Viking mythology and all that goes with it

awesome, i was pretty sure from the context it was Jorms nickname or another name for him, but still I didnt see it anywhere.

I googled it awhile ago and came up with only amon amarth site stuff.

thx
 
Tyra said:
Larsson, that sucks about your brother, though. How old is he? It wasn't some sort of stupid dare or initiation of some kind, was it? I suppose that in a way, it may be a good thing he got caught now - hopefully he'll be scared shitless and not do it again because of it.
Click to expand...
He's 14(so there won't be any legal problems in the future). I don't know why he did it and my parents don't want me talking to him about it either. He's almost dying of shame though so I don't think he'll do it again.

Forget about that for now. Tyra, since you are an archeologist I think you are a good person to ask about the climate and how it has changed during the ages. The reason I ask is the global warming debate. It smells sensationalism a long way if you ask me. And when the ''solutions''(more control, a more restricted market etc.) are mentionend it's hard not to take it as left-wing propaganda.
The scientific reports often don't mention that climate is dynamic and changes naturally. The way I understand it we had a warm period from about 900 AD to 1300 AD and a ''little ice age'' from 1500 to 1850. And let's not forget that scientists switch back and forth from ''global warming'' and ''global cooling'' a few times every century.
 
Speaking of winter/christmas celebrations, and in particular Jul...in Serbia we have a custom during Christmas eve on Janurary 6th (old callendar date) where we take logs and branches of wood and do a procession (I forget how many times) around a house or chuch carrying the wood and then build a fire outside using this wood. It is now a Christmas celebration but it definately has its roots in the pre-Christian Slavic religion. The burining fire is supposed to represent bringing the light of Christ into your home and community, but before Christianity it meant something completely different. I think it was something to do with bringing the warmth into the home and celebrating the time when winter will end and the comming of the warmth and melting of the snow of the long awaited spring. And it might have had to do with bringing the trees/nature/fertility of the land,spring,and the gods into your home and paying homage to the gods to grant the comming of spring and fruitful harvests. This was also to chime in the new year. Well, and of course there is a feast and still is one with plenty of food, drink, family, and hospitality (for that is still valued very highly). The traditional holiday meal includes roasted pork, sarma (cabbage rolls stuffed with meat), potatoes, etc. The winter celebrations lasted from the winter solstice onward until the 7th I think (but I am not sure). I forgot who on this forum mentioned St. Nickolas but we have him too. There is no santa claus but we have Deda Mraz, meaning "old man winter", (no doubt pagan) and sometimes he is refered to as Bozic Bata and he leaves presents out on the doorstep on Jan 6th. I remember reading a reference on Viking Jul customs and I think I came across something similar with burning logs on the hearth or fireplace that symbolized the same thing with the comming of the warmth of spring and the sun. Now the very early Slavs did worship the sun and it was close to the old Finnish religion with shamans and stuff. Ok, now comes the question for Tyra :) Did the ON also have this custom with burning wooden logs during Jul?
 
Thanks Sleipnir! I thought we did that question, cuz I remember that you replied to it but not if I did... Don't know where my head was when I wrote that last reply - forgot the lyrics and all! Jormundur is the kenning for Odin I was thinking of. Sorry Alakine!

Larsson; Yeah, you're absolutely right in that the climate has changed enormously over time. This has had a huge impact not only on evolution, but on cultural evolution. Certain ways of life had to stop, and new types replaced them because it was just too cold or just too hot. Trade routes had to change so that some very prosperous trade-centres became deserted because the river they were on dried out. Certain countires lost a major source of revenue when their main export crop could not be grown because it was too cold, while other previously lush and flourishing areas became a desert (that's why it is always interesting to dig in the desert - there are whole cities and such under that sand, but nobody really thought to look, cuz nobody expected there to be lush cities with water etc under all that sand until recently! They stay well preserved in the dry desert sand, so you can make some spectacular finds...), and so on.
We can measure temperature fluctuations quite accurately very, very far back in time. If you were to take all of those fluctuations in temperature and plot them on a chart to get a median, there will be ups and downs over time. What is different about the current hot period is that the temperature has gone up much, much higher than it has before - it's litterally off the chart that we've used for measuring the other fluctuations - and it is all happening in a fraction of the time that these other climate fluctuations have happened. I guess one could say that this hot period is more extreme. It's faster by far and bigger by far than the other previous periods.
That's about as far as you can go with the subject without getting into politics and how best to deal with this. The world is changing, as it has over millenia, it's just that now we're painfully aware of it because A. we can plot it and compare it, and we can see how our own behavior is accelerating things and B. there are more people now than back when this last happened, so we notice it more when millions of people are hit by Hurricane Katrina then when a whole tribe of 30 people got washed away by a flashflood during the mesolithic.
 
