13 ms·

Vikings went to Mediterranean for ‘summer jobs’ as mercenaries, left graffiti

289 points by dxs 4y ago

sacnoradhq 4y ago
Goddamn kids never change. Booze, drugs, and the make out cave with graffiti all over it. Viking resumes and Viking guidance counselors must've been interesting. "I'm sorry, I lied. I only have 1 year of experience of plundering at sea. And I wasn't captain of a fleet of pirate ships. My references are real though."
- pjmlp 4y ago
  There is a surviving letter from a famous roman writer, complaing about how his son is wasting money in parties and alchool instead of studying in the Athens university. Maybe someone else knows his name and the letter reference better. Some things never change, yeah.
  - praptak 4y ago
    "Even Sumerians complained about the young" sounds like an urban legend but it is not, there's a historical record of a scribe from Ur complaining about his ungrateful son, loitering about public squares rather than dutifully training to become a scribe: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/001112875700300210 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/001112875700300...
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      In the stone age my friends often complained about their kids spending time painting their hands on cave walls rather than learning how to properly knap a flint knife.
    - smcl 4y ago
      This is why I’m really insistent on pushing back on “kids these days…” complaints. Every single generation has had grumpy people who whine about how the young’uns are unruly, lazy, have it easy, etc. I’m starting to people in my age group (mid 30s) saying it, which is a little bit sad since it was not long ago that we were on the receiving end of a lot of “psssh, typical millennials…” nonsense :-/
      - Extasia785 4y ago
        This is an interesting topic though, because this generation is the first generation of kids who grew up with social media, so it's not unfathomable that "kids these days" are different, for better or worse. Kids these days might be normal, but with them being the first generation to truly grow up in the internet and social media era, there is a legitimate argument that they are not.
        smcl 4y ago
        You're not wrong that there will be some kind of difference in how they grow up, but I think each generation has grown up exposed to new technologies from birth that the previous one wasn't. My thought is that it would be really unusual if, after decades and decades of "kids these days..." that this is the time it is finally right that the current generation are in some way worse or more badly behaved or whatever negative connotation people may be using at any given point. There's a lot of "I think..." in this so obviously this is totally based on speculation and from what I've seen in my encounters with Gen Z, where they generally seem pretty good and certainly no worse behaved than my fellow millenials :)
        devonkim 4y ago
        I’m much more upset at the cruelty and hypocrisy kids display (and of course by extension the adults that grow no wiser) in that when I was on the Internet as a kid you were a loser and loner. And now if you’re _not_ on the Internet enough you’re a loser and loner. Have to admit that the movie Black Phone was much better than I thought because the children were portrayed very realistically in their dynamics and yet still we were reminded of their vulnerability in society as those without many rights or privileges that adults have. Furthermore, the child abuse… I don’t even flinch at some of the most brutal violence in media anymore because it seems so comical typically but I felt sick during that part. Horror to me is reality oftentimes I guess and much of why I watch horror is to desensitize myself a bit about the horrors of our world.
      - minxomat 4y ago
        Everything old is new again … https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/juvenoia https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/juvenoia
  - science4sail 4y ago
    It was the orator Cicero! > Cicero hoped that his son Marcus would become a philosopher like him, but Marcus himself wished for a military career. He joined the army of Pompey in 49 BC and after Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus 48 BC, he was pardoned by Caesar. Cicero sent him to Athens to study as a disciple of the peripatetic philosopher Kratippos in 48 BC, but he used this absence from "his father's vigilant eye" to "eat, drink and be merry." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Family
engineer_22 4y ago
Vikings famously defended the Roman Emperor in Byzantium, known as the Varangian Guard. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard Edit: Oh, the article actually mentions the same. I find it endlessly fascinating how interconnected the ancient worlds really were.
- sn41 4y ago
  Yes, the Arabs knew about the Vikings. Similarly old Sanskrit grammar texts in India refer to the Greeks. St. Thomas Aquinas extensively refers to Arab scholars like Avicenna and Averroes. The ancient world was more connected than we realise.
  - e-_pusher 4y ago
    Ibn Fadlan’s writings about his encounters with Vikings are a fun read : https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Saint_Mary's_College_(Notre_Dame_IN)/Humanistic_Studies/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan_and_the_Rus_(Vikings) https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Saint_Mary's_College_(N...
  - ROTMetro 4y ago
