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The Scandinavian sequence


It is done.

After the Ice: how foragers and farmers conquered ScandinaviaChariots of Ice, Coursers of the Sun, The 100-year-winter and the coming of Ragnarök and Fury out of the North: from pagan slavers to Christian kings.

Also, from a few years back, on Finland: Finnish brains, baiting and bottlenecks
, Weirdness as a national pastime, Go west, young Siberian, From deepest Siberia to Europe’s edge and Frontier Finns: cabins, rakes & Indians.

6 thoughts on “The Scandinavian sequence

  1. Can’t miss this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRjH_gJbUqQ

    Led Zeppelin: The Immigrant Song:

    “We come from the land of the ice and snow
    from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow
    The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands
    To fight the horde and sing and cry, Valhalla, I am coming.”

    12 centuries on. England is still traumatized.

  2. I know that you’re pushing the substack, but this post is so insider-baseball link-heavy it’s difficult to parse the theme. Throw me a bone! A mere hundred words would likely suffice for context.

  3. Related:

    “Why Old Norse myths endure in popular culture” by Carolyne Larrington
    Published: March 14, 2023
    https://theconversation.com/why-old-norse-myths-endure-in-popular-culture-200891
    In my new book, The Norse Myths That Shape The Way We Think,
    https://thamesandhudson.com/the-norse-myths-that-shape-the-way-we-think-9780500252345
    “I explore how 10 key Norse myths and legends have been reworked over the last 200 years. Although these stories have been influential since their discovery in 17th-century Europe, in recent years Norse narratives have exploded across fiction, Hollywood blockbusters, rock albums, opera, video games and TV shows – these are just a few of the cultural spheres in which Norse myths have been put to work. Here I introduce three of the most important gods, the feminine divine in the form of valkyries and shield-maidens, and finally, the looming threat of ragna rök – the end of the world.”

    Unfortunately, it sounds very contemporary academia.

  4. @Benjamin Vulpes:

    Feed the kitty. Subscribe to the Substack.

    The content is excellent and our man needs the support to keep producing it.

  5. “In 105 BC, an army of 80,000 Romans fell to a barbarian horde led by the Cimbri tribe. The scale of the slaughter left only a few hundred survivors to tell Rome what had happened.”

    I am grateful to your site for pointing me to Razib Khan’s substack and I intend to subscribe now that I am aware of its existence. I am glad to see him writing in a forum that is cancel-proof.

    That aside, I think I would not personally attribute the Cimbri and Teutones as introductory to ‘Scandinavian’ history, or expansion, given that the later is the name of one of the three Celtic primary deities, everything we know about them indicates Celtic religious practices, their initial sweeping victories overrun huge territories but recklessly fail to secure strongpoints which is typically Celtic (Macedonia, anyone..) and we know they are joined eagerly by Central Euro / Alpine Celts during the Cimbric campaigns, who by this point have been under attack by actual German/Scandinavian cultural populations for centuries.

    It seems a lot more likely, Gundestrup as physical evidence, that you had a vestigial Belgic / Celt component that preceded Germanic expansion into the Jutland Penninsula, and in a ‘relocation’ very similar to later Helvetti Celtic migration from Switzerland, the Cimbric wars were most likely an attempt to fight their way out of what was becoming an indefensible situation.

    I am not saying that these peoples did not originate in what is part of modern Scandinavia, but I am saying they were Continental Celts culturally, in action, tactics, terminology, religious relics, and alliances, who had simply become a population isolate as a land link to the low countries was lost to them.
    If you take the level of population replacement in ancient>modern Belgium as a comparison, there is no reason to expect anything different in Jutland.

    Most likely the pressure on them to break-out of Jutland dials up as population density increases, and they are viewed by the people we consider to be ‘Scandinavians’ as an alien population.

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