#norsebinge

[nimblermortal]

Oh hell yeah, @athingofvikings you'll like this

So, in the Thirty Years' War of 1618-1648, the Swedes had the audacity to win a string of victories. This could only be justified as witchcraft, and led to a desire to study their practices. Which resulted in the discovery that the pagans live among us. Consequently, the Christians dispatched missionaries. But not, like, their best guys. Not their most devoted zealots. Because if you push too hard, man, the pagans might go support the Russians instead, and then we lose political power.

In the early 1720s, they started to get their act together by dispatching Pietist ruthless zealot Thomas von Westen.

...the missions were spurred on by the discovery that many of the shamanic drums confiscated by the churchmen in the 1680s were fakes, made by the Sámi to deceive these representatives of a foreign faith.

The bustling Fake Pagan Drum industry. Convert us and we'll drown you in tchotchkes of our definitely forgotten past. How many instrument makers got their practice in providing drums to priests. Brilliant.

[nimblermortal]

(warning: gore?, harm to animals, dismemberment) In a large, oval grave, a woman was interred supine with a handful of objects: a box, a bucket, a knife and a possible metal staff. At her feet but inside the grave-cut, av small standing stone had been erected, and the body of a dog pressed down over it so as to be ripped apart. Chunks of sheep or goats had been strewn around inside the grave, simply pieces of flesh rather than precise cuts of meat butchered for consumption. On top of the woman and dog, with its head towards the former’s feet, an adult horse had been deposited. From its position it had probably been killed in the grave, which would have entailed driving the animal down into the hole, actually standing on the woman’s body. On top of the horse were parts of two more people – most of a woman’s body and pieces of a man. At this point (and, despite its complexity, the sequence in the grave is clear), some large boulders had been placed on the horse and onto the face of the first woman; from their size, the stones must have been rolled or dropped into the grave, and were so heavy as to cause crushing injuries to the bodies beneath. Finally, the grave was filled in with pebbles and covered by a low mound.

- Neil Price, in "Nine paces from Hel: time and motion in Old Norse ritual performance"

It's so gruesome and bizarre. Price describes quite a few that are just - so elaborate and so weird. (He also has favorites - the woman in the wagon, the 42 men in Estonia. I'd go for the people in pots myself, from a point of ignorance.)

Just. Just pieces of a couple extra people? As he said, what did they do with the rest? How do we know, from just pieces, that these were a man and a woman?

He talks about how the horse was led into the burial, so it would have had to actually step onto the dead woman. Horses don't like to do that! plus it would damage the body!

...but I guess you don't care about that when you're planning to roll boulders onto it here in a bit. Which. Why? Why would you do that? Some stones, yes, to keep animals out. But. Are we talking about propitiating the dead with sacrifices and then adding weight to keep them in the ground? The draugar of sagas do not seem much impeded by stone.

I'm tempted to suggest that maybe the person on the bottom is not the most important, except that she's the only complete human body present. (Thought: What if this is not a burial? What if this is a ritual?)

How do we know she was a woman? Are we inferring this from the "possible metal staff" that Price worked with so much over his dissertation? But it's only a possible metal staff. How was this body sexed? The artist's reconstruction in the article doesn't include any telltale jewelry. Nor does it show a distaff cage on the staff. What was in the box? Are buckets gendered items? How would we even know?

I don't really want to get into reading the details of inhumation of a lot of different sites, honestly it kinda grosses me out a bit, but also. I want to know where they are getting this sexing information.

[nimblermortal]

A key concept is that of time-distance, through which transport is perceived not in terms of the measured physical separation of places but by the time it takes to travel between them. Accustomed as we are to viewing geography through maps (which digitisation has not changed), it can be hard to grasp that England and Norway can be 'closer' in perceptual terms via water than an overland journey of thirty or forty miles. Recent Danish experiments in the Sea Stallion, a replica longship based on an eleventh-century example excavated near Roskilde, have demonstrated that with favorable winds it is easily possible to travel from Denmark to the east coast of Britain in just a few days. Weather permitting, a return trip of a fortnight or so is by no means impossible, emphasising just how closely connected the communities of the North Sea were to one another. When these kinds of calculations are applied within Svandinavia, the ubiquity of marine transport becomes clear. The rivers, fjords, lakes, and coastal channels of the North formed the primary means of movement in Viking-Age Scandinavia, but this travel did not have to be waterborne; a significant amount of journeying was made along the same routes in winter by means of ice transport. Sleds, sledges, and horse-drawn sleighs, including large examples made to accommodate several passengers, have been found in Viking-Age graves. Individuals used ice skates made of cattle bones bound to the shoes with hide thongs; the wearer moved forwards with the aid of a single stout pole much in the manner of a punt on a river. Both humans and animals used iron crampons, folded over and fixed to hooves or footwear. Skis were also used, single or double planks with tapered ends that were often richly carved and, again, propelled with a single pole. Of all the images associated with the Viking Age, one of the most powerful is that of their ships, especially the great dragon-prowed oceangoing vessels that have been popularised in movies and other media. However, it should be remembered that they represented just one of many kinds of watercraft utilised throughout the period. The most common Viking-Age vessel of all was the humble dugout log boat, a simple craft that could have provided almost anyone access to marine transport and communication routes. Hollowed from a single tree trunk, these could vary in size from a one-person runabout to a larger boat up to ten metres in length and with room for both people and cargo. These vessels are often overlooked in the wider literature on the Viking Age, but their original presence in large numbers testifies to the marine mobility of the time. Another relatively common vessel was the rowboat or skiff, owned perhaps by prosperous fisherfolk. The important farmers of a district might well have stretched to a sail-powered boat ten metres long or more.

- Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm

[nimblermortal]

To summarize a page or so: Norse deities didn't exactly have deities of love, but sex, fertility, procreation, different patrons of sexual enjoyment, sure. In that sense Odin functions as a deity of sexual abandonment/frenzy and not caring about the consequences (e.g. slaughter). Also rape. Odin does a lot of rape. Including magic rape.

Odin has 'divine liquids' of blood, sperm, and mead.

And then this gem:

"Solli concludes that there is clear evidence for a discrete gender of queer shamans, whose deviant activities were crucial for the definition of the normative in Viking-Age society... I find some of her reasoning a little speculative - for example, I see no real evidence that the sexual stimulus sometimes associated with hanging in autoerotic acts can be seen as part of shamanic initiation rituals and the Óðinn cult... - but the overall idea of such gender constructions is convincing."

--> Auto-erotic asphyxiation as a shamanic initiation ritual, Price/vikings' gift to Tumblr.

(It's really helpful to have read The Archaeology of Shamanism and know what Price is alluding to in these passages, in regards to multi-gender societies and the argument that arctic cultures have similarities and consequently it's more suspect to postulate an arctic society without at least three genders.)

[nimblermortal]

In all the accounts of Freyja in connection with seiðr, it should be remembered that she was a war-deity. This may have a small reflection in burial rites. We know that valiant warrior males joined Óðinn in Valhöll, but the enigmatic realm of Freyja seems the only available alternative for worthy females. This could also provide an interesting explanation for voluntary female sacrifice at funerals. Perhaps a woman could only follow her partner to the 'Viking' afterlife in Valhöll through dying a violent death, and thereby ritually participating in a defining act of aggression. A similar explanation may lie behind the occasional finds of weapons in female graves.

- Neil Price, The Viking Way

[nimblermortal]

A thought from a bit ago:

One way I think about Norse mythology - and keep applying to Price to see if it holds up - is that the Norse were not particularly interested in natural phenomena. They were interested in how humans relate to each other. In this sense Thor is not the god of thunder, he is the god of loud, not very thoughtful people, and his stories are about how you deal with this person - or with being this person - and his uses in society.

In this sense, magic is about how to make people work together. It is very clear in some sagas (and... not so much in others - though then one has to ask, is that because the authors leaning into a broader mystical sense understood something broader, or failed to understand what was going on?) that magical abilities are exaggerations of mundane ones: a man becomes a prophet when he gets really good at predicting people, such that he can say that this man in this situation will act in this way, and consequently you should do thus.

And if thinking things through allows you to control others, then magically thinking things through might also mean laying bindings on people to control them. And frequently it does!

But sometimes sorcerers call up blizzards.

Which seems to contradict this. But the Norse world was a lot more full than what we are used to thinking of - humans were present, and so were gods and giants and trolls and elves and dwarves and Vanir and... So if magic is something that allows you to control people, but sometimes those people are the-spirit-of-the-storm, then controlling that person might mean controlling a storm.

Might! I don't know :)

[nimblermortal]

In many respects the Vikings lived lives just like our own, experiencing the fundamental needs - to eat, to sleep, to cope with menstruation, to prevent their infant children from doing too much incidental damage to the home, and so on.

- Neil Price, The Viking Way

[nimblermortal]

The resulting rectangular feature, oriented north-east/south-west, appears to have had a slightly bowl-shaped depression at the centre and been bounded by timber fences along the short sides. Chemical analyses show that a great deal of fat and blood had been spilled within the enclosure, especially near the north-east end where wooden posts had been erected. There had also been some kind of organic depositions – probably food remains or simply meat – along the south-eastern fence line, on top of the clay surface

- Neil Price, in "Nine Paces from Hel: Time and Motion in Old Norse Ritual Sites"

Fantasy writers, maybe... bear in mind that if you have folks doing regular animal sacrifice, the traces of that can be found literally a thousand years later (by chemical analysis by people looking, but still).