    Greek art heavily influenced Buddhist art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism And there were Buddhists in the Roman empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarmanochegas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarmanochegas
    - CitizenKane 4y ago
      This is actually one of my favorite historical facts. Buddha images are everywhere in modern Thailand and it’s fascinating to me that this likely would not be the case if it weren’t for Greeks in Central Asia
      - sct202 4y ago
ggm 4y ago
Surprise! Everyone left graffiti. Tagging is as old as going on a pilgrimage. (summer working holiday with potential for a long residency visa? also as old as the business of being mobile, and capable of fighting. The romans did it.)
- galaxyLogic 4y ago
  > Tagging is as old as ... Many animals mark their domain by peeing around. So "tagging" may have biological roots
  - ggm 4y ago
    Desmond Morris would agree. "the naked ape" pretty much said it's all down to genes.
  - thaumasiotes 4y ago
    > So "tagging" may have biological roots Everything anyone does has biological roots. There is no part of any living thing that doesn't have biological roots. That's what "biology" is.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      Technically correct, in that biology created a brain capable of learning non-genetic information. But, personally, I think if a behaviour is learned rather than e.g. a genetically programmed reflex, it's useful to draw a line between them and say that the former isn't biological in origin.
      - cjbgkagh 4y ago
        Having worked in behavioral analytics at scale the most surprising aspect is how much of it is purely genetic. There is a lot of emergent complexity that looks unique but really isn’t, simply variations on a theme. But an individual is unlikely to meet enough people to see the trends in the long tail. Clustering at scale along with the birthday paradox will give you a bunch of people with the same rare behavior and usually you can drill down and find there is quite a lot of genetic similarities as well.
hnbear 4y ago
For anyone interested in the interconnectedness of the medieval world, I'd highly recommend The Bright Ages: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/09/the-bright-ages-by-matthew-gabriele-and-david-perry-review-the-colourful-side-of-the-dark-ages https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/09/the-bright-age... It covers 200-1200 AD (roughly) with stories from around Europe and the middle-east, highlighting the access, travel, science, and art of the time, in a way that really shows that it was far less "dark ages" than commonly thought.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  “Dark ages” was limited to the leftover sphere of influence of the western Roman Empire, 200 AD is considerably too early as a start for the period. There really was a steep decline in civilization, cities emptied, many completely, literacy rates in the tank, many many people regressed to subsistence agriculture. No it wasn’t the whole world, the successful successor states to the Roman Empire didn’t experience it. It was also not complete, but don’t make the naysayers mistake of overstating the contrary evidence.
  - Swizec 4y ago
    My favorite tidbit from history class: We can track slavic migration into Europe by when churches stopped sending updates to Rome.
  - vintermann 4y ago
    It's a lot about what you value. Most of my ancestors were subsistence farmers, probably yours too. Doesn't mean their lives were all dark. I read a local book about violin makers. I was shocked at how many there were, in the almost entirely rural community around here. To me, making a violin requires some pretty serious, specialised woodworking skills. But they document hundreds of local farmers - subsistence farmers - apparently having those skills. And they don't even count those who "just made a fiddle or two". Which isn't to say there can be no such thing as dark ages. When there's so much war and chaos that no one has time to build much of lasting value, whether materially or culturally, that's pretty dark. Yet the few things that come out of such times and places (the English border ballads comes to mind, or the hymns of Paul Gerhardt) can be all the more beautiful.
defrost 4y ago
The Lion of Piraeus actually originates from the Athens port city of Piraeus. It was carved out of marble in ancient Greece. The lion is almost 2,400 years old. The Venetians took the lion from Piraeus in 1688, after wresting control of the port city of Athens from the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. The Vikings who had tagged the lion 700-800 years earlier were most likely Swedish and Norwegian mercenaries — called Varangians— in the service of the emperor in Byzantium. Hmmm. @dang can we get a ( ~ 788 - 888 CE ) tag here please?
- klyrs 4y ago
  Date-tags typically list the year that an article was written.
westurner 4y ago
Would you put graffiti on your own vehiclr? Careers for graphic artists with BA degrees Prehistoric art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art 1. "Encino Man" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encino_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encino_Man https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05fc8m&hl=en-US&q=Encino+Man&kgs=ea2812dc1c661ad8&shndl=17&source=sh/x/kp/osrp/2 https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05fc8m&hl=en-US&q=Enc...
mukundesh 4y ago
Why `summer jobs`, I would have thought they would have gone there for a `winter jobs`.
- vidarh 4y ago
