Axe of Iron

Confrontation, An Axe of Iron Novel - Chapter One Serialized - Conclusion

2012-01-28T11:10:00.000-07:00

Halfdan had taken the small broken body from the bull’s antlers and laid it on the damp ground beside the corpse of the animal that had killed him.

“It is best if you go look upon Yola. Remember your friendship with him, for it will be the last time you see him. His spirit is still here with us. He is watching,” Gudbjartur said gently.

The boys looked at each of the men. Halfdan nodded and gestured with a lift of his chin, and the boys walked slowly toward the corpse. The men let them go alone, following closely. Life could be cruel, but the young must know how to accept it. Violent death would follow them all the days of their lives, to swoop down without warning; they must learn to confront the specter of death without shirking.

The boys bravely looked down at the remains of their friend. Ivar’s inner strength held him rigid, while tears coursed in rivulets down Lothar’s cheeks. Yola’s head had been crushed like an egg, his body torn to pieces. The smooth, young features were distorted and misshapen. “His face is gone,” Ivar said. Broken ribs, white as teeth, stuck out of the squashed chest. Splintered bones protruded from one leg. The bones of the other leg were intact except that the upper leg muscle hung asunder. One arm hung from the exposed socket. Ivar glanced at his brother. “He does not look like Yola anymore.”

Lothar’s shoulders shook with silent sobs. He nodded abjectly at Ivar’s assessment and turned toward the men. “Will we bury him here?”

Halfdan answered. “Yes, we will do it now. We cannot take him back with us. He should rest here where he died. No useful purpose would be served by his mother seeing what remains of her son.” He took a breath. “We will camp here for the night. It will be dark soon, so let us be about it.” He finished gruffly, feeling an unfamiliar surge of emotion. I must be getting old. On the other hand, maybe it is because of Frida. I feel things more intensely now. She has changed me in many ways.

Gudbjartur put a hand on the shoulder of each of his sons. “Come, boys, we will all bury Yola together. You must help us prepare Yola for the afterlife. He was your friend and you must do him this final honor. Afterwards, Halfdan and I will show you how to butcher the bull you killed and prepare the meat for the boat trip back to Halfdansfjord.”

The four of them grouped around Yola, each with his own thoughts.

Gudbjartur tried to soothe his sons. “Yola did not suffer. I heard him scream once as the bull attacked, but then he died. He was so afraid that he would not be able to feel pain. That is the way of things when we fight; our fear dulls the pain of our wounds.”

“He did not have time to fight before he died,” Lothar said. “I was right next to him and the bull had hold of him before he could move.”

“He fought nonetheless, Lothar. Even the least of us will fight to survive.” Halfdan put a hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Now, let us put your friend in the earth, to rest.”

They cleaned up the small, torn body as best they could, washing away the blood and gore and putting the torn flesh back in place. Both boys had to overcome their initial revulsion at touching the grisly remains.

“I cannot do this,” Lothar said, stepping away to retch as the gorge rose in his throat.

“Come, boy, you must steel yourself.” Gudbjartur held an arm out for his son. “It is the way of things and the reason you both were included in these preparations. In this way, you will know what you must do for a burial. Playing an active part fosters acceptance of your friend’s death.”

Lothar reluctantly returned to the task. His face was tight, his lips bloodless and pressed into a severe line as he fought down nausea.

Finally, they finished the work with the body. They straightened the shattered limbs and wrapped the corpse in a wool sleeping robe. Then with Gudbjartur at one end and both boys at the other end, they lifted the pitiful bundle and carried it to the grave. Tenderly they laid their burden in the dark, shallow hole.

“We want to bury him with his weapons.” Ivar looked at his father, his chin thrust out, his eyes defiant.

Gudbjartur regarded his sons in silence. He looked from one to the other. Then he nodded. “I think that is proper. The gods will make the young warrior welcome. He will have need of his weapons in the afterlife.”

The boys sat at the graveside and snapped the arrows and bow in two as they had seen the men do, to kill and release the spirits within. Ivar forced the blade of Yola’s knife into a crack in a handy boulder and leaned into it to bend the blade over. They arranged the weapons on either side of the body. Then their final act for their friend was to push the cold earth over his body, refill the grave, and mound it over with earth and rocks.

***

Later that evening, after the men gorged on chunks of spitted moose liver, the four sat around the campfire staring into the flames.

“Eat some more of this liver.” Gudbjartur urged the boys.

“I cannot eat, Father.” Ivar glanced at his brother.

“Nor I. The liver makes me sick,” Lothar said.

“How about a steak then?” Gudbjartur asked.

Both boys shook their heads.

Conversation ebbed back and forth for a time before silence reigned.

Halfdan told us that our arrows would have killed the bull. Glancing in the direction of his father and Halfdan, Ivar’s mind sifted through the events of the day. Catching his brother’s eye, he winked and smiled slightly at him. Lothar returned a weak smile, bobbed his head slightly, and sighed, telling Ivar without words that he knew what he was thinking. Ivar looked at his brother for another moment, and then laid back full length on the ground, hands clasped behind his head. He stared at the countless stars winking in the clear night sky. A meteorite scribed a bright trail across the blackness overhead. A spark from Thor’s hammer. His eyes followed its path until the light winked out. Yes, we did kill that bull. Father cut off his head, but Halfdan said he would have died from our arrows. And all but one of them came from my bow.

***

Vinland Publishing, http://www.vinlandpublishing.com/

Confrontation, An Axe of Iron Novel - Serialized - Installment #4

2012-01-20T07:13:00.000-07:00

Moose hunt contd:

Gudbjartur and Halfdan ran as fast as conditions permitted toward the mayhem. Branches and saplings whipped and tore at their faces.

The cow and calves they had intended to drive toward the boys’ hiding place froze in position in the chest deep water as the yelling apparitions swept past. Disturbed water and bulrushes flew in all directions as the cow ran into the security of the forest, closely followed by her calves.

***

As Ivar loosed his third arrow, realization slowly dawned on the bull that an enemy was nearby and he wheeled to confront him. The remnants of little Yola hung in tatters from his antlers as he charged, mowing down saplings and standing dead trees he crashed toward the new target.

“Shoot him, Lothar!” Ivar shrieked at his brother. He darted around a tree and loosed his fourth arrow into the center of the bull’s chest. Gasping in fright, he wheeled and ran for his life. Unconsciously he used the trees and undergrowth to slow the animal’s charge, darting in a tight circle to give Lothar a clear shot. A big tree saved his life when he swerved around the trunk a heartbeat before the bull crashed into it. Ivar jumped back and forth around the tree trunk while the enraged bull, an arm’s length away, blew snot over him in his effort to hook the boy with his bloody antlers.

Lothar, who had stood rooted in place while Yola died and his brother shot arrow after arrow into the great beast that towered over him, suddenly regained his senses. Ivar’s screams galvanized him to action and he ran to the side far enough to get a clear shot through the trees. “Yahhh!” He screamed to distract the bull from Ivar, pulled his bowstring to the head of the nocked arrow, and loosed it into the animal’s ribcage. The shaft penetrated all the way to the feathers without visible effect.

The bull wheeled toward him and charged. Lothar darted behind a small evergreen. The tree bent over and snapped off at the ground like a twig as the bull crashed against the trunk. The boughs of the falling tree ensnared Lothar. The bull straddled the tree’s trunk and swung his head back and forth, as he tried to crush the crawling boy with his antlers. Lothar’s whimpering terror seemed to enrage the animal further. His flailing front hooves stripped limbs from the evergreen’s trunk like dry leaves, missing the boy’s body by a hand’s breadth.

A yelling Ivar ran to the animal’s side and shot his last arrow low into the ribcage behind the bull’s shoulder.

Lothar scrambled from under the entanglement of boughs. His bow snagged on something and he let it lie, running for his life.

The bull charged after the running boy.

“Run, Lothar! He is coming after you!” A shrieking Ivar went in pursuit.

***

The men burst through the undergrowth with Halfdan in the lead. Yelling to distract and confuse the bull, Halfdan swept his arm back and threw the heavy hunting spear with all his strength at the bull’s shoulder. The razor-sharp head sliced through the animal’s shoulder muscles and lodged in the massive shoulder joint. The bull staggered from the force of the impact, dropping his head to regain his balance.

Gudbjartur leaped toward the bull with his axe held high for the stroke.

“Odin!” The battle cry rang through the forest as he closed the distance.

Without checking his forward momentum, Gudbjartur chopped the axe blade down across the juncture of the beast’s neck and shoulders. The bull’s straining neck muscles popped apart like overripe fruit as the keen blade sliced down through them.

The bull’s head dropped. The corded neck muscle no longer supported the weight of his head and neck. He crashed to the ground, all but beheaded by the axe stroke.

A shudder shook the beast. He tried to rise. Slowly he rolled onto his side. Muscles twitched in confusion. His brain no longer sent usable signals to his body. With a great sigh, he died; accusing dark eyes gazed unseeing on his slayers.

Gudbjartur left the axe stuck in the bull’s body and bolted toward Ivar. Dropping to his knees, his arms encircled the boy, crushing him to his chest as emotion swept over both of them. The young boy trembled in his father’s arms. Gudbjartur was speechless in his relief at finding his son unharmed.

Halfdan attended to Lothar. He turned the boy round and round, inspecting for injuries. Lothar unashamedly wept with relief and sorrow. Halfdan hugged him and patted his back. “It is over, boy. You are all right.” He turned to Gudbjartur. “Lothar is all right, Gudbj, just scratched up some.”

“Come here, son.” Gudbjartur held an arm out to the boy.

Lothar walked to his father, his eyes downcast and wet with tears. Gudbjartur wrapped his arms around both his sons. Kneeling before them on the ground, he rested his head on their shoulders. A shudder shook his body as pent-up emotion receded. “Thank the gods you are safe.”

“I can hardly breathe, Father. You are crushing me.” Ivar’s words served to calm the three of them.

Gudbjartur released the boys and searched their faces for a heartbeat. “You did well,” he said, his voice husky with feeling.

Halfdan let Gudbjartur have his moment with his sons by examining the dead bull. When finished, he pulled the buried axe blade from the animal’s neck and stepped over to join them. “They shot six arrows into him, Gudbj. Any one of them would have killed him. But not before he got both of them.” He handed the bloody axe to Gudbjartur.

“I only shot him once. Ivar shot him the most,” Lothar’s voice caught in misery. “I could not move I was so afraid. But not Ivar. He shrieked at the bull while he shot arrows into him.”

The two men made brief eye contact. They keenly appraised Ivar while the boy relived the events with his brother.

“Your arrow saved me, Lothar. He almost got to me before you shot him. My last arrow may have saved you. I think it hurt him because he blinked. If you had not scampered from under the tree right then and tried to run away, he might have turned on me.” Ivar grinned at his brother. “I was just as scared as you were. Anger and fear made me act. I was trying to save Yola. I did not know he was already dead.” Ivar spoke in a strong voice, his emotions controlled.

“You both did well, as your father has told you. I know grown men who could not stand their ground under such a threat.” Halfdan gestured toward the bull’s corpse. “You did better than well, both of you. I am proud to have you as my young warriors. The people will tell tales of this hunt for some time to come.”

Both boys were silent; the tragedy that had befallen them filled their thoughts. They basked in their chieftain’s praise, but stole furtive glances at the remains of Yola.

Read the conclusion of Chapter One, Confrontation, An Axe of Iron Novel with Installment #5, on 27 January 2012.

Confrontation, An Axe of Iron Novel - Serialized - Installment 3

2012-01-15T15:22:00.001-07:00

Moose hunt contd:

As the shadows lengthened toward day’s end, a trio of moose stepped from the dense forest surrounding the lake. The lead animal, an old cow, paused and carefully surveyed the lake environs. Her sensitive nose tested the still air while the huge ears turned this way and that, listening to the cries of birds and the buzz of insects. Her senses told her that all was well. She continued down into the willow scrub along the lake shoreline. She and her calves nibbled at the tender tips of willow before stepping into the shallow waters of the lake. Their kind did this same thing, just before sundown every day, when hunger and thirst drove them from their bedding grounds to begin another night of foraging.

***

Gudbjartur watched the cow moose and two large calves walk with caution from the cover of the forest. The quarry grazed slowly through the thick willows along the shoreline before wading into the lake. The animals began to relax as they grazed along the lake bottom on an abundance of bulrushes and other underwater forage plants, oblivious to the threat lurking nearby.
Gudbjartur waved to Halfdan and the two men began closing in from both sides of the boys’ position. They walked along the shoreline making no attempt at stealth. Gudbjartur figured that he and Halfdan would be almost up to the animals before they became alarmed. If everything worked as planned, the three moose should pass the boys’ hiding place as they ran from the lake.

***

Greenland Sea, east of the Helluland coast

Five hundred sea leagues to the northeast of Halfdansfjord, the four ships of the settlement’s trading flotilla to Greenland rolled and plunged in the heavy swells of the strait separating Helluland and Greenland. The flotilla had sailed from the strait between Markland and Helluland, through the southerly current flowing along the Helluland coast the preceding morning, and into the open ocean area of relatively slack currents between Helluland and Greenland.

Seabirds had recently joined the ships, diving and swooping in their constant quest for food, indicating land was not far off. Estimating there were some fifty leagues remaining in the voyage for the ships bound for Eiriksfjord, Greenland, Bjorn Kjetilsson, flotilla commander, signaled the ships to heave to into the wind as they approached a bank of thin fog and sea mist.

Fog banks of varying thickness and the pervading sea mist had been their constant companion during the twelve days of the voyage. Although it had not been necessary to heave to, the Fog Giant and reduced visibility preyed on Bjorn’s mind. Command of more than his own ship weighed heavily on him. He thought the cargoes of green timber would be most welcome in both Greenland settlements and should induce the local farmers to part with all manner of trade goods from both Iceland and Vestfoldland. The ships had managed to stay in contact while running in the thin fog by sailing in close company and frequently sounding their bullhorns. The sound of the horns reverberating from ship to ship lent a surreal quality to the damp blanket as the ships alternately appeared and disappeared within its shroud.

After turning into the wind to heave to, the heavily laden ships remained close together. As they paid-off slowly downwind, their unfettered sails flapped loosely, and the crews shouted back and forth.

“If the visibility was not so poor the masthead would have the clouds of Greenland in sight to leeward. We will part company when the coast is sighted. As agreed, Athils and Sweyn will steer for Lysufjord, and Brodir and I will make for Eiriksfjord,” Bjorn shouted across the narrow expanse of water separating the ships. “Good luck trading with the Tornit on your return voyages. I hope you kill many walrus with them. We will see you at Halfdansfjord before winter.”

“Brodir,” Sweyn shouted through cupped hands, “I hope you fill your ship with the trade goods we need in Halfdansfjord. Good luck trading with the Thalmiut on your return voyage, Bjorn. Trade them out of another pair of those big dogs.” He waved and turned back to his waiting crew to get his ship underway.

Shouted farewells drifted across the water as crews bid their opposite numbers farewell and sheeted their sails home. A freshening wind out of the northwest began to blow the tatters of fog away and the flotilla rapidly gathered way as each ship answered her helm and steadied on course.

The ships would shortly come under the influence of the current sweeping into the north along the coast of western Greenland, speeding them toward their individual destinations. This fast-moving current would be especially useful to the two ships bound for Lysufjord, more than one hundred and fifty leagues north of Eiriksfjord.

***

The moose hunt

Unseen by the five moose hunters, a large bull moose ambled from his bed grounds toward the same lake. He stopped briefly to graze on the tender tips of ferns that had drawn his attention. The muffled snap of a breaking twig caused him to jerk his head erect. His senses went to full alert. The last mouthful of ferns dangled forgotten from slack lips as his small eyes stared in the direction of the sound. He detected a slight movement and his heightened attention fastened on the object. The animal’s brain registered a warning, possible danger. Long, brown guard hairs along the top of his neck and back slowly came erect as his agitation increased.

The object of the bull’s attention happened to be Yola. The boy stirred ever so slightly in his place of concealment. A small, dry twig snapped under him as he shifted position.

The bull knew not what the creature was, but it had no place in his ordered world. His rigid stance went from interest to alarm to rage in a moment, as he became aware that the creature was between him and the cow and calves. He began to move very slowly, almost noiseless for an animal of his bulk. The only sound of his passage was a slight whispering of the grass and ferns as they parted before him. His little eyes fixed unblinkingly on the creature he stalked.

“Yola, look out!” Lothar shrieked in alarm. The bull broke into a trot. He covered the short distance to the prone boy before Yola was aware of the mortal danger descending upon him.

Yola had but a heartbeat to turn toward the sound before the full force of the bull’s charge descended upon him. The great spread of palmated antler pinned the struggling boy to the ground. The beast struck the center of Yola’s chest with a flailing front hoof, breaking the breastbone in two. A violent whoosh of breath blew from the boy’s mouth as the bull’s head crushed his chest and cut off his screams.

In another heartbeat, the bull scooped Yola from the ground in his antlers and slammed his body against the trunk of a tree. Repeatedly, he smashed the now lifeless body against the tree trunk until it was a bloody pulp.

Ivar and Lothar stood immobilized by the suddenness and ferocity of the attack, but only for a moment. Ivar screamed in fear and rage. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He nocked an arrow on his bowstring as he ran to the bull’s side. Without hesitation he drew the hunting arrow to its razor-sharp head and loosed it into the bull’s heaving ribcage from pointblank range as the beast worried the bundle of bloody rags that had been his friend.

***

To be continued with #4, 20 January 2012

Blog Talk Radio interview of author J. A. Hunsinger

2012-01-09T15:46:00.000-07:00

Listen to the Sylvia Dickey Smith interview of author J. A. Hunsinger on Blog Talk Radio when they talk about the Axe of Iron series of historical fiction novels and the premise behind Hunsinger's books on the Greenland Vikings.

Confrontation, An Axe of Iron Novel - Serialized - Installment 2

2012-01-06T09:23:00.001-07:00

They sailed up a wide river until the wind off the bay became too variable from the dampening effect of the forest to be of any further use. The three boys had taken turns at the steering oar as the hunting party progressed inland. Now, Ivar had the helm.

Gudbjartur pointed ahead to the mouth of a tributary stream that issued from a small lake partially hidden back in the forest. “Steer for that stream, Ivar. Beach the boat anywhere along the left bank. Lothar, you and Yola lower the sail just before the boat reaches the shore.”

The two boys craned forward to watch the shoreline, the tag end of the halyard clenched in their hands, ready to jerk it loose from the cleat and lower the sail. Lothar glanced anxiously at Halfdan, who watched them from his seat on the bow thwart. He smiled and nodded at him, but said nothing.

Ivar put the helm over and the boat headed into the shore.

“Now Yola,” Lothar hollered, as he jerked the halyard loose. The small sail plummeted down the mast as the boys lost their grip on the halyard, covering them as they lost their footing and fell in a heap when the boat ground to a halt on the stones of the stream bank.

“See, there is nothing to it.” Halfdan said, as he and Gudbjartur pulled the sail off the two struggling boys. “You dropped the sail at just the right time.”

Ivar, hands on hips and a smile on his face, stood at his place in the stern as he watched his brother and Yola regain their feet.

“What are you grinning at?” Lothar asked.

“I saw the whole thing,” Ivar said, his superior attitude coming to the fore. “That was a pretty funny way to lower the sail. You are supposed to lower it hand-over-hand, not just turn loose of the halyard.”

“We know that. It was heavier than we thought and the halyard slipped through our hands.”

The grinning Gudbjartur caught a wink from Halfdan as the two men, barely able to keep from laughing aloud, enjoyed the moment with their young charges.

“All right, boys. You all did well. Roll the sail up on the boom as we showed you, and secure the boat to a tree. Then we will go find a good place to hunt around yon lake,” Gudbjartur ordered, gesturing inland.

***

They walked in single file, with Halfdan and Gudbjartur in the lead, around the shoreline to the north shore of the closest of the several small lakes in the area. Moose tracks seemed to be everywhere. Well-used game trails naturally funneled animals to the shoreline of the lake the men selected for the hunt.

Gudbjartur briefed the boys on his plan. “There is no wind so the moose will not smell you. You all saw the deep game trails winding down here from the forest. The moose use these trails every evening when they leave their bed grounds to water and feed on bulrushes on the lake bottom. Halfdan and I will find hiding places for you that will allow us to drive the animals to you. If we spring the trap at the right moment the moose will come right by your positions when they run away from Halfdan and me.”

“How will we know when to shoot?” Lothar asked.

Ivar snorted at the question.

“That is a good question, Lothar.” Halfdan entered the conversation to show Ivar that questions were a part of learning. “Each of you knows your range limit for accurate shots. Your quarry is a big moose. Even the calves are big, as you all know. The target you are shooting at is an area in the chest that is as big around as your mother’s stew pot. About like so.” He held both hands out in a circle to demonstrate a diameter equal to the length of a man’s forearm. “The arrow must hit that target to kill him. If you hit him anywhere else, he may die, but he will run away and be lost to us because we probably will never find his carcass.”

“Try to wait until your target is quartering and heading away from where you are.” Gudbjartur demonstrated the proper angle with his hands. “If you get that angle, aim for the paunch, just back of the short ribs. There is no heavy bone there and all his vital organs are lying low in his chest cavity when he is on his feet. Your arrow will slice forward into his chest cavity, hitting a tub full of guts, the liver, at least one lung, and maybe the heart. It will be a killing shot.”

“Aye, that is the best shooting angle on any game we kill with an arrow. Another important thing to remember when you get an arrow into him and he runs away—let him go. Wait for Gudbj and me.” Halfdan looked at each of the boys. “Yola, why should you wait?”

Yola looked at his two friends and then back to Halfdan. “Because we should give him time to bleed to death.”

“That is right!” Halfdan exclaimed enthusiastically. “If the animal has not seen you he will not know what happened. Maybe the wound will only burn. He will feel secure because you have not scared him. As he weakens, he will lie down. Why do we want him to lie down, Ivar?”

“So he will bleed to death quietly rather than run away in a panic until he finally drops dead. We would probably lose him then. And the meat would not be as good if he was all heated up when he died.”

Halfdan smiled and nodded. He winked at Gudbjartur and stepped aside.

“Good, Ivar,” Gudbjartur said, looking from boy to boy. “Remember, we will all be focused only on animals coming to the lake from this game trail. There may be others but ignore them unless they are about to step on you.” The boys laughed. “You will see the moose before they get to the lake. They will be nervous. Their senses will be on full alert. Stay still and do not take a shot, no matter how tempting it is. Wait until they relax and Halfdan and I decide the time is right to drive them to you. You may get only one shot so take your time. Make your shots count. All it takes is one well-placed arrow and the moose is meat on the board.” He grinned at them. “All right, I think you all know what to do. Now, check your arrows and knives. Make certain they are sharp. You will have need of them. Are there any questions before we lay our trap?”

The boys shook their heads. They busied themselves giving each arrowhead a final swipe or two with their whetstones. All were understandably nervous.

***

A short time later, all three boys lay concealed in the underbrush well back from the game trail. The trap lay ready for the quarry.

The men separated and each walked to a position across the lake from each other and with the targeted game trail roughly centered. When they sprang the trap, each man would cover half the shoreline as they converged on the quarry, thereby ensuring the flushed animals would have to make their bid to escape right by the three hidden boys.

While he waited in concealment Gudbjartur cut a short piece of green willow shoot, chewed the end until it frayed and softened, and used it to scrub his teeth. For him it was a daily ritual. He watched the scene unfold much as he and Halfdan had told the boys it would.

***

To be continued 13 January 2012

Confrontation, An Axe of Iron Novel - Chapter One Serialized

2012-01-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

Halfdansfjord, Vinland
Late summer, AD 1008

Out of long habit, the Northman, Gudbjartur Einarsson, carefully examined his surroundings every morning. He climbed a ladder to the palisade parapet and circled the settlement looking out over the bay, the fen, and surrounding countryside. Alert for the slightest danger or anything that did not belong in his world, the daily ritual, and a wave from the two tower guards assured him that all was well. He turned back toward his longhouse, his immediate thoughts being the coming adventure for his sons, Ivar and Lothar, and their small friend Yola.

He entered the house to find his sons almost finished with their morning meal. “When you are done, go and get Yola. Yesterday, I spoke to his mother about the hunt. He will be ready to go,” Gudbjartur said.

Watching his sons run excitedly from the house, Gudbjartur shook his head at such exuberance on a full stomach. He rubbed his stomach at the thought of food, and smiled a greeting to his wife as she moved the kettle from the hearth tripod to the stone warming ledge.

She ladled the steaming fish chowder into a bowl and handed it to him. “They are really looking forward to this, Gudbj,” Ingerd said.

Gudbjartur sat down in his high seat and began to eat. “It is time. This is their rite of passage to manhood.” He noisily slurped the thick liquid from the bowl, leaving a few chunks of cod in the bottom, which he ate with gusto. Suddenly he stopped chewing, pulled a long rib bone from his mouth, and examined it ruefully. “I could have choked on this, Ingerd.”

She chuckled at him. “That is why we should chew our food instead of bolting it down in chunks. Honestly, you are as bad as the boys.”

Grinning at her, he got to his feet and placed his empty bowl and spoon with the other dirty utensils. “Thank you. The chowder was delicious.”

“It should be. We made it with butter and milk. You ate so fast I am surprised you could taste it.”

“I tasted it, all right. I am in a hurry. The boys are eager to get going.” He watched her for a moment. “They will be men soon, Ingerd, whether we want them to or not,” he said gently, mindful of her feelings on the subject.

She leaned against the wide shoulders of this man she loved so much, warm and content as he put an arm around her. She gazed up into his pale blue eyes. “I know. I know. But they seem so young.”

“They are young. Soon they will be men. You were only two years older than Ivar is now when you birthed him.”

“And well I know it. The birthing was very hard for me and that is why we have had no more children. Something came loose in me.”

“I know, Ingerd. I think that is why the gods sent us Lothar. He is our son, too, as if you birthed him.”

The boys rushed in with Yola in tow, effectively shattering the moment, much to Gudbjartur’s relief.

He gave Ingerd a final squeeze, released her, and gave his attention to the three boys. “I have told you what you can take with you, and I see you have your packs and weapons in order. The only food we will have is dried meat. We will use it if the hunt is unsuccessful.” His glance played over the three boys. A slight smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. Their barely checked exuberance, as they listened intently to him, caused a flush of pleasure through his chest. “Say goodbye to your mother, and we will be off.”

The best the boys could manage was a perfunctory peck on her cheek before they ran from the longhouse. Gudbjartur hugged and kissed Ingerd, examined her appreciatively at arm’s length, and then hugged and kissed her again. Then he picked up his gear and walked from the longhouse to begin the much-anticipated hunting expedition.

Ingerd watched him go. A heat rose in her. She smiled and hugged herself with pleasure. She began to clean up the mess from the morning meal, whistling softly as she worked.

***

As Gudbjartur walked into the settlement commons, he saw his chieftain, Halfdan Ingolfsson, talking to the two men tending the charcoal kiln. He joined them, not interrupting the conversation beyond a nodded greeting.

“It takes all day for the charcoal in the kiln to cool enough to shovel it out when we open it up in the morning,” Grimr said, glancing from Halfdan to Gudbjartur. “After we empty the kiln it takes a short time to fill it back up with wood and light the fire. We throw the wood in through the vent hole on top until the kiln is full. Then we light it at the bottom opening.” He gestured as he spoke. “After it catches fire we place the flat rock over the vent and roll another rock in front of the bottom opening. By dawn the next day we have a kiln full of charcoal.” The man grinned through the grime that covered his face.

“The woodcutters haul the dry wood in for us,” Barthur, his companion, said. “We would rather do this than cut wood, but I know we will be swapping jobs soon. As you told us, Gudbj, it keeps us from getting bored.”

Gudbjartur acknowledged him with a nod and spoke to Halfdan. “The boys are waiting for us.”

They took their leave of the kiln tenders, shouldered their packs and weapons, and headed for the landing beach to meet the boys.

“They gave me a report on the winter charcoal supply,” Halfdan said, as he and Gudbjartur strolled slowly along the log walkway toward the main gate. “The bins in each longhouse are almost full. Then they will pile the excess charcoal under the shed roof next to the kiln until they judge there is plenty for winter. I left that up to them. They know more about it than I do.”

“I spoke to them several days ago. Since they started using the new kiln their job is much easier. The charcoal is all made of dry birch wood. Birch will give us better heat than the pine we normally use,” Gudbjartur said as they walked through the gate and down the hill toward the landing beach.

***

Further conversation about the charcoal supply ended when the three boys saw the men and ran to meet them.

“Which boat are we taking?” Ivar asked breathlessly.

“This one.” Gudbjartur swung his pack aboard. “Your mother has already put a pack of dried meat aboard in case you boys do not kill us fresh meat.”

“We will not fail, Father,” Lothar said, a determined look on his thin face.

Gudbjartur could not remember the boy ever calling him father before. Taken aback, the big man gripped the boy’s shoulder in a rare display of affection. “I never thought you would, Lothar.” Gudbjartur glanced at the smiling Halfdan and turned away, unaccustomed to the feeling one word had brought to him. He carefully laid his bow, quiver of hunting arrows, and axe across the boat’s thwarts. “Load your gear, boys. We will launch the boat and get under way.”

The boys gathered their scattered gear and loaded it aboard. The two men, eagerly assisted by the chattering boys, pushed the boat’s bow off the beach and all clambered aboard.

***

Note: The next installment follows on Friday, 6 January 2012, and each Friday thereafter until completion of the Chapter One.

Glacial chill ebbs and flows

2011-12-17T10:44:00.000-07:00

This excellent article on some of the mechanics of climate change, most specifically the polar icecaps, is thought-provoking. The author alludes to both the medieval warm period and the little ice age. the latter one of the prime causal factors for the disappearance of the Norse settlements on Greenland. Take a look at my Axe of Iron novel series on the subject.

