Vikings

And what their attraction is to Molly Hatchet or Norwegian black metal bands is totally beyond me :-)

Um, longboats yeah okay. I made a viking ship with milk bottle tops for shields and straws for oars when I was in primary school. Bit hairy.

(That one's for you, Ronan…)

And smelled bad. You can't forget the smells. Apparently, many thousands of pounds were spent on getting authentically grim smells for the Jorvik centre. I can't really vouch for the authenticity of the smells, but their grimness was beyond any doubt.

beat pirates any day

Something tells me that pirates were pretty smelly, too.

Price’s book, however, centres on ‘what made [the Vikings] tick, how they thought and felt’. How much money did they make? How much labour went into fitting out a Viking fleet? What did Vikings think happened to women when they died? (Warriors, of course, went to Valhalla.) There are clues to this last question in excavated Viking graves, but these discoveries – Price is professor of archaeology at Uppsala University – are often inscrutable. There are logistical questions too. In considering the wealth of the Vikings, it’s impossible to ignore the island of Gotland, where hundreds of hoards of silver have been found, almost one for every farm – contributing to a total of more than a million silver dirhams found in Scandinavia and the Baltic, nine times as many as have been found in their point of origin in the Muslim Near East. It’s ‘simply not credible’, Price writes, ‘that virtually all homeowners concealed their family cash in the backyard and then died before telling anyone about it’. Later accounts claim that the Vikings believed they would enjoy their buried wealth in the afterlife. The sources aren’t reliable, but it does at least explain the phenomenon.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-shippey/did-they-even-hang-bears

Two traumatic events affected the northern world long before Lindisfarne. One was the collapse of the Roman Empire, a destabilisation that led to a kind of ‘gangster culture’ of unemployed mercenaries and roving warbands. Even worse, and better evidenced, were the volcanic eruptions of 536, 539/540 and possibly 547. The second, which originated from Ilopango in what is now El Salvador, threw around ninety cubic kilometres of dust, ash and aerosols into the atmosphere. The entire world suffered, but Scandinavia, with its short growing season and often marginal agriculture, suffered most. It’s thought as much as half the population died of starvation. At the heart of Norse mythology is the Fimbulwinter, three winters with no summers in between, which may once have been a fact.

what are the odds that this will happen again in 2020?

skol : )

I thought this would be about Robert Eggers's latest thing:

https://deadline.com/2020/08/the-northman-filming-ireland-bjork-robert-eggers-viking-1203018626/

As an ex-fan of her's, I hope Bjork's is a bit part. I like Eggars, mostly.

good 'In Our Time' on the Orkney vikings:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001zvvp