  I don't think it's meant to literally suggest they just went for the summer. Rather "summer job" ("sommerjobb") is commonly used in Norway to mean a second job done while you have time off from your regular duties. The "summer" bit included because the term is most often used for students who have an extra long summer vacation and so has plenty of time to take a short term job.
  - moogly 4y ago
    Same in Sweden and Denmark.
- wavefunction 4y ago
  At least in crop agriculture the work tends to be concentrated during planting and harvest so there is a big period in between with nothing to do for most of the people involved in planting and harvest. The labor for at least some of the Egyptian pyramids were idle farmers who had free-time available for hire, iirc.
  - Pephers 4y ago
    Nothing to do outside of crop agriculture in Viking times gives time for: - Building housing and barns - Chopping firewood - Shipbuilding - Wood working - Weaving fabric (linen) from the summer harvest - Ropes - Leatherworking - Metalworking/blacksmithing - Pottery - Animal husbandry - Hunting - Fishing ... and probably lots of other things that were necessary during those times. Of course Viking raids are a different means of acquiring a lot of the above.
  - BurningFrog 4y ago
    In Scandinavia there is zero agriculture work to do when the ground is frozen and covered in snow.
steponlego 4y ago
Yes they were called Varangians. Varangians!
Hanschri 4y ago
As a Norwegian I might be biased, but the viking era contains so many weird and interesting facts and happenings. I would strongly recommend checking out more on one of the following things I remember from the top of my head: The works of Icelandic historian/poet Snorre Sturlason, he is most famous for what in English would be called 'Snorre's sagas of kings', which is widely regarded to be one of the most important books for Norway. The Danelaw is also pretty interesting, but what I personally find even more interesting is the colonization and settlements in Ireland by vikings. Dublin, Cork, the Isle of Man and much more was settled by vikings. The Danelaw and settlements caused words from Old Norse to become fairly influential on English. Someone else has mentioned Ibn Fadlan, who met vikings which came from the river Dnipro, which runs through modern day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Vikings traveled from Sweden towards Russia, giving the country it's name. The name Rus was first used about the Scandinavians in Eastern Europe, but later referred to the Kievan Rus. The region of Normandie in France has it's name from the vikings, as Rollo the Walker was made ruler of the region by the king of France. This was allegedly after the vikings had tried to sack Paris for the n-th time. This deal was made on the premise that the people of Normandie would defend the rest of France from vikings and other raiders. Rollo the Walker is a direct ancestor of William the Conqueror, and by extension the British royal family. The title jarl is often translated into English as earl, but the correct translation would be duke. Jarl is simply just etymologically related to earl. Hope this random list wasn't too confusing, if anyone is interested in this I would gladly help with finding good English language sources!
- emsixteen 4y ago
  Celts were on the Isle of Man long before the Vikings, but I'm just nit-picking. I agree that the history of Vikings is way more fascinating and complicated than what's typically paraded about. Shoutouts to Tore Hund!
- cozos 4y ago
  There was a scene in The Northman (2022) which is based on Ibn Fadlan. After seeing the movie I read the account [0] which I found very interesting. This describes the scene in the movie: > The men came with shields and sticks. She was given a cup of intoxicating drink; she sang at taking it and drank. The interpreter told me that she in this fashion bade farewell to all her girl companions. Then she was given another cup; she took it and sang for a long time while the old woman incited her to drink up and go into the pavillion where her master lay. I saw that she was distracted; she wanted to enter the pavillion but put her head between it and the boat. Then the old woman siezed her head and made her enter the pavillion and entered with her. Thereupon the men began to strike with the sticks on the shields so that her cries could not be heard and the other slave girls would not seek to escape death with their masters. Then six men went into the pavillion and each had intercourse with the girl. Then they laid her at the side of her master; two held her feet and two her hands; the old woman known as the Angel of Death re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead. [0] http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ibn_fdln.shtml http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ibn_fdln.shtml
eitland 4y ago
One famous and interesting story that might be new and interesting to those who are already here and aren't middle-aged or older Norwegians is about one of the Viking kings (Sigurd Jorsalfar) who got his horse shod with golden shoes and instructed the blacksmith to make sure one of them would be loose enough to fall off while they rode through Miklagard ("Big Town, today Istanbul) so that he could pretend he didn't care when someone made him aware of it.
vintermann 4y ago
I think it's interesting to see how they saw themselves, compared to the stereotypes about them: Not great warrior Hausi. Farmer Hausi. Just doing a little side gig for the winter, probably.
bjornsing 4y ago
They still do. But nowadays they mostly bartender and party instead.
arethuza 4y ago