Well I'm no expert on the subject of global warming, and I haven't really bothered finfding out much on y own, but from what I can gather, human caused Global warming is very real. I heard maybe 6 months ago on CNN that scientists have confirmed so, and recently in Dagens Nyheter I read about Bavaria and the Alps and how extremly warm it has been there. Right now here in Berlinthere is 13 degrees celcius, and just a couple of days ago they found a tree here which had just started to bloom (is that the correct word?). That's fucked up. Never experienced that before. As Tyra said, that's an extreemley fast climate change.

I'm wondering about the exact date for winter solstice. DOes it change depending on ehre you are? Because Dragonkeeper talks about Serbia and the 6th, whereas in Sweden I think it's more like the 18th. The only burning in Scandinavia I can think of takes place the first of May, but that's a different thng I guess.
 
TheLastWithPaganBlood said:
Well I'm no expert on the subject of global warming, and I haven't really bothered finfding out much on y own, but from what I can gather, human caused Global warming is very real. I heard maybe 6 months ago on CNN that scientists have confirmed so, and recently in Dagens Nyheter I read about Bavaria and the Alps and how extremly warm it has been there. Right now here in Berlinthere is 13 degrees celcius, and just a couple of days ago they found a tree here which had just started to bloom (is that the correct word?). That's fucked up. Never experienced that before. As Tyra said, that's an extreemley fast climate change.
Click to expand...
We have had spring signs(''vårtecken'') in southern sweden as well. I have no doubt that humans have some impact on the warming(which maybe wasn't apparent in my first post), but how much? And is changing our lifestyles worth the trouble?
 
DragonKeeper said:
Speaking of winter/christmas celebrations, and in particular Jul...in Serbia we have a custom during Christmas eve on Janurary 6th (old callendar date) where we take logs and branches of wood and do a procession (I forget how many times) around a house or chuch carrying the wood and then build a fire outside using this wood. It is now a Christmas celebration but it definately has its roots in the pre-Christian Slavic religion. The burining fire is supposed to represent bringing the light of Christ into your home and community, but before Christianity it meant something completely different. I think it was something to do with bringing the warmth into the home and celebrating the time when winter will end and the comming of the warmth and melting of the snow of the long awaited spring. And it might have had to do with bringing the trees/nature/fertility of the land,spring,and the gods into your home and paying homage to the gods to grant the comming of spring and fruitful harvests. This was also to chime in the new year. Well, and of course there is a feast and still is one with plenty of food, drink, family, and hospitality (for that is still valued very highly). The traditional holiday meal includes roasted pork, sarma (cabbage rolls stuffed with meat), potatoes, etc. The winter celebrations lasted from the winter solstice onward until the 7th I think (but I am not sure). I forgot who on this forum mentioned St. Nickolas but we have him too. There is no santa claus but we have Deda Mraz, meaning "old man winter", (no doubt pagan) and sometimes he is refered to as Bozic Bata and he leaves presents out on the doorstep on Jan 6th. I remember reading a reference on Viking Jul customs and I think I came across something similar with burning logs on the hearth or fireplace that symbolized the same thing with the comming of the warmth of spring and the sun. Now the very early Slavs did worship the sun and it was close to the old Finnish religion with shamans and stuff. Ok, now comes the question for Tyra :) Did the ON also have this custom with burning wooden logs during Jul?
Click to expand...
Well, I don't know if the Norse in specific did it, but the old Germanic tribes on the continent, before they were converted, used to burn a Yule log. This practise has survived in many Germanic countires to this day, and the practise was brought to North America with them. These days you bring a log in the home, pass it around so that anyone who wishes can place a hand on it and make a wish for the next year. The Christian ritual has never managed to penetrate this practise for some reason. The practise was also common in many of the slavic countries, as you said.
The Norse did do a very similar thing to what you are talking about, but not necessarily at Yule. Whenever there was a crisis of some kind, you'd light a "need fire". A special log would be brought home, and then passed around so that everyone could place their hand on it, after a gothi or a gythia had hallowed it, to make a wish. Then the log was dedicated to the gods and goddesses and burned. I've only ever taken part in one such ritual, and we did ours outdoors, but I don't think it matters much. Generally with the ON, it only matters how high the smoke rises, but I am not sure if that applies here.
 