***

Glacial chill ebbs and flows

• by: Ian Plimer

• From: The Australian

• December 17, 2011 12:00AM

Ice conditions at the end of the Arctic melt season in 2007, captured by NASA's Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer and overlaid on the NASA Blue Marble. Source: AFP

ICE sheets grow and shrink. At times, they disappear. At other times, ice starts to cover polar areas and high mountains. That's what ice has done over the history of our planet. The Greenland and Antarctic basins are more than 1km deep, and deeper in the centres than around the edges, so that ice is squeezed uphill like toothpaste out of a tube by the weight of overlying ice. The alarmist media stresses that changing sea ice and continental glaciers indicate rapid global warming. Is this really so?

Since the last interglacial started some 10,500 years ago, summer sea ice in the Arctic has been far from constant. Sea ice comes and goes without leaving a clear record. For this reason, our knowledge about its variations and extent was limited before we had satellite surveillance or observations from aeroplanes and ships. A huge amount of the earth's surface water moves alternately between the ice sheets and the oceans.

Svend Funder, commenting on his recent Science paper, stated: "Our studies show that there have been large fluctuations in the amount of summer sea ice during the last 10,000 years. During the so-called Holocene Climate Optimum, from approximately 8000 to 5000 years ago, when the temperatures were somewhat warmer than today, there was significantly less sea ice in the Arctic Ocean, probably less than 50 per cent of the summer 2007 coverage, which is absolutely the lowest on record.

"Our studies also show that when the ice disappears in one area, it may accumulate in another. We have discovered this by comparing our results with observations from northern Canada. While the amount of sea ice decreased in northern Greenland, it increased in Canada. This is probably due to changes in the prevailing wind systems. This factor has not been sufficiently taken into account when forecasting the imminent disappearance of sea ice in the Arctic Ocean."

In order to reach their unsurprising conclusions, Funder and the rest of the team organised several expeditions to Peary Land in northern Greenland. Funder said: "Our key to the mystery of the extent of sea ice during earlier epochs lies in the driftwood we found along the coast. One might think that it had floated across (the) sea, but such a journey takes several years, and driftwood would not be able to stay afloat for that long. The driftwood is from the outset embedded in sea ice and reaches the north Greenland coast along with it. The amount of driftwood therefore indicates how much multi-year sea ice there was in the ocean back then. And this is precisely the type of ice that is in danger of disappearing today."

What is interesting about this study is that the new understanding came from getting away from computer modelling and doing fieldwork in pretty inhospitable areas. Back in the laboratory and again away from computer models, the wood type was determined and dated using carbon-14. This wood came from near the great rivers of present-day North America and Siberia. This shows that wind and current directions have changed. The field study of coastal beach ridges shows that at times there were waves breaking unhindered by ice over at least 500km of coastline. At other times, due to sea ice cover, there were no beaches. This is the present situation.

Even if there is a great reduction in sea ice, all is not lost. Funder stated: "Our studies show that there are great natural variations in the amount of Arctic sea ice. The bad news is that there is a clear connection between temperature and the amount of sea ice. And there is no doubt that continued global warming will lead to a reduction in the amount of summer sea ice in the Arctic Ocean. The good news is that even with a reduction to less than 50 per cent of the current amount of sea ice, the ice will not reach a point of no return: a level where the ice no longer can regenerate itself even if the climate was to return to cooler temperatures.

"Finally, our studies show that the changes to a large degree are caused by the effect that temperature has on the prevailing wind systems. This has not been sufficiently taken into account when forecasting the imminent disappearance of the ice, as often portrayed in the media."

Those playing with computer climate models need to get outside, collect new data and take into account far more factors than they feed into computer models.

Studies of the behaviour of tropical glaciers over the last 11,000 years show irregular shrinkage, with slower rates in the Little Ice Age and faster rates in the 20th century. Glaciers such as the Bolivian Telata glacier reflect long-term warming during the current 10,500-year-long interglacial and that glacial retreat was in progress thousands of years before industrialisation.

Scientists urged on by the media state that ice calving off glaciers indicates global warming. Ice always falls off the front of a glacier. If ice did not melt, then the planet would now be covered in ice. Ice drops off the toe of both advancing and retreating glaciers and the melting snout of a glacier is at a point determined by the balance between the forward movement of the ice by gravity and the rate at which it melts. Ice falling off the front of a glacier means absolutely nothing when the air temperature is less than zero. Ice sheets grow and contract. At times, ice sheets disappear. The story of glacial retreat is far more complex than a television image.

Many glaciers that are now in retreat did not exist until the Little Ice Age (which climaxed in the middle to late 17th century). During the medieval warming (which peaked around AD1000), alpine glaciers in the northern hemisphere were smaller or did not exist. Over much of the Canadian Cordillera, there may have been no glaciers at all during the Holocene Maximum (8000 to 6500 years ago), when temperatures were considerably higher than now.

Records from New Zealand and Norway show glacier retreat started in the 18th and 19th centuries. Most of the modern ice retreat is due to post-Little Ice Age warming, changes in humidity and a decrease in ice flow rates.

The idea that a glacier slides downhill on a base lubricated by melt water was a good idea when first presented by Horace-Benedict de Saussure in 1779. We now know a lot more, yet this treasured idea remains. Ice moves by creep, a process of constant recrystallisation of ice crystals. Ice at the snout of a glacier has crystals 1000 times larger than those in snow as a result of growth during recrystallisation.

Ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland first flow uphill before flowing down glaciers. The upward flow of ice cannot be due to human-induced global warming producing melting. There are some places in the world today where glaciers are expanding.

Ice sheets and glaciers grow and retreat for a great diversity of reasons. For scientists to argue that ice retreat is due to human activity is simplifying a very complex process. Furthermore, it is too cold in Antarctica and Greenland for ice to melt.

Since the discovery of the Hubbard Glacier (in Alaska) in 1895, it has been advancing 25m a year during periods of cooling and warming. The ice front is 10km long and 27m high. What does the ice do at the snout of the glacier? It falls off, because it is getting pushed from behind. This has nothing to do with temperature; it shows ice behaves as a plastic and brittle material and that ice sheets are always changing.

As with all areas of science, there are regular surprises. It was always thought that ice formed from frozen snow. The science was settled and there was a consensus. Recent work in East Antarctica shows that the deepest part of the ice sheet contains ice that did not originate as snow. It was melt water that seeped to the base of the ice sheet and then froze. The amount of ice formed by this method is probably greater in volume than all the glaciers on earth outside Antarctica and Greenland. The computer models predicted this melt-water escaped to the oceans and contributed to sea level rise. Wrong. The volume of water in this ice is larger than Antarctica's sub-glacial lakes. The addition of hundreds of metres of ice at the base of an ice sheet bends the overlying ice and causes uplift of the surface of the glacier. This changes the slope and flow of the ice. The thickest sub-glacial ice was 1100m and this pushed the top of glaciers up 410m to reflect the shape of the added basal ice.

Antarctica has another little surprise. Underneath the ice sheets are volcanoes. The last big eruption was in Roman times and Mount Erebus is continually restless. Addition of heat from below could cause massive melting and detachment of a large block of ice.

As snow falls, it traps air. This air is preserved as the snow becomes an ice sheet. This air remains trapped and uncontaminated in ice, otherwise it cannot be used to measure past atmospheres. Antarctic ice core (Siple) shows that there were 330 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air in 1900; Mauna Loa Hawaiian measurements in 1960 show that the air then had 260ppm carbon dioxide.

Either the ice core data is wrong, the Hawaiian carbon dioxide measurements are wrong, or the atmospheric carbon dioxide content was decreasing during a period of industrialisation.

As in all other areas of science, uncertainty rules.

This is an extract from Ian Plimer's book How to Get Expelled from School: A Guide to Climate Change for Pupils, Parents & Punters.

More on Vikings Navigated With Translucent Crystals?

2011-11-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

National Geographic
November 13, 2011

Icelandic spar may have revealed sun's position on cloudy days, study says.

Vikings may have navigated by looking through a type of crystal called Icelandic spar, a new study suggests.

In some Icelandic sagas- embellished stories of Viking life- sailors relied on so-called sunstones to locate the sun's position and steer their ships on cloudy days. The stone would've worked by detecting a property of sunlight called polarization. Polarization is when light- which normally radiates randomly from its source- encounters something, such as a shiny surface or fog, that causes the rays to assume a particular orientation.

Due to this property, as sunlight moves through the atmosphere, the resulting polarization gives away the direction of the original source of the light.

Detecting light's polarization is a natural ability of some animals, such as bees.

In 1969, a Danish archaeologist suggested real-life Vikings might have used sunstones to detect polarized light, using the stones to supplement sundials, stars, and other navigational aids.

Since then, researchers have been probing how such a sunstone might have worked. On that point, though, the sagas were silent.

Sun-Revealing Crystal

Now, Guy Ropars, a physicist at the University of Rennes in France, has conducted an experiment with a potential Viking sunstone: a piece of Icelandic spar recently found aboard the Alderney, a British ship that sank in 1592.

In the laboratory, Ropars and his team struck the piece of Icelandic spar with a beam of partly polarized laser light and measured how the crystal separates polarized from unpolarized light.

By rotating the crystal, the team found that there's only one point on the stone where those two beams were equally strong- an angle that depends on the beam's location.

That would enable a navigator to test a crystal on a sunny day and mark the sun's location on the crystal for reference on cloudy days. On cloudy days, a navigator would only be able to use the relative brightness of the two beams.

Icelandic Spar "Ideal" for Navigating

The team then recruited 20 volunteers to take turns looking at the crystal outside on a cloudy day and measure how accurately they could estimate the position of the hidden sun. Navigators subdivide the horizon by 360 degrees, and the team found that the volunteers could locate the sun's position to within 1 degree. The results confirm "that the Icelandic spar is an ideal crystal, and that it can be used with great precision" for locating the sun, said ecologist Susanne Akesson of Sweden's University of Lund, who was not part of Ropars's research team.

In 2010 Akesson and colleagues showed how local weather conditions may have influenced how light polarizes in the sky at Arctic latitudes, something Vikings would've needed to account for in their navigation.

"But the question remains," she said, "whether [Icelandic spar] was in common use" in Viking times.

On that point, physics is also silent.

Treasure hunter digs up 200 piece haul of Viking jewellery and coins

2011-11-11T11:06:00.000-07:00

UK Mail Online

October, 27 2011

A metal detecting enthusiast unearthed 'the find of a lifetime' when he discovered a Viking treasure hoard including 200 pieces of silver jewellery.

Darren Webster dug up a 1,000-year-old casket that also held coins, hacksilver and ingots while scouring at an undisclosed location on the border between Cumbria and North Lancashire.

Experts at the British Museum in London say the find is of 'national significance'.

'It's a find of a lifetime,' said Mr Webster, from Carnforth, Cumbria.

'It's a long process having the find assessed.

'Neither me or the landowner know what will happen with it. There has been a lot of interest. I want everybody to know about the find.

'I got a good signal on my detector so I dug about 18 inches and then I saw a lead pot. It was slightly open. I could see all the coins and jewellery inside. It was a great feeling.'

Bracelets elaborately engraved with serpents, which could have been worn by a wealthy Viking leader, make up part of the discovery along with rings and an impressive stash of coins.

The haul is now being studied by experts at the British Museum who will reveal their findings in December.

Secret: Mr Webster has not revealed the location of his find - which included silver jewellery and coins - but he made it while out on a weekly expedition on the border between Cumbria and North Lancashire.

Brian Randall, chairman of the Lune Valley Metal Detecting Club, said: 'We are all thrilled for Darren and wish it was us.

'No one goes out looking for hoards but it's very nice if you do find one.'

Sabine Skae, the curator of Barrow's Dock Museum, said the new hoard will help put Cumbria and South Lakeland on the map as having an important Viking heritage.

'Over the past ten years there has been an increase in small finds and now some larger finds which is really forcing people to look at Cumbria in a new way,' said Mrs Skae.

Oxford University anthropology lecturer, Stephen Oppenheimer, said big hoards such as this paint a new picture of what Vikings were doing in England.

The discovery of big hoards break down the stereotype of Vikings just coming over here to raid our churches and take valuables back to their own country.

'Burying large amounts like this indicates they were settling here,' said Mr Oppenheimer.

Local archaeologist Steve Dickinson, of Ulverston, said the hoard was 'extremely important nationally'.

He said: 'Any hoard is always rare and therefore of national importance but because of its size and detail this is particularly exciting.'

A spokesman for the British Museum confirmed that Darren's discovery was 'a significant Viking hoard'.

He said: 'Research on the hoard is ongoing and more information and images will be revealed at the time of the coroner's inquest in mid-December.'

A spokesperson for Carlisle's Tullie House Museum, where the hoard was originally taken, compared Mr Webster's find to that of the Cuerdale Hoard found on the southern bank of a bend of the River Ribble in 1840, the largest Viking silver hoard in north-western Europe.

Magical Viking stone may be real

2011-11-05T10:59:00.000-06:00

Our penchant to know how the medieval Vikings navigated the North Atlantic to Greenland and North America 500-years before Columbus was born continue with this article on the rediscovery of sunstone.
If you have an interest, click the links to my novels, where I refer to the stone's use, or sunstone for another good article on an old subject.

***

Telegraph UK

November 03, 2011

A Viking legend which tells of a glowing "sunstone" that, when held up to the sky, disclosed the position of the Sun on a cloudy day may have some basis in truth, scientists believe.

The ancient race is believed to have discovered North America hundreds of years before Christopher Columbus.

Now experiments have shown that a crystal, called an Iceland spar, could detect the sun with an accuracy within a degree allowing the legendary seafarers to navigate thousands of miles on cloudy days and during short Nordic nights.

Dr Guy Ropars, of the University of Rennes, and colleagues said "a precision of a few degrees could be reached" even when the sun was below the horizon.

An Iceland spar, which is transparent and made of calcite, was found in the wreck of an Elizabethan ship discovered thirty years ago off the coast of Alderney in the Channel Islands after it sank in 1592 just four years after the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

Viking legend tells of an enigmatic sunstone or sólarsteinn that, when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the sun, even on overcast days or below the horizon, the study reveals.

One Icelandic saga describes how, during cloudy, snowy weather, King Olaf consulted Sigurd on the location of the Sun. To check Sigurd's answer, Olaf "grabbed a sunstone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun"

Using the polarisation of the skylight, as many animals like bees do, the Vikings could have used to give them true bearings.

The Viking routes in the North Atlantic were often subject to dense fog and the stone could also be used to locate the sun on very cloudy days.

The researchers said such sunstones could have helped the Vikings in their navigation from Norway to America before the discovery of the magnetic compass in Europe.

They would have relied upon the sun's piercing rays reflected through a piece of the calcite. The trick is that light coming from 90 degrees opposite the sun will be polarised so even when the sun is below the horizon it is possible to tell where it is.

They used the double refraction of calcite to pinpoint the sun by rotating the crystals until both sides of the double image are of equal intensity.

Navigation was based on tables showing the position of the sun in the sky at various times of year, prior to the use of the compass by Europeans, around the 12th century.

Added the researchers: "The Alderney discovery opens new possibilities as it looks very promising to find Iceland spars in other ancient shipwrecks, or in archaeological sites located on the seaside such as the Viking settlement with ship repair recently discovered in Ireland."

The study is published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A.

Linn Duchaill: Ireland's unlikely Viking capital

2011-11-04T13:17:00.000-06:00

Twelve hundred years ago the medieval Vikings built their capitol city at the head of a bay in northeastern Ireland. The forgotten site has been found and excavation has begun.

***

Linn Duchaill: Ireland's unlikely Viking capital
By Conor Macauley BBC Newsline reporter

The Vikings chose Linn Duchaill as one of their first settlements in Ireland

A windswept barley field just south of Dundalk seems an unlikely spot for Ireland's capital. But if things had been different, Annagassan near Castlebellingham might have been the principal city on the island of Ireland.
Twelve hundred years ago it was the site of Linn Duchaill, one of the first Viking settlements, which rivalled Dublin in size and importance.
Folklore said it was there, but all traces of it had disappeared, until a group of archaeologists and local historians set out to prove its existence. Extensive field research and test digs have now done that.
What they found was a huge fortified settlement up to 150 acres in size, established by 841AD where the Vikings built and repaired their ships, traded and raided into the surrounding countryside.
Artist and historian Micheál McKeown was one of those who carried out extensive field research.

Raids

He said the Vikings sailed their ships about a mile upstream in the River Glyde, then built a heavily defended position by digging a long trench between the river and the Irish Sea, to completely cut themselves off. "Dublin developed more as a trading town, this appeared to be more of a raiding town," he said.
"From here they attacked inland, they flattened all the monasteries in County Louth, they went to Armagh three times in one year, they went as far as the Shannon, deep into Longford. So there had to be a great amount of Vikings here. I would estimate four or five thousand Vikings here with up to 200 ships."

Test trenches were dug at the site in August last year and a host of items were found. They included ships rivets, off-cuts of silver, which the Vikings used as currency, and a tiny weighing scale. Those are now on show at an exhibition in Dundalk's Louth County Museum, along with other items recovered years ago in the same area, including a slave chain, and an axe head - all of Viking vintage.

A slave chain is among the items found at the site

Around 70 people gathered there over the weekend for a two day conference to discuss the significance of the finds at the Annagassan site. Among them was Ned Kelly, the keeper of Irish antiquities at the National Museum of Ireland, one of those who helped uncover the settlement. "There's been a bit of a mystery about where exactly the site was located or what exactly the site consisted of, and antiquarians and historians and archaeologists have been trying to sort that mystery since about 1750. We've now absolutely confirmed the location and nature of the site. It's a very large site. It's one of the earliest sites, there's only one earlier site in Lough Neagh."

History

"Sites of this nature by virtue of the fact that the Vikings were an international phenomenon, are of international importance. This is a site that has the potential to tell us an awful lot about the early activities of the Vikings in Ireland. This is the phase prior to the establishment of towns like Dublin and Wexford. The site is well preserved, it's very big and the trial cuttings we put in last September show us that there's a great depth of archaeological deposits, so there's an enormous amount we can learn about early Viking settlement in Ireland."

Linn Duachaill was eventually abandoned in favour of Dublin. Experts believe that was because Dundalk Bay is shallow and access to the Glyde River was dependant on the tides, which effectively meant the Vikings were stranded upstream twice a day. That left them and their ships vulnerable to attack and it became too big of a risk.

More on Ardnamurchan (Scotland) Viking boat burial discovery a first

2011-10-28T08:57:00.003-06:00

October 22, 2011

BBC

The UK mainland's first fully intact Viking boat burial site has been uncovered in the west Highlands, archaeologists have said.

The site, at Ardnamurchan, is thought to be more than 1,000 years old. Artefacts buried alongside the Viking in his boat suggest he was a high-ranking warrior.

Archaeologist Dr Hannah Cobb said the "artefacts and preservation make this one of the most important Norse graves ever excavated in Britain". Dr Cobb, from the University of Manchester, a co-director of the project, said: "This is a very exciting find." She has been excavating artefacts in Ardnamurchan for six years.

The universities of Manchester, Leicester, Newcastle and Glasgow worked on, identified, or funded the excavation.

Archaeology Scotland and East Lothian-based CFA Archaeology have also been involved in the project which led to the find.

The term "fully-intact", used to describe the find, means the remains of the body along with objects buried with it and evidence of the boat used were found and recovered.

The Ardnamurchan Viking was found buried with an axe, a sword with a decorated hilt, a spear, a shield boss and a bronze ring pin.

About 200 rivets - the remains of the boat he was laid in - were also found.

Previously, boat burials in such a condition have been excavated at sites on Orkney.

Until now mainland excavations were only partially successful and had been carried out before more careful and accurate methods were introduced.

Other finds in the 5m-long (16ft) grave in Ardnamurchan included a knife, what could be the tip of a bronze drinking horn, a whetstone from Norway, a ring pin from Ireland and Viking pottery.

'The icing'

Dozens of pieces of iron yet to be identified were also found at the site.

The finds were made as part of the Ardnamurchan Transition Project (ATP) which has been examining social change in the area from the first farmers 6,000 years ago to the Highland Clearances of the 18th and 19th centuries.

Viking specialist Dr Colleen Batey, from the University of Glasgow, has said the boat was likely to be from the 10th Century AD.

Dr Oliver Harris, project co-director from the University of Leicester's School of Archaeology and Ancient History, reinforced the importance of the burial site.

He said: "In previous seasons our work has examined evidence of changing beliefs and life styles in the area through a study of burial practices in the Neolithic and Bronze age periods 6,000-4,500 years ago and 4,500 to 2,800 years ago respectively.

"It has also yielded evidence for what will be one of the best-dated Neolithic chambered cairns in Scotland when all of our post-excavation work is complete.

"But the find we reveal today has got to be the icing on the cake."

Viking chieftain's burial ship excavated in Scotland after 1,000 years

2011-10-20T10:36:00.000-06:00

An excellent article from the Guardian, UK, on this very important archaeological discovery of the first undisturbed burial of a Viking chieftain on the British mainland.

***

Timber fragments and rivets of vessel, and deceased's sword and shield, unearthed undisturbed on Ardnamurchan peninsula.

By Maev Kennedy

The Guardian

Tuesday 18 October 2011

An intact axe is lifted in a soil block from the site of a boat burial of a Viking chief. Video: Charlotte Tooze/University of Manchester Link to this video

A Viking ship, which for 1,000 years has held the body of a chieftain, with his shield on his chest and his sword and spear by his side, has been excavated on a remote Scottish peninsula – the first undisturbed Viking ship burial found on the British mainland.

The timbers of the ship found on the Ardnamurchan peninsula – the mainland's most westerly point – rotted into the soil centuries ago, like most of the bones of the man whose coffin it became.

However the outline of the classic Viking boat, with its pointed prow and stern, remained. Its form is pressed into the soil and its lines traced by hundreds of rivets, some still attached to scraps of wood.

An expert on Viking boats, Colleen Batey from the University of Glasgow, dates it to the 10th century.

At just 5m long and 1.5m wide, it would have been a perilously small vessel for crossing the stormy seas between Scandinavia, Scotland and Ireland. But the possessions buried with him suggest the Viking was a considerable traveller.

They include a whetstone from Norway, a bronze ringpin from Ireland, his sword with beautifully decorated hilt, a spear and a shield which survive only as metal fittings, and pottery.

He also had a knife, an axe, and a bronze object thought to be part of a drinking horn. Dozens of iron fragments, still being analysed, were also found in the boat.

The peninsula in the Highlands is still easier to reach by sea than along the single narrow road.

But with its magnificent mountain, sea and sunset views, it was a special place for burials for thousands of years.

The oldest, excavated by the same team three years ago, was a 6,000-year-old neolithic grave, and a bronze age burial mound is nearby.

Hannah Cobb, an archaeologist from the University of Manchester who is co-director of the excavation, said: "We had spotted this low mound the previous year, but said firmly that it was probably just a pile of field clearance rocks from comparatively recent farming.

"When we uncovered the whole mound, the team digging came back the first night and said it looked quite like a boat.

"The second night they said: 'It really does look like a boat.' The third night they said: 'We think we really do have a boat'. It was so exciting, we could hardly believe it."

They recovered fragments of an arm bone and several teeth, which should allow analysis of radioactive isotopes and reveal where the man came from.

The fragments of wood clinging to the rivets should reveal what trees were felled for his ship, and possibly where it was built.

"Such burials were reserved for high status individuals," Cobb said. "He may have been a chieftain, a famous navigator, or renowned for his wisdom, but this man was clearly special to his people."

The boat had been almost filled with stones and Cobb believes these must have had meaning for the Vikings.

"Rocks are obviously significant as they also appear in other Viking burials," she said.

"Building a lasting monument to the dead for the living may well be an important factor, and also rooting people in with landscape traditions, given the proximity to the neolithic and bronze age cairns.

"We don't think the association with the older monuments can be a coincidence – this was a place which was very important to people over an extraordinarily long period of time."

No trace of a settlement site has been found, but the team will be returning to the peninsula next summer.

The Ardnamurchan Transitions Project brings together students and academics from several universities working with CFA Archaeology and Archaeology Scotland.

The most famous ship burial in Britain, Sutton Hoo – found heaped with treasure and excavated in Suffolk in the shadow of the second world war – looks like anyone's idea of a Viking burial but proved to be Anglo-Saxon, centuries older than the seafaring Scandinavians.

When overcrowding or yearning for adventure and wealth sent the Vikings overseas in the late eighth century, the sight of their long narrow ships on the horizon struck dread.

Although their reputation has now been partly rehabilitated and they are recognised as traders, farmers, and brilliant shipwrights and metal and craft workers, a poem written in the margin of an Irish manuscript records a monk's relief that the wild seas that night were too rough even for Vikings.

In 793, Viking raids forced monks to abandon Lindisfarne, an island off the north-east coast of England, carrying the body of Saint Cuthbert with them.

But the raiders also struck as far inland as Lichfield and established permanent settlements including York, the Wirral and Dublin.

The most famous description of a Viking ship burial, complete with the human sacrifice of a woman who volunteered to go with the dead chieftain into the next world – with lurid details of drugged potions and ritual sexual intercourse pillaged by generations of novelists and film-makers – was left by a 10th century Arab writer, Ahmad Ibn Fadlan. But archaeology has vindicated much of his account.

Fadlan's chieftain was cremated along with his ship, leaving only ashes to be buried under a mound. But many Vikings, like the man in Ardnamurchan, were laid in ships with their possessions heaped around them.

One of the best preserved, holding the remains of two women, was excavated at Oseberg in Norway in the early 20th century.

The burial dated from around 834 but the ship used was a generation older. The ship's superbly carved bow and stern are now preserved at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo.

Most of the Viking graves found in Britain are from cemeteries, after the raiders became settled and Christianised.

There is an intriguing rumoured Viking ship under a pub car park on the Wirral, and there are many claimed earlier ship burial finds – including one almost a century ago on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

But all of these had been disturbed or were ransacked by the people who stumbled on them, so none was properly recorded by archaeologists.

Years of work will follow on the new find, and may reveal whether the man who lay quietly in his ship for 1,000 years was a local resident, a sailor taking shelter from a storm or whether his body was brought specially to the beautiful site for burial.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

Vikings as citizens, craft workers, artists, traders and homemakers.

2011-10-13T10:50:00.000-06:00

A good article on the medieval Viking research of Richard Hall in the UK.

***

Richard Hall, who died of cancer on September 13 aged 62, led excavations in York that showed that the popular image of the Vikings as Scandinavian thugs intent on rape and pillage was misplaced.

The Telegraph

5:58PM BST 12 Oct 2011

His research revealed another, less familiar image of the Vikings as citizens, craft workers, artists, traders and homemakers.

Richard Hall

Hall’s interest in the Vikings was sparked during history lessons at school when he found that, while much was known about England’s Norman invaders, very little was known about the Vikings. “Others were interested in the Dark Ages or Greece, but I realised the British Isles had their very own dark ages,” he recalled.

The fearsome stereotype came from the writings of monks who found themselves literally on the sharp end of Viking attacks. Their monasteries were targeted as they contained much portable wealth, and the monks could be forced into slavery. As a result, Hall explained, “horror stories swept over Europe describing [the Vikings] as a revolting bunch of pagans coming from the North”.

When an invasion force led by Ivar the Boneless arrived in York in 866, the old Roman settlement of Eboracum was crumbling. The outline of the Roman fortress remained, but other buildings were long gone. The Saxons had renamed it Eoforwic, but had not altered things much.

The Vikings changed the name of the city to the more Danish “Jorvik” and established a thriving community based on agriculture and trade, leaving a legacy of street names — the suffix “gate” that attaches to many York streets (the Viking “gata” means “street”). By 1066 York was much bigger in terms of size, status and population than it had ever been.

Hall’s involvement in investigating Jorvik began in the 1970s, when approval was given for the demolition of a sweet factory in Coppergate (the “cup maker’s street”) to make way for a new shopping centre. In 1976 he was appointed director of excavations at the 1,000 square metre site before development got under way.

There he unearthed remains of 10th-century closely-packed wood and wattle buildings, set gable end on to the street and surrounded by moist, spongy layers of earth providing anoxic (oxygen-free) conditions similar to those of a peat bog.

In addition to jewellery, bone and antler carvings, metalwork and coins, the damp conditions had helped to preserve everyday items such as wood, leather, cloth, insects, cesspools and even a Viking latrine and its contents. The 1,000-year-old smells, Hall recalled, “hit us at full blast”. In addition there were luxury goods from as far afield as Byzantium and the Arabian gulf, side by side with goods from around the British Isles and northern Europe.

“Archaeology has shown that these people took over by the sword initially,” Hall explained, “but most settled, adapted, indulged in trade and soon became part of the local communities of farmers and fisherfolk.”

The excavations lasted five years and generated enormous local and international interest. Unusually for that time, he saw it as an important part of his job to involve the public in the project, and he provided viewing points around the site from where the work could be seen as it progressed.

The huge range of discoveries prompted an entrepreneur, Ian Skipper, to suggest to the York Archaeological Trust, for which Hall worked, that the excavation should be turned into a permanent exhibition below the planned shopping centre. Luckily the developers were happy with the idea, and the Jorvik Viking Centre, which Hall helped to develop, opened in 1984.

The centre went on to become one of the most successful archaeological exhibitions in the world. Visitors travel in a “time car” monorail that takes them past various Viking scenes (many of them — such as the butcher, fishmonger and latrine — with appropriate smells). To date, nearly 17 million people have visited the attraction.

Richard Andrew Hall was born at Ilford, Essex, on May 17 1949. His father’s job in the linen industry took the family to Belfast, where Richard was educated at the Royal Belfast Academical Institution. He read Archaeology at Queen’s University, Belfast, graduating in 1971. His dissertation, in which he updated the catalogue of Viking Age material for Ireland, marked the beginning of a lifelong interest. Later on, in the 1980s, he took a doctorate at Southampton University with a thesis on the towns of the English Danelaw.

Hall began his career in archaeology excavating several sites in Dublin and Derby, and also at Mount Grace, the Carthusian priory near Northallerton, Yorkshire.