A band of Viking warriors sheltered from a snowstorm in the 5000 years old Maeshowe chambered tomb on Orkney and left quite a lot of graffiti written as runes: http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/maeshrunes.htm http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/maeshrunes.htm
moomoo11 4y ago
I read somewhere that Christian inquisition into Nordic region basically washed and labeled the Vikings as barbarians, brutes, and overall abusive people. Is that true? I mean the other inquisitions ended up with labeling other native people as savages or not fully human. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is true that they were just called bad because they had a pagan religion.
- pard68 4y ago
  Can't speak to the Christian angle, though probably not an "Inquisition" that term is for when Catholics tried "cleaning house" and I think it may have been a one-off thing in Spain. Any way, what I wanted to say was that the Vikings (strictly referring to the warrior class here) tended to be fairly abusive and brutal. Ibn Fadlan’s writings document some of the rather barbarous acts they engaged in.
- krapp 4y ago
  They got that reputation partly because they were pagan, but mostly because of all the sacking, pillaging and brutal murdering. Of course, Christian armies were just as brutal to Jews and Muslims, but the Vikings being pagan made it easier to propagandize them as being a literal satanic horde.
- bombolo 4y ago
  Did the inquisition and the vikings even exist at the same time? According to wikipedia, no. Vikings were gone a good century before the inquisition existed at all. > Is that true? Probably not. The dates don't seem to even match for it to have happened.
- vintermann 4y ago
  First, you probably mean incursion, there was no Scandinavian inquisition. And no, it isn't true. First, remember that by the time the first churches were built on the Scandinavian peninsula, Christianity had existed for about 700 years. Before that time, Christian ideas had perculated up and been incorporated, in garbled form, in Norse religion. And even after that, they had 300 years to get to know what it was about until being Christian became a civic obligation like it was in the rest of Europe. The viking raiders absolutely were savages, but the Norse did not identify with them, the way we equate them today. For them, viking was just the word for pirate, and if you did it - as could be tempting, seeing your neighbours come home with loot - you still probably wouldn't want to brag about it.
sandos 4y ago
They should have went in the winter? Who wants the dark winters up here...
sigg3 4y ago
Yeah, I remember seeing runes in the Aya Sofia in Istanbul.
mcv 4y ago
Summer jobs? Considering the climates, I'd expect them to do it as winter jobs. Raid England during summer, serve the Byzantine emperor in the med during winter.
- hummus_bae 4y ago
  [dead]
JPKab 4y ago
Relevant song: https://youtu.be/LeSOQ_qM6xs https://youtu.be/LeSOQ_qM6xs
- lumiukko 4y ago
  Other relevant song: Turisas - Varangian Guard https://youtu.be/8kIv7ZJOyB4 https://youtu.be/8kIv7ZJOyB4 Those were the guards of the byzantine emperor, which were vikings that travelled to miklagard/constantinopolis/istanbul for such "summer jobs".
aleksiy123 4y ago
But they can circle until they drop dead I have not come this far To end, but to pursue my own thread To join The Varangian Guard
farseer 4y ago
>>She went to Venice at three different times of the year, to see how the light from the sun fell at different angles and cast varying shadows on the worn runes. Is this really a thing or BS?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
ElfinTrousers 4y ago
It just occurred to me that these guys must have gotten terrible sunburns from the combination of pale Scandinavian skin and bright Mediterranean sun. No wonder they fought so fiercely: they were always incredibly annoyed.
caseysoftware 4y ago
In late 2019, I was at the Viking Museum in Stockholm and they had a map marking where they knew Vikings had visited (and likely raided) and where they had probably visited (and likely raided). Not surprisingly, it was most of the North Atlantic and down through Gibraltar. What surprised me is that Egypt and Israel were on the "probably" list.. which seemed plausible if they just kept going down the coast of North Africa.
bitwize 4y ago
I'm not surprised to hear the Vikings went where the money was. The epic Beowulf describes Hrothgar as a Danish king who would give generously of his treasure in order to recruit the strongest, fiercest warriors (hence the kenning "ring-giver"). I always thought there were considerable parallels between this and the tech industry, at least when times were good and interest rates low.
sercand 4y ago
As a person from Mediterranean, It finally makes sense the 5% of Nordic genes in my 23andMe result.
marcusverus 4y ago
I read a fascinating book about the Vikings recently that touched on this topic. One really interesting tidbit was the route they took.[0] At first blush, I'd expect them to have sailed/rowed their longboats counter-clockwise around Europe, through the straights of Gibraltar and into the Med. But they actually took much more direct route--straight through Europe! They'd go east through the Baltic Sea, up a navigable river like the Daugava to a point where that river neared the Dneiper river, at which point they'd jump out and hump their boats down to the Dneiper, which would carry them to the Black Sea. The world has small for a very long time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_from_the_Varangians_to_the_Greeks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_from_the_Varangians_to_t...

