Tag: Norse

An Icelandic Approach to the “Reburial” Issue

On By Chas S. Clifton1 Comment

Here is a twist on the controversy over the reburial of ancient remains: Bury the skeleton and grave goods at the museum.

Of course, it helps it the remains are Norse and the museum is the Viking World Museum in Iceland. Not so many problems of cultural continuity there.

According to museum director Elisabeth Ward, research has shown that most Icelandic settlers were pagan [sic] and that paganism was practiced among the first generations of Icelanders.

“We are reconstructing the pagan grave from Hafurbjarnarstadir,” Ward explained. “The skeletons are placed in a wooden boat, which is a replica of a Viking boat, and sand from Hafurbjarnarstadir has been put inside. Some people believe the man was buried inside a boat, but it is not quite clear.”

(Hat tip: Caroline Tully at Necropolis Now.)

‘Severed Ways’: Headbangers of 1007 CE

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments

"Severed Was" poster imageA movie made by a company called Heathen Films is likely to have a certain ideological component. Severed Ways, a 2007 indie production, however, has not become a cult favorite like The Wicker Man.

The plot comes right from the Vinland Sagas, but adds a bit about two scouts abandoned and believed dead when Norse settlers abandon one settlement after conflicts with the natives.

The dialog is in Swedish with colloquial English subtitles, like “We’re toast if the Skraelings find us.”

But in accordance with a Scandinavian tradition of filmmaking, there are long silent periods where the camera merely follow the men on their journey seeking their comrades.

One Internet Movie Database comment calls it “Aguirre, the Wrath of God for Black Metal fans.” That is not necessarily a compliment, but director Tony Stone would disagree:

Heavy metal and vikings have always had this sort of connection—the warrior spirit, the harshness, the visuals of battle, the pagan side. The music is hard and rough and trying at times, but that’s what the physical world is; that’s how we used to live. Metal describes something of another time. It’s a very emotional music that’s more like classical music in the way it recalls history. It’s also just music we were listening to while making the movie.

As an expression of “Dionysian pessimism” (Nietzsche’s term), it works.

It was filmed in Maine, Vermont, Labrador, and at the reconstructed Norse camp of L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.

M.’s short review: “Beautiful landscapes interrupted by bashing.”

Bryan White at Cinema Suicide says much the same thing at greater length.

Hot Baths and Battle Wounds among the Norse

On By Chas S. Clifton

A summary of ancient Norse practices on personal hygiene, bathing, treatment of disease, and battle wounds.

Both the saga literature and forensic studies of skeletal remains suggest that battle injuries could be horrific …. The femur (leg bone) shown to the right is from another man who died of battle injuries in the 11th century. The bone shows clear marks of the impact of ring mail against the bone, suggesting his upper leg was hit with a sword blow so powerful as to force the rings of his mail shirt through the muscles of his leg into contact with the bone. Astonishingly, this injury was not the cause of his death. His skeletal remains show other serious injuries received in that battle. However, it was a cut that partially severed his spine at the neck that killed him.

My own modest reading of the sagas suggest that when two men went at each other with battle axes, usually after no more than two swings of the ax someone had serious arterial bleeding.

But in Iceland they sure loved their natural hot tubs—and who wouldn’t?

(Via Making Light.)

Slavery, Vikings, and Charlemagne

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments

Here is a little bit of synchronicity in my historical reading. I am not sure if it “proves” anything, other than the fact that it is difficult to sort people into “good guys” and “bad guys.”

1. At the library, I recently picked up The Long Morning of Medieval Europe: New Directions in Early Medieval Studies, ed. Jennifer R. Davis and Michael McCormick.

I wanted to look for some material on agriculture—the adoption of the three-field system, wheeled plows, etc.—but I was sucked into a chapter entitled, “Strong Rulers—Weak Economy? Rome, the Carolingians and the Archaeology of Slavery in the First Millennium AD” by a German scholar, Joachim Henning.

Here are two figures that I have lifted from his work:

As I used to tell my students when we talked about American religion and slavery, the Roman empire back in Jesus’ time ran on slavery the way that our civilization runs on petroleum. (And Jesus had nothing to say about it.)

Slavery requires chains and shackles, lest the slaves wander away. Figure 2.1 is a map of archaeological sites (farms, villas, plantations) containing shackles.

The second figure graphs shackle finds over time in Gaul (France, roughly). They rise during the Roman times, then plunge during the Merovingian dynasty, during the so-called Dark Ages.

But then shackle finds—and hence presumably slavery—rise during the Carologian dynasty. Its founder, Charles Martel (ca. 688-741), stopped the Islamic expansion into Europe. His grandson Charlemagne (Charles the Great) is a huge figure in medieval western European history, but his actions included the slaughter of more than 4,000 Saxons who resisted conversion to Christianity.

There was a European slave trade in Pagan, polytheistic Roman times—and it continued into Christian times, up through the 1400s, at least—and then it was time for Columbus!

2. Meanwhile, a British historian suggests that Viking raids on Europe might have been payback for Charlemagne’s forced-conversion program. (Via the Covenant of the Goddess NPIO blog.)

But before you annoint the Vikings as the pro-Pagan “good guys,” remember that they were in the slave trade too, particularly in what is now Ireland and Russia.

As some people say about their relationships on Facebook, “It’s complicated.”

Vinland 3

On By Chas S. Clifton

Part 1

Part 2

From the skeptics’ point of view, the acceptance of a Norse presence in North America, following the archaeological dig at L’Anse aux Meadows, should have made the Kensington Runestone a non-issue.

“No Kensington stone is needed to prove that the Scandinavians reached America first,” wrote James E. Knirk of the University of Oslo, reviewing works by two Kensington supporters for the journal Scandinavian Studies.

But the arcane arguments continue. In a lengthy rebuttal (PDF) to Knirk and other skeptics, Richard Nielsen, the best-prepared of the stone’s defenders and author of the book mentioned earlier, marshaled a long series of linguistic defenses for the Minnesota runes.

He argued, with extensive citations, that they did represent “a faithful record of medieval Scandinavian speech” and that their dialect was unknown to the farmer Olof Ohman.

The purported location of the stone’s discovery, west of Minneapolis, seems to make little sense in terms of a possible Norse journey up the St. Lawrence River, through the Great Lakes, and into Minnesota, but Nielsen has an explanation for that too.

Writing in the Journal of the West, Nielsen argues that the location makes more sense if, as he believes, the Norse launched trading trips into the interior of North America from Hudson’s Bay. Indians from the region (Santee Sioux, Mandans, and others) were known to have used a trading route that went down the Red River to Lake Winnepeg and then by other water routes to Hudson’s Bay. The Kensington site, he claims, lies on the portage between the Mississippi watershed and the Red River watershed.

These claims, in turn, tie in the fascinating history of the Norse settlements in Greenland, which did endure for four centuries despite their stubborn insistence on not learning from the Dorset-culture Eskimos and on attempting to maintain a pastoral economy in the near-Arctic.

Personally, I have no strong feelings about the Kensington Runestone’s authenticity, although I do suspect that there was more to the Norse exploration than just the L’Anse aux Meadows station.

Instead, Nielsen’s passionate “outsider” defense of the stone reminds me of another friend of mine, the late Bill McGlone, and his quixotic study of some Colorado stone inscriptions.

More to come.