Larsson said:
We have had spring signs(''vårtecken'') in southern sweden as well. I have no doubt that humans have some impact on the warming(which maybe wasn't apparent in my first post), but how much? And is changing our lifestyles worth the trouble?
Click to expand...

According to the statistics that I have seen, we've accelerated things a lot. The issue is, as you point out, that stats can be bent for political purposes. The stats that I have seen, though, are ones that I believe to be accurate, as they were not sponsored by any political faction or configured to support of dispute any political issue. The ones I saw were done to configure temperatures over time, in order to find new places that we can dig now, but not in fifty years, because they will be under water, or to find new places we can dig today that we couldn't before, because they are now on dry land as a difference to at the bottom of a lake or whatever. The stats I don't trust are the ones put out by politicians.

I think one should probably do what one can within reason. What do we have to loose? Yes, some people will loose their jobs, some economic balances will shift from one continent to another. That'll happen anyways, and it has happened several times before in history. We have the ability to adjust to that, somewhat, but the ecology cannot adjuts on its own. If left unchecked, it will adjust us for us, and then we will have no control over how and when and to where it gets adjusted, which to me seems a worse option than the first one.
 
The sun is crushed in the street
the rays rain on the trees borders
the sheets of them blaze up
And ashes puffed up by the wind

A luminosity white lead bathes the pyres
Cold and empty
And a ball crunched by the night goes up,
Flayed by the calcined woodland claws

Perpetual white mourning,
For the dead sheets,
Siberize the areas
In a transitory shroud

Dead windows, glances deserted,
On the street Morgue, collective suicide
Or natural murder
Phantom City, vacated Earth


(vague translation of a french poem i wrote) i thought it was fitting here...
 
TheLastWithPaganBlood said:
Well I'm no expert on the subject of global warming, and I haven't really bothered finfding out much on y own, but from what I can gather, human caused Global warming is very real. I heard maybe 6 months ago on CNN that scientists have confirmed so, and recently in Dagens Nyheter I read about Bavaria and the Alps and how extremly warm it has been there. Right now here in Berlinthere is 13 degrees celcius, and just a couple of days ago they found a tree here which had just started to bloom (is that the correct word?). That's fucked up. Never experienced that before. As Tyra said, that's an extreemley fast climate change.
Click to expand...


There have been a lot of problems with our planet lately; hell, that last tsunami shifted the earth's axis a few degree's (which really fucks up wheather patterns). Not only that, but you'll find that c02 in the air itself is healthy (as there are two main cycles that regualte earth's temperature like a thermostat - the co2 cycle and the h20 cycle).