289 points by dxs 4y ago

Goddamn kids never change. Booze, drugs, and the make out cave with graffiti all over it. Viking resumes and Viking guidance counselors must've been interesting. "I'm sorry, I lied. I only have 1 year of experience of plundering at sea. And I wasn't captain of a fleet of pirate ships. My references are real though."

pjmlp 4y ago
There is a surviving letter from a famous roman writer, complaing about how his son is wasting money in parties and alchool instead of studying in the Athens university. Maybe someone else knows his name and the letter reference better. Some things never change, yeah.
- praptak 4y ago
  "Even Sumerians complained about the young" sounds like an urban legend but it is not, there's a historical record of a scribe from Ur complaining about his ungrateful son, loitering about public squares rather than dutifully training to become a scribe: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/001112875700300210 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/001112875700300...
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    In the stone age my friends often complained about their kids spending time painting their hands on cave walls rather than learning how to properly knap a flint knife.
  - smcl 4y ago
    This is why I’m really insistent on pushing back on “kids these days…” complaints. Every single generation has had grumpy people who whine about how the young’uns are unruly, lazy, have it easy, etc. I’m starting to people in my age group (mid 30s) saying it, which is a little bit sad since it was not long ago that we were on the receiving end of a lot of “psssh, typical millennials…” nonsense :-/
    - Extasia785 4y ago
      This is an interesting topic though, because this generation is the first generation of kids who grew up with social media, so it's not unfathomable that "kids these days" are different, for better or worse. Kids these days might be normal, but with them being the first generation to truly grow up in the internet and social media era, there is a legitimate argument that they are not.
      - smcl 4y ago
        You're not wrong that there will be some kind of difference in how they grow up, but I think each generation has grown up exposed to new technologies from birth that the previous one wasn't. My thought is that it would be really unusual if, after decades and decades of "kids these days..." that this is the time it is finally right that the current generation are in some way worse or more badly behaved or whatever negative connotation people may be using at any given point. There's a lot of "I think..." in this so obviously this is totally based on speculation and from what I've seen in my encounters with Gen Z, where they generally seem pretty good and certainly no worse behaved than my fellow millenials :)
      - devonkim 4y ago
        I’m much more upset at the cruelty and hypocrisy kids display (and of course by extension the adults that grow no wiser) in that when I was on the Internet as a kid you were a loser and loner. And now if you’re _not_ on the Internet enough you’re a loser and loner. Have to admit that the movie Black Phone was much better than I thought because the children were portrayed very realistically in their dynamics and yet still we were reminded of their vulnerability in society as those without many rights or privileges that adults have. Furthermore, the child abuse… I don’t even flinch at some of the most brutal violence in media anymore because it seems so comical typically but I felt sick during that part. Horror to me is reality oftentimes I guess and much of why I watch horror is to desensitize myself a bit about the horrors of our world.
    - minxomat 4y ago
      Everything old is new again … https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/juvenoia https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/juvenoia
- science4sail 4y ago
  It was the orator Cicero! > Cicero hoped that his son Marcus would become a philosopher like him, but Marcus himself wished for a military career. He joined the army of Pompey in 49 BC and after Pompey's defeat at Pharsalus 48 BC, he was pardoned by Caesar. Cicero sent him to Athens to study as a disciple of the peripatetic philosopher Kratippos in 48 BC, but he used this absence from "his father's vigilant eye" to "eat, drink and be merry." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Family https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicero#Family