Moving to York, he joined York Archaeological Trust in 1974 as excavations supervisor, eventually holding the position of director of archaeology and deputy director of the trust. He also held a post as lecturer in the Department of Continuing Education at the University of Leeds.

Hall’s expertise led him to advise numerous international excavations, especially of Viking sites in Scandinavia, among them a major dig at the Viking port of Kaupang, Norway. In 2001 archaeologists revealed evidence that the Vikings had abandoned the area in the mid-9th century, raising the possibility that York had been settled by Vikings from the Kaupang area.

Hall was a trustee of the Foundation for the Preservation of Archaeological Heritage and served on the council of the Society of Antiquaries of London, the executive board of the Council for British Archaeology Executive and the council of the Institute for Archaeologists, of which he served as chairman from 1987 to 1989. He was also president of the Society for Medieval Archaeology and of the Yorkshire Archaeological Society.

Besides Viking archaeology, Hall was active in the conservation and analysis of church fabric and oversaw excavations of what is thought to be the oldest complete Saxon crypt in England, uncovered during work on Ripon cathedral. In 2005 he led studies on the Ripon Charter Horn, a steer’s horn carved into a ceremonial musical instrument thought to have been given to the city in AD886 by Alfred the Great. Among other things he discovered that the horn had been filed down in what musical experts believe was an attempt to improve its tone and resonance.

During the 1980s Hall and his co-workers published a series of reports on the Coppergate excavations, and Hall also wrote a number of books about the Vikings and their world. In Exploring the World of the Vikings (2007) he investigated Viking culture from its origins in Scandinavia during the first millennium AD, through the period of raiding, trading and settling, to the last surviving settlements in 15th-century Greenland.

Hall’s first marriage to Linda Tollerton was dissolved. In 1991 he married a ceramics expert, Ailsa Mainman, who survives him with their two sons.

Richard Hall, born May 17 1949, died September 13 2011

Book Tour To Canada

2011-09-22T15:26:00.000-06:00

Hi Folks,

We leave tomorrow morning for a driving book tour of Idaho, Montana, and Alberta, CA, so this will have to suffice for a blog until our return on or about 6 October.
I expect to do some excerpt readings for interested fans while in Alberta, so wish me luck.

All the Best to You,
Jerry

Review--Confrontation: An Axe of Iron Novel

2011-09-16T16:49:00.000-06:00

Confrontation details the dangers and hardships of a large mixed group of Greenland Vikings and their attempts at a peaceful assimilation with the pre-historical natives of what is now the Province of Quebec, Canada, 1000-years ago.

Click on the title link to read a review of the second novel of the Axe of Iron series, Confrontation. Christie Olsen Field, of the Norwegian American Weekly newspaper wrote this review last summer.

Other reviewers opinions of Confrontation may be read on my website, under the Reviews button, here, along with synopsis and excerpts of the book.

Viking Museum Ship, Sea Stallion, Roskilde, Denmark

2011-09-02T10:56:00.000-06:00

This banner of the magnificent Sea Stallion, a modern, 98' recreation of an 11th century Viking Longship built in Glendalough, Ireland, appears on the website of the Vikingeskibsmuseet in Denmark. Full details of the ship's construction may be viewed in video and text on this site.

***

Oxford Viking massacre revealed by skeleton find

2011-08-25T18:41:00.000-06:00

"A furorae Normanorum libera Nos, Dominae!" No wonder King Ethelred the Unready ordered these Viking warriors killed, he was scared to death of them.

***

BBC

August 13, 2011

Evidence of a brutal massacre of Vikings in Oxford 1100 years ago has been uncovered by archaeologists.

At least 35 skeletons, all males aged 16 to 25 were discovered in 2008 at St John's College, Oxford.

Analysis of wound marks on the bones now suggests they had been subjected to violence.

Archaeologists analysing the find believe it dates from 1002 AD when King Ethelred the Unready ordered a massacre of all Danes (Vikings) in England.

The surprise discovery of the skeletons was made by Thames Valley Archaeological Services under the quadrangle at St John's College at the University of Oxford, before building work started on the site.

The bodies had not received any type of formal burial and they had been dumped in a mass grave on the site of a 4,000-year-old Neolithic henge monument.

Ceri Falys, an osteologist (a scientist who studies the structure of bones) from Thames Valley Archaeological Services, has been examining the bones since they were excavated. She has found a host of gruesome injuries on each of the individuals.

It was obvious at the time of excavation that many of the skulls had been fractured or crushed, but after piecing these skulls back together, she found that many of them were covered in blade and puncture wounds mostly to the back of the head.

One of the victims had puncture wounds to his pelvis that seem to have come from behind him and from the side, as well as substantial blade wounds to his skull, suggesting that he had been attacked from all sides by at least two different people.

These injuries were almost certainly fatal in each case, slicing through flesh and arteries right to the bone.

"Usually when people have been involved in hand to hand combat or are attacked you get evidence of this on the bones," Ceri Falys explained.

"You get cut marks on the forearms as they raise their arms to defend themselves, but we have minimal evidence of this on these skeletons, it seems that whoever was attacking them, it is likely that they were just trying to run away."'

It is possible that the Oxford skeletons were victims of an event called the St Brice's Day Massacre, recorded in a number of historical sources.

In AD1002, the Saxon king Ethelred the Unready recorded in a charter that he ordered "a most just extermination" of all the Danes in England.

He made the decision after he was told of a Danish plot to assassinate him.

The charter also recorded how on that day, the Danes in Oxford fled to St Fridewides church expecting to find refuge, but instead were pursued by the townspeople, who then set the church on fire.

Radiocarbon dating of the bones indicated that the bodies were dumped between AD960 and AD1020. This is compelling evidence for the association with St Brice's Day, explained archaeologist Sean Wallis, who directed the dig.

"We found evidence of charring on some of the bones, but not in the soil surrounding them.

"This ties in nicely with the documentary sources that the bodies may have been partially burnt prior to burial," he said.

Isotope analysis of the bones has shown that the men were eating a diet that was high in seafood.

This is an unusual find considering that they lived in inland Britain and perhaps a further indication that they may have been first or second generation Vikings.

A similar mass grave was found last year by Oxford Archaeology during work to build the Weymouth relief road.

It was radiocarbon dated to a similar period and again containing only young male victims, indicating that Anglo Saxon violence towards Vikings at the time may have been nationwide.

Salme Yields Evidence of Oldest Sailing Ship in Baltic Sea

2011-08-19T09:25:00.000-06:00

More data on the Viking ship discovered by archaeologists on an island off western Estonia. I disagree with the article's keel supposition as stated, for it an opinion unsupported by our collective present-day knowledge of these magnificent vessels.
NOTE: No Viking ship has ever been found with a keel; the reason being that a keeled sailing ship could not be run up on a beach, a common practice for them, nor could it be transported overland, another common practice. As far as is known, all Viking ocean-going vessels had a large steerboard affixed on the outside of the hull, on the starboard (a term no doubt derived from steerboard) aft quarter and extending well below the longitudinal axis of the hull. This steerboard performed the same function as the contemporary keel and could be secured up out of the water, allowing the crew to beach the ship.

***

August 11, 2011
Estonian Public Broadcasting

The ancient ship burial site in Salme on the island of Saaremaa still has some surprises in store.

The archeological excavations in Salme, soon to be completed, have yielded evidence that the ship that had been buried with 35 warriors and nobles had a keel, which in turn leads to the conclusion that it used sails. This represents the earliest known use of sails on a vessel in the Baltic Sea region, reported ETV.

"One piece of new information that we have been anticipating since winter was still to be found - namely, confirmation of whether it was a sailing ship or not. Now we have evidence that it used sails," said archeologist Jüri Peets of Tallinn University.

Peets called this discovery the cherry on top of the cake that was the nearly two-year-long archeological dig. "It is thought that sails were first introduced in the North Sea and Baltic Sea region at about 700 A.D., which is the conventional date. Our ship dates from the year 750. The ship from the year 700 was from the North Sea region, near Norway. However, here in the Baltic Sea region, this is without a doubt the oldest sailing ship that has been found," said Peets.

In addition to the discovery of the keel, the irregular rows of strong rivets found on the bottom of the vessel also prove that the ship used sails.

Maritime archaeologist Vello Mäss confirmed that the Salme ship was without a doubt a warship that used sails. Although sails had been long in use in the Mediterranean Sea region, it was the Norwegians who first started using them in the North Sea region. Mäss also suggested that perhaps two separate war parties on two different ships had met in Salme centuries ago. Such hypotheses concerning the Salme ship burial site are sure to keep the scientists busy for years to come.

30 Viking graves found in Setesdal

2011-08-10T10:02:00.000-06:00

Views and News from Norway

August 3, 2011

Thirty graves believed to originate from the Viking period have been discovered in the valley of Setesdal, southern Norway. The major discovery earlier this summer was made in connection with a road project in the area.

Newspaper Aftenposten reports that the burial area, near the settlement of Langeid, was first found in June as part of archaeological surveys connected to work on state highway 9, a road that winds through the scenic valley.

The graves lay side-by-side in deep, rectangular pits around 1.5 to 2.5 meters long. Most of the graves are believed to have been made between 900 and some point in the 1000's, although some of the graves could predate the Vikings by centuries.

A preliminary study last year had already found traces of archaeological interest in the region, including cooking pits and signs of early agricultural cultivation that suggest a settlement was built nearby. Early estimates believe this settlement may long predate the graves, and could go as far back as 600 BC.

As the graves have been found among moraine (accumulations of unconsolidated glacial debris characterized by stones and sand), researchers have found that much of the organic matter has been eroded away. Some remains have been found outside of the graves in the same area, but require further analysis before it can be determined whether they are animal or human. One grave found so far has postholes in all four corners, indicating that a structure with a roof was built over the grave at some point. Such a burial arrangement is usually reserved for those with higher status.

In terms of artifacts found on the site, field leader Camilla C. Wenn of the Museum of Cultural History, Oslo, told Aftenposten, "we have taken out a series of remains from the 10 graves that have been opened so far." Finds from these graves reported by Wenn include "three simple iron axes, of which one is dated from the period 850 to 950," as well as "a few knives and sickles, a pair of scales made with a copper alloy, five to six weighing instruments," "several spinning wheels," "two lovely 50 to 60 centimeter long sharpening stones, flint and some detached glass beads." Many of the metal objects found are poorly preserved, with some iron finds so badly corroded that it is difficult to tell what they are without the use of x-ray equipment at the Museum of Cultural History.

Because of the long time periods potentially covered by the graves and the other archaeological finds around them, researchers have lengthened their investigative period until August 19. "It is not unthinkable that we will manage to find further surprises," Wenn concluded.

Things I’ve Learned About Writing/Publishing

2011-08-05T08:54:00.000-06:00

The road to publication has been a nightmare because of the time and money wasted while I learned the business. I wish I could say that there is lots of help out there for the newbie’s, but actually, the reverse is true. You are prey swimming in the shark’s pool—take heed. Believe nobody, and get everything in writing, research, research, and research. Even then, you will have picked the worst time in the world’s economy to enter the business.

Dealing with agents is the most disheartening undertaking for a writer. Agents act like the writer exists because of agents, when in fact it is the other way around. I wasted a year trying to find an agent from among those professing to have an interest in my area of my genre only to find that there are not any in existence. So no, I have no need for an agent. Having said all of that, though, clearing the air so to speak, I do have a few suggestions if you are interested.

Do your homework on the submission guidelines for any query. All literary agents will have their own guidelines; adhere to them absolutely. Do not ever send a manuscript unless it is requested. Hire professional editors to edit everything that another person will read, especially the final draft of your manuscript. An English teacher is not an editor and you cannot edit your own work, so hire someone. Your professionalism will determine whether you ever make the grade. A shabby cover letter on your submission packet will guarantee its demise. Agents and publishers are busy people and they have no time to waste on people who do not follow the submission guidelines.

Okay, it is time to consider your mission—to get published. I will assume that your manuscript is a first draft. Before you can send out query letters telling the world of the birth of the great American novel, your work needs editing. I do not mean having a friend, an English teacher, your boss, or any other layman read your manuscript, no, I mean that you must engage the services of a professional editor. Thus begins the process of polishing your manuscript until it is the best it can be. This process can involve numerous corrections and rewrites. The time and expense involved varies with the quality of the work. One hundred thousand words will cost in the neighborhood of $2000.00, or more, by the time you get it right.

Believe it or not, writing your book is only the beginning. With a final draft of your manuscript in hand, it is time to query. Famous people query with a proposal before writing the book. I will assume that you are not yet famous. As an author, you cannot deal directly with one of the large publishing houses, so your next challenge is to interest a literary agent in your work. If you find a literary agent, your relationship will be contractual. Do nothing with anyone without a contract. Fully understand your part of the contract before signing or hire an attorney versed in literary contracts to help you understand. There are numerous listings of literary agents on the Internet. Research each agent for their submission guidelines, select those receptive to your genre, be certain that they are accepting submissions, submit only what they require, and never send an unsolicited manuscript, they will not read it. Your literary agent will handle your contractual relationship with a publisher; they are your agent acting in your behalf.

If you are fortunate enough to become a published author through the literary agent/publisher/reader sequence of progression, congratulations, you have hit the big time. Your publisher will handle all the details of composition/format, cover design, printing/binding, fulfillment/marketing, and warehouse/distribution, leaving you free to crank out books. You will have little or no input regarding any of the production aspects of your book, nor will you retain any rights other than copyright. The publisher will own the ISBN and all future negotiations for anything concerning that work will be through, or with the permission of, the publisher.

Okay, you have spent a year submitting to literary agents without results. If you have not completely lost interest in publishing your work, you are left with publishing it yourself, e.g. self-publishing or becoming an independent publisher. A self-published author has hired a publishing company to publish a book, surrendering all rights save copyright—this last is negotiable in some instances. An independent publisher has formed a small company and gone through the process from copyright to a finished book ready for the market. That author owns all rights to the book because often the author and the publishing company are one and the same. Books are produced and marketed by an independent publisher working closely with a large full service book production facility such as BookMasters, Ashland, OH, where everything is done in house.

Regardless of the method used to publish your work yourself, you will be responsible for promotion and marketing. In working with an organization such as BookMasters, you will already have a leg up as they handle some of the initial marketing through their own marketing department. Getting the word out before and after the publication date is vital to your sales success. You must have a website and/or a blog that calls attention to your book and ultimately leads a visitor to your order page. If you do not want to handle book sales from your garage, then your website order page will link your customers to your distributor or other points of sale that you have set up. In this way, someone else will take care of the myriad details of the warehousing/distribution of your work.

Solicit professional book reviewers. Do not send them a book until you have queried them first. Be the consummate professional insofar as your contacts with reviewers. Always include a cover letter with your book that includes a short synopsis and your expectations as the author. Reviews are important and they can restore your bruised and battered ego when you read what someone else has to say about your work. Their reviews look good on your website and provide potential customers for your next book a sales closer as they read your book cover’s ad copy.

I have found that conventional print and display advertising on websites is only minimally successful. The mission here is to get your name and that of your book out to as many sites on the Internet as possible. Hire professional people to do this for you, e.g. Theodocia McLean, promotionalservices@booksinsync.com/. Additionally, Amazon is one of the most effective and important book sales tools out there. When you have your book listed with them be sure that you also use their ‘Look Inside the Book’ program. Ditto for Google Book Search. Going through the submission process with Internet book promotion and sales sites is time consuming, but the rewards outweigh this expenditure.

Local booksellers such as Barnes and Noble and Borders do everything possible to arrange and facilitate book-signing events for local authors. So, be certain you contact the individual store’s book manager to set one up for you. They provide a display table and chairs, posters, and a newspaper announcement of the event, and it is all free. In addition, they will order a supply of your books to stock your book-signing. Not a bad deal, I think.

If you do not have letterhead stationery, design some, including the envelope. Remember, you are trying to sell a product, be professional in all of your contacts. Edit religiously, use spell check. Everything that you write is a reflection on you personally, so do it right the first time because the one chance is usually all you will get. And oh, good luck to you.

J. A. Hunsinger, Vinland Publishing, http://www.vinlandpublishing.com/

Man Receives 100,000 Euros for Treasure Trove

2011-07-28T11:47:00.000-06:00

Viking artifacts continue to surface in Estonia. This coin trove, first reported in January 2011, is the most monetarily valuable so far.

***

ERR News
Published: 28.01.2011 10:34

Photo: Postimees/Scanpix

A man who found a large hoard of Viking-era silver in Harju County last summer has received 100,000 euros from the state as a finder's reward.

The treasure was dated to around 1060 and consisted of 1,329 coins and nine pieces of silver appraised at about 200,000 euros, Eesti Ekspress reported.

The finder had been conducting investigations in the field with the consent of the land owner. Other items included an axe, also from before the 13th century, and several daggers and several hundred other silver coins.

Most of the coins were forged in areas controlled by Germany, but there were also coins from Britain, Denmark, Sweden, Arabia and Hungary; and one Italian and two Bohemian coins.

Dorset burial pit Viking had filed teeth

2011-07-22T09:29:00.000-06:00

Archaeologists reported an interesting discovery near Dorset, UK, with the excavation of a 10th century burial pit that contains the remains of 54-Viking warriors. The supposition is that they were executed and thrown into the pit for disposal.

***

BBC

July 07, 2011

Archaeologists have discovered one of the victims of a suspected mass Viking burial pit found in Dorset had grooves filed into his two front teeth.

Experts believe a collection of bones and decapitated heads, unearthed during the creation of the Weymouth Relief Road, belong to young Viking warriors.

During analysis, a pair of front teeth was found to have distinct incisions.

Archaeologists think it may have been designed to frighten opponents or show status as a great fighter.

Oxford Archaeology project manager David Score said: "It's difficult to say how painful the process of filing teeth may have been, but it wouldn't have been a pleasant experience.

"The incisions have been very carefully made and it is most likely that they were filed by a skilled craftsman.

"The purpose behind filed teeth remains unclear but, as we know these men were warriors, it may have been to frighten opponents in battle or to show their status as a great fighter."

Multiple wounds

The burial pit, found in 2009, contained 51 skulls and 54 bodies.

Many of the executed men suffered multiple wounds inflicted by a sharp blade, including one skeleton with six cut marks to the back of the neck.

Dorset County Council senior archaeologist Steve Wallis said radiocarbon dating showed they come from about AD970 to 1025.

Mr Wallis said those dates fell within the period of Viking raids on the Anglo Saxons in the UK, and isotope analysis of teeth found in a severed jaw suggests they were from the Nordic countries.

He said: "It's great that the burial pit on Ridgeway is still surprising us and teaching us more about who these men may have been and what they may have been like.

"It is very rare that this kind of deliberate dental modification is found in European remains, although it is often found in cultures from around the world, so that it was found in an excavation in Dorset is fantastic."

Archaeologists Find Pre-Viking Ship Burial (3)

2011-07-15T10:32:00.000-06:00

A significant archaeological discovery has been made of the site of a Viking battle that occurred on an island in the Baltic west of the Estonian mainland. Swedish Vikings (Svear or Gotar), no doubt. This article appeared in the English version of the ERR News from Estonia last year and I missed it, so I include it as a starting point for ongoing news from this site. Standby for more news on this active excavation.

***

ERR News
Published: 30.08.2010 09:51

Excavations in Salme ( Photo: ERR )

Another ship burial discovered this year in the village of Salme may turn out to be a pre-viking era battleground burial, an unparalleled find in Europe. So far, 16 skeletons of men killed in battle have been discovered on the site.

There is no doubt that a fierce struggle took place some 1,250 years ago near what is now the village of Salme on the island of Saaremaa, said Jüri Peets, professor of archaeology at Tallinn University. "Our estimate is 30 casualties, plus the same amount of injured. The skeletons bear sword marks. This shows the battle took place on land - you can't reach the enemy with a sword from a boat. There were also arrowheads found in the skeletons and in a shield."

The remains of the men-at-arms have been preserved as if by a miracle - at some point, three cable pipes were laid straight through the hull, narrowly missing the ancient treasure.

Such a mass grave of warriors from that period has never before been discovered anywhere in Europe. This, and the large amount of artifacts found, make the discovery exceptional, said Peets.

The foreign warriors were buried with their belongings. For example, the findings included a gilded bronze sword handle. The archaeologists plan to extract a tooth from one of the skulls and submit it to a DNA-analysis to find out where the unwelcome visitors might have arrived from.

The estimated length of the ship is 18 meters and the width 3.5 meters. The excavations will continue next year by the village schoolhouse, where the bow of the ship is expected to be.

In 2008, a smaller ship with an estimated length of 10 meters was discovered during excavations in Salme.

The Trial of Eirik the Red

2011-07-09T20:20:00.000-06:00

I wrote this skit last year for a Viking reenactment group in Colorado. It has never been published, but I thought to do so now for readers who might have an interest in what may have occurred on Iceland in the 10th century that led to the banishment of Eirik Thorvaldsson--Eirik the Red.
His subsequent voyages into the western ocean from Iceland in 985-986, looking for a new home, led to the discovery and colonization of Greenland by the Norse people. As you know, he already knew of Greenland's existence, from a previous explorer by the name of Gunnbjorn Ulfsson who found the Earth's largest island about 100-years before, but I digress.
The NARRATOR sets the stage and the LAW SPEAKER is the supreme and final authority of the Althing, an assembly of Viking chieftains.

***

Southern Iceland
Spring 985 AD

NARRATOR: (calm, strong voice throughout) I will tell you a Viking tale of murder, revenge, and adventure that began on Iceland in about 985. Later, the story moves to Greenland, and finally to Vinland, the land that would become North America.

During those times arguments between men frequently led to violence because the laws of the land were not clearly defined. Thirty-six jarls, or chieftains, ruled the four major districts of Iceland. When trouble came the district high chieftain called a thing, a lawsuit or assembly of freemen to decide the fate of a lawbreaker. Attended by minor chieftains acting as a council, the high chieftain assumed the position of the law speaker--judge and jury--during the thing and his verdicts were final.

And so it was on Iceland with a man called Eirik Thorvaldsson, who later became known as Eirik the Red. A vile tempered man, Eirik stood accused of killing two men in a fit of rage. One, Filth-Eyjolf, a kinsman of the owner of a neighboring farm, killed two of Eirik’s slaves for causing a rock slide that destroyed a sheep shed. A kinsman of Filth-Eyjolf, Hrafen the Dueler, sought revenge for the killing and Eirik killed him, too.

In a separate matter that led to killings, Eirik loaned a set of his bed boards to a neighbor, Thorgest. Eirik later asked for the return of his boards and Thorgest refused. Fighting resulted from this theft. There were two main factions, those men supporting Eirik the Red and those men supporting Thorgest. The fighting turned into a blood feud, spreading over the district, finally reaching the point of open warfare when Eirik and his men killed two of Thorgest’s sons and several of his followers.

As the feud spread, the district chieftain intervened and called for a thing at Thorsnes, in the south of Iceland, to settle the matter. The word went out over the district that the fighting was to stop and all landowning freemen were expected to attend.

The Trial of Eirik the Red

NARRATOR: The people gathered in the amphitheater of the Thorsnes Thing, among the rocks and grasses along the base of a sheer granite cliff overlooking the sea. A grass-covered knoll dominated one end and scattered birch trees dotted the landscape. A splash of color from the woolen clothing of the people gathered around the base of the knoll brightened the earth tones of the scenery and lent a festive air as the people stood in groups or milled around the wood fires to stay warm. The buzz of many conversations filled the air.

A chill onshore wind, moist with spray from the breakers that crashed onto the rocky shoreline, ruffled the tall grass and the leaves of the birch trees. Low grey clouds obscured the sky and the summit of the volcano Hekla, in the near distance. The law speaker and his council of minor chieftains sat atop the knoll. His eyes played over his charges as the last of the latecomers joined friends and kinsmen.

Prominently arrayed nearby, Eirik the Red, his wife, three sons, daughter, kinsmen, and friends, stood apart from the others. The immediate family had not been involved in the feud, but was present in a support role. Eirik presented a commanding figure, hands fisted on his hips; his red beard blew in the wind as he glared belligerently at his enemies standing nearby.

The law speaker got to his feet. Silence fell over the people as all waited for their high chieftain to speak. He beckoned those having business at the thing to draw near.

Eirik, the accused, and Geirstein and Odd of Jorvi, the first of the accusers, stepped forward.

The law speaker looked at Eirik for a moment before he turned his attention to the other two men.

LAW SPEAKER: (firm voice) “Tell me your part in this matter.”

ACCUSERS: (angry, loud voices) “Eirik killed our kinsmen, Filth-Eyjolf and Hrafen the Dueler at Leikskalar,” Odd said.

“We demand to settle our differences by the einvigi, a duel to the death, each of us in turn.” Geirstein said.

NARRATOR: Eirik made to bluster at them until stopped by the raised hand of the law speaker. The law speaker glanced at the crowd and then fastened his attention on the two accusers.

LAW SPEAKER: (forceful) “There will be no einvigi. A duel to the death will not solve this matter. Now, who witnessed these killings?”

WITNESSES: (shouted from the crowd) “I saw Eirik kill Eyjolf,” a man said. “Aye, I saw him kill Eyjolf without warning and then he had a fight with Hrafen the Dueler and killed him, too,” another man added.

NARRATOR: The law speaker motioned them forward.

LAW SPEAKER: (calm, questioning tone) “Why did Eirik kill, Eyjolf? Tell me what happened to make him kill him.”

WITNESSES: (angry, voice raised) “Eirik’s two thralls caused a rock slide that smashed a sheep shed. Eyjolf got mad and killed both of them. When Eirik heard about it he flew into a rage. He and Eyjolf argued and Eirik killed him.”

NARRATOR: Over the next hour or so, the law speaker also heard from Thorgest and two of his witnesses on the other matter before the thing. Thorgest admitted his part in starting the feud by stealing Eirik’s bed boards. But, he would never forgive Eirik for killing his sons and kinsmen. His anger boiled over, forcing the law speaker to silence him. It seemed the problems were without solution. A pattern of violence was emerging that all pointed in one direction. Things were not going well for Eirik.

LAW SPEAKER: (questioning tone) “Are there other witnesses for the accusers?”

NARRATOR: The law speaker looked out over the silent assembly. When nobody answered his eyes came to rest on Eirik.

LAW SPEAKER: (forceful) “What say you?”

EIRIK: (angry, voice raised) “Aye, I killed both of them, everybody knows that.” Eirik sweeps a hand out over the onlookers. “Eyjolf killed my thralls and I killed him for that. It is my right. He deprived me of my property. Hrafen the Dueler attacked me and I defended myself, killing him in the process. Thorgest is a common thief and I attacked him and his men for stealing from me. I make no apology for any of this. It is my business and mine alone.”

NARRATOR: Eirik glared at his accusers and their witnesses. The law speaker’s expression did not change during Eirik’s final outburst; he looked at him silently for a heartbeat.

LAW SPEAKER: (very forceful tone) “I will decide what is to be done, according to our laws and customs. You, Eirik Thorvaldsson will heed my words.”

NARRATOR: The law speaker’s commanding voice boomed out over the crowd. Eirik gritted his teeth, his famous temper barely held in check as he glared at the law speaker. Eirik heaved a great sigh, knowing full well that he could not afford to anger his chieftain.

LAW SPEAKER: (loud, for all to hear) “Who speaks for Eirik?”

NARRATOR: The law speaker’s eyes swept the crowd.

WITNESSES: (shouted from crowd) “We do!”

NARRATOR: Thorbjorn and a man called Styr stepped forward from the crowd. The law speaker beckoned for them to speak.

WITNESSES: (loud clear voices) “Eirik defended himself when attacked by Thorgest and his followers,” Thorbjorn said. “Aye, we fought with him,” Styr added.

LAW SPEAKER: (questioning tone) “Who started the argument that led to this fighting?”

NARRATOR: The law speaker’s eyes bored into the eyes of the two witnesses.

Both men seemed uncomfortable, each glancing at Eirik for support.

EIRIK: (angrily shouting) “I started the argument. Thorgest stole my property. I wanted him to return my bed boards. He refused.”

NARRATOR: The law speaker nodded thoughtfully, motioning for the two witnesses to continue.

EIRIK: (angry, loud, threatening) “Enough of this; I have not denied the killings. Make your decision.”

NARRATOR: Eirik waved his arms angrily, shouting at the law speaker and glaring defiantly at his accusers and their witnesses. Shouts and angry gestures of defiance swept through the crowd, with each faction loudly voicing their opinions. The order of the Thing fell apart, beginning a slide into chaos.

LAW SPEAKER: (loud, very forceful) “Hold! Quiet all of you!”

NARRATOR: The law speaker shouted above the din, both hands over his head in an attempt to restore order. Gradually the people became silent, their frustration and anger satisfied for the moment. Everybody was on their feet, naturally split into the feuding factions. The law speaker’s hold over his people was the only thing preventing bloodshed. He glanced at Eirik occasionally as he strode back and forth atop the mound, his mind grappling with what he knew he must do. Seeming to come to a decision, he stopped suddenly and gave his full attention to Eirik the Red.

LAW SPEAKER: (forceful) “Eirik Thorvaldsson, you stand accused of killings and outlawry.”

NARRATOR: Again, the deep voice of the law speaker boomed out over the crowd. A kind of animal growl rose from many of the people. The law speaker’s raised hand restored order after a moment. As all fell silent, waiting for the verdict and sentence to be passed down, Leif Eiriksson, the oldest of Eirik’s offspring stepped closer to his mother Thjodhild, and draped an arm over her shoulders protectively. Tears wet her cheeks.

LAW SPEAKER: (loud, forceful) “Eirik, I find you guilty of all charges. You are banished from all of Iceland for three years. No man will interfere while you settle your affairs. Be gone from this island before the new moon or you will be hunted down and killed.”

NARRATOR: Pandemonium ruled for a time, while the law speaker and his council departed the scene. Eventually, the people departed for their scattered farms. Eirik, his family, kinsmen, and followers departed for his farm at Eiriksstadir, for a strategy meeting. At this meeting, it was decided to explore and settle the unknown land sighted by Gunnbjorn Ulfsson as he was storm driven far off course to the northwest of Iceland. Thorvald, Thorstein, and Freydis, Eirik’s offspring, were to remain with their mother on Iceland to find people to join the expedition. Eirik, his son Leif, and a full crew of men, sailed from Iceland on the ebb tide the following morning. They found the ice covered island, later to be known as Greenland, spending the remainder of that first year exploring the rugged coastline and building shelters to stay the winter.

Settlement of Greenland

NARRATOR: (calm, strong voice throughout) The following year, during the summer of 986, Eirik, his son Leif Eiriksson, and other men of his crew, returned to Iceland for their families. Upon his return, Eirik found that his other two sons and daughter had gathered 500-people, 25-ships, and supplies for the first year of settlement. It is said that Eirik called the island Greenland to entice people to follow him there. That is not certain, nor is it known if he actually gave the island its name. Fourteen of the original complement of 25-ships made it to Greenland, the fate of the other 11-ships is unknown, but given the stormy waters of the North Atlantic Ocean, they probably rest on the seabed somewhere between Iceland and Greenland.

Greenland is the largest island on Earth and the only portion of the island not covered with an ice sheet, is along the southwestern coast. During the first year, the people settled there on small farms around the head of a long fjord that came to be known as Eiriksfjord. Eirik and his family claimed the best land at the head of the fjord and he called his farm Brattahlid. In the beginning, green grass for livestock forage was abundant. There were even a few thin stands of stunted birch trees and willow bushes until all had been eaten to the ground by the settler’s livestock. Trade with Iceland and Norway commenced and life was good.

In later years, several people moved 400-miles north to another likely fjord that became known as Lysufjord. Eventually, as many as 4000-Viking settlers may have lived on Greenland for some 400-years and then, sometime between the 14th and 15th centuries, all disappeared, never to be seen again.

Sighting of North America

NARRATOR: During that first summer of the Greenland settlements, a seafarer and trader named Bjarni Herjulfsson arrived on Iceland, from Norway, to find that his father, Herjulf had sailed to Greenland with Eirik the Red and his followers. Bjarni immediately put back to sea and set sail for the island. A violent storm blew him far off course and he missed Greenland; however, he sighted unknown land further to the west—North America. Realizing his mistake, Bjarni reversed course and finally found Greenland, reuniting with his father.

Discovery of America

NARRATOR: Leif Eiriksson later became interested in Bjarni’s tale of unknown land to the west of Greenland, bought Bjarni’s ship, and with his original crew, sailed into the western ocean to have a look. On the voyage he landed on two shores, one he called Helluland (flat stone land) and the other he called Markland (forestland). Today we call them Baffin Island and Labrador respectively. Leif and his crew then sailed further south, finally landing on the northeastern tip of another island. We call this island Newfoundland. What Leif and his men called the island we may never know, but the saga writers two centuries later referred to it as Vinland

Leif built a settlement on Newfoundland, consisting of eight buildings, that he called Leifsbudir (Leif’s Booths). This settlement was used for several years for some unknown purpose.

In 1962, the Norwegian explorer, Helge Ingstad and his wife, Anne-Stine Ingstad, an archaeologist, found Leifsbudir and spent the next several years excavating the site. Although the sagas tell us that there are two other settlements in Vinland, Hop and Straumfjord, which have not been found, we have positive identification of Leifsbudir.

So, sometime between 997 and 1002--nobody is certain of the year--Leif Eiriksson, the eldest son of Eirik the Red, became the first man of European descent to land on the North American continent, almost 500-years before Christopher Columbus was born.

***

Abrupt climate change doomed Norse settlements: Study

2011-06-30T17:59:00.000-06:00

Interest continues to develop for a sudden climatic change leading to the destruction of the two medieval Viking settlements on Greenland as the scientific community gears-up for another summer of archaeological work in the far north.

***

MONTREAL GAZETTE

BY RANDY BOSWELL, POSTMEDIA NEWS JUNE 23, 2011

Photograph by: File photo, Postmedia News

New scientific evidence supporting a long-standing theory that abrupt climate change probably doomed Greenland's Norse settlements about 650 years ago may also explain why most Canadians today are not speaking Danish and celebrating their Viking ancestry.

The study by a group of researchers from Denmark, Germany and Norway used samples of marine sediment from Greenland's west coast to reconstruct a picture of the giant island's climate over the past 1,500 years. Their findings showed that when Scandinavian settlers led by Eric the Red first established colonies on Greenland in 985, the west coast around present-day Disko Bay — located just 400 kilometres east of Baffin Island across the Davis Strait — was relatively warm and conducive to the farming life the settlers favoured.

It was during that early era of Norse settlement in Greenland that Viking explorers — most famously Eric's son, Leif Ericsson — are known to have become the first Europeans to reach the Americas.

L'Anse aux Meadows, at the northern tip of Newfoundland, was the site of a Norse settlement established around 1,000 but abandoned shortly after — primarily, scholars believe, because of attacks by hostile aboriginal tribes known as "skraelings" to Ericsson and his fellow adventurers.

The Norse continued to inhabit their Greenland settlements for at least 350 more years, with evidence documented from Baffin Island by Canadian archaeologist Pat Sutherland suggesting sporadic contact between Greenlandic Norse traders and the Dorset culture, ancient aboriginals who were later overrun — probably before 1400 — by the eastward-migrating Thule ancestors of modern Inuit.

But around that same time, the European researchers have concluded in a study published in the journal Boreas, a prolonged stretch of cold weather on Greenland appears to have led to the demise of the Norse settlements there. And any chance of a renewed effort by the Scandinavian seafarers to colonize Canada disappeared with them.

That left the next, and enduring, wave of European settlement in North America to French and English colonists after explorer John Cabot reached Newfoundland in 1497.

"Our study shows a major shift towards cooler conditions and extensive sea-ice which coincides with the estimated time for the collapse of the western settlement in AD 1350," University of Copenhagen geologist Sofia Ribeiro said in a summary of the new study.

"The Norse were proud of being Europeans, farmers and Christians, and never adopted the hunting and survival techniques of the Inuit, so these temperature shifts would have caused significant problems for the colonists and their livestock."

Ribeiro cautioned that "we cannot attribute the end of the Norse civilization to a single factor," but noted that "there is enough evidence to suggest that climate change played a major role in determining its collapse."

The harsher climate in Greenland would have made "farming and cattle production increasingly difficult" at the same time that increased sea ice "prevented navigation and trading with Europe," she stated.

Ribeiro told Postmedia News that "what happened to the Norse after 1350 is a mystery."

But she noted that in both Greenland and nearby Newfoundland, "there were no specially favourable conditions for the Norse to settle there during medieval times."

The Boreas study pointing to the onset of severe cooling in Greenland at the end of the Norse habitation supports recent research published by scientists at Brown University in Rhode Island in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

After probing sediments from two lakes near Greenland's west coast, they also concluded that abrupt climate cooling preceded the disappearance of the Norse settlements in the region.

RBoswell@postmedia.com

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

Workers find ancient Viking burial ground

2011-06-27T09:30:00.000-06:00

From the Irish Independent as reported in the Archaeology Daily News: there will be more on this unfolding story as the local archaeologists open the dig.

***

Irish Independent

June 26, 2011

Ancient skeletal remains have been uncovered by contractors working on the largest energy project in the country.

The unrecorded burial ground was discovered on farmland in Rush, north Dublin, as EirGrid laid piping for a high voltage direct current (HVDC) underground power line.

Several skulls and bones were recovered on the strip of land near Rogerstown estuary, which locals historians believe could date back to the Vikings in the 9th century.

An on-site archaeologist has informed the National Monuments Service and is expected to be given the go-ahead to carry out a full archaeological survey next week.

It is not yet known how many bodies are buried there or exactly what era they date back to.

A spokeswoman for EirGrid said the section of land has been cordoned off and was being protected from heavy rainfall until examinations can be completed.

However work is continuing in the surrounding area.

"A previously unrecorded burial ground has been located on private land in Rush earlier this week," she said.

"It wasn't marked up on any ordnance survey maps."

She said there was no evidence of disturbance on the land before the 1.5 metres deep trench was dug on the farmland.

More on What May Have Happened to the Greenland Vikings.

2011-06-23T20:41:00.000-06:00

22 June 2011

In the past two months there have been several articles written indicating that the demise of the Greenland Vikings may have been weather related; specifically the worsening winter weather of Greenland with the advent of the Mini-ice Age beginning in about the 11th century. Some of the articles are posted on this Blog.

As you may know from reading the Axe of Iron posts, I have made mention of the fact that the Viking Age began with the warming weather of the Medieval Warm Period in the 8th century, ending during the Mini-ice Age in the 12th century. I also have long held that the disappearance of the entire Greenland Viking population was a gradual trend that began soon after the establishment of the two known settlements around the year 986. Some of the population remained to the end of the Eastern Settlement in the 15th century.

Here is what I wrote on the subject, excerpted from the Historical Perspective of Axe of Iron: The Settlers, the first novel of the Axe of Iron series of historical fiction novels:

“The two known Norse Greenland colonies prospered into the late fifteenth century. The population eventually swelled to as many as four thousand people at any given time, spread among farms in the areas around these settlements.

At some point late in the fourteenth or early in the fifteenth century, all settlement attempts and trading voyages to Greenland from Iceland and other points to the east were abandoned. Sometime in the middle of the fourteenth century (Western Settlement), and just after the turn of the fifteenth century (Eastern Settlement), the Greenland populations disappeared without a trace.

Perhaps most of the inhabitants of the Greenland settlements had already moved west having migrated to successful settlements already established by other Northmen with the native populations of North America over the ensuing years.

In any case, I maintain they eventually gave up the sea. Like thousands of their compatriots in Europe, they settled ashore. All impetus and desire for undertaking the perilous voyages became a thing of the distant past.

Around 1450, winters became colder in the far north, a lot colder. The ice in the harbors and fjords began remaining well into summer, and then it just remained. Greenland became uninhabitable for the Northmen. The Medieval Warm Period ended. A mini–ice age gripped the Arctic and northern portions of North America for the next four hundred years, into the last half of the nineteenth century.

During the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, a Catholic Prelate voyaged to Greenland, ostensibly to check on his flock. Although a few domestic animals grazed the hillsides, he found no people, living or dead. No ships, supplies, or tools remained. The people and their possessions had simply vanished into the mists of time.

The Icelandic bishop Gisli Oddsson, quoting church records, stated in the sixteenth or seventeenth century (the exact date is unknown) that the Norse Greenlanders joined the natives of America in 1342, giving up Christianity in the process. The record notes a firm date for the migration, not sometime in the fourteenth century.

We know three things for certain if one considers the disappearance of these people objectively: They did not sail to Iceland or Europe; they did not remain on Greenland until they died of hunger or exposure; they did not simply disappear. No, they had been migrating slowly to North America for five hundred years. Assimilation with the indigenous peoples became, over time, the Norse Greenlanders’ only option for survival. It is the only logical answer to the one-thousand-year-old mystery.

Since their assimilation, almost everything the Northmen left behind on this continent has turned to dust, become locked under the permafrost, or disappeared under many feet of debris in the forests and along the seashores of North America.

I have attempted to tell a tale of what might have happened, what could have happened, and considering the options available, what probably did happen to the Norse Greenlanders.

More than 40–generations have elapsed since they came to this continent. Now their very existence, everything they accomplished, has faded from the collective memory of all the peoples they contacted and lived among.

I prefer to believe the four thousand live on however, their genetic makeup diluted by the intervening centuries of time. They are still here, smiling back at us from the faces of the Inuit Greenlanders, Cree, Ojibwa, and Iroquois with whom they joined so long ago.”

Jones, 95, 111.

Jones, 95.
Thomas H. McGovern, The Demise of Norse Greenland (Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington, DC 2000) 327.
Ingstad, 177–178.
Ingstad, 179–180.
History Channel, The Vikings Fury From The North (A&E Television Networks, New York, NY, 2000) VCR Tape.

***

This new data seems to indicate that the winters on Greenland worsened and the summers became shorter and colder much sooner than originally thought, perhaps as early as the beginning of the 11th century. As a result the dates indicated in the Historical Perspective are off by at least 300-years.

The Greenland Vikings did not disappear, they left Greenland to survive. As a pastoral/littoral society, life in Greenland became untenable with the shorter and colder summers. The exodus began as a trickle in the late 10 and early 11 century’s and continued each year until every single one of those remaining on Greenland had migrated to North America as the fury of the Mini-Ice Age enveloped the far North.

J. A. Hunsinger, Vinland Publishing http://www.vinlandpublishing.com/

Surprise Archeological Find from Iceland’s Settlement

2011-06-18T20:40:00.000-06:00

Iceland Review

May 19, 2011

Archaeological remains that were found during an excavation in Urridakot in Gardabaer, a neighboring town of Reykjavik, were much older than archaeologists had assumed. They date back to the settlement of Iceland in the 9th century AD while Urridakot is first mentioned in written sources from the 16th century.

Excavation has been ongoing in Urridakot in the past years because of planned construction in the area. In 2006 the local authorities asked the Institute of Archaeology to fully complete the registration of archaeological remains within the town limits, Fréttabladid reports.

"The first test dig was made in Urridakot in 2007 and last year the excavation was to be completed at which point I decided to dig in the area between those that had been tested," said archaeologist Ragnheidur Traustadóttir.

"Nothing could be seen on the surface and there are no sources on anything in the area but then we discovered a magnificent cowshed from the Settlement Era," she described, adding that they also found a lodge, storage room, pantry and a cooking hole from the 9th to 11th century; further research is required to determine how old the remains are exactly.

Remains dating back to the Middle Ages, shortly after 1226, have also been found: a pantry, kitchen and outhouse. No living quarters from that time have been found yet but they may have been located above the excavation area.

Conditions for preservation are poor at Urridakot so biological remains haven't been found. Few but notable objects have been discovered such as two spindles, one of which is decorated and the other inscribed with runes, which is rare in Iceland.

Two pearls from the Viking Age have also been found, along with baking plates, a sharpener imported from Norway, knives made of iron, nails and various bronze sheets.

Traustadóttir said there are many indications that there was seasonal habitation at Urridakot but not permanent; no such dwelling, known as sel in Icelandic, has been thoroughly researched.

The remains found at Urridakot will be displayed in the future although probably not at that exact location. They might be exhibited in connection with Hofsstadir, the local archaeological center.

Greenland Cold Snap Linked to Viking Disappearance

2011-06-04T10:58:00.000-06:00

Mon May 30, 4:37 pm ET

OSLO (Reuters) – A cold snap in Greenland in the 12th century may help explain why Viking settlers vanished from the island, scientists said on Monday.

The report, reconstructing temperatures by examining lake sediment cores in west Greenland dating back 5,600 years, also indicated that earlier, pre-historic settlers also had to contend with vicious swings in climate on icy Greenland.

"Climate played (a) big role in Vikings' disappearance from Greenland," Brown University in the United States said in a statement of a finding that average temperatures plunged 4 degrees Celsius (7F) in 80 years from about 1100.

Such a shift is roughly the equivalent of the current average temperatures in Edinburgh, Scotland, tumbling to match those in Reykjavik, Iceland. It would be a huge setback to crop and livestock production.

"There is a definite cooling trend in the region right before the Norse disappear," said William D'Andrea of Brown University, the lead author of the study in the U.S. journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers have scant written or archaeological records to figure out why Viking settlers abandoned colonies on the western side of the island in the mid-1300s and the eastern side in the early 1400s.

Conflicts with indigenous Inuit, a search for better hunting grounds, economic stresses and natural swings in climate, perhaps caused by shifts in the sun's output or volcanic eruptions, could all be factors.

LITTLE ICE AGE

Scientists have previously suspected that a cooling toward a "Little Ice Age" from the 1400s gradually shortened growing seasons and added to sea ice that hampered sailing links with Iceland or the Nordic nations.

The study, by scientists in the United States and Britain, added the previously unknown 12th century temperature plunge as a possible trigger for the colonies' demise. Vikings arrived in Greenland in the 980s, during a warm period like the present.

"You have an interval when the summers are long and balmy and you build up the size of your farm, and then suddenly year after year, you go into this cooling trend, and the summers are getting shorter and colder and you can't make as much hay," D'Andrea said.

The study also traced even earlier swings in the climate to the rise and fall of pre-historic peoples on Greenland starting with the Saqqaq culture, which thrived from about 4,500 years ago to 2,800 years ago.

Scientists fear that the 21st century warming is caused by climate change, stoked by a build-up of greenhouse gases from human activities. An acceleration of warming could cause a meltdown of the Greenland ice sheet, raising world sea levels.

Copyright © 2011 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.

Greenland Flourishes Due to Global Warming and Climate Change

2011-05-27T10:53:00.000-06:00

May 16, 2011

by Hans Bader

OpenMarket.org

in Agriculture,Energy,Environment,Global Warming,International,Natural Resources,Regulation

Alarmists have been decrying the effects of global warming on Greenland for years, even though Greenland was greenest during the Medieval Warm Period, and Greenland’s Vikings, who flourished during that warm period, died out when cold temperatures returned, reducing them to starvation. (It was warmer in the year 1003 than 2003.) Now, the residents of Greenland, the world’s largest island, are once again profiting from global warming, reports the Washington Post:

“Rather than questioning global warming, many of this island’s 60,000 inhabitants seem to be racing to cash in. The tiny capital of Nuuk is bracing for record numbers of visitors this year; the retreating sea ice means a longer tourist season and more cruise ships . . . Hunters are boasting of more and bigger caribou, and the annual cod migration is starting earlier and lasting longer. In the far south, farmers are trying their hand at an exotic form of agriculture: growing vegetables. ‘Before, the growing season was too short for vegetables,’ . . .‘Now it is getting longer each year.’”

Since 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency has sought to regulate greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide (which we breathe out and plants consume) because they supposedly threaten public health in the United States by causing global warming. President Obama has backed a corporate welfare-filled global-warming bill that would increase electricity bills. Obama admitted to the San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 that under his “cap and trade” plan to address global warming, ”electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

But even if greenhouse gas emissions are the principal cause of global warming (as opposed to natural causes), it’s not clear why such warming would harm public health in a non-tropical country like America. After all, people in America’s warmer cities have lower mortality rates, and higher life expectancies, than people in its colder cities.

Warmer climates may be particularly helpful for racial minorities in Canada. Most non-white Canadians suffer from Vitamin D deficiency, putting them at risk of cancer, osteoporosis, and diabetes, according to the Toronto Globe and Mail. Lack of exposure to the sun is a big part of the problem. More than 50,000 people die every year in the United States every year as a result of inadequate sun exposure. While milk is Vitamin D enriched, many non-whites are lactose intolerant. Sunlight is the most potent source of Vitamin D. But in northern regions like Canada, sunlight alone does not provide enough Vitamin D for many people who work indoors. There, the sunlight is too feeble in winter and fall for people’s bodies to turn sunlight into Vitamin D. To get enough Vitamin D from the sun, people have to go outside a lot during spring and summer to offset the weak sunlight in fall and winter. But increasingly sedentary lifestyles and office jobs have reduced outdoor activity. And cold temperatures in spring discourage warmth-loving people from going outside, even when the light is strong enough to produce Vitamin D. Thus, cold climates can be bad for their health.

More on the The Demise of the Greenland Vikings

2011-05-20T12:03:00.001-06:00

From sociological/archaeological points of view this research paper, Ideological Rigidity and the Limits of Ingenuity, by Gary Bowden, University of New Brunswick-Fredericton, is a good read for those with an interest in what may have happened to the Greenland Vikings during the 500-year history of the two known Norse settlements on the southwestern Greenland coast. Bowden has done a good job consolidating the dogma of the current science regarding the disappearance from history of the 4000-6000 Norse Greenlanders.

Bowden's supposition is that the Norse Greenlanders adhered to the pastoral practices of their kin in the homelands, eventually starving as the weather worsened with the advent of the Mini-Ice Age rather than adopt the survival techniques of the Arctic natives. He identifies these natives as Inuit and according to all accepted research on the subject the Inuit did not begin to arrive in the area from the west until the 12th century, so they were not there in sufficient numbers to influence anyone. The Dorset Culture, or Tornit, peopled the Arctic and Greenland when the Norse first arrived in 986: it is they who would have influenced the Norse if anyone did.

I believe that an assimilation process with North American natives began shortly after the Norse arrival on Greenland simply because the environment dictated adaptation rather than adherence to centuries of pastoral subsistence farming. The Norse Greenlanders did not starve out, they assimilated with the natives of North America.

Viking Ship Not Just Ceremonial

2011-05-16T07:54:00.000-06:00

Views and News from Norway

May 10, 2011

For years, it was widely believed that the ancient Tune ship on display at the Viking Ships Museum in Oslo was used mainly as a so called "grave ship," perhaps even built for the purpose of being buried in the grave of an important Viking.

Now a new doctoral dissertation claims that it was not only an ocean-going sailing vessel, but even grounded in its time and underwent repairs.

The Tune ship is the lesser-known and in the poorest condition of the three vessels on display at the museum. It was discovered on a farm on Rolvsøy, north of Fredrikstad, and excavated from a burial mound in 1867.

The grave was unusually large, measuring 80 meters in diameter and around four meters high, according to the Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo. The vessel, built around 900AD, was best preserved in the areas where it had been buried under thick clay.

Its remnants, however, paled when the stately Gokstad ship was discovered in 1880 and the Oseberg ship in 1903-04 on the other side of the Oslo Fjord. Now, archaeologist Knut Paasche of the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (NIKU) maintains in his newly finished doctoral dissertation that the Tune ship was also used on the high seas.

"Six planks forward on the starboard side are extended at the same place," Paasche told newspaper Aftenposten this week. "No boat builder would do that, not even in Viking times. Repairs to the hull show in all clarity that the ship was damaged under the water line, that is, it had grounded."

Paasche doesn't believe the Tune ship was a ceremonial ship that only was rowed inland until it was brought ashore and used in the burial mound. His studies revealed both ruts and signs of wear and tear under the keel, which he contends show that the ship was in use for a long time.

"The discoveries show that the Tune ship was in use for several years before it wound up in the grave," he told Aftenposten.

The Cultural History Museum now reports as well that the vessel "has probably been a fast, ocean-going vessel." Right behind the mast, a burial chamber was built and in it laid a man. Even though the grave had been plundered before its excavation, research has revealed remains of burial gifts, parts of a ski, the skeleton of a horse and remnants of his weapons including a sword handle.

Paasche, using data scanning, has reconstructed the ship in full. That adds to the knowledge of the third ship in the Oslo museum.

"While the Gokstad ship was a large ocean-going trading vessel, and the Oseberg ship close to a pleasure yacht, the Tune ship was a fast-sailing courier ship along the coast," Paasche told Aftenposten. He said it was equipped with unusually strong rigging for such a small vessel that also was built for 12 oarsmen.

Paasche believes the craftsmanship also suggests that early residents of today's Norway were sailing long before Viking times, given the knowledgeable boat-building behind the Tune ship. He said such building techniques could only have been rooted in maritime experience and handed down through generations.

Aerial Surveys of Viking Shipyard on Skye

2011-05-13T19:05:00.000-06:00

BBC

May 05, 2011

Aerial surveys are being carried out over Skye to help archaeologists investigate a 12th Century Viking shipbuilding site.

Boat timbers, a stone-built quay and a canal have already been uncovered at Loch na h-Airde on Skye's Rubh an Dunain peninsula.

The Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) has launched the air surveys.

Staff hope to pinpoint new sites for investigation.

Working with marine archaeologists, RCAHMS also hope to find potential dive sites for searches for the remains of ships and other artefacts.

Archaeologists now believe the loch was the focus for maritime activity for many centuries, from the Vikings to the MacAskill and Macleod clans of Skye.

RCAHMS said the loch and canal would likely have been used for protecting boats during winters and also for their construction and maintenance.

Colin Martin, a marine archaeologist specialising in ship wrecks, has been investigating Loch na h-Airde.

He said: "This site has enormous potential to tell us about how boats were built, serviced and sailed on Scotland's western seaboard in the medieval period - and perhaps during the early historic and prehistoric eras as well.

"There is no other site quite like this in Scotland."

RCAHMS aerial survey manager Dave Cowley said the sea had been vital for connecting communities in the past.

He added: "The aerial perspective gives us an excellent sense of this, showing the inter-relations of land and sea, and helping us to understand how people may have travelled, traded - and fought - on the waters around Scotland's western isles."

In 2009, a crofter uncovered an ancient anchor while digging a drain on the Isle of Skye.

Graeme Mackenzie, 47, made the find after hiring an excavator to open the drain on rough pastureland 50yds (48m) from his home near Sleat.

Rain had partly washed away the bottom of the drain and exposed a corroded 4in (10cm) iron spike.

National Museums Scotland said the type of anchor was in use from the Viking period until the Middle Ages.

Experts were unable to date it any more precisely.

Archaeologists find new Viking site in Temple Bar

2011-05-06T15:52:00.000-06:00

The Journal

May 04, 2011

A VIKING SETTLEMENT has been uncovered in Temple Bar during building work to build a retractable canopy over Meeting House Square.

The settlement is believed to have been originally situated on what would have been an island in the middle of the River Poddle but would have been destroyed by flood waters in the 10th or 11th century.

Dermot McLaughlin, CEO of the Temple Bar Cultural Trust, posted a video blog in March that a "medieval, timber structure" had been uncovered. Further archaeological investigations found the two Viking homes at Meeting House Square, in the centre of Temple Bar. Bits of pottery from a slightly later era were also found at the site, when it was uncovered two weeks ago.

The discoveries were made during building for the erection of four large retractable umbrella-style canopies that will provide shelter over the square in inclement weather. Currently the square plays host to a food market on Saturdays and a host of events, festivals and outdoor film screenings during the summer months. The new improvements are intended to help make the space useable year-round.

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NOTE: Temple Bar is located near city center in old Dublin, Ireland

More on American Indian Sailed to Europe With Vikings?

2011-04-22T09:33:00.000-06:00

This National Geographic article is somewhat dated, but I missed it the first around, so it is offered as support for the other articles on the subject posted herein.

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National Geographic News

November, 24 2010

Centuries before Columbus, a Viking Indian child may have been born in Iceland.

Five hundred years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a Native American woman may have voyaged to Europe with Vikings, according to a provocative new DNA study.

Analyzing a type of DNA passed only from mother to child, scientists found more than 80 living Icelanders with a genetic variation similar to one found mostly in Native Americans.

This signature probably entered Icelandic bloodlines around A.D. 1000, when the first Viking-American Indian child was born, the study authors theorize.

Historical accounts and archaeological evidence show that Icelandic Vikings reached Greenland just before 1000 and quickly pushed on to what is now Canada. Icelanders even established a village in Newfoundland, though it lasted only a decade or so.

The idea that a Native American woman sailed from North America to Iceland during that period of settlement and exploration provides the best explanation for the Icelanders' variant, the research team says.

"We know that Vikings sailed to the Americas," said Agnar Helgason of deCODE Genetics and the University of Iceland, who co-wrote the study with his student Sigrídur Ebenesersdóttir and colleagues. "So all you have to do is assume & that they met some people and ended up taking at least one female back with them.

"Although it's maybe interesting and surprising, it's not all that incredible," Helgason added. "The alternative explanations to me are less likely"- for example the idea that the genetic trait might exist independently, undiscovered, in a few Europeans.

The study authors themselves admit the case is far from closed. But University of Illinois geneticist Ripan Malhi- an expert in ethnic DNA differences who wasn't part of the project- agreed that the report holds "strong genetic evidence for pre-Columbian contact of people in Iceland with Native Americans."

Dating the DNA Signature

Through genealogical research, the study team concluded that the Icelanders who carry the Native American variation are all from four specific lineages, descended from four women born in the early 1700s.

Those four lineages, in turn, likely descended from a single woman with Native American DNA who must have been born no later than 1700, according to study co-author Ebenesersdóttir.

The genealogical records for the four lineages are incomplete before about 1700, but history and genetics suggest the Native American DNA arrived on the European island centuries before then, study co-author Helgason said.

He pointed out that Iceland was very isolated from the outside world in the centuries leading up to 1700, so it's unlikely that a Native American got to the island during that period.

As further evidence, he noted that- though the Icelanders share a distinct version of the variation- at least one lineage's variation has mutated in a way that would likely have taken centuries to occur, the researchers say.

This unique signature suggests that, in Helgason's words, the Native American DNA arrived in Iceland at least "several hundred years" before 1700.

DNA Evidence Fragmented

Despite the evidence, for now it's nearly impossible to prove a direct, thousand-year-old genetic link between Native Americans and Icelanders.

For starters, no living Native American group carries the exact genetic variation found in the Icelandic families.

But of the many known scattered versions that are related to the Icelandic variant, 95 percent are found in Native Americans. Some East Asians, whose ancestors are thought to have been the first Americans, carry a similar genetic pattern, though.

The Inuit, often called Eskimos, carry no version of the variant- a crucial detail, given that Greenland has a native Inuit population.

Helgason speculates that the precise Icelandic variation may have come from a Native American people that died out after the arrival of Europeans.

It's possible, he added, that the DNA variation actually came from mainland Europe, which had infrequent contact with Iceland in the centuries preceding 1700. But this would depend on a European, past or present, carrying the variation, which so far has never been found.

History Not Much Help?

Complicating matters, the historical record contains no evidence that Icelandic Vikings might have taken a Native American woman back home to their European island, scholars say.

"It makes no sense to me," said archaeologist and historian Hans Gulløv of the Greenland Research Centre in Copenhagen.

For one thing, experts say, nothing in excavations or the Icelandic sagas- thought to be rooted in fact but not entirely reliable- suggests a personal alliance of the kind reported in the new study, published online November 10 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The Saga of Erik the Red does tell of four Skraeling boys- the Norse term for the American Indians- who were captured by an Icelandic expedition and taken back to Greenland, said Birgitta Wallace, an emeritus archaeologist for Parks Canada who has written extensively about the Norse.