However, because we are pumping so much carbon into the air, the land and sea can't absorb it quick enough. We're truly fucking ourselves over. And if you follow economics or politics...you only know it's going to get worse.
Example: China has decided to start building coal plants to meet energy requirements...
 
ok, im curious about a detail.
but first, the context : we had to write a long research text for english class a few weeks ago and the subject was of our choice. I chose viking art. my thesis was The Viking Art is an important depository of the mythology of the scandinavian culture before Christianisation. , so i divided my work in 3 classes : the culture, the mythology and the art itself. no need to say i wrote alot more than what was first supposed to do, and i wrote so few about all i would have wanted to say. (average 750, i did alot more... 3000 heh passionating subject ^^ ) ok, so while looking for infomations i red about Sleipnir the eight legged horse of Odin and i red some place else what the horse meant for the Norses. and i wrote that : The horse for example, was associated to speed as much as fertility, it meant dignity and power. The link to Sleipnir, the eight-legged horse of Odin, is then often made[in art]. By consideration to the god and his horse, Odin, never charging in battle horse mounted, the Vikings were always charging enemies in running.

well, i was listening to Cry of the Black Birds saying
Charge your horses across the fields
To carry wide into destiny

you then find me puzzled. have i made a mistake in my research or what?
 
Most Norse would not have fought on horseback. Some did, though, but they were the exception to the rule. Also, remember their horses were smaller than the Arabians we see in most "Viking movies". In "Beowulf and Grendel" they used Icelandics to show this, which is as close as you can get to the real thing. Those horses didn't get you up high enough to give you much of an advantage, but it would have been more of a hindrance. Also, one can only bring so many horses on a ship full of warriors, and most battles would have entailed a seavoyage to get to the battlefield. Horses were valuable, too, and one would not want ones main mode of transportation and labour to be injured in battle unless one had one or two more to spare.
 
Thank you Tyra, so i guess my mistake was taking the "religious" aspect more important than reality...
thank you Larsson, i red the first paragraph, and ill read all the rest, seems very interesting!
although, im going to work in 20 mins and im not ready lol ill do that when i come back
 
Tyra said:
Well, I don't know if the Norse in specific did it, but the old Germanic tribes on the continent, before they were converted, used to burn a Yule log. This practise has survived in many Germanic countires to this day, and the practise was brought to North America with them. These days you bring a log in the home, pass it around so that anyone who wishes can place a hand on it and make a wish for the next year. The Christian ritual has never managed to penetrate this practise for some reason. The practise was also common in many of the slavic countries, as you said.
The Norse did do a very similar thing to what you are talking about, but not necessarily at Yule. Whenever there was a crisis of some kind, you'd light a "need fire". A special log would be brought home, and then passed around so that everyone could place their hand on it, after a gothi or a gythia had hallowed it, to make a wish. Then the log was dedicated to the gods and goddesses and burned. I've only ever taken part in one such ritual, and we did ours outdoors, but I don't think it matters much. Generally with the ON, it only matters how high the smoke rises, but I am not sure if that applies here.
Click to expand...

Ya, it seems like the Slavic practice is closest to the ancient Germanic practice, which does make sense since some Germanic tribes were living near Slavs. Sadly, I have no idea what the original practice was meant for since it went through the "let's make it Christian as an excuse for its continued existence in a seemingly Christianized nation" thing. As for the date, it was probably an existing festival day perhaps dedicated to the gods or something, I don't know. I am not sure if the Slavs practiced this "need fire" ritual since not enough research has been done on the pre-Christian Slavic religion. The Kievian Rus might have due to the ON influence there, but I doubt it. I will check Nestor's Chronicle to see if there is anything mentioned in there about it. Thanks for answering my question Tyra. Have a good and happy Yule! :)
 
Pagan: Depends on what kind they were. Traders took wives and kids, horses and cows and the whole kit and kaboodle with in their ships, and some of the larger dragonships brought horse when they were expecting to go inland for sieges and such. That's still to do with transportation and not with fighting, primarily, though. The difference is the design of the ship, as traders didn't need to sneak up onto shore in a hurry, so their ships could sit deeper into the water. Long story... Anyhow, horses in battle were for rich people, and considering the fact that your average "viking" could not even afford armour for his own body, the expense of replacing a wounded horse is likely one that they would not likely have been able to afford. Also, bringing a horse would mean taking the horse from the farm where it was much needed for labour.

Dragon keeper: Same to you! Have a great holy day season, religious or not.
 
does any one know what that triangle thing in the back of "with oden on our side is called" i know it has to do with norse mytholgy and with oden, thanx for anyhelp

(trying to get a pendent of that for my friend for a present)
 
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