engineer_22 4y ago

Vikings famously defended the Roman Emperor in Byzantium, known as the Varangian Guard. [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varangian_Guard Edit: Oh, the article actually mentions the same. I find it endlessly fascinating how interconnected the ancient worlds really were.

sn41 4y ago
Yes, the Arabs knew about the Vikings. Similarly old Sanskrit grammar texts in India refer to the Greeks. St. Thomas Aquinas extensively refers to Arab scholars like Avicenna and Averroes. The ancient world was more connected than we realise.
- e-_pusher 4y ago
  Ibn Fadlan’s writings about his encounters with Vikings are a fun read : https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Saint_Mary's_College_(Notre_Dame_IN)/Humanistic_Studies/Ahmad_ibn_Fadlan_and_the_Rus_(Vikings) https://human.libretexts.org/Courses/Saint_Mary's_College_(N...
- ROTMetro 4y ago
  Greek art heavily influenced Buddhist art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhist_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Buddhism And there were Buddhists in the Roman empire https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarmanochegas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zarmanochegas
  - CitizenKane 4y ago
    This is actually one of my favorite historical facts. Buddha images are everywhere in modern Thailand and it’s fascinating to me that this likely would not be the case if it weren’t for Greeks in Central Asia
    - sct202 4y ago

ggm 4y ago

Surprise! Everyone left graffiti. Tagging is as old as going on a pilgrimage. (summer working holiday with potential for a long residency visa? also as old as the business of being mobile, and capable of fighting. The romans did it.)

galaxyLogic 4y ago
> Tagging is as old as ... Many animals mark their domain by peeing around. So "tagging" may have biological roots
- ggm 4y ago
  Desmond Morris would agree. "the naked ape" pretty much said it's all down to genes.
- thaumasiotes 4y ago
  > So "tagging" may have biological roots Everything anyone does has biological roots. There is no part of any living thing that doesn't have biological roots. That's what "biology" is.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    Technically correct, in that biology created a brain capable of learning non-genetic information. But, personally, I think if a behaviour is learned rather than e.g. a genetically programmed reflex, it's useful to draw a line between them and say that the former isn't biological in origin.
    - cjbgkagh 4y ago
      Having worked in behavioral analytics at scale the most surprising aspect is how much of it is purely genetic. There is a lot of emergent complexity that looks unique but really isn’t, simply variations on a theme. But an individual is unlikely to meet enough people to see the trends in the long tail. Clustering at scale along with the birthday paradox will give you a bunch of people with the same rare behavior and usually you can drill down and find there is quite a lot of genetic similarities as well.

hnbear 4y ago

For anyone interested in the interconnectedness of the medieval world, I'd highly recommend The Bright Ages: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/09/the-bright-ages-by-matthew-gabriele-and-david-perry-review-the-colourful-side-of-the-dark-ages https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/jan/09/the-bright-age... It covers 200-1200 AD (roughly) with stories from around Europe and the middle-east, highlighting the access, travel, science, and art of the time, in a way that really shows that it was far less "dark ages" than commonly thought.

