithsonian:
Those tough seafaring warriors came to one of the worldâs most formidable environments and made it their home. And they didnât just get by: They built manor houses and hundreds of farms; they imported stained glass; they raised sheep, goats and cattle; they traded furs, walrus-tusk ivory, live polar bears and other exotic arctic goods with Europe. âThese guys were really out on the frontier,â says Andrew Dugmore, a geographer at the University of Edinburgh. âTheyâre not just there for a few years. Theyâre there for generations â for centuries.â
So what happened to them?
**********
Thomas McGovern used to think he knew. An archaeologist at Hunter College of the City University of New York, McGovern has spent more than 40 years piecing together the history of the Norse settlements in Greenland. With his heavy white beard and thick build, he could pass for a Viking chieftain, albeit a bespectacled one. Over Skype, hereâs how he summarized what had until recently been the consensus view, which he helped establish: âDumb Norsemen go into the north outside the range of their economy, mess up the environment and then they all die when it gets cold.â
[…]
But over the last decade a radically different picture of Viking life in Greenland has started to emerge from the remains of the old settlements, and it has received scant coverage outside of academia. âItâs a good thing they canât make you give your PhD back once youâve got it,â McGovern jokes. He and the small community of scholars who study the Norse experience in Greenland no longer believe that the Vikings were ever so numerous, or heedlessly despoiled their new home, or failed to adapt when confronted with challenges that threatened them with annihilation.
âItâs a very different story from my dissertation,â says McGovern. âItâs scarier. You can do a lot of things right â you can be highly adaptive; you can be very flexible; you can be resilient â and you go extinct anyway.â And according to other archaeologists, the plot thickens even more: It may be that Greenlandâs Vikings didnât vanish, at least not all of them.
H/T to Kate at Small Dead Animals for the link.
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October 25, 2016
QotD: Viking weapons and combat techniques (from historical evidence and re-creation)
I expected to enjoy Dr. William Shortâs Viking Weapons and Combat Techniques (Westholme Publishing, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59416-076-9), and I was not disappointed. I am a historical fencer and martial artist who has spent many hours sparring with weapons very similar to those Dr. Short describes, and I have long had an active interest in the Viking era. I had previously read many of the primary saga sources (such as Njalâs Saga Egilâs Saga, and the Saga of Grettir the Strong) that Dr. Short mines for information on Viking weaponscraft, but I had not realized how informative they can be when the many descriptions of fights in them are set beside each other and correlated with the archeological evidence.
For those who donât regularly follow my blog, my wife Cathy and I train in a fighting tradition based around sword and shield, rooted in southern Italian cut-and-thrust fencing from around 1500. It is a battlefield rather than a dueling style. Our training weapons simulate cut-and-thrust swords similar in weight and length to Viking-era weapons, usually cross-hilted but occasionally basket-hilted after the manner of a schiavona; our shields are round, bossless, and slightly smaller than Viking-era shields. We also learn to fight single-sword, two-sword, and with polearms and spears. The swordmasterâs family descended from Sicilo-Norman nobles; when some obvious Renaissance Italian overlays such as the basket hilts are lain aside, the continuity of our weapons with well-attested Norman patterns and with pre-Norman Viking weapons is clear and obvious. Thus my close interest in the subject matter of Dr. Shortâs book.
Dr. Short provides an invaluable service by gathering all this literary evidence and juxtaposing it with pictures and reconstructions of Viking-age weapons, and with sequences of re-enactors experimenting with replicas. He is careful and scholarly in his approach, emphasizing the limits of the evidence and the occasional flat-out contradictions between saga and archeological evidence. I was pleased that he does not shy from citing his own and his colleaguesâ direct physical experience with replica weapons as evidence; indeed, at many points in the text, .the techniques they found by exploring the affordances of these weapons struck me as instantly familiar from my own fighting experience.
Though Dr. Short attempts to draw some support for his reconstructions of techniques from the earliest surviving European manuals of arms, such as the Talhoffer book and Joachim Meyerâs Art of Combat, his own warnings that these are from a much later period and addressing very different weapons are apposite. Only the most tentative sort of guesses can be justified from them, and I frankly think Dr. Shortâs book would have been as strong if those references were entirely omitted. I suspect they were added mostly as a gesture aimed at mollifying academics suspicious of combat re-enactment as an investigative technique, by giving them a more conventional sort of scholarship to mull over.
Indeed, if this book has any continuing flaw, I think itâs that Dr. Short ought to trust his martial-arts experience more. He puzzles, for example, at what I consider excessive length over the question of whether Vikings used âthumb-leaderâ cuts with the back edge of a sword. Based on my own martial-arts experience, I think we may take it for granted that a warrior culture will explore and routinely use every affordance of its weapons. The Vikings were, by all accounts, brutally pragmatic fighters; the limits of their technique were, I am certain, set only by the limits of their weapons. Thus, the right question, in my opinion, is less âWhat can we prove they did?â than âWhat affordances are implied by the most accurate possible reconstructions of the tools they fought with?â.
As an example of this sort of thinking, I donât think there is any room for doubt that the Viking shield was used aggressively, with an active parrying technique — and to bind opponentsâ weapons. To see this, compare it to the wall shields used by Roman legionaries and also in the later Renaissance along with longswords, or with the âheaterâ-style jousting shields of the High Medieval period. Compared to these, everything about the Viking design â the relatively light weight, the boss, the style of the handgrip â says it was designed to move. Dr. Short documents the fact that his crew of experimental re-enactors found themselves using active shield guards (indistinguishable, by the way from my schoolâs); I wish he had felt the confidence to assert flat-out that this is what the Vikings did with the shield because this is what the shield clearly wants to do…
Eric S. Raymond, “Dr. William Shortâs ‘Viking Weapons and Combat’: A Review”, Armed and Dangerous, 2009-08-13.
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August 19, 2016
Lindisfarne – An Age Borne in Fire – Extra History
Published on 30 Jul 2016
Bishops. Manuscripts. Pilgrimage. Wealth. In 793 CE, the island monastery of Lindisfarne thrived in a state of harmony. Then, everything changed when the Viking raiders attacked. Once they discovered Europe’s weakness, not even mighty kings like Charlemagne could stop them. They transformed their power at sea into an avenue for conquest and expansion: the Viking Age had begun.
____________Troubling omens were recorded in Lindisfarne prior to the Viking invasion on June 8, 793 CE. It was the seat of the bishop for much of Northeastern Britain. Monks in the scriptorium produced some of the most celebrated illustrated manuscripts, and abroad they helped convert the pagans of Britain. Lindisfarne had been the final resting place of St. Cuthbert, so pilgrims often came and enriched the priory and the town. It never occurred to anyone that when strange ships appeared on the horizon, that they might be hostile. The men who disembarked were fierce, unknown, and merciless. They cut down monks in the churches and looted the church… then left. Bishop Higbald survived, and sent the news across Europe. From there, the frequency of raids only increased and raged across all of Europe. The burgeoning flame of Lindisfarne was almost snuffed out. It was the first time in history that the reach of Christianity shrank, rather than expanded. But what about the other side of the story? These “barbarians,” who would become known as Vikings, were striking back at a culture that looked down on them, insulted their faith, and tried to swindle them at trade. They had realized how poorly defended these both the British Isles and mainland Europe were, and how rich they were in fertile land. They put their vast knowledge of shipcraft to work and turned trading routes into raiding routes, finding new lands for them to settle. The Viking Age had begun.
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June 20, 2016
Getting to L’Anse Aux Meadows
A few days back, “Weirddave” posted a little account of his recent visit to L’Anse Aux Meadows:
You can fly into Gander, but it’s expensive AF and you’ll have to make a jillion connections and live in airports for 2 days. Driving from the US means taking I-95 as far as it goes, then transiting New Brunswick and Nova Scotia to North Sydney. There you get on a ferry for an 8 hour trip to Port Aux Basque. Do it overnight and splurge for a cabin (trust me on this). Even then, you can’t get into Port Aux Basque if it’s too windy (a not uncommon occurrence in the North Atlantic). Our ferry sailed in a circle off Port Aux Basque for 12 hours until it was calm enough to go in, costing us a whole day (you don’t drive at night in Newfoundland because the island is infested with moose and you’ll hit one). There is no WiFi on the ferry.
From Port Aux Basque it’s 699 kilometers to L’Anse Aux Meadow, 699 kilometers of 2 lane highway with lots of potholes. If you love scrub pine and birch, you’ll be in heaven. It’s very pretty, and Gros Morne National Park, which you’ll go through about halfway, is gorgeous. The drive is miserable when it’s raining, and it’s always raining in Newfoundland. As a bonus it was 2 degrees C today. After you’ve seen L’Anse Aux Meadow ( a day at most ) you have to do it all over again going the other way. The local hootch is a rum called Screech that aspires to be Val-U-Rite. On the plus side, the locals are friendly, if occasionally unintelligible, and I ate 6 lobsters in four days, so yum.
If you find yourself in Newfoundland, you must go to L’Anse Aux Meadow. If you’re thinking of going, my advice would be to take an RV and make it a leisurely trip across the Maritimes. Take 2 weeks off and really enjoy yourself.
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