But Icelanders spent little time in North America, and their relations with the people they found living there seem to have been mostly hostile, she said. The stories "talk in not very flattering terms about [Native Americans'] looks," Wallace said.

One saga, she added, tells of explorers "who found some sleeping natives- and they just killed them."

Time to Rewrite Viking History?

"What we have is a big mystery," study co-author Helgason admitted.

It won't be solved, he said, until the DNA pattern's origins are nailed down, perhaps through the study of ancient DNA- for example, if an ancient Native American bone is found with DNA closely matching the Icelandic variant.

But at least one skeptic suggests it's a mystery worth pursuing.

"I have no historical sources telling me" that Vikings took Native Americans home, said Gulløv, the historian. But often when new data is uncovered, he added, "we have to write history anew."

Dundee academics reconstruct Viking woman’s face

2011-04-14T15:05:00.003-06:00

April, 13 2011

BBC

Academics at Dundee University have helped recreate the face of a Viking woman whose skeleton was unearthed in York more than 30 years ago.

The facial reconstruction was achieved by laser-scanning her skull to create a 3D digital model.

Eyes were then digitally created, along with hair and a bonnet, to complete the look.

The project was part of a £150,000 investment at York's Jorvik Viking Centre.

The Dundee academics were brought in by the centre's owners, the York Archaeological Trust, as part of a project to bring York's Vikings to life.

The female skeleton used was one of four excavated at Coppergate in York.

The reconstruction process was carried out using specialist computer equipment which allowed the user to "feel" what they were modeling on screen. The anatomy of the face was modelled in "virtual clay" from the deep muscles to the surface.

Dundee University researcher Janice Aitken took the digital reconstruction and added the finishing touches.

'Research capabilities'

She explained: "I use the same sort of software as is used to create 3D animations in the film industry. I digitally created realistic eyes, hair and bonnet and added lighting to create a natural look.

"It is very satisfying knowing that the work we create at Dundee University will be seen by thousands of visitors to Jorvik and being part of a process which can so vividly help people to identify with their ancestors."

The reconstruction now features in York Archaeological Trust's new Investigate Coppergate exhibition, which examines the Vikings' diet and investigates the diseases from which the Vikings suffered.

The exhibition also looks at the final battles of the Viking age in York that heralded the end of the Viking era and the coming of the Normans.

It features skeletal remains showing battle wounds and a full skeleton with evidence of severe trauma, alongside discussion about how they died.

Sarah Maltby, York Archaeological Trust director of attractions, said: "Archaeological research capabilities have moved on considerably since the original Coppergate excavations which took place over 30 years ago.

"The new exhibition areas mark a shift in how archaeological finds are analysed and the techniques available to researchers

Review of Confrontation: An Axe of Iron Novel

2011-04-08T12:27:00.000-06:00

If you haven't yet begun to read my historical fiction series about the Greenland Vikings you might be interested in what one Canadian reviewer had to say after reading Confrontation, the second novel in the Axe of Iron series.

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The following is an excerpt of her review from 2010.

By Tracy Roberts, Write Field Services, Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada.

"Hunsinger successfully builds on his first novel and adds even more action and adventure. As with the first novel, the story is rich in historical details which clearly show the careful attention paid to historical accuracy which allows the reader to peer through a window into the past and experience an important historical period. He incorporates the fictional tale with historical details which makes reading the story not only fun, but also engaging. Readers will root for Gudbjartur as he struggles with his Norsemen fighting spirit and his desire to make peace with the native people. I highly recommend ‘Confrontation: An Axe of Iron Novel’ as an entertaining addition to the historical fiction genre. Readers will find the story and characters so compelling that they will not realize that they are learning as they read."

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Roberts' complete review as well as many others of both novels are available on my website. Click on this direct link.

Thanks for dropping by.

Suggestions for Querying Literary Agents

2011-04-02T09:20:00.000-06:00

It is my hope that the following suggestions, based on my own experience in the world of writer/publisher, will save you from some of the pitfalls you will encounter querying literary agents.

1. The completed first draft of your manuscript begins your odyssey toward publication. Up until now your work has been uniquely personal, something that you have created. Before you can send out query letters telling the world of the birth of the great American novel, your work needs editing. I do not mean having a friend, an English teacher, your boss, or any other nonprofessional read your manuscript; no, I mean that you must engage the services of at least one professional editor, two is better. Thus begins the process of polishing your manuscript until it is the best it can be. This process can involve numerous corrections and rewrites. Do not take it personally; treat the process as a learning experience because that is exactly what it is. The time and expense involved varies with the quality of the work. One hundred thousand words will cost in the neighborhood of $2000.00, or more, by the time you get it right. After all of that effort there will still be errors. The most pervasive and difficult to find are words that sound the same, but have different meanings, e.g. – broach and brooch. The English language is full of such words. I find it easier to correct edits electronically within the Word document rather than by hand with a marked up manuscript. Communication between you and the editor is kept within the document by e-mailing it back and forth. There is less chance of missing necessary changes with the electronic edit and it is easier; edit/rewrite by hand can be a crushing experience for an author. Of course, the choice of methodology is yours to make, just be certain you do not skimp on the capital outlay because this is not the place to save money.

2. Before you begin to query, keep professionalism firmly in mind. If you do not have letterhead stationery, design some, including the envelope. Microsoft Publisher makes great looking forms, business cards, and stationery. Remember, you are trying to sell a product, be professional in all of your contacts. Edit religiously, use spell check. Everything that you write is a reflection on you personally, so do it right the first time because the one chance is usually all you will get.

3. As an author, you cannot deal directly with one of the large publishing houses, so your next challenge is to interest a literary agent in your work. Famous people query with a proposal before writing the book. I will assume that you are not yet famous. For you the path to conventional publication begins with the literary agent in almost all circumstances. That accommodation is not an accident. Do your homework on the submission guidelines for any query. All literary agents will have their own submission guidelines; adhere to them absolutely. Query only agencies accepting submissions in your genre and target specific agents within each agency. Do not ever send a manuscript unless it is requested, they will not read it. When the time comes, manuscripts are sent loose-leaf, unbound by request. Manuscript mailing boxes can be purchased online. Again, hire professional editors to edit everything that another person will read, especially the final draft of your manuscript. Remember, you cannot edit your own work, you must hire someone. Your professionalism will determine whether you ever make the grade. A shabby cover letter on your submission packet will guarantee its demise. Agents and publishers are busy people and they have no time to waste on people who do not follow their submission guidelines.

4. Dealing with agents is a disheartening undertaking for a writer. Agents act like the writer exists because of them, when in fact it is the other way around. Keep that fact in mind. Use the considerable resources of the Internet to find agents interested in your genre. Do not rely on print lists of agents. The game will have changed before you receive the list. Many agents will require an exclusive submission, unnecessarily extending the period of angst for the author. Many others do not; focus on them. These days they are looking for contentious subjects or manuscripts written by known authors, never mind whether or not they can write. If you find a literary agent, your relationship will be contractual. Do nothing with anyone without a contract. Fully understand your part of the contract before signing or hire an attorney versed in literary contracts to help you understand. I wasted a year trying to find an agent from among those professing to have an interest in my genre only to find that there are not any in existence.

5. If you are fortunate enough to become a published author through the literary agent/publisher/reader sequence of progression, congratulations, you have hit the big time. Your publisher will handle all the details of composition/format, cover design, printing/binding, fulfillment/marketing, and warehouse/distribution, leaving you free to crank out books. You will have little or no input regarding any of the production aspects of your book, nor will you retain any rights other than copyright. The publisher will own the ISBN and all future negotiations for anything concerning that work will be through, or with the permission of the publisher.

The road to publication has been a nightmare because of the time and money wasted while I learned the business. I wish I could say that there is lots of help out there for the newbies, but actually, the reverse is true. You are prey swimming in the shark’s pool—take heed. Believe nobody; get everything in writing; and, research, research, research.

J. A. Hunsinger, Vinland Publishing, http://www.vinlandpublishing.com/

Vikings revered Stone Age objects

2011-03-24T09:26:00.000-06:00

This article on recently found medieval Viking grave artifacts from Norway is noteworthy because the information suggests that Stone Age weapons and tools may have been regarded as "magical" and a possible link to the afterlife, a subject that I have noted in my Axe of Iron novels on the Greenland Vikings assimilation with certain North American natives.

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Views and News from Norway

February, 02 2011

New archaeological findings suggest that the Vikings considered Stone Age objects to have magical qualities, and that such "antiques" were more important in Viking culture than previously understood.

Examinations of around 10 Viking graves found in Rogaland, southwest Norway, revealed Stone Age items, such as weapons, amulets and tools. Olle Hemdorff of the Archaeological Museum in Stavanger told newspaper Aftenposten that he believes the items were buried so that "they would protect and bring luck to the dead in the after-life."

The latest revelations are linked to discoveries from Vikings who had travelled to Iceland, and who have been found carrying Stone Age items with them. Previously, such findings were not considered to be significant, but recent analysis links them to similar, earlier-overlooked evidence from several locations over the former Viking lands.

As well as being buried with the dead, as were some of their ships, Stone Age arrowheads and daggers were sometimes buried under Viking houses. Hemdorff suggests that "by including objects from their ancestors, the Vikings legitimized and gained 'control' over the past."

The custom of burying Stone Age treasures has also been identified in Iron Age communities and excavations from the age of migration (400-600 BC) found in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. Indeed, the practice is mentioned in William Shakespeare's Hamlet, where it is stated that flint, pottery, round stones and shards are thrown into Ophelia's grave.

Hemdorff speculates that Shakespeare "probably built his own description on an old custom that we now know goes back to Viking times."

Dig to begin at royal Viking estate

2011-03-18T09:58:00.000-06:00

March, 10 2011

Views and News from Norway

The largest archaeological project in Norway in nearly 10 years will begin in June to recover property of the Viking king Harald Harfagre (alternatively known as "Harald Fairhair," "Harald Finehair" or, simply, "Harald I"). He was, at any rate, the first king of Norway.

Newspaper Aftenposten reports that the work will be taking place in Avaldsnes, Karmøy (southwest Norway), at a site believed to be part of Fairhair's royal estate. The research project, led by Oslo's Cultural History Museum in cooperation with its counterpart museum in Stavanger, will run from mid-June to mid-September and look to exhume about 11,000 square meters in the area this year, before completing the project in 2012.

Harald Fairhair is credited by many with uniting, through conquests and alliances, the various smaller princedoms into something resembling the modern kingdom of Norway. He is believed to have reigned from 872AD until his death in 932AD.

There is considerable historical debate over which areas he controlled, either directly or indirectly, and many point out that there were large parts of the existing country that lay outside of his kingdom.

The name "Fairhair" originates from a legend that suggests that Harald vowed not to cut his hair until he was king of all of Norway, after being originally rejected by his eventual queen Gyda Eiriksdottir, who wanted him to have more power before they married.

Other digs, too

Alongside the project to uncover the remains of Harald I, there are a series of other digs set to go ahead across southwestern and southern Norway.

Research will be conducted as part of motorway works in Vestfold related to a number of eras in human history, with the majority looking at the various stages of the Stone Age, especially the middle and late Mesolithic period. The Cultural History Museum hopes the work will reveal more about the development of stone age dwellings in the region.

More work will also be undertaken in Gudbrandsdalen in Oppland County before the building of a new motorway between Ringebu and Otta. It will focus on Iron Age settlements, and coal or whaling pits from the Iron and Middle Ages.

Yet more archaeological projects will take place in Hovden in the mountains of Aust-Agder and at Tyinkrysset, Oppland County before the building of new holiday homes, and will look for evidence of iron production.

Viking ancestry explored on the Isle of Man by researchers

2011-03-11T09:48:00.000-07:00

February, 04 2011

BBC

Researching your family tree can only go back so far in time before records become patchy.

Now genealogists from the University of Leicester are using DNA tests to trace Manx ancestry back to the Viking era.

Local men with popular Manx surnames are being asked to give a DNA sample to help researchers explore the links between Y chromosomes, surnames and common ancestry.

The investigation starts on Saturday, 19 February 2011 at the Manx Museum.

Allison Fox, Curator of Archaeology at Manx National Heritage, told BBC Isle of Man: "The Vikings have had a lasting impact on the island and we've still got Tynwald today.

Norwegian ancestry

"If it's possible to show that this influence has filtered down to the current generation, then it will be a very valuable piece of research."

The research is part of a PhD degree project, which looks at the proportion of Manx inhabitants with Viking ancestry.

Participants will be asked to fill out a questionnaire about their ancestry and give a DNA sample by brushing the inside of their cheek.

The only criteria is that you are a male, whose father's father was born on the Isle of Man and that your surname is one of those listed here

Viking's first took up settlement on the Isle of Man at the end of the 8th century.

The research team will analyse Y chromosomes which are linked with surnames and then estimate proportions of Norwegian ancestry in these samples.

The results of the study will be available at the end of the study in 2013.

Scotland's DNA: Who do you think you are?

2011-03-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

This article is of interest because it gives the reader a sense of the continuing work on the influence that the medieval Vikings had on every culture they contacted.

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Published Date: 04 March 2011

By Alistair Moffat and Dr Jim Wilson

Our series on the DNA make-up of Scots looks at how the Vikings left an indelible mark on this country and in particular Orkney, where around 20 per cent of all Orcadian men carry the bloodthirsty raiders' M17 marker

HIDDEN snug beneath oiled sheep- and goatskins, or tucked into tiny corners under gear, or nibbling at parcels of food, mice began sailing to Scotland in the 9th century. They came from Norway, mostly, and settled in Orkney, where their descendants still thrive. The mice brought other creatures with them who were neither tim'rous nor cow'rin, but they were certainly beasties. The mice sailed the North Sea with the Vikings.

DNA researchers conducted a series of tests on house mice in Orkney and discovered that their genetic make-up was quite different from mice on the Scottish mainland, even though they had been on the islands for about 1,000 years. But when they compared it with that of mice in Norway, they found it was an exact match. The only possible explanation was that mice had stowed away on Viking longships and when these ferocious warriors rasped up their keels on Orcadian beaches to attack terrified communities, their little passengers quietly scuttled through the rocks and seaweed to settle and multiply.

As with mice, so it was with men. The Viking attacks began in AD793 with the surprise assault on the Holy Island of Lindisfarne. Even across 12 centuries the shock is palpable. These pagan sea-raiders seemed to sail out of nowhere and attack without hesitation some of the most sacred places in the north. The footsteps of Columba and Cuthbert were spattered with blood as monks and nuns were tortured, killed and raped, and their churches echoed not with prayer and plainsong but with the screams of the dying as they were ransacked for gold, silver and other valuables. Iona was desecrated repeatedly.

An account of what happened in AD825 was written by Walafrid Strabo, Abbot of Reichenau in southern Germany. Like many raiders wishing to use the element of surprise, the Vikings attacked the monastery on Iona at first light and broke into the abbey where St Blathmac and his followers lay prostrate in prayer. In what must have been a terrible orgy of ferocity, they were all slaughtered before the altar except for their leader. Demanding to know where the monks had buried Columba's reliquary and other precious objects, the Vikings began to torture Blathmac. Using ponies they took ropes attached to their harness and tied the ends to his arms and legs, and when he continued to refuse to give up the holy relics, Walafrid wrote that the pious sacrifice was torn limb from limb.

The appalling fate of Blathmac was by no means unique. Among recorded atrocities – and there must have many that were not – the pagan ritual of blood-eagling was horrific. As a sacrifice to the war god, Odin, victims were tied face-first to a post or pillar before a Viking marked the blood-eagle on his back. In AD869 King Edmund of East Anglia suffered this dreadful death when his ribs were hacked from his spine and pulled outwards like an eagle's wings. Then his lungs were wrenched out and draped over his shoulders. On Orkney the Viking Earl Turf Einarr ordered the same ritual in the 870s. It is no wonder the monks called the Vikings the Sons of Death.

In the light of such sustained and well-documented barbarity it is perhaps surprising that many Scottish men hanker after a Viking legacy. Before having their DNA tested, they often express a wish to be the descendants of these bloodthirsty raiders and many are disappointed when another result is conveyed. But there is a significant group who glory in the DNA of the Vikings, and while there was much to abhor, it is fair to say that there was also much to admire. Great seamen and daring, they sailed in open longships to discover Iceland, Greenland, (eventually making landfall in North America), they founded the embryonic Russian state of Kievan Rus, composed epic sagas of verve and colour, and inspired the cartoon character Noggin the Nog – although his mild manners must have been an exception.

Recent DNA research has shown a very significant Viking inheritance in Orkney. Around 20 per cent of all Orcadian men carry the M17 marker, the classic signature of Viking settlement. If the statistics are narrowed to cover only men with ancient Orcadian surnames like Linklater, Foubister, Clouston, Flett or Rendall, the percentage of M17 rockets to 75 per cent.

M17 is also present in the Western Isles in large numbers. Clan names are a visible relic; MacIvors were originally the sons of Ivar, MacSween, the sons of Swein, Macaulay, the sons of Olaf, MacAskill, the sons of Asgeir and so on. Clan MacLeod is a fascinating case study. From a sample of the DNA of 45 Macleod Y chromosomes almost half, 47 per cent, clearly show social selection at work in that they descend from one individual. If this statistic is projected amongst the total number of MacLeods, it means that almost 10,000 men alive today are descended from this man. Among the remaining 53 per cent, researchers have found only nine other lineages present, showing that MacLeod men married women who were unfailingly faithful to them.

Nevertheless, the MacLeods do not carry the M17 marker group. Theirs is a recently discovered sub-group labelled S68. It is found in Lewis, Harris and Skye, core Macleod territory, but also in Orkney, Shetland and Norway, with a few examples in Sweden. Despite extensive screening, S68 is very specifically located, showing up only once in the east of Scotland and once in England. This is a classic pattern for a Viking marker in Britain, but one much rarer than M17. MacLeods determinedly claim descent from a common name father, a Norse aristocrat called Ljot, a relative of Olaf, King of Man. They are probably right to continue to claim that – science for once supporting tradition.

Despite striking examples of extreme violence, the Vikings were often anxious to keep their captives alive. At Dublin they set up a great slave market and many poor souls were sold on to the agents of wealthy individuals. Some were taken as far south as the Mediterranean and the developing Muslim states of Spain and North Africa where fair-skinned thralls or slaves commanded a premium. The discovery of both the pan-British Isles DNA marker of S145 and the Irish and Scottish-specific M222 in coastal Norway has suggested a remnant legacy of slaves shipped back to the Viking homeland. Even very small numbers of M284, one of the founding lineages in Scotland, have been detected. Although many Scots visited and even settled for long periods in Norway, from the later middle ages onwards, it is quite possible that some of these S145 and M222 descendants are, in fact, the children of slaves. The British-specific mtDNA or female group of J1b1 has also been found in coastal Norway, and it almost certainly represents another survival of slaving.

There is a fourth distinctly Irish subtype of the great S145 marker but, like the Pictish subgroup, it has yet to be identified with a single, slowly evolving marker. Instead geneticists rely on a particular signature of more quickly evolving markers to identify members of this group. It is concentrated in Munster, and particularly in counties Cork and Kerry. It is very rare in Scotland and has only been found in the Northern and Western Isles. This suggests that it is unlikely to have spread outwards from Dalriada – as M222 appears to have done. Rather it looks as it was taken directly from South-west Ireland to north and west Scotland. A likely explanation would be that these lineages represent the descendants of Irish slaves taken north by the Vikings. This is supported by the fact that the major genetic lineage of the surname of Macaulay, the sons of Olaf, belongs to the group. It seems that some slaves contributed to the ancestral gene pool of the peripheral regions of Scotland.

One of the most fascinating mixes of DNA in Scotland can be seen in the most southerly part of the country. The territory of Greater Galloway stretched east to Annandale and north to include Carrick and it may be seen as a palimpsest of our linguistic and cultural history, a mirror to what happened in perhaps more familiar parts of the country. The most westerly peninsula, the Rhinns of Galloway, lies close to Ireland and at the same time as Dalriada was emerging in Argyll and the south-western Hebrides, Gaelic was certainly also spoken there. The ancient kingdom of Rheged understood itself in Old Welsh and it had royal centres near Stranraer, Kirkcudbright and probably at Carlisle. When it faded and died at the end of the 6th century, the English-speaking Bernicians pushed westwards to establish an episcopal see at Whithorn and colonise fertile costal areas.

Even Pictish became part of the mix – by mistake. The Bernicians may have believed the Gaelic speakers of Galloway to have been Picts because the first two bishops at Whithorn took symbolic names. Peohthelm means "Leader of the Picts" and Peohtwine "Friend of the Picts".

In the late 9th and early 10th century the kaleidoscope was twisted once more when some of the Celto-Norse peoples of the Hebrides migrated south. Because they spoke Gaelic but were descended from Vikings, they became known as the Gall-Gaidheil and they gave their name to Galloway.

It means the Land of the Stranger-Gaels. For six centuries at least, dialects of Old Welsh, Gaelic and English were spoken by substantial communities who lived alongside each other.

Multiculturalism may not be fashionable in certain quarters nowadays but it has a long history in Scotland. A very early linguistic mix like this is usually reflected in DNA, and when more testing is completed in Galloway, a rich and complex picture is likely to emerge.

Perhaps the most attractive achievement of the Viking settlers and their descendants was the great medieval Atlantic principality of the west, the Lordship of the Isles. It was essentially the creation of Somerled, also the founder of Clan Donald and the progenitor of its major name-fathers. There is accurate data available from a large sample, from 164 MacDonald Y chromosomes, and they contain a fascinating twist on tradition.

Somerled was known to chroniclers as Somerled the Viking and it turns out that the large number in the sample descended directly from him, 23 per cent, carry a specific signature type within the Norse subgroup of M17.

Somerled's own ancestors did indeed originate in Scandinavia. And the tradition lives on, for Clan Donald have genotyped the chiefs of their various clan branches and they all carry the old Vikings' marker.

It seems in the north, west and south of Scotland the legacy of the sea-raiders carries on. Most of the significant in-migrations to Scotland had taken place by the years around AD1000, but in the later 19th and the 20th century, the age of mass transport, more peoples came to enrich our collective DNA.

• The Scots: A Genetic Journey by Alistair Moffat and Dr Jim Wilson is available now. Readers of The Scotsman and Scotland on Sunday can buy copies of the book at the special price of £12.75 (p&p free in the UK) by calling 0845 370 0067 and quoting reference SMAN211.

• Last Updated: 03 March 2011 7:54 PM

• Source: The Scotsman

• Location: Edinburgh

• Related Topics: Who do you think you are?

Excerpt from Assimilation: An Axe of Iron Novel

2011-02-20T19:19:00.000-07:00

The following is a short excerpt from the third book of the Axe of Iron series, a continuing tale of the Greenland Vikings assimilation with certain tribes of pre-historical North American Indians. The scene is Halfdansfjord, the settlement built on a cove by the expedition on the southwestern shore of present day James Bay, Canada.

***

Halfdansfjord

The face of the sun had just dipped below the western horizon when the peace that normally descends at day’s end was shattered by the guard’s horn wailing from the south tower. The signal was soon duplicated by the horn from the north guard tower as both combined to set up a frightful din, bringing the occupants of Halfdansfjord running from every quarter. People poured from the south gate onto the landing beach in response to the guard’s outstretched arm and shouts, “A ship rounds the headland! It is Steed of the Sea.”

Halfdan and Frida, in the forefront of the crowd swelling out along the beach caught sight of the ship between the two islands offshore of the landing beach as her mast top and sail swam into view through the ever-present haze. Her sail foot was pulled in close as she beat close around the headland.

Frida grabbed Halfdan’s arm, excitement flushing her beautiful face as she shouted above the din of the crowd. “Just look at her! She is a sight to behold!”

Halfdan’s arm encircled her shoulder and he pulled her close, his eyes drinking in the sight of his ship as Bjorn brought her about and she charged downwind on a broad reach for the landing beach. A flush coursed through his body at sight of the bow wave creaming out, the graceful prow slicing the water’s surface asunder as her speed rapidly increased on the downwind tack. “She has the bone in her teeth, just look at the white foam of the bow wave. Gorm has her hard on the wind.”

***

Large snow flakes drifted lazily to earth from the grey, leaden clouds. The still air ensured an even accumulation over every surface. It all began three days hence with a cold wind from the northwest that brought increasing clouds and driving snow. With passage of this onslaught after the first day, the storm front pushed its way out over the broad bay to the south, a stillness gradually developed as the low clouds filled in, enfolding the settlement and the countryside in ice fog and steady snow.

Halfdan sat staring into the opaqueness from the shelter of one of the many sheds scattered about the settlement commons, where he often sought seclusion to commune with his thoughts. Dressed for the occasion, he wore the heavy bearskin parka that Frida had just this morning presented to him.

J. A. Hunsinger, Vinland Publishing, http://www.vinlandpublishing.com/

Did Vikings navigate by polarized light?

2011-02-18T14:02:00.000-07:00

Published online 31 January 2011

doi:10.1038/news.2011.58

Nature News

'Sunstone' crystals may have helped seafarers to find the Sun on cloudy days.

Jo Marchant

As highly skilled navigators, Vikings crossed thousands of kilometres of open sea.BRYNA PRODS/UNITED ARTISTS / THE KOBAL COLLECTION

A Viking legend tells of a glowing 'sunstone' that, when held up to the sky, revealed the position of the Sun even on a cloudy day. It sounds like magic, but scientists measuring the properties of light in the sky say that polarizing crystals — which function in the same way as the mythical sun stone — could have helped ancient sailors to cross the northern Atlantic. A review of their evidence is published today in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B1.

The Vikings, seafarers from Scandinavia who travelled widely and settled in swathes of Northern Europe, the British Isles and the northern Atlantic from around 750 to 1050 AD, were skilled navigators, able to cross thousands of kilometres of open sea between Norway, Iceland and Greenland. Perpetual daylight during the summer sailing season in the far north would have prevented them from using the stars as a guide to their positions, and the magnetic compass had yet to be introduced in Europe — in any case, it would have been of limited use so close to the North Pole.

But Viking legends, including an Icelandic saga centring on the hero Sigurd, hint that these sailors had another navigational aid at their disposal: a sólarsteinn, or sun stone.

The saga describes how, during cloudy, snowy weather, King Olaf consulted Sigurd on the location of the Sun. To check Sigurd's answer, Olaf "grabbed a sun stone, looked at the sky and saw from where the light came, from which he guessed the position of the invisible Sun"2. In 1967, Thorkild Ramskou, a Danish archaeologist, suggested that this stone could have been a polarizing crystal such as Icelandic spar, a transparent form of calcite, which is common in Scandinavia2.

Light consists of electromagnetic waves that oscillate perpendicular to the direction of the light's travel. When the oscillations all point in the same direction, the light is polarized. A polarizing crystal such as calcite allows only light polarized in certain directions to pass through it, and can appear bright or dark depending on how it is oriented with respect to the light.

Centred on the light

Scattering by air molecules in the atmosphere causes sunlight to become polarized, with the line of polarization tangential to circles centred on the Sun. So Ramskou argued that by holding a crystal such as calcite up to the sky and rotating it to check the direction of polarization of the light passing through it, the Vikings could have deduced the position of the Sun, even when it was hidden behind clouds or fog, or was just beneath the horizon.

Historians have debated the possibility ever since, with some arguing that the technique would have been pointless, because it would only work if the crystal was pointed at patches of clear sky, and in such conditions it would be possible to estimate the position of the Sun with the naked eye, for example from the bright lining of cloud tops3.

Gábor Horváth, an optics researcher at Eötvös University in Budapest, and Susanne Åkesson, a migration ecologist from Lund University, Sweden, have been testing these assumptions since 2005. The special issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B in which their review appears is dedicated to biological research on polarized light1.

In one study, the researchers took photographs of partly cloudy or twilight skies in northern Finland through a 180° fish eye lens, and asked test subjects to estimate the position of the Sun4. Errors of up to 99° led the researchers to conclude that the Vikings could not have relied on naked-eye guesses of the Sun's position.

To check whether sun stones would work better, in 2005 they measured the polarization pattern of the entire sky under a range of weather conditions during a crossing of the Arctic Ocean on the Swedish icebreaker Oden5,6.

Through the clouds

The researchers were surprised to find that in foggy or totally overcast conditions the pattern of light polarization was similar to that of clear skies. The polarization was not as strong, but Åkesson believes that it could still have provided Viking navigators with useful information.

"I tried such a crystal on a rainy overcast day in Sweden," she says. "The light pattern varied depending on the orientation of the stone."

She and Horváth are now planning further experiments to determine whether volunteers can accurately work out the Sun's position using crystals in various weather conditions.

Sean McGrail, who studied ancient seafaring at the University of Oxford, UK, before retiring, says that the studies are interesting but there is no real evidence to indicate that the Vikings actually used such crystals. "You can show how they could be used, but that isn't proof," he says. "People were navigating long before this without any instruments."

Surviving written records indicate that Viking and early medieval sailors crossed the north Atlantic using the Sun's position on clear days as a guide, in combination with the positions of coastlines, flight patterns of birds, migration paths of whales and distant clouds over islands, says Christian Keller, a specialist in North Atlantic archaeology at the University of Oslo. "You don't need to be a wizard," he says. "But you do need to combine a lot of different sorts of observations."

Keller says he is "totally open" to the idea that the Vikings also used sun stones, but is waiting for archaeological evidence. "If we find a shipwreck with a crystal on board, then I would be happy," he says.

• References

1. Horváth, G. et al. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B 366, 772-782 (2011).

2. Ramskou, T. Skalk 2, 16-17 (1967).

3. Roslund, C. & Beckman, C. Appl. Opt. 33, 4754-4755 (1994).

4. Barta, A. , Horváth, G. & Meyer-Rochow, V. B. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 22, 1023-1034 (2005).

5. Hegedüs, R. , Åkesson, S. , Wehner, R. & Horváth, G. Proc. R. Soc. A 463, 1081-1095 (2007).

6. Hegedüs, R. , Åkesson, S. & Horváth, G. J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 24, 2347-2356 (2007).

The Icelandic Riddle

2011-02-10T07:48:00.003-07:00

January, 31 2011

Northern Pen

Could a Beothuk woman have been taken from the Northern Peninsula to Iceland by a Viking? Could they have had children, and could that bloodline still run through modern day Icelanders?

Turns out it's a possibility.

Archaeological evidence has long pointed to the fact that when the Vikings settled at Vinland, now L'Anse aux Meadows, around 1000 AD, there was no contact between them and the native inhabitants.

There was the odd reference to "Skraelings" in the Icelandic sagas, but physical evidence never backed up the theory that the two populations actually met.

However, a new study of Icelandic DNA raises the intriguing possibility that the two populations not only met - they also produced offspring.

It all boils down to a mysterious mitochondrial DNA sequence (that is, one inherited through the female line) called the C1e lineage.

The C lineage was originally discovered by Dr. Angar Helgason at deCODE Genetics, then study author Sigrídur Sunna Ebenesersdóttir spent three years examining the sequence.

Carried by more than 80 Icelanders, she found the C1e DNA sequence can be definitively traced to four female ancestors born in the country around 1700.

But, Ms. Ebenesersdóttir explained to the Pen last week by phone, it's likely the C1e sequence was brought to Iceland well before that - and well before Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in north America in 1492.

"We think it started a lot further back. The Icelandic population has not been affected by constant gene flow like many other populations, so we can assume that most matrilines in contemporary Icelanders are descended from the original set of female settlers, 1100 hundred years ago," she says.

"It's also important to bear in mind that this C1e lineage isn't found among Eskimo Aleut speakers, so it can be ruled out that it's found in the Icelandic gene pool as a result of a mixture between Greenland Inuit and Icelanders."

In fact, the only other people who carry the C1 sequence are a small group of East Asians and, more prominently, a large number of native Americans.

They carry a slightly different branch of the DNA sequence, but it's the closest relative and certainly has the most plausible explanation - that is, Vikings.

When you combine that with the archaeological evidence of Vikings in north America, specifically on the Northern Peninsula, things start to look a bit more interesting.

"If a native American woman was brought back to Iceland with a Viking, or if she had a female child with a Viking and he brought her back to Iceland, then that would explain the presence of this DNA lineage in the Icelandic gene pool," Ms. Ebenesersdóttir says.

"We cannot say for 100 per cent certain that this is what happened, because this particular DNA group has no other member to date, but the closest relatives of this group are found among Native Americans, so it's the most likely source."

There's even a chance this sequence could have come from the now-extinct Beothuk people, who are known to have lived in the region around the time of the Vikings.

"There is a chance that this C1e sequence still exists, and it's most likely to be among a native American population, but in terms of DNA the Native Americans from North America are somewhat under sampled compared to groups from other regions," Ms. Ebenesersdóttir explains.

"There's also a chance that it has now been lost from the native American gene pool and that it will only be found in ancient remains, so ancient DNA studies may play an important role in determining its origin."

The identities of the 80 or so Icelandic women who carry the mysterious DNA are encrypted in the country's genealogical database, but Ms. Ebenesersdóttir says they would probably feel pretty good about their involvement in a possible re-writing of history.

"I think it would be very cool for them - I would be excited," she laughs, "but I tested my DNA and I'm definitely not a descendant from this woman."

She's not the only one excited about the possibilities raised by the study.

Bill Bartlett, of Griquet, also goes by the name Lambi the Skald.

He works as a Viking interpreter during summer at Norstead Viking village, and says there's no reason the Vikings and native population couldn't have met.

"There are just so many things that point to the fact that happened," he told the Pen.

"Usually Vikings traveled with a boat of 30 men and five to seven women, and I'd imagine those women would end up saying stop pestering me' so why wouldn't the Vikings have looked elsewhere?"

Then you've got the stories in the Viking sagas, which Mr. Bartlett knows back to front.

"When you read the sagas, they talk about Skraelings and women bearing their breasts - that's a tradition of the Beothuk who'd rip open their shirts to prove they were women," he explains.

"On top of that there are references to interactions between the Indians, Eskimos and the Vikings, and when they were digging up L'Anse aux Meadows there were bits of Eskimo pottery there. I'm not sure how much, but it was there.

"When you think about it, this whole area of the Northern Peninsula was the gateway to Europe - everything passed through here. Everyone passed through here and all the way down to Port au Choix they've found native settlements, so why not? Why couldn't this have happened?"

So where to from here?

Well, Ms. Ebenesersdóttir hopes the study will inspire other scientists to look for relatives of the C1e lineage in native American DNA samples, perhaps establishing more concrete proof of the tie between that population and the Vikings.

"This is very exciting for Icelandic people because it's more evidence that they settled north America 500 years before Christopher Columbus, which a lot of people I think don't realize," she says.

This study could prove interaction between two populations on the Northern Peninsula that history says never met, but until the C1e lineage is found in another population, the fact a Viking may have taken a Beothuk wife will simply remain plausible speculation.

Ireland's Viking Fortress

2011-02-05T11:56:00.000-07:00

January, 31 2011

Archaeology Magazine

The remains of the legendary Viking fortress Linn Duachaill have been discovered in northeastern Ireland, 45 miles north of Dublin.

"Historians and archaeologists have been trying to locate Linn Duachaill for more than 200 years," says Eamonn Kelly, Keeper of Antiquities with the National Museum of Ireland, who led a lengthy research and targeted excavation effort that resulted in the discovery of the infamous Viking base.

Linn Duachaill was founded in A.D. 841, the same year as Viking Dublin. The fortress was used as a center by the Vikings to trade goods, organize attacks against inland Irish monasteries, and send captured Irish slaves abroad. For more than 70 years, Linn Duachaill rivaled Dublin as the preeminent Viking holding on the east coast of Ireland before it was eventually abandoned.

The discovery of Linn Duachaill will finally allow archeologists to compare the actual site with medieval documents. The names of leaders of the garrison are recorded, along with extensive accounts of attacks they carried out. The site is often referred to as a longphort, a term used to describe a fortification built by the Vikings to protect their ships.

A defensive rampart has already been excavated at the site and examples of Viking silver and ecclesiastical metalwork looted from native Irish sites have also been recovered. "We are excited to learn what insights into medieval times Linn Duachaill will reveal," says Kelly.

A new Norse saga: DNA detectives in the Viking North West

2011-01-27T07:44:00.000-07:00

January, 25 2011

The Vikings are alive and well and living in the North West of England! That's the revelation in a new book on an epic research project into the genetic footprint of the Scandinavian invaders.

'Viking DNA: The Wirral and West Lancashire Project' is the culmination of several years of research by biochemists and geneticists, by Wirral-raised Professor Steve Harding from The University of Nottingham and Professor Mark Jobling and Dr Turi King from the University of Leicester. It shows the power of modern DNA methods to probe ancestry using the North West of England as an example.

The North West has long been known to have special links with the Vikings going back over a thousand years, through archaeological evidence, ancient manuscripts, local surnames and placenames such as 'Thingwall' from the Old Norse 'ping-vollr' meaning 'meeting place'. It's believed many of the Vikings, of mainly Norwegian origin, ended up in the region after being expelled from Ireland in AD902.

The new book tells the story of how 21st century genetic methods have been used in conjunction with historical and linguistic evidence to investigate the Viking ancestry of Wirral and neighbouring West Lancashire. Rigorous DNA analysis of samples of the local population, focusing on people who had surnames present in the regions prior to 1600, has scientifically proved that the Vikings settled heavily in the area and left a huge genetic legacy which survives and continues today.

The researchers' new 'Norse saga' unfolded as they carried out cheek swab DNA tests on around 100 men from the area who had local surnames dating back hundreds of years, some taken from a tax register from the time of King Henry VIII. Other lists of old names included people contributing to the stipends of priests, alehouse records and criminal records, for example the namesake of one of the authors is accused in 1348 of vandalising hedges (found not guilty!). Only men were chosen because they carry the Y-chromosome, DNA on which is passed down the paternal line from father to son with little or no change, unlike the other chromosomes.

The results found that up to 50 per cent of the DNA from the men of both Old Wirral and Old West Lancashire ancestry was indeed Viking in origin. The full scientific study appeared in the leading journal 'Molecular Biology and Evolution' but has now been put into context for a wider audience in this new, full colour-illustrated book which pulls together all the evidence, both scientific and historical.

Geneticist Professor Mark Jobling said: "We rely on the interest and generosity of DNA donors for all of our studies, and as researchers we're committed to the public understanding of science. So great to give something back in the form of this book, and to help people get to grips with the science of genetics at the same time."

Professor Steve Harding said: "The results were very exciting because they tie in with the other evidence from the area. The book explains the background and the DNA method in a way that everyone can understand, and should be of interest to people interested in Vikings and ancestry anywhere. It is also a great example of community involvement in science. Indeed one youngster from Irby on Wirral was so impressed with the results for her father that she wrote a school project called 'My Viking Dad and his Viking Dog'".

Famous TV historian Michael Wood pays tribute to the book in his Foreword: "As the best history always should, the tale involves identity, local feeling, the life lived; it suggests how in a mysterious way even the deep past still lives on in us. It also shows how gripping and informative local history can be, but how it also can vividly illuminate the big picture. It is a model applicable to every community in the UK: a perfect example of what one hopes will become the new history. Not one delivered from on high but developed at grass roots in conjunction with the people themselves, using their archaeology history and landscape, their family histories documents and memories and even their DNA."

The Wirral and West Lancashire Viking DNA survey is now being extended to North Lancashire, Cumbria and over the Pennines to North Yorkshire to see how far the Norse settlers from the Irish Sea penetrated into medieval northern England. The researchers are also collaborating with experts in Scandinavia focusing again on people who can show their ancestry goes back many generations in particular parts of Scandinavia. In this way they will be able to get a much better idea of what the genetic profile of Scandinavia was like in the Viking age.

'Viking DNA: The Wirral and West Lancashire Project' (ISBN 978-1907284946) has been published by Nottingham University Press in association with Countyvise and is available now from Amazon and all good booksellers. 166 pages, fully illustrated in colour. There is a local launch planned for 16th February in Nottingham.

More details on the full Wirral genetic survey and the book are available at http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/-sczsteve

The Medieval Greenland Vikings Can Teach Us About Climate Change

2011-01-24T18:37:00.000-07:00

If you have ever been here before you have already read this article. I felt the content especially germane to the current world weather situation. This planet is in a state of flux, weatherwise, in case you haven't noticed. I will let my article from 2009 speak for itself. Look around, it is happening.

***

The Northern Hemisphere of this planet is in a normal warming cycle. It began to manifest itself as the preceding cycle, the Mini-Ice Age (1300-1800), wound down about the mid-19th century. Nothing in global climate happens overnight. Each cycle is of about 500-years duration. With that assumption, we can say that the midpoint of this warming cycle that we are enjoying will be about 2100. In other words, we can expect the climate to gradually trend toward warmer and dryer for the next 92-years. Then it might get worse, historically speaking that is. At the same time, there will be periodic cycles of colder, wetter weather in parts of the globe that have never experienced such in living memory.

The advent of the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300) gave rise to the Viking Age (793-1150).

The warmer weather increased production of everything the Vikings ate. Populations among the Viking tribes burgeoned dramatically. This eventually led to thoughts of expansion and conquest; the norm throughout human history. The ice-locked fjords began to clear earlier in the season than normal. The length of the raiding and trading season continued to increase over the 500-year period of the Medieval Warm Period. The Vikings exploded out over the north and western Atlantic Ocean, settling Iceland, Greenland, and areas of northeastern North America. The five hundred years of comparatively benign weather during the Medieval Warm Period fostered the Viking Age. Earth's next weather cycle, the Mini-Ice Age (1300-1800), played a major roll in ending it, especially for isolated--from the homeland--Norse Greenland. The Greenland Norse lifestyle could not be maintained in the face of Climate Change and a changing environment--starvation loomed. Of all the single-cause explanations for the death of Norse Greenland, Climate Change has been the most durable. (Thomas McGovern, Vikings, The North Atlantic Saga, The Demise of Norse Greenland, 2000-Smithsonian Institution, 330-331.)

Now, if the present global Climate Change cycle - Global Warming - is our responsibility, you know carbon offsets, CO2, and whatnot, if we caused this calamity, how do you explain the Medieval Warm Period (800-1300)? It was warmer in the Northern Hemisphere then than it is now. Perhaps the Vikings, the Greenland Norse people whom I write about caused it with their peat fires, flatulent livestock, and whatnot. Sounds ridiculous, huh? It is ridiculous. They had nothing more to do with their natural planetary climate cycle then, than we do with ours today. Remember, all of this climate stuff has happened before. It has been happening for 18,000-years that we know about.

The sun and the oceans working in concert control the weather on this planet. Without this synergy, much of the inhabited areas of the northern and southern hemispheres would be uninhabitable.

Simplistically speaking, the sun transmits most of its solar radiation to the earth along the equatorial belt, heating the oceans of the world and setting up out flowing currents that emanate north and south from the equator. At the same time, cold water from the Polar Regions sinks to the ocean floor establishing a flow pattern in the direction of the equator as they under ride the warm water flowing on the surface. Therefore, under ideal conditions a massive exchange of hot water from the equator and cold water from the poles occurs, giving us hominids the benign weather conditions that we enjoy over much of this planet.

All of this circulation occurs automatically because of the forces at play, hydrodynamics in other words. With Climate Change, the dynamics change. British scientists have reported that the warm water currents flowing toward northwestern Europe have declined by 30% since the 1950's. There also appears to be a 50% reduction in the amount of cold water flowing from the poles. Computer models of this dynamic predict that the North Atlantic current will cease to exist in 50-100 years. National Geographic News, James Owen, November 30, 2005.

The same article points to the fact that the melting Arctic and Antarctic ice is diluting the salt water of the Arctic and Antarctic Oceans. The dynamic of circulation dependent on sinking cold water flowing south from the North Pole, or north from the South Pole, to bring the warm water of the equatorial seas north and south, is stalling as a result. This fact will make the northern and southern hemisphere much colder within the next 50-100 years.

Now there are six billion of us, give or take. The fastest growing populations have the least: they are deficit societies. People in Africa--all of the continent--the Indian sub-continent, much of continental Asia, Asia Minor, much of South and Central America, all of Mexico, every island in the Caribbean--well, you get the picture. Like rats or lemmings, we are positioning ourselves for disaster on a scale that defies comprehension. Can we feed the world, save the disenfranchised? NO! In the final analysis why would we? Our survival would be compromised. Shortages are like a snowball rolling down a hill, they are cumulative. Food shortages will translate to less food to send to feed the populations of all the undeveloped countries that we already support, because they cannot feed themselves; we will keep what we have for ourselves; and nature will take its course with them-they will begin to starve.

Entrepreneurs and scientists are playing the well-meaning, misinformed, easily manipulated, masses of earthlings like the proverbial banjo. Why, you might ask? Because the politics of human-caused global warming offer enormous profit potential.

Rare 4,600 year old Ontario burial lifts lid on prehistoric Canada

2011-01-16T14:46:00.000-07:00

The Independent
June 24, 2010

A 4,600 year old burial has been discovered in a remote corner of northern Canada and could hold the key to how ancient Canadians lived. The remarkable find has been made at the mouth of the Bug River, near Big Trout Lake, Ontario. Today the region is home to the Kitchenuhmaykoosik Inninuwug First Nation, an indigenous tribe numbering around 1,200.

The discovery was made by First Nation fishermen as water levels fell at the lake, exposing the burial. The site is currently being handled by an archaeological team from Lakehead University, Thunder Bay. The discovery is particularly rare as Canadian ethics laws largely forbid excavations.

The skeleton discovered is that of a man aged in his late-30s or 40s. Around five-and-a-half feet tall, the man had a "very, very robust muscular build," according to team leader Prof Scott Hamilton. The man would have held high status in his day thanks to a seemingly formal burial. "There's a flat slab of granite that's associated directly with the bones," adds Prof Hamilton. "It looks very much like a purposeful grave. We'll be taking a closer look at the stone as part of our analysis to see if we can find any evidence of function."

Another aspect due further study is a red ochre found on the man's bones and nearby sediment. It is thought the colour was added to his body before burial, a practice seen throughout the world, including prehistoric North America.

The man lived at around the same time the Great Pyramids were being built in ancient Egypt, and great cities such as Babylon were popping up across the Near East. Yet life at Big Trout Lake, where temperatures can plummet to -30°C, was very different. "These folks are adapted to the kinds of resources one finds in the boreal forest," says Hamilton. "These resources are highly seasonal in their availability and the season of comparative plenty is often spring, summer and perhaps early fall."

Isotope testing has so far shown that the man enjoyed a fish-based diet, with a side of hunted land mammals such as caribou (reindeer). The Spartan lifestyle, and migratory nature of food, meant Ontario's prehistoric tribes travelled huge distances in small numbers. "The winter seasons are generally a time of some scarcity and hardship as spatially concentrated food disappears," says Hamilton.

"That means sub-Arctic people, in order to survive year in, year out through generations, have to have a seasonal cycle that's highly mobile," adds Hamilton. "They can place themselves on the landscape where they can predict resources will be available and follow the seasonal cycles of availability."

It may seem an ancient lifestyle, but Canada's tribes have followed this ancient practice for millennia. "The past is very recent in the far north," says Hamilton. Even the appearance of Europeans in the 17th century did nothing to alter the indigenous way of life, and Hamilton says prehistoric traditions are still alive today: "(The First Nation) may be gathering and harvesting resources with European technology but they're (still using a) fairly significant amount of traditional technology canoes, snowshoes, footwear, clothing."

"What we see is this really interesting mix, an admixture, of traditional technology and the incorporation of new technology to practice a traditional life." First Nation Chief Donny Morris insists the man will be reburied after tests are completed, in the traditions of his forebears. Yet it seems we'll learn a lot more from him yet.

Notes About Swedish Viking Burial Practices and a Contemporary Film on Vikings

2011-01-08T07:49:00.002-07:00

Two letters I submitted to the editor of the excellent Scandinavian Press magazine in rebuttal to other reader's letters in a prior edition of the magazine might be of interest because they speak to Swedish Viking burial practices and a rant about a particular contemporary film on the Vikings.

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Dear Editor,

The following is in response to two Letters to the Editor in your excellent edition of the Summer 2010 edition of Scandinavian Press.

It’s the Viking Team, Ellen Boryen: while realizing that your letter is a paraphrased summation of Dr. Hale’s presentation, there are a couple points I feel compelled to make on your conclusions. I will assume that your reference to the Swedish Vikings burning their ships as the reason we have no examples of those ships, to be a reference to the 10th century writings of Ibn Fadlan, specifically his portrayal of the funeral pyre of a Rus chieftain. The Rus are thought to be Swedish Norsemen. Rus may also be the term used by the Swedish Vikings to describe the locals of present day Eastern Europe. Either contention is argumentative in some circles. Like almost everything regarding these people, we do not know for certain. Actually, several Swedish ships and boats have been found, one 20 meter example as recently as last year at the bottom of Lake Vänern, Sweden’s largest lake. To say that ‘Swedish Vikings burned their ships in burial rituals’ may not be the whole story. As you write, there are many examples of ships that have been recovered throughout Scandinavia. Every large museum that I have visited has examples of these magnificent ships. The 98’ Sea Stallion, Viking Ship Museum, Roskilde, DE, is a computer scale copy of one of them and at this writing the largest extant. From Sea Stallion’s voyages we now know that the square rigged Viking ship was fast and capable in all seas. You are correct in saying that the medieval Viking ships lacked a traditional keel, however; the huge steerboard, mounted on the right aft side of the ship, performed that function admirably and pivoted up and out the way to beach the ship, or row it up a shallow river. The Vikings never felt the need of a keel and as a result no ship that we are aware of constructed by them ever had a keel. The function of a traditional keel is to balance the thrust of the sail when sailing close hauled to the wind, otherwise the ship or boat would be pushed away, to leeward, from the desired course by the wind’s force, making little or no progress along the desired track. You correctly point out that the shallow, keel less hull design allowed them to sail or row over many of the rivers they encountered—that was not accidental. Their ships were also hauled overland, something that would be impossible with a keeled ship.

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The Subject of the Vikings, John Houle: The Vikings, 1958, MGM, is actually a classic film and the best contemporary rendering of the Viking era that we have. Certainly artistic license was taken with the script, it was a movie, you know, for entertainment. I would say to John, the author of the negative rant on the film, “do some research the next time your dander is up.” The movie locations were authentic: Brittany, Fort La Latte, Côtes d'Armor, France, Germany, Hardangerfjord, Norway, and Lim Fjord, Croatia, to name a few. You missed the entire reason for the axe throwing scene involving the ‘beautiful Scandinavian girl.’ It wasn’t a savage game; it was a test of fidelity, or the lack thereof. The medieval Vikings were a savage people, living in a savage time. To make contemporary comparisons is ludicrous. The nationalities of the actors are of no consequence--although the Norwegian people were well represented--they are portraying the elements of the script. To those of us who have enjoyed the film, they became Vikings for a time. And John, the Vikings were not cowering in the ship during a storm, rather they were fogbound, and unable to see their surroundings, or the way ahead. It was a terrifying event for them. Have you ever been at sea, blind in the fog, or ‘cowering’ during a storm, John? Well, I have. The crash of the surf against an unseen rocky shore gives pause to anyone. The film makers were not portraying ‘we Scandinavians’ in a bad way, they were not portraying us as a people at all. Rather, they were trying to depict an era--they did an admirable job--about which we know little or nothing.

So John, sometimes it is best if we keep our lack of knowledge on a particular subject private rather than formalize it with a public letter.

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Global Warming Is Not Science

2010-12-31T19:13:00.001-07:00

Global warming is not science, as stated by Richard Johnson in his letter in Friday’s Grand Junction Sentinel. Climatology, Meteorology, Astronomy, Physics, etc. are some of the sciences associated with climate. Global warming is a theory, a hypothesis of anthropogenic involvement in the climate of this planet and as such it is unproven.

Mr. Johnson might want to check the facts of the matter before making public statements: e.g. “teach what 97% of climate scientists, that average global temperature are rising at unnatural rates, drastically and dangerously changing weather patterns worldwide,” etc. These are apparently Mr. Johnson’s contentions because they have no basis in fact.

The average temperature of the Earth has increased by less than <1°C in the last century. The synergy between the sun and the oceans control the weather on this planet, not Homo sapiens.

Entrepreneurs and scientists are playing the well-meaning, misinformed, easily manipulated, masses of earthlings like the proverbial banjo. Why, you might ask? Because the politics of human-caused global warming offer enormous profit potential. Scientists are lining up with their hands out for the billions of tax dollars that will fund the research programs that will purport to find a solution to save the planet from human-induced mass suicide. You cannot blame the scientists for adopting a self-serving agenda. After all, what use would they be without research dollars to fund their efforts? Let me couch that a different way: we are being fed a lie to further a political agenda and promote research to perhaps find a solution to a natural cycle over which we humans have no control whatsoever.

No, the theory of global warming should not be taught to impressionable children as anything but the political attempt to propagandize the masses, for that is what it is.

J. A. Hunsinger, Vinland Publishing, http://www.vinlandpublishing.com/

Archaeology: The Amazing Vikings

2010-12-17T05:35:00.000-07:00

This interesting article on the Vikings was published in 2000 in Time; although dated, its content is relevant today. Details of the Norse settlements on Greenland, the exploration and settlement attempts by Leif Eiriksson on Newfoundland, and contacts with the natives of the land they called Vinland are of particular interest, since my Axe of Iron series covers that topic in a fictional sense. I think you will find the article to be worth your time.

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Archaeology: The Amazing Vikings

By Michael D. Lemonick; Andrea Dorfman
Monday, May. 08, 2000

Ravagers, despoilers, pagans, heathens--such epithets pretty well summed up the Vikings for those who lived in the British Isles during medieval times. For hundreds of years after their bloody appearance at the end of the 8th century A.D., these ruthless raiders would periodically sweep in from the sea to kill, plunder and destroy, essentially at will. "From the fury of the Northmen, deliver us, O Lord" was a prayer uttered frequently and fervently at the close of the first millennium. Small wonder that the ancient Anglo-Saxons--and their cultural descendants in England, the U.S. and Canada--think of these seafaring Scandinavians as little more than violent brutes.

But that view is wildly skewed. The Vikings were indeed raiders, but they were also traders whose economic network stretched from today's Iraq all the way to the Canadian Arctic. They were democrats who founded the world's oldest surviving parliament while Britain was still mired in feudalism. They were master metalworkers, fashioning exquisite jewelry from silver, gold and bronze. Above all, they were intrepid explorers whose restless hearts brought them to North America some 500 years before Columbus.

The broad outlines of Viking culture and achievement have been known to experts for decades, but a spate of new scholarship, based largely on archaeological excavations in Europe, Iceland, Greenland and Canada, has begun to fill in the elusive details. And now the rest of us have a chance to share in those discoveries with the opening last week of a wonderfully rich exhibition titled "Vikings: The North Atlantic Saga" at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington.

Timed to commemorate the thousand-year anniversary of Leif Eriksson's arrival in North America, the show examines the Vikings and their Norse descendants from about A.D. 740 to 1450--focusing especially on their westward expansion and on the persistent mysteries of how extensively the Vikings explored North America and why they abandoned their outpost here.

In doing so, the curators have laid to rest a number of popular misconceptions, including one they perpetuate in the show's title. The term Viking (possibly from the Old Norse vik, meaning bay) refers properly only to men who went on raids. All Vikings were Norse, but not all Norse were Vikings--and those who were did their viking only part time. Vikings didn't wear horned helmets (a fiction probably created for 19th century opera). And while rape and pillage were part of the agenda, they were a small part of Norse life.

In fact, this mostly blue-eyed, blond or reddish-haired people who originated in what is now Scandinavia were primarily farmers and herdsmen. They grew grains and vegetables during the short summer but depended mostly on livestock--cattle, goats, sheep and pigs. They weren't Christian until the late 10th century, yet they were not irreligious. Like the ancient Greeks and Romans, they worshiped a pantheon of deities, three of whom--Odin, Thor and Freya--we recall every week, as Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were named after them. (Other Norse words that endure in modern English: berserk and starboard.)

Nor were the Norse any less sophisticated than other Europeans. Their oral literature--epic poems known as Eddas as well as their sagas--was Homeric in drama and scope. During the evenings and throughout the long, dark winters, the Norse amused themselves with such challenging board games as backgammon and chess (though they didn't invent them). By day the women cooked, cleaned, sewed and ironed, using whalebone plaques as boards and running a heavy stone or glass smoother over the seams of garments.

The men supplemented their farm work by smelting iron ore and smithing it into tools and cookware; by shaping soapstone into lamps, bowls and pots; by crafting jewelry; and by carving stone tablets with floral motifs, scenes depicting Norse myths and runic inscriptions (usually to commemorate a notable deed or personage).

Most important, though, they made the finest ships of the age. Thanks to several Viking boats disinterred from burial mounds in Norway, archaeologists know beyond a doubt that the wooden craft were "unbelievable--the best in Europe by far," according to William Fitzhugh, director of the National Museum's Arctic Studies Center and the exhibition's chief curator. Sleek and streamlined, powered by both sails and oars, quick and highly maneuverable, the boats could operate equally well in shallow waterways and on the open seas.

With these magnificent craft, the Norse searched far and wide for goods they couldn't get at home: silk, glass, sword-quality steel, raw silver and silver coins that they could melt down and rework. In return they offered furs, grindstones, Baltic amber, walrus ivory, walrus hides and iron.

At first, the Norse traded locally around the Baltic Sea. But from there, says Fitzhugh, "their network expanded to Europe and Britain, and then up the Russian rivers. They reached Rome, Baghdad, the Caspian Sea, probably Africa too. Buddhist artifacts from northern India have been found in a Swedish Viking grave, as has a charcoal brazier from the Middle East." The Hagia Sophia basilica in Istanbul has a Viking inscription in its floor. A Mycenaean lion in Venice is covered with runes of the Norse alphabet.

Sometime in the late 8th century, however, the Vikings realized there was a much easier way to acquire luxury goods. The monasteries they dealt with in Britain, Ireland and mainland Europe were not only extremely wealthy but also situated on isolated coastlines and poorly defended--sitting ducks for men with agile ships. With the raid on England's Lindisfarne monastery in 793, the reign of Viking terror officially began. Says archaeologist Colleen Batey of the Glasgow Museums: "They had a preference for anything that looked pretty," such as bejeweled books or gold, silver and other precious metals that could be recrafted into jewelry for wives and sweethearts. Many monasteries and trading centers were attacked repeatedly, even annually. In some cases the Vikings extorted protection money, known as danegeld, as the price of peace.

The Vikings didn't just pillage and run; sometimes they came to stay. Dublin became a Viking town; so did Lincoln and York, along with much of the surrounding territory in northern and eastern England. In Scotland, Vikings maintained their language and political links to their homeland well into the 15th century. Says Batey: "The northern regions of Scotland, especially, were essentially a Scandinavian colony up until then." Vikings also created the duchy of Normandy, in what later became France, as well as a dynasty that ruled Kiev, in Ukraine.

Given their hugely profitable forays into Europe, it's not entirely clear why the Vikings chose to strike out across the forbidding Atlantic. One reason might have been a growing population; another might have been political turmoil. The search for such exotic trade goods as furs and walrus ivory might have also been a factor. The timing, in any event, was perfect: during the 9th century, when the expansion began, the climate was unusually warm and stable. Pastures were productive, and the pack ice that often clogged the western North Atlantic was at a minimum.

So westward the Vikings went. Their first stop, in about 860, was the Faeroe Islands, northwest of Scotland. Then, about a decade later, the Norse reached Iceland. Experts believe as many as 12,000 Viking immigrants ultimately settled there, taking their farm animals with them. (Inadvertently, they also brought along mice, dung beetles, lice, human fleas and a host of animal parasites, whose remains, trapped in soil, are helping archaeologists form a detailed picture of early medieval climate and Viking life. Bugs, for example, show what sort of livestock the Norse kept.)

Agriculture was tough in Iceland; it was too cold, for instance, to grow barley for that all important beverage beer. "They tried to grow barley all over Iceland, but it wasn't economical," says archaeologist Thomas McGovern of New York City's Hunter College. Nevertheless, the colony held on, and in 930 Iceland's ruling families founded a general assembly, known as the Althing, at which representatives of the entire population met annually to discuss matters of importance and settle legal disputes. The institution is still in operation today, more than a thousand years later.

In 982 the Althing considered the case of an ill-tempered immigrant named Erik the Red. Erik, the saga says, had arrived in Iceland several years earlier after being expelled from Norway for murder. He settled down on a farm, married a Christian woman named Thjodhild (the Norse were by now starting to convert) and had three sons, Leif, Thorvald and Thorstein, and one daughter, Freydis. It wasn't long, though, before Erik began feuding with a neighbor--something about a cow and some wallboards--and ended up killing again.

The Althing decided to exile him for three years, so Erik sailed west to explore a land he had heard about from sailors who had been blown off course. Making his way around a desolate coast, he came upon magnificent fjords flanked by lush meadows and forests of dwarf willow and birch, with glacier-strewn mountain ranges towering in the distance. This "green land," he decided (in what might have been a clever bit of salesmanship), would be a perfect place to live. In 985 Erik returned triumphantly to Iceland and enlisted a group of followers to help him establish the first Norse outposts on Greenland. Claiming the best plot of land for himself, Erik established his base at Brattahlid, a verdant spot at the neck of a fjord on the island's southwestern tip, across from what is now the modern airport at Narsarsuaq. He carved out a farm and built his wife a tiny church, just 8 ft. wide by 12 ft. long. (According to one legend, she refused to sleep with him until it was completed.)

The remains of this stone-and-turf building were found in 1961. The most spectacular discovery from the Greenland colonies was made in 1990, however, when two Inuit hunters searching for caribou about 55 miles east of Nuuk (the modern capital) noticed several large pieces of wood sticking out of a bluff. Because trees never grew in the area, they reported their discovery to the national museum. The wood turned out to be part of an enormous Norse building, perfectly sealed in permafrost covered by 5 ft. of sand: "definitely one of the best-preserved Norse sites we have," says archaeologist Joel Berglund, vice director of the Greenland National Museum and Archives in Nuuk.

According to Berglund, a leader of the dig at the "Farm Beneath the Sand" from 1991 through 1996, the site was occupied for nearly 300 years, from the mid-11th century to the end of the 13th century. "It went from small to big and then from big to small again," he explains. "They started with a classic longhouse, which later burned down." The place was abandoned for a while and then rebuilt into what became a "centralized farm," a huge, multifunction building with more than 30 rooms housing perhaps 15 or 20 people, plus sheep, goats, cows and horses.

The likeliest reason for this interspecies togetherness was the harsh climate. Observes Berglund: "The temperature today gets as cold as -50[degrees]C [-58 (degrees) F]." Bones recovered from trash middens in the house indicate that the occupants dined mostly on wild caribou and seals, which were plentiful along the coast. (The domesticated animals were apparently raised for their wool and milk, not meat.) Scientists recovered more than 3,000 artifacts in the ruins, including a wooden loom, children's toys and combs. Along with hair, body lice and animal parasites, these items will be invaluable in determining what each room was used for. Researchers also found bones and other remnants from meals, and even a mummified goat. That means, says Berglund, "we'll even be able to tell whether there was enough food and whether the people and animals were healthy."

As Greenland's overlord, Erik the Red took a cut of virtually everyone's profits from the export of furs and ivory. Material success apparently did not keep Erik and his family content, though; they undoubtedly heard of a voyage by a captain named Bjarni Herjolfsson, who had been blown off course while en route to Greenland from Iceland. After drifting for many days, Bjarni spotted a forested land. But instead of investigating this unknown territory, he turned back and reached Greenland.

Intrigued by this tale, Erik's eldest son Leif, sometime between 997 and 1003, decided to sail westward to find the new land. First, say the sagas, the crew came to a forbidding land of rocks and glaciers. Then they sailed on to a wooded bay, where they dropped anchor for a while. Eventually they continued south to a place he called Vinland ("wineland," probably for the wild grapes that grew there). Leif and his party made camp for the winter, then sailed home. Members of his family returned in later years, but Leif never did. Erik died shortly after his son returned, and Leif took over the Greenland colony. Though he retained ownership of the Norse base in North America and received a share of the riches that were brought back, he stopped exploring.

This much had long been known from the Icelandic sagas, but until 1960 there was no proof of Leif's American sojourns. In retrospect, it is astonishing that the evidence took so long to be found. That year Norwegian explorer Helge Ingstad and his wife, archaeologist Anne Stine Ingstad, went to Newfoundland to explore a place identified on an Icelandic map from the 1670s as "Promontorium Winlandiae," near the small fishing village of L'Anse aux Meadows, in the province's northern reaches. They were certain that it marked the location of an ancient Norse settlement.

Finding the settlement turned out to be absurdly easy. When the Ingstads asked the locals if there were any odd ruins in the area, they were taken to a place known as "the Indian camp." They immediately recognized the grass-covered ridges as Viking-era ruins like those in Iceland and Greenland.

During the next seven years, the Ingstads and an international team of archaeologists exposed the foundations of eight separate buildings. Sitting on a narrow terrace between two bogs, the buildings had sod walls and peaked sod roofs laid over a (now decayed) wooden frame; they were evidently meant to be used year-round. The team also unearthed a Celtic-style bronze pin with a ring-shaped head similar to ones the Norse used to fasten their cloaks, a soapstone spindle whorl, a bit of bone needle, a small whetstone for sharpening scissors and needles, lumps of worked iron and iron boat nails. (All these items helped win over detractors, since the artifacts were clearly not native to America.)

Further excavations in the mid-1970s under the auspices of Parks Canada, the site's custodian, made it plain that this was most likely the place where Leif set up camp. Among the artifacts turned up: loom weights, another spindle whorl, a bone needle, jasper fire starters, pollen, seeds, butternuts and, most important, about 2,000 scraps of worked wood that were subsequently radiocarbon dated to between 980 and 1020--just when Leif visited Vinland.

The configuration of the ruined buildings, the paucity of artifacts and garbage compared with those found at other sites, and the absence of a cemetery, stables and holding pens for animals have convinced Birgitta Linderoth Wallace, the site's official archaeologist, that L'Anse aux Meadows wasn't a permanent settlement and was used for perhaps less than 10 years.

Instead, she believes, it served as a base camp for several exploratory expeditions up and down the coast, perhaps as far south as the Gulf of St. Lawrence. "We know this because of the butternuts," she says. "The closest places they grow are east of Quebec near the Gulf of St. Lawrence or in eastern New Brunswick. They are too heavy for birds to carry, and they can't float. And we know the Norse considered them a delicacy."

The National Museum's Fitzhugh notes that the location of the camp was advantageous for various reasons. "L'Anse aux Meadows is rocky and dangerous," he admits. "There are much better places just a few miles away--but there's a good view. They could watch out for danger, and they could bring their boats in and keep an eye on them." What's more, Fitzhugh says, "they would have built where they could easily be found by other people. That's why they chose the tip of a peninsula. All they had to tell people was, 'Cross the Big Water, turn left and keep the land on your right.'" With fair winds, the voyage would have taken about two weeks; a group of men who tried it in the replica Viking ship Snorri (named after the first European born in America) in 1998 were stuck at sea for three months.

Despite all the natural resources, the Norse never secured a foothold in the New World. Within a decade or so after Leif's landing at L'Anse aux Meadows, they were gone. Wallace, for one, believes that there were simply too few people to keep the camp going and that those stationed there got homesick: "You had a very small community that could barely sustain itself. Recent research has shown it had only 500 people, and we know you need that many at a minimum to start a colony in an uninhabited area. They had barely got started in Greenland when they decided to go to North America. It wasn't practical, and I think they missed their family and friends."

Fitzhugh offers another theory. "I think they recognized that they had found wonderful resources but decided they couldn't defend themselves and were unable to risk their families to stay there," he says. "Imagine 30 Norsemen in a boat on the St. Lawrence meeting a band of Iroquois. They would have been totally freaked out."

As for discovering additional Norse outposts in North America, most experts think the chances are very slim. "These areas were heavily occupied by Native Americans," says archaeologist Patricia Sutherland of the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Hull, "so while there may have been some trade, relations would have been hostile. Maybe someone will find an isolated Norse farm on the coast of Labrador or Baffin Island, but not an outpost."

That's not to say Norse artifacts haven't been discovered south of Newfoundland--but aside from a Norse penny, minted between 1065 and 1080 and found in 1957 at an Indian site near Brooklin, Maine, nearly all of them have turned out to be bogus. The Newport (R.I.) Tower, whose supposed Viking origin was central to Longfellow's epic poem The Skeleton in Armor, was built by an early Governor of Rhode Island. The Kensington Stone, a rune-covered slab unearthed on a Minnesota farm in 1898 that purportedly describes a voyage to Vinland in 1362, is today widely believed to be a modern forgery. So is Yale's Vinland Map, a seemingly antique chart with the marking "Vinilanda Insula" that surfaced in the 1950s bound into a medieval book.

To the north, though, it's a different story. Digs at dozens of ancient Inuit sites in the eastern Canadian Arctic and western Greenland have turned up a wealth of Norse artifacts, indicating that the Europeans and Arctic natives interacted long after Leif Eriksson and his mates left. Says Sutherland: "The contact was more extensive and more complex than we suspected even a couple of months ago."

The Norse referred to the indigenous peoples they encountered in Greenland and the New World as skraeling, a derogatory term meaning wretch or scared weakling, and the sagas make it clear that the Norse considered the natives hostile. But the abundance of Norse items found at Inuit sites--some 80 objects from a single site on Skraeling Island, off the east coast of Ellesmere Island, including a small driftwood carving of a face with European features--suggests that there was a lively trade between the groups (as well as an exchange of Norse goods among the Inuit).

The Vikings held out in their harsh Greenland outposts for several centuries, but by 1450 they were gone. One reason was climate change. Starting about 1350, global temperatures entered a 500-year slump known as the Little Ice Age. Norse hunting techniques and agriculture were inadequate for survival in this long chill, and the Vikings never adapted the Inuit's more effective strategies for the cold.

Another factor was the rapacious overuse of resources. The goats, pigs and sheep brought by the Norse ate or trampled the forests and shrub lands, eventually transforming them into bare ground. Without enough fodder, the farm animals could not survive. The Norse were forced to eat more seal, seabirds and fish--and these too became locally scarce. The depletion of Greenland's meager trees and bushes meant no wood for fuel or for repairing ships.

To make matters worse, demand for the trade goods that Greenlanders exported to Europe plummeted. Not only was African ivory once again available (the supply had been cut off during the Crusades), but the material was falling out of fashion. And Europeans had their own problems: plague, crops failing in the colder conditions and city dwellers rioting in search of food. By the time the last Norse departed Greenland, the colonies had become so marginal that it took several hundred years before some Europeans realized they were gone. The Icelandic colony suffered too, though it managed to hang on.

But the true Vikings--those marauders of monasteries, those fearsome invaders from the north--had long since vanished, except in myth. As Europe's weak feudal fiefs had grown into powerful kingdoms, the Norse raiders had run out of easy victims. In England the victory in 1066 of William the Conqueror--a descendant of Norsemen from Normandy--marked the end of Viking terror.

Indeed, fear of the Vikings had played a pivotal role in reshaping Europe. "They helped develop nations and forced the Europeans to unite and defend themselves," says Fitzhugh. "It was a turning point in European history."

Back in their Scandinavian homeland, the Vikings' descendants also united into kingdoms, ultimately establishing Norway, Sweden and Denmark and pursuing a history no more or less aggressive than that of any other Europeans. The transfer of the Orkney Islands from Danish to Scottish control in 1468, for example, came not as the result of a bloody battle but as part of a royal wedding dowry.

As for the Norse settlements scattered around Britain and Europe, their inhabitants intermarried with the locals and finally disappeared as a distinct people. All that remains of them is their language and genes, spread widely through the Western world. Unlike Columbus, the Vikings may not have established a permanent presence in North America the first time around. But given the millions of Americans who share at least a bit of Viking blood, they are still there--and in considerable force.

Icelandic DNA study Shows Evidence of First Americans in Europe in 1000 CE

2010-12-11T11:13:00.000-07:00

The Genetic Edge Back to Sci-Tech

Icelandic DNA study Shows Evidence of First Americans in Europe in 1000 CE

Martin Barillas November 22nd 2010

Cutting Edge Senior Contributor

Medieval map showing the Old World and American coastline

When Christopher Columbus returned from his first voyage to the Americas, he shanghaied ten to twenty-five of the native peoples he encountered on the Caribbean islands he explored. Of these, only 6 were to be presented to the court of Spain's Catholic monarchs when he returned to the Iberian Peninsula in March 1493. These 6 American natives were presumed to be the first of the New World to set foot in the Old World. Until now.

King Ferndinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille had joined forces to unite Spain as the first modern nation-state, and by bankrolling Columbus they set about on a process of conquest, exchange, and transformation that still resonates today.

And it is now a Spanish researcher - a modern explorer charting a course in human history - who has uncovered evidence that Americans contributed to the European gene pool approximately 500 years before Columbus' decisive voyage of discovery.According to new research, scientists have found the genetic past of an Icelandic family that exhibit descent from Americans who were brought to Europe by Vikings who ranged into the northern reaches of what is now Canada and Greenland. Researchers at Spain’s Center for Scientific Research say that a woman from the Americas probably arrived in Iceland 1,000 years ago, leaving behind genes that are reflected in the DNA of about 80 Icelanders today. The link was first detected in Iceland several years ago. The island nation has one of the most thorough gene-mapping programs in the world, and the largest DNA ever attempted was conducted there in 2009.

Suggestions that the genes encountered by the Spanish researchers may have come directly from Asia were ruled out after samples showed they had been in Iceland since the early 18th century, long before Asian genes began appearing among Icelanders. Researchers showed that the genes they studied can be traced to common ancestors in the south of Iceland, near the Vatnajˆkull glacier, in around 1710. "

As the island was largely isolated from the 10th century onwards, the most probable hypothesis is that these genes correspond to an Amerindian woman who was taken from America by the Vikings some time around the year 1000," Carles Lalueza-Fox, of the Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, said. Researchers will continue to determine when the Amerindian genes first arrived in Iceland. Said Lalueza-Fox, "So far, we have got back to the early 18th century, but it would be interesting to find the same sequence further back in Icelandic history." The study will be published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Norse sagas suggest the Vikings arrived in the Americas centuries before Columbus. Among these would have been the Viking Erik “the Red.” A Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in the eastern Canadian region of Newfoundland, is thought to date to the 11th century. Other such settlements are found in Greenland, which Viking navigators reached from Iceland. The Vikings called the North American mainland "Vinland."

The unknown American woman was probably abducted from the Americas and then brought to Iceland. Having survived her capture and voyage to a distant place with strangers, the woman bore children there. This would explain the resemblance of many native Icelanders to American aboriginal peoples such as the Inuit. That her arrival is not recorded in Norse sagas did not surprise Lalueza-Fox, who averred that “women did not write history.”

The researchers collaborated with deCode Genetics, a company based in Iceland, which has DNA records of practically everyone living on the island. Their studies show that some 80 individuals, representing four distinct family lines, have American genetic origins.

The DNA lineage, named C1e, is mitochondrial – which means that the genes were introduced by a woman. “Given that they have the same sequence and that is of the Ameridindian type, it is logical to believe that these four ancestors, also come from a single common ancestor,” explained Lalueza-Fox. Since Iceland was isolated since the 11th century, “the most reasonable hypothesis is that these genes correspond to an Amerindian woman who was taken from the Americas by the Vikings around the year 1000 AD.”

Since the woman’s arrival a millenium ago, 40 generations of her descendants have flourished. In each generation, there was at least one girl child. “That woman had daughters and that female lineage has not been interrupted until now.” Otherwise, according to Lalueza-Fox, the DNA mitochondrial material would not have been passed down. The Spanish scientist said that he doubted that the woman’s genetic lineage would have been transmitted to the European mainland. No such lineage has been found to date among families in continental Europe, he said.

The Vikings were not only adept warriors and navigators, but also far-ranging slavers. Viking raids on the British Isles and into the Russian heartland brought gold to their coffers not only from pillage, but also from captives they sold in slave markets as far away as Constantinople. Genetic studies show, for example, significant levels of genetic material from the British Isles among modern Icelanders, descendants of Vikings. While the original male inhabitants of Iceland were mostly of Viking origin, the majority of original female inhabitants hailed from the coasts of Scotland and Ireland.

Viking Greenland Referenced in Climate Change Article

2010-12-03T10:30:00.012-07:00

BusinessDay
News Worth Knowing

ANDREW KENNY: Climate change
Published: 2010/11/30 07:31:12 AM

A year after Climategate, the corruption of science persists

IT IS a year since the so-called Climategate e-mails were leaked. Since then, we have had freezing winters in Europe and the US, and revelations of gross misrepresentations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The lasting impression is of massive corruption of science.

Leaked from the Climate Research Unit in England, the e-mails showed the scientists behind the climate scare plotting to: hide, delete and manipulate data; to denigrate scientists presenting different views; to force journals to publish only papers promoting climate alarm; to subvert "peer review" into "pal review"; and make the reports of the IPCC nothing but alarmist propaganda. The corruption spread through governments, universities, scientific societies and journals. You have to look back to the Lysenko episode in the Soviet Union in the 1940s (when a crank persuaded the Soviet establishment that agriculture did not follow Darwinian evolution) to find such perversion of science.

The worst nonsense after the scandal was this: "Well, some climate scientists committed a few minor transgressions but the basic science is sound." In fact, the basic science is nonexistent.

There is no evidence that mankind is changing the climate in a dangerous way. The slight warming of the p ast 150 years is no different from previous natural warming periods, such as the worldwide medieval warm period from about 900 to 1200AD. Global warming and cooling are closely correlated to variations in the sun, especially in its emission of charged particles. Carbon dioxide (CO² ), a harmless, natural gas upon which green plants depend, is a feeble greenhouse gas. Its only significant absorption band (15 micron) is saturated, so adding more to the atmosphere has a small and diminishing effect.

Over the p ast half- billion years (the span of multicelled life), CO² levels have averaged more than 2000ppm (parts per million) but with wild fluctuations, from more than 6000ppm to less than 500ppm. This has had no noticeable effect on global temperatures, which have remained remarkably constant for long periods, pointing to a stable global climate system, without which higher life might not be possible. This stability probably comes from low clouds, which increase when temperatures rise and have a powerful cooling effect by reflecting away sunlight.

In the 19th c entury, CO² levels were about 280ppm, extraordinarily low, putting stress on green plants. Man, by burning fossil fuels and through deforestation, has pushed the levels up to 390ppm. On present trends, they will be more than 500ppm by the end of the century. This will have only one major effect: better crops and forests, and more biodiversity. The effect on the climate will be insignificant. Talk of a temperature rise of 2°C is not valid.

But rising CO² has spawned the new millennial religion of man-made climate change. It has the usual religious themes of sin, damnation and redemption. The sin is naughty industrial man emitting CO² . Damnation is soaring temperatures, rising seas, floods and droughts. Redemption is forsaking fossil fuels and building wind turbines. The priesthood has special exemptions. The faithful see nothing wrong with US environmental activist Al Gore, who tells us to reduce carbon emissions, consuming vast amounts of fossil-generated electricity in his mansion and flying first class around the world.

The ideological reasons for climate alarm are the usual religious ones too: a desire to show how sinful man is, and to control human behaviour. The alarmists yearn to forbid ordinary people from using fossil energy.

What is new is the staggering amount of money involved. It is estimated that the US government alone, in the p ast two decades, has given 79b n to fund climate alarm. This dwarfs any money oil companies might have given to research. The sinister effect of this political funding is to drive science towards a desired result rather than truth: you will get your funding only if you show that mankind is causing dangerous climate change. The more alarm, the more funding.

Harold Lewis, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) after 67 years. In his resignation letter, he wrote about "… the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the Climategate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organises the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion."

He refers to The Hockey Stick Illusion by AW Montford, which is essential reading for understanding the climate scam. The book is about a key part of the scam: denial of the medieval warm period. If you go to www.co2climatescience.org, you will see more than 900 scientific studies confirming the medieval warm period. So does historical record: during this period, the Vikings colonised Greenland and grew crops where it is now too cold for them. The alarmists hate it because it showed the world warmer a thousand years ago while CO² was lower. So they used quackery to deny it.

The "hockey stick" graph, first published in Nature magazine in 1998 and then shown six times in the IPCC’s 2001 report and brandished around the world, showed temperatures in the northern hemisphere steady from 1000 to 1900AD (the handle of a hockey stick) and then rising to unprecedented heights in the 20th century (the blade). No medieval warm period! This nonsense was accepted with blind, unquestioning faith by the IPCC and much of the scientific establishment. They liked the result; they didn’t care about the method.

The hockey stick theory was eventually demolished by Steve McIntyre, an expert statistician, who managed to get hold of the data on which it was based and found outrageously wrong statistical methods, deliberate use of data known to be wrong, and other manipulations. (After this exposure, the perpetrators of the hockey stick started a website called "realclimate".)

The Climategate e-mails are there for all the honest world to see. You will see a small number of names — Jones, Mann, Bradley, Hughes, Briffa, Schneider, Santer, etc — conspiring among themselves to silence critics and promote climate alarm, which they have done with great success.

The climate alarmists are unable to counter the scientific arguments of the climate rationalists. So they resort to vilification. Anyone who questions man-made global warming is: a stooge of the oil companies; just like those who deny the Nazi Holocaust or deny that cigarette smoking causes cancer — or just like those who deny that Americans landed on the moon.

In May, I attended a superb climatescience conference in Chicago. Most of the speakers were the world’s leading scientists, all of whom showed convincingly that climate changes are natural. But some were politicians. One, Harrison Schmitt, gave a passionate attack on the pseudoscience of man-made climate change. He had been a US senator. He had also been a crew member of Apollo 17 — among the crew who were the last humans to walk on the moon.

Kenny is a consulting engineer with degrees in physics and mechanical engineering.

More on American Indian Sailed to Europe With Vikings?

2010-11-27T11:55:00.000-07:00

The deluge of scientific articles and papers associated with the startling discovery of modern Icelanders with North American Indian DNA has taken on a life of its own. As the story continues to unfold you will see that my contention—the premise of my novels on the assimilation of the Viking Greenland populace with pre-historical Canadian and American Indians—will be proven correct.

***

More on American Indian Sailed to Europe With Vikings?

November, 24 2010

National Geographic News

Centuries before Columbus, a Viking Indian child may have been born in Iceland.

Five hundred years before Columbus sailed the ocean blue, a Native American woman may have voyaged to Europe with Vikings, according to a provocative new DNA study.

Analyzing a type of DNA passed only from mother to child, scientists found more than 80 living Icelanders with a genetic variation similar to one found mostly in Native Americans.

This signature probably entered Icelandic bloodlines around A.D. 1000, when the first Viking-American Indian child was born, the study authors theorize.

Historical accounts and archaeological evidence show that Icelandic Vikings reached Greenland just before 1000 and quickly pushed on to what is now Canada. Icelanders even established a village in Newfoundland, though it lasted only a decade or so.

The idea that a Native American woman sailed from North America to Iceland during that period of settlement and exploration provides the best explanation for the Icelanders' variant, the research team says.

"We know that Vikings sailed to the Americas," said Agnar Helgason of deCODE Genetics and the University of Iceland, who co-wrote the study with his student Sigrídur Ebenesersdóttir and colleagues. "So all you have to do is assume & that they met some people and ended up taking at least one female back with them.

"Although it's maybe interesting and surprising, it's not all that incredible," Helgason added. "The alternative explanations to me are less likely"- for example the idea that the genetic trait might exist independently, undiscovered, in a few Europeans.

The study authors themselves admit the case is far from closed. But University of Illinois geneticist Ripan Malhi- an expert in ethnic DNA differences who wasn't part of the project- agreed that the report holds "strong genetic evidence for pre-Columbian contact of people in Iceland with Native Americans."

Dating the DNA Signature

Through genealogical research, the study team concluded that the Icelanders who carry the Native American variation are all from four specific lineages, descended from four women born in the early 1700s.

Those four lineages, in turn, likely descended from a single woman with Native American DNA who must have been born no later than 1700, according to study co-author Ebenesersdóttir.

The genealogical records for the four lineages are incomplete before about 1700, but history and genetics suggest the Native American DNA arrived on the European island centuries before then, study co-author Helgason said.

He pointed out that Iceland was very isolated from the outside world in the centuries leading up to 1700, so it's unlikely that a Native American got to the island during that period.

As further evidence, he noted that- though the Icelanders share a distinct version of the variation- at least one lineage's variation has mutated in a way that would likely have taken centuries to occur, the researchers say.

This unique signature suggests that, in Helgason's words, the Native American DNA arrived in Iceland at least "several hundred years" before 1700.

DNA Evidence Fragmented

Despite the evidence, for now it's nearly impossible to prove a direct, thousand-year-old genetic link between Native Americans and Icelanders.

For starters, no living Native American group carries the exact genetic variation found in the Icelandic families.

But of the many known scattered versions that are related to the Icelandic variant, 95 percent are found in Native Americans. Some East Asians, whose ancestors are thought to have been the first Americans, carry a similar genetic pattern, though.

The Inuit, often called Eskimos, carry no version of the variant- a crucial detail, given that Greenland has a native Inuit population.

Helgason speculates that the precise Icelandic variation may have come from a Native American people that died out after the arrival of Europeans.

It's possible, he added, that the DNA variation actually came from mainland Europe, which had infrequent contact with Iceland in the centuries preceding 1700. But this would depend on a European, past or present, carrying the variation, which so far has never been found.

History Not Much Help?

Complicating matters, the historical record contains no evidence that Icelandic Vikings might have taken a Native American woman back home to their European island, scholars say.

"It makes no sense to me," said archaeologist and historian Hans Gulløv of the Greenland Research Centre in Copenhagen.

For one thing, experts say, nothing in excavations or the Icelandic sagas- thought to be rooted in fact but not entirely reliable- suggests a personal alliance of the kind reported in the new study, published online November 10 in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The Saga of Erik the Red does tell of four Skraeling boys- the Norse term for the American Indians- who were captured by an Icelandic expedition and taken back to Greenland, said Birgitta Wallace, an emeritus archaeologist for Parks Canada who has written extensively about the Norse.

But Icelanders spent little time in North America, and their relations with the people they found living there seem to have been mostly hostile, she said. The stories "talk in not very flattering terms about [Native Americans'] looks," Wallace said.

One saga, she added, tells of explorers "who found some sleeping natives- and they just killed them."

Time to Rewrite Viking History?

"What we have is a big mystery," study co-author Helgason admitted.

It won't be solved, he said, until the DNA pattern's origins are nailed down, perhaps through the study of ancient DNA- for example, if an ancient Native American bone is found with DNA closely matching the Icelandic variant.

But at least one skeptic suggests it's a mystery worth pursuing.

"I have no historical sources telling me" that Vikings took Native Americans home, said Gulløv, the historian. But often when new data is uncovered, he added, "we have to write history anew."

First American in Europe was native woman kidnapped by Vikings

2010-11-19T15:01:00.001-07:00

I have contended for years that the Greenland Vikings did not disappear, as was thought, rather they assimilated with the natives of the land they called Vinland. It is the premise of my novels on the Greenland Vikings. The following article indicates that scientists are beginning to take a look at that possibility with mitochondrial DNA found in the current residents of Iceland. Check out my website for my Axe of Iron series on the medieval Greenland Vikings and their adventures among the natives of Vinland.

***

Friday, Nov 19 2010

First American in Europe 'was native woman kidnapped by Vikings and hauled back to Iceland 1,000 years ago'

By Niall Firth

Daily Mail

Last updated at 7:47 PM on 17th November 2010

A native woman kidnapped by the Vikings may have been the first American to arrive in Europe around 1,000 years ago, according to a startling new study.

The discovery of a gene found in just 80 Icelanders links them with early Americans who may have been brought back to Iceland by Viking raiders.

The discovery means that the female slave was in Europe five centuries before Christopher Columbus first paraded American Indians through the streets in Spain after his epic voyage of discovery in 1492.

The genes that the woman left behind have now been discovered in the DNA of just our distinct family lines.

Replicas of Viking sod houses at L'Anse Aux Meadows on the northern tip of Newfoundland. The area holds the earliest evidence of Viking raiders arriving in the Americas

Any early suggestion that the genes were from Asia were ruled out after it was worked out that they had been present in Iceland since at least the 18th century – long before Asian genes appeared in Icelanders.

The team found that the genes they studied can be traced to common ancestors in the south of Iceland, near the Vatnajˆkull glacier, in around 1710.

It has long been thought that Viking raiders arrived in the Americas centuries before Columbus ever arrived in the Caribbean.

Norse epic sagas such as ‘Erik the Red’, talk of early Scandinavian settlers discovering lush new lands, with a temperate climate and abundant crops – now believed to be parts of northern Canada.

A Viking settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in the eastern Canadian region of Newfoundland, is thought to date to the 11th century. Other such settlements are found in Greenland, which Viking navigators reached from Iceland.

Because Iceland was isolated from the rest of the world from the 11th century onwards scientists speculate that the woman must have been taken from the Americas sometime around the year 1000. Viking raiders kidnapped local women on their plundering trips to Europe and the Americas.

The DNA lineage, named C1e, is mitochondrial – which means that the genes were introduced by a woman.

The unknown American woman was probably abducted from the Americas and then brought to Iceland after surviving the sea voyage back. She then bore children in her new home but nothing was ever written of her existence or fate.

The study will be published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

Iceland is a renowned centre for gene research and the new study was led by DeCode Genetics - a world-leading genome research lab on the island which has DNA records of almost everyone living on the island.

Carles Lalueza-Fox, who co-authored the paper, told MailOnline: ‘In my view, the most plausible hypothesis is that these four Icelandic families derived from an Amerindian woman brought there at pre-Columbian times.

‘There are alternatives to this that we cannot totally reject. To have a definite proof, we should found a pre-Columbian Icelandic remain that could be genetically analysed and show the same Amerindian lineage.’

One of the alternatives is that a post 1400s American female, like Pocohontas, the character that inspired the Disney film, found her way from mainland Europe to Iceland. But scientists believe this to be unlikely because of how isolated Iceland was at the time.

Since the woman’s arrival a millennium ago, 40 generations of her descendants have lived in Iceland. In each generation, there was at least one girl child.

She also had daughters and the female lineage has not been interrupted yet as the mitochondrial gene has been passed through the generations.

The research team do not believe the lineage passed to the European mainland

The Vikings were fearsome warriors and highly skilled navigators. Viking raiders in Britain took not just gold and other precious good but also slaves that they could sell elsewhere around the world.

For example, while the original male inhabitants of Iceland were mostly of Viking origin, the majority of original female inhabitants came from the coasts of Scotland and Ireland.

Historical evidence suggests that people in Scandinavia and the British Isles arrived in Iceland around the year 870. The analysis of the Y sex chromosome, which passes from father to son, shows that 80% of Icelandic lineages comes from Scandinavia, compared to 20% in Scotland and Ireland.

Mitochondrial DNA, inherited through the maternal line, shows a 37 per cent from Scandinavia and 63% of the British Isles.

‘This difference has only one explanation: that the Vikings were in the habit of plundering the women of the British Isles. It is logical that they would do the same in America,’ said Lalueza-Fox.

Book Posting on Teach Our Children Website

2010-11-19T10:05:00.001-07:00

Confrontation: An Axe of Iron Novel is featured on the Teach Our Children website. The info includes a synopsis, link to this blog, link to website, and book ordering links.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Long lost Viking gateway found near Schleswig

2010-11-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

August 28, 2010

The Local

Archaeologists have found a legendary 1,200 year old gateway to the massive wall the Vikings built to defend themselves against their rivals the Saxons, according to a Friday media report.

Records of such a gateway existed, but archaeologists were due Friday to announce they had found the actual site, news magazine Der Spiegel reported. The team described the find as a "sensation."
The discovery, near the town of Schleswig in Germany's far north near the Danish border, reinforces the view that the Vikings were more than plunderers and pillagers, and that they also built and traded. The gate was the only opening in the Danevirke the 30-kilometre long wall that the feared men of the north built across the Cimbrian peninsula to separate their kingdom from what is now Germany.

The famous Nordic plunderers, who raided cities from Ireland to Spain were also prolific stone builders. The Danevirke is considered the largest archaeological site in northern Europe. A team of archaeologists have excavated a three-metre thick section of the stone wall from the eighth century in the Haddeby district near Schleswig. Many of the stones are fist-sized but others are veritable boulders weighing 50 kilogrammes or more. "The Vikings have gathered millions of stones," archaeologist Astrid Tummuscheit told the magazine.
The scientist said they had found a single, a five-metre-wide door in the wall. According to chronicles, horses and wagons once poured through this gateway. It included a customs house with bawdy taverns and brothels.

For hundreds of years archaeologists had dreamed of finding this door between Denmark and the kingdom of Charlemagne, the Frankish king who built an empire that stretched across much of western and central Europe in the second half of the eighth century. The existence of the fortifications were vaguely known. But archaeologists were prevented from digging at the site where they believed the gate stood because an old guesthouse, the Café Truberg, stood there. "The Café Truberg blocked everything," said state archeological head Claus von Carnap-Bornheim told Der Spiegel. When the guesthouse went broke, the Danish shipping magnate Arnold Mærsk swooped, buying the decrepit property. The German energy firm EON Hanse paid for the demolition of the guesthouse. Then the archaeologists moved in and quickly discovered the legendary door.

The Danes are equally excited by the discovery. Queen Margrethe II visited the excavation site along with Prince Frederik.

The Vikings were fighting at the time with neighbouring Slavs and Saxons for supremacy in the region. "This was the Kosovo of the early Middle Ages," Carnap-Bornheim told Der Spiegel. Ultimately the Danes triumphed. Records show that in year 808 a King Göttrik decided "to protect his empire from Saxony with a wall."

The Vikings' burning question: some decent graveside theatre

2010-11-06T13:09:00.000-06:00

From The Times

October 26, 2008

Magnus Linklater

The average Viking lived a life in which spirituality and thoughts of immortality played a far more important part than the rape and pillage more usually associated with his violent race, according to new research. A study of thousands of excavated Viking graves suggests that rituals were performed at the graveside in which stories about life and death were presented as theatre, with live performances designed to help the passage of the deceased from this world into the next.

Neil Price, Chair of Archaeology at the University of Aberdeen, who will be presenting his findings at a lecture at the university tonight, believes that these rituals may have been the early beginnings of the Norse sagas, which told stories about men and gods in the pagan world. He said that close study of the graves and the artefacts they contained, as well as contemporary accounts of Viking funerals, presented a far more complex picture of their lives than the simple myth of the Viking raider.

Detailed analysis of the burials revealed a remarkable variety of objects found alongside the bodies - from everyday items to great longships, wagons and sledges, together with animals of many different species and even human sacrifices.

Professor Price said: “Close analysis of Viking burials not only gives us an insight into the workings of their minds, but most importantly how slim they perceived the boundaries to be between life and death, and between humans and animals.”

He said that the burial rituals suggested the Vikings had no defined religion, but instead made up a set of spiritual beliefs, which were then acted out at the graveside. These became a form of theatre that predates the sagas and may have contained the origins of Norse mythology - the inspiration for Wagner's operas.

Professor Price said: “There seem to have been something like stage directions dictating how these rituals were to be enacted. Eyewitness accounts suggest that there were as many as ten days of ritual, with enormous time and effort put into the performances.”

The artefacts buried with the dead varied enormously. “No two graves were the same,” he said. Some bore evidence of a military career, with whole ships containing the corpse left open. Other graves were found to have had animal remains - one had no fewer than 20 decapitated horses - and occasionally there were human remains as well. Some Vikings were buried with their wives and families, others were laid to rest in more simple single graves.

Professor Price said: “What emerges from these studies is that these were an immensely sophisticated people, with a complex set of beliefs, and a strong interest in poetry. It was an utterly different world from ours. They were aggressively pagan, and strongly anti-Christian, perhaps as a reaction to the Christian missionaries. But there is great richness in this non-Christian world.”

Most of the existing records on Norse mythology date from the 11th to 18th centuries, having gone through more than two centuries of oral tradition that is thought to carry the seeds of Germanic legends such as the Valkyrie, the Niebelungen and Siegfried. Hundreds of place names in Scandinavia are named after the gods.

“The research focused on the examination of excavated material and Old Norse texts, combined with eyewitness descriptions of Viking burial ceremonies found in contemporary literature,” said Professor Price. “The study demonstrated the significant role that storytelling and dramatisation played in the Viking disposal of the dead. It seems clear that public enactments took place on these occasions, intended to provide the deceased with a poetic passage into the next life.

“The work suggests that Vikings used these funeral stories as a way of connecting the world of the living and the worlds of the dead. It is likely that these dramas, which were created and acted out using objects that were placed with the body in the grave or on the cremation pyre, form the beginnings of what we know today as Norse mythology.”

Scientist lives as Inuit for a year to save disappearing language

2010-10-31T13:02:00.000-06:00

August 14, 2010

CNN News

A British anthropologist is setting out on a year long stay with a small community in Greenland in an ambitious attempt to document its dying language and traditions.

Stephen Pax Leonard will live with the Inughuit in north-west Greenland, the world's most northernmost people, and record their conversations and story-telling traditions to try and preserve their language.

The Inughuit, who speak Inuktun, a "pure" Inuit dialect, are under increasing political and climactic pressure to move south, says Leonard.

"They have around 10 to 15 years left in their present location, then climate change and politics will force them to move south and they will be assimilated into a different culture, into a broader community, and their way of life will be lost," Leonard told CNN.

Leonard, who flies out to Copenhagen on Sunday before heading to Greenland, says there are about 1,000 speakers of Inuktun, an undocumented language.

Although most Inughuit are trilingual, also speaking Danish and Greenlandic, their primary language is still Inuktun.

"There is no doubt that this is a major linguistic challenge... they speak a very pure form of Inuit, partly because of their geographic isolation. Their entire culture is based on a story-telling culture."

Leonard, an anthropological linguist at Cambridge University, England, is under no doubt about the physical and cultural hurdles that face him. The average temperature is minus 25 degrees Celsius, although it can fall to minus 40 degrees Celsius in the winter.

Inughuit, which is the name of the northern Inuits, are hunter-gatherers; they do not have a cash economy and the men can spend weeks away from home hunting for walruses, seals and other mammals. They still use dog sleds in the winter and kayaks in the summer.

Hivshu, an Inughuit who now lives in Sweden, helped Leonard establish contacts with his former community in Greenland.

He has written about the Inughuit way of life on his website: "Even before I went to school I began assisting my father when he was out hunting, summer or winter, no difference. That was the way I heard the stories about my ancestors and their songs told and sung by the old people as it was a tradition to tell the stories and sing the traditional drum songs of Inuit to all of us during the hunting."

Leonard says he is determined to become a part of their community and plans to hunt with the men if he is allowed.

He is taking solid-state audio recorders that should work in the freezing conditions and plans to produce an "ethnography of speaking" that he hopes will be a permanent record that shows how their language and culture are interconnected.

The Assimilation of The Greenland Norse With Native Peoples

2010-10-20T18:53:00.002-06:00

The following is a repeat of an article I wrote two years ago. Given the renewed interest in Arctic exploration for signs of medieval Greenland Viking presence I thought it appropriate to show it to those of you who are new to all of this.

***

The Assimilation of The Greenland Norse With Native Peoples

26 JUNE 2008

As I have mentioned in other writings, sooner or later some group of scientists will undertake to sample the mtDNA of certain native peoples of southeastern Canada, including the Cree of the Ungava Peninsula of Quebec, and the northeastern United States for Norse genetic markers.

Such a study is the only way to finally put to rest the 1000-year old mystery of what happened to the Greenland Norse settlers.

This effort should concentrate on a cross section of pure blooded members of the Cree, Ojibwa, and Iroquois Indian tribes. I submit that Norse genetic markers will be found in these Indians as they have been found in the male Inuit(Y-chromosome) of Greenland, although none have been found in female Inuit. The Greenland Norse, Niels Linnerup and Søren Nørby (Laboratory of Biological Anthropology, University of Denmark, Copenhagen, 2002) 107

This work will no doubt continue and extend into other areas of the Canadian Arctic.

Given the tremendous distances involved, the high cost of travel in the Arctic, primitive conditions, and the shortness of the summer season, it seems plausible that DNA studies will prove to be cheaper than archaeological excavations.

Marauding Vikings Ale Packs a Real Punch

2010-10-14T20:12:00.001-06:00

Marauding Vikings Ale Packs a Real Punch

September 26, 2010

Belfast Telegraph

A team of archaeologists has recreated the heather ale drunk by marauding Vikings to boost their ferocity in battle.

***

Galway archaeologists Billy Quinn and Nigel Malcolm and businessman Declan Moore have been involved in their "great experiment" for the past three years, sampling Bronze Age brews and unearthing Ireland's ancient recipes and beer-making traditions.

The intrepid trio have just brewed their first heather ale using a recipe believed to date back to the 8th century AD.

'Bheoir Lochlannachis' is made from heather and barley; and instead of hops, which only became common in brewing in the 9th century, the herb bog myrtle is used to add flavour and preserve the potion.

Some sources believe the word 'ale' comes directly from the Viking word 'aul', and, according to legend, Norse invaders downed substantial quantities of the heather brew to whip up their battle frenzy.

The trio brewed the Scandinavian ale with barley from the Oslo Hotel Microbrewery in Salthill. The heather was gathered at Maumeen Lake in Connemara.

"We're using a recipe that was recorded in the 'Ulster Journal of Archaeology' in 1859," explained Mr Moore, MD of the Moore Group, an environmental consultancy firm. "It dates back, we would estimate, to the early Christian and Viking period."

Unlike the Moore Group's previous beer experiment, which involved using a prehistoric cooking pit heated by stones, the Viking beer was heated in a large pot and is now fermenting.

When the brew is ready, the team plans a private beer-tasting party next month. "We're going to produce around 150 litres and by the time that's filtered and sieved, there'll be 100 litres -- plenty to go around," said Mr Moore, while Mr Malcolm, general manager of Moore Group, said the finished product was eagerly anticipated.

This is not the trio's first foray into bygone brewing techniques. In 2007, the team produced a Bronze Age brew using a prehistoric cooking pit, which overturned the belief that brewing was only practised here from the 6th century onwards.

New images may yield Viking ships

2010-10-08T08:59:00.000-06:00

Views and News from Norway

October 5, 2010

Archaeologists think they have found two more Viking ships buried in Vestfold County south of Oslo. The biggest may be 25 meters long, larger than any found so far.

***

Road construction near the old Viking trading center at Kaupang has led to the discovery of two large ship silhouettes on ground radar pictures. The pictures have been made possible through a venture involving the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research (Norsk institutt for kulturminneforskning, NIKU) and the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Archeological Prospection and Virtual Archaeology.

They portray some "exciting" images with the help of high tech methods including satellites, laser scanning, magnetometers and georadar, according to NIKU officials. The methods can avoid or minimize destructive excavations by allowing archaeologists to register what the Norwegians call kulturminner (cultural antiquities) under the surface with a high degree of precision.

The images of Viking ships, along with several burial mounds, could be the biggest discoveries of their kind for more than a century, and some call them potentially "sensational" while officials urge restraint.

Even though the data so far is startling, the head of the Directorate for Cultural Heritage in Norway, Jørn Holme, told Norwegian Broadcasting (NRK) that people should not expect too much at this stage. "What we have discovered so far are the imprints of ships and iron nails," Holme told NRK. "However we are fairly certain that we will not find an intact Viking ship. It probably has disintegrated since the properties of the local soil are not good enough."

The imprints of the ships were found by means of georadar, a scanning technology that produces three-dimensional images of objects and structures below ground. "This technology is a breakthrough in the world of archaeology," say Holme told NRK.

Georadar works well in loose soil, but is less able to penetrate the clay that is needed to preserve wood and other organic objects, says Holme.

Both Norway's famed Oseberg and Gokstad ships were buried in such favourable clay conditions. The two discoveries, which are considered to be the best preserved Viking ships in the world, were discovered under several tons of stone, tightly packed with clay.

Even if archaeologists are not expecting finds on the scale of the Gokstad and Oseberg sites, there is good reason to believe that other cultural artifacts will be found in the ground. "There might be a burial in the ship, but one cannot expect the organic material to have survived," Holme said. "We can hope to find gold, silver, iron, pottery and glass."

A boat for Skjoldungelandet

2010-10-05T09:01:00.000-06:00

This article appeared in the latest Viking Ship Museum newsletter, 3 October 2010

***

A boat for Skjoldungelandet

Did you miss the construction of the Sea Stallion? Now’s your chance to get close to the construction of a Viking ship in full scale.

Kraka Fyr - a reconstruction of Skuldelev 6. The construction of another copy of the beautiful boat from the Sognefjord in western Norway is beginning now.

The keel has been laid for what will become the reconstruction of Skuldelev 6, the small fishing and cargo vessel from Sognefjord in western Norway. The Viking Ship Museum’s boatyard is building the boat in cooperation with the National Park Project, Skjoldungelandet. The boat will be used to present and explain the historic landscape around Roskilde Fjord.

“The new construction will provide a unique opportunity to experience, or re-experience, the reconstruction of a Viking ship in full scale,” says museum curator Louise Kæmpe Henriksen from the Department of Outreach, which was responsible for the exhibition displayed in the shipyard in connection with the construction. “It’s been 6 years since the Viking Ship Museum launched the Sea Stallion from Glendalough after a 4-year construction process. But the work is not completed, even though all 5 ship finds now have sailing reconstructions. The new construction will allow for other interpretations of the original ship, and will invite the visitors to the museum to follow the boat builders’ work up close.”

Another reconstruction

The Viking Ship Museum’s boat collection already includes a reconstruction of Skuldelev 6. In 1998, the museum’s boatyard launched Kraka Fyr, which has sailed with guests at the museum since then. There is also an active guild linked to Kraka Fyr. The guild sails the boat frequently throughout the season from May to September and a great deal of experience has already been obtained with this type of boat.

When the original boat was built around the year 1030, it was as a relatively low-sided fishing boat with six so-called strakes, which formed the sides of the boat. At a later stage in the life of the boat, it was converted from a fishing vessel to a cargo vessel by adding a 7th strake. In this way they achieved a more spacious and seaworthy vessel.

The new reconstruction shall be built with the original six strakes.

A new hypothesis

The construction will provide the museum’s boat builders with the opportunity to test new interpretations of the original wreck. Skuldelev 6’s stem was not preserved when it was excavated and the current reconstruction was therefore built with a so-called stepped stem, as in Skuldelev 3 (Roar Ege). “The new construction’s stem will resemble the stems from the second ship from Sognefjord, Skuldelev 1,” explains the head of the boat yard, Søren Nielsen. “This sea-going cargo ship had a lower stem and a radically different design than the stepped stem, and we are therefore offering a different suggestion about how the original boat might have looked when it sailed into the western fjords of Norway 1000 years ago.” Read more...

By: Preben Rather Sørensen

03/10 - 2010

A Viking Mystery

2010-10-03T09:45:00.000-06:00

September 24, 2010

Smithsonian

Beneath Oxford University, archaeologists have uncovered a medieval city that altered the course of English history

Before construction could begin on new student housing at one of Oxford University's 38 colleges, St. John's, archaeologists were summoned to investigate the site in January 2008. After just a few hours of digging, one archaeologist discovered the remains of a 4,000-year-old religious complex- an earthwork enclosure, or henge, built by late Neolithic tribesmen, probably for a sun-worshiping cult. About 400 feet in diameter, the temple was one of the largest of Britain's prehistoric henges, of which more than 100 have been found.

Later, the archaeologists found pits full of broken pottery and food debris suggesting that people had used the henge as a medieval garbage dump millennia after it had been dug. Excited, they began searching for items that might reveal details of daily life in the Middle Ages. Instead they found bones. Human bones.

"At first we thought it was just the remains of one individual," says Sean Wallis of Thames Valley Archaeological Services, the company that did the excavating. "Then, to our surprise, we realized that corpses had been dumped one on top of another. Wherever we dug, there were more of them. Not only did we have a 4,000-year-old prehistoric temple, but now a mass grave as well."

After one month of digging at the grave site and two years of lab tests, the researchers concluded that between 34 and 38 individuals were buried in the grave, all of them victims of violence. Some 20 skeletons bore punctures in their vertebrae and pelvic bones, and 27 skulls were broken or cracked, indicating traumatic head injury. To judge from markings on the ribs, at least a dozen had been stabbed in the back. One individual had been decapitated; attempts were made on five others.

Radiocarbon analysis of the bones convinced the archaeologists that the remains date from A.D. 960 to 1020- the period in which the Anglo-Saxon monarchy peaked in power. Originally from Germany, Anglo-Saxons had invaded England almost six centuries earlier, after the Roman Empire had fallen into disarray. They established their own kingdoms and converted to Christianity. After decades of conflict, England enjoyed a degree of stability in the tenth century under the rule of King Edgar the Peaceful.

But "peaceful" is a relative term. Public executions were common. British archaeologists have discovered some 20 "execution cemeteries" across the country- testifying to a harsh penal code that claimed the lives of up to 3 percent of the male population. One such site in East Yorkshire contains the remains of six decapitated individuals.

The Oxford grave, however, didn't fit the profile of an execution cemetery, which typically contains remains of people put to death over many centuries- not all at once, as at Oxford. And execution victims tended to be various ages and body types. By contrast, the bodies buried at Oxford were those of vigorous males of fighting age, most between 16 and 35 years old. Most were unusually large; an examination of the muscle-attachment areas of their bones revealed extremely robust physiques. Some victims had suffered serious burns to their heads, backs, pelvic regions and arms.

The most telling clue would emerge from a lab analysis, in which scientists measured atomic variations within the skeletal bone collagen. The tests indicated that the men ate, on average, more fish and shellfish than did Anglo-Saxons.

The mounting evidence increasingly pointed to an astonishing conclusion: this was a mass grave of Viking warriors.

In the late eighth century a.d., the Vikings- a Scandinavian people from Denmark, Norway and Sweden- began a 300-year campaign of pillaging and piracy throughout Europe. Some scholars say that political changes (especially the emergence of fewer yet more powerful rulers) forced local Viking chieftains to seek new sources of revenue through foreign conquests. Others point to advances in shipbuilding that enabled longer voyages- allowing the Vikings to establish trade networks extending as far as the Mediterranean. But when an economic recession hit Europe in the ninth century, Scandinavian seamen increasingly turned from trading to pillaging.

Most historians believe that England suffered more from the Vikings than other European countries. In the first recorded attack, in A.D. 793, Vikings raided an undefended monastic community at Lindisfarne in the northeast. Alcuin of York, an Anglo-Saxon scholar, recorded the onslaught: "We and our fathers have now lived in this fair land for nearly three hundred and fifty years, and never before has such a terror been seen in Britain as we have now suffered at the hands of a pagan people. Such a voyage was not thought possible. The church of St. Cuthbert is spattered with the blood of the priests of God."

The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a contemporary historical account, records that the Vikings waged some 50 battles and destroyed or ravaged scores of settlements. Dublin, one of the largest Viking cities in the British Isles, became a major European slave-trading center, where, historians estimate, tens of thousands of kidnapped Irishmen, Scotsmen, Anglo-Saxons and others were bought and sold.

"In many respects the Vikings were the medieval equivalent of organized crime," says Simon Keynes, a professor of Anglo-Saxon history at Cambridge University. "They engaged in extortion on a massive scale, using the threat of violence to extract vast quantities of silver from England and some other vulnerable western European states."

"Certainly the Vikings did all these things, but so did everyone else," says Dagfinn Skre, a professor of archaeology at the University of Oslo. "Although admittedly, the Vikings did it on a grander scale."

Martin Carver, an emeritus professor of archaeology at the University of York, characterizes the antagonism between the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians as part of a wider clash of ideologies. Between the sixth and ninth centuries, Vikings in Scandinavia preferred to be organized "in loose confederations, favoring enterprise," says Carver. But other parts of Europe, such as Britain, yearned for a more orderly, centralized government- and looked to the Roman Empire as a model.

Only one Anglo-Saxon kingdom- Wessex, ruled by Alfred the Great- is known to have withstood the Viking invasion. Alfred and his son, Edward, built up an army and navy and constructed a network of fortifications; then Edward and his successors wrested back control of those areas the Vikings had taken over, thus paving the way for English unification.

After decades of peace, Vikings again raided England, in A.D. 980. At the time, the Anglo-Saxon ruler was King Aethelred the Unraed (literally "the ill-advised"). As his name suggests, popular history has portrayed him as a mediocre successor to Alfred the Great and Edgar the Peaceful. The 12th-century historian William of Malmesbury wrote that Aethelred "occupied rather than governed" the kingdom. "The career of his life was said to have been cruel in the beginning, wretched in the middle and disgraceful in the end."

To avert war, Aethelred paid the Vikings some 26,000 pounds in silver between A.D. 991 and 994. In the years that followed, the king employed many of them as mercenaries to discourage other Vikings from attacking England.

But, in A.D. 997, some of the mercenaries turned on their royal employer and attacked the Anglo-Saxon southern counties. In early A.D. 1002, Aethelred again tried to buy off the Vikings- this time with 24,000 pounds in silver.

The geopolitical situation changed in England's favor only when Aethelred made an alliance with Normandy and sealed the deal by marrying the Duke of Normandy's sister in A.D. 1002. Possibly emboldened by the support of a powerful ally, Aethelred decided to take pre-emptive action before the Danes again broke the truce.

According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Aethelred was "informed" that Danish mercenaries intended to "beguile him out of his life." (It is unknown whether an informer learned of an actual plot, or if Aethelred and his council fabricated the threat.) Aethelred then set in motion one of the most heinous acts of mass murder in English history, committed on St. Brice's Day, November 13, 1002. As he himself recounted in a charter written two years later, "a decree was sent out by me, with the counsel of my leading men and magnates, to the effect that all the Danes who had sprung up in this island, sprouting like cockle [weeds] amongst the wheat, were to be destroyed by a most just extermination."

Prior to 2008, the only known inhabitants of the St. John's College garden had been the songbirds and squirrels that darted across the neatly cropped lawn and hid in an ancient beech tree. Generations of dons and students had strolled across that greenery, unsuspecting of what lay beneath.

The lab data indicating that the men buried there for 1,000 years had eaten lots of seafood, plus the burn markings and other evidence, convinced the archaeologists that the grave probably held victims of the St. Brice's Day massacre. Aethelred himself recounted exactly how the residents of Oxford killed the Danes in a local church: "Striving to escape death, [the Danes] entered [a] sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defence for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the [building's] timbers and burnt [it] down."

Wallis, the archaeologist in charge at Oxford, surmises that the townspeople loaded the corpses onto a cart and drove out through the north gate of the city, past land that today encompasses the Oxford colleges of Balliol and most of St. John's, then threw the Vikings into the prehistoric henge- the largest ditch nearest the city's northern exit.

A year after this discovery, another team of investigators, from the company Oxford Archaeology, were looking for evidence of prehistoric activity at a site 90 miles to the southwest in the English county of Dorset, near Weymouth, when they discovered a second mass grave. This one held the skeletons of 54 well-built, fighting-age males, all of whom had been decapitated with sharp weapons, most likely swords. Lab tests of the teeth suggested the men were Scandinavians. The ratio between various types of oxygen atoms in the skeletons' tooth enamel indicates the victims came from a cold region (one man from inside the Arctic Circle). Radiocarbon dating placed the victims' deaths between A.D. 910 and 1030; historical records of Viking activities in England narrow that to between A.D. 980 and 1009. The corpses had been unceremoniously dumped in a chalk and flint quarry that had been dug hundreds of years earlier, possibly during Roman times. Although no historical account of the massacre exists, the archaeologists believe the Vikings were apprehended and brought to the site to be executed.

The discovery of the two mass graves may resolve a question that has long vexed historians. In the centuries following the St. Brice's Day massacre, many chroniclers believed that the Danish community in England (a substantial percentage of the population) was targeted for mass murder, akin to a pogrom. Certainly there was undisguised hatred for the Scandinavians, who were described by contemporary writers as "a most vile people," "a filthy pestilence" and "the hated ones." But more recently, the massacre has been seen more as a police action against only those who posed a military threat to the government. The discovery of the two mass graves supports this view, since victims were found where the rebellious mercenaries would have been stationed: close to royal administrative centers (usually towns or important royal estates) on or near England's south coast and in the Thames Valley. By contrast, no such graves have been found in the region of eastern England once known as the Danelaw, which was populated by descendants of Scandinavian settlers. "I would estimate that out of a total population of around two million in England, perhaps half were of Scandinavian or partly Scandinavian origin- most of whom were loyal subjects," says Ian Howard, a historian writing a biography of Aethelred. "I think it inherently unlikely that the king ever intended to kill them all, as it would obviously have been impossible to do so."

Far from being just a ghoulish footnote to medieval history, Aethelred's massacre of the Danes likely reinforced Danish determination to attack England and set in motion a chain of events that would change the course of England's future. In A.D. 1003, the year after the massacres, King Svein of Denmark launched his own assault against a much wider swath of Anglo-Saxon England. This renewed aggression continued off and on for more than a decade, inspiring a level of terror the Anglo-Saxons had not faced since the first Viking invasions a century and a half earlier. An Anglo-Danish text, the Encomium Emmae Reginae, written around A.D. 1041 or 1042, described the Danish war fleet of 1016: "What adversary could gaze upon the lions, terrible in the glitter of their gold...all these on the ships, and not feel dread and fear in the face of a king with so great a fighting force?"

Both circumstantial and historical evidence suggests that revenge was at least part of the motivation for Svein's invasions. There were almost certainly blood ties between Aethelred's victims and Danish nobility. According to medieval chronicler William of Malmesbury, Svein's sister (or, possibly, half sister) Gunnhild was a victim of the St. Brice's Day massacre (although her body has never been found). Neither her gender nor her royal blood saved her, probably because she was the wife of Pallig, one of the turncoat mercenaries. Wrote William of Malmesbury: "[She was] beheaded with the other Danes, though she declared plainly that the shedding of her blood would cost all England dear."

Gunnhild's words proved prophetic. The Danes ultimately conquered England, in A.D. 1016, and Canute, the son of Svein, was crowned the nation's king in London's St. Paul's Cathedral in January 1017. Twenty-five years later, the Anglo-Saxons would regain the crown, but only for a generation. The Scandinavians, who had refused to renounce the throne, embarked on yet another onslaught against England in September 1066- less than a fortnight before William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, launched his own invasion of the country.

Although the English pushed back the Scandinavian invaders, the effort so weakened the Anglo-Saxons that they were defeated by William at the Battle of Hastings, also in 1066. The Norman Conquest consolidated the unification of England, as the new rulers introduced a more centralized, hierarchal government. The Anglo-Saxons would rise again, their culture and language merging with that of their oppressors to produce a new nation- the predecessor of modern England, and eventually an empire that would span half the globe.

David Keys is The Independent's archaeology correspondent.