colechristensen 4y ago
“Dark ages” was limited to the leftover sphere of influence of the western Roman Empire, 200 AD is considerably too early as a start for the period. There really was a steep decline in civilization, cities emptied, many completely, literacy rates in the tank, many many people regressed to subsistence agriculture. No it wasn’t the whole world, the successful successor states to the Roman Empire didn’t experience it. It was also not complete, but don’t make the naysayers mistake of overstating the contrary evidence.
- Swizec 4y ago
  My favorite tidbit from history class: We can track slavic migration into Europe by when churches stopped sending updates to Rome.
- vintermann 4y ago
  It's a lot about what you value. Most of my ancestors were subsistence farmers, probably yours too. Doesn't mean their lives were all dark. I read a local book about violin makers. I was shocked at how many there were, in the almost entirely rural community around here. To me, making a violin requires some pretty serious, specialised woodworking skills. But they document hundreds of local farmers - subsistence farmers - apparently having those skills. And they don't even count those who "just made a fiddle or two". Which isn't to say there can be no such thing as dark ages. When there's so much war and chaos that no one has time to build much of lasting value, whether materially or culturally, that's pretty dark. Yet the few things that come out of such times and places (the English border ballads comes to mind, or the hymns of Paul Gerhardt) can be all the more beautiful.

defrost 4y ago

The Lion of Piraeus actually originates from the Athens port city of Piraeus. It was carved out of marble in ancient Greece. The lion is almost 2,400 years old. The Venetians took the lion from Piraeus in 1688, after wresting control of the port city of Athens from the Turks in the Ottoman Empire. The Vikings who had tagged the lion 700-800 years earlier were most likely Swedish and Norwegian mercenaries — called Varangians— in the service of the emperor in Byzantium. Hmmm. @dang can we get a ( ~ 788 - 888 CE ) tag here please?

klyrs 4y ago
Date-tags typically list the year that an article was written.

westurner 4y ago

Would you put graffiti on your own vehiclr? Careers for graphic artists with BA degrees Prehistoric art: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prehistoric_art 1. "Encino Man" (1992) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encino_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encino_Man https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05fc8m&hl=en-US&q=Encino+Man&kgs=ea2812dc1c661ad8&shndl=17&source=sh/x/kp/osrp/2 https://www.google.com/search?kgmid=/m/05fc8m&hl=en-US&q=Enc...

mukundesh 4y ago

Why `summer jobs`, I would have thought they would have gone there for a `winter jobs`.

vidarh 4y ago
I don't think it's meant to literally suggest they just went for the summer. Rather "summer job" ("sommerjobb") is commonly used in Norway to mean a second job done while you have time off from your regular duties. The "summer" bit included because the term is most often used for students who have an extra long summer vacation and so has plenty of time to take a short term job.
- moogly 4y ago
  Same in Sweden and Denmark.
wavefunction 4y ago
At least in crop agriculture the work tends to be concentrated during planting and harvest so there is a big period in between with nothing to do for most of the people involved in planting and harvest. The labor for at least some of the Egyptian pyramids were idle farmers who had free-time available for hire, iirc.
- Pephers 4y ago
  Nothing to do outside of crop agriculture in Viking times gives time for: - Building housing and barns - Chopping firewood - Shipbuilding - Wood working - Weaving fabric (linen) from the summer harvest - Ropes - Leatherworking - Metalworking/blacksmithing - Pottery - Animal husbandry - Hunting - Fishing ... and probably lots of other things that were necessary during those times. Of course Viking raids are a different means of acquiring a lot of the above.
- BurningFrog 4y ago
  In Scandinavia there is zero agriculture work to do when the ground is frozen and covered in snow.

steponlego 4y ago

Yes they were called Varangians. Varangians!

Hanschri 4y ago

As a Norwegian I might be biased, but the viking era contains so many weird and interesting facts and happenings. I would strongly recommend checking out more on one of the following things I remember from the top of my head: The works of Icelandic historian/poet Snorre Sturlason, he is most famous for what in English would be called 'Snorre's sagas of kings', which is widely regarded to be one of the most important books for Norway. The Danelaw is also pretty interesting, but what I personally find even more interesting is the colonization and settlements in Ireland by vikings. Dublin, Cork, the Isle of Man and much more was settled by vikings. The Danelaw and settlements caused words from Old Norse to become fairly influential on English. Someone else has mentioned Ibn Fadlan, who met vikings which came from the river Dnipro, which runs through modern day Russia, Belarus and Ukraine. Vikings traveled from Sweden towards Russia, giving the country it's name. The name Rus was first used about the Scandinavians in Eastern Europe, but later referred to the Kievan Rus. The region of Normandie in France has it's name from the vikings, as Rollo the Walker was made ruler of the region by the king of France. This was allegedly after the vikings had tried to sack Paris for the n-th time. This deal was made on the premise that the people of Normandie would defend the rest of France from vikings and other raiders. Rollo the Walker is a direct ancestor of William the Conqueror, and by extension the British royal family. The title jarl is often translated into English as earl, but the correct translation would be duke. Jarl is simply just etymologically related to earl. Hope this random list wasn't too confusing, if anyone is interested in this I would gladly help with finding good English language sources!

emsixteen 4y ago
Celts were on the Isle of Man long before the Vikings, but I'm just nit-picking. I agree that the history of Vikings is way more fascinating and complicated than what's typically paraded about. Shoutouts to Tore Hund!
cozos 4y ago
There was a scene in The Northman (2022) which is based on Ibn Fadlan. After seeing the movie I read the account [0] which I found very interesting. This describes the scene in the movie: > The men came with shields and sticks. She was given a cup of intoxicating drink; she sang at taking it and drank. The interpreter told me that she in this fashion bade farewell to all her girl companions. Then she was given another cup; she took it and sang for a long time while the old woman incited her to drink up and go into the pavillion where her master lay. I saw that she was distracted; she wanted to enter the pavillion but put her head between it and the boat. Then the old woman siezed her head and made her enter the pavillion and entered with her. Thereupon the men began to strike with the sticks on the shields so that her cries could not be heard and the other slave girls would not seek to escape death with their masters. Then six men went into the pavillion and each had intercourse with the girl. Then they laid her at the side of her master; two held her feet and two her hands; the old woman known as the Angel of Death re-entered and looped a cord around her neck and gave the crossed ends to the two men for them to pull. Then she approached her with a broad-bladed dagger, which she plunged between her ribs repeatedly, and the men strangled her with the cord until she was dead. [0] http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ibn_fdln.shtml http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/ibn_fdln.shtml

eitland 4y ago

One famous and interesting story that might be new and interesting to those who are already here and aren't middle-aged or older Norwegians is about one of the Viking kings (Sigurd Jorsalfar) who got his horse shod with golden shoes and instructed the blacksmith to make sure one of them would be loose enough to fall off while they rode through Miklagard ("Big Town, today Istanbul) so that he could pretend he didn't care when someone made him aware of it.

vintermann 4y ago

I think it's interesting to see how they saw themselves, compared to the stereotypes about them: Not great warrior Hausi. Farmer Hausi. Just doing a little side gig for the winter, probably.

bjornsing 4y ago

They still do. But nowadays they mostly bartender and party instead.

arethuza 4y ago

A band of Viking warriors sheltered from a snowstorm in the 5000 years old Maeshowe chambered tomb on Orkney and left quite a lot of graffiti written as runes: http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/maeshrunes.htm http://www.orkneyjar.com/history/maeshowe/maeshrunes.htm

moomoo11 4y ago

I read somewhere that Christian inquisition into Nordic region basically washed and labeled the Vikings as barbarians, brutes, and overall abusive people. Is that true? I mean the other inquisitions ended up with labeling other native people as savages or not fully human. I wouldn’t be surprised if it is true that they were just called bad because they had a pagan religion.

pard68 4y ago
Can't speak to the Christian angle, though probably not an "Inquisition" that term is for when Catholics tried "cleaning house" and I think it may have been a one-off thing in Spain. Any way, what I wanted to say was that the Vikings (strictly referring to the warrior class here) tended to be fairly abusive and brutal. Ibn Fadlan’s writings document some of the rather barbarous acts they engaged in.
krapp 4y ago
They got that reputation partly because they were pagan, but mostly because of all the sacking, pillaging and brutal murdering. Of course, Christian armies were just as brutal to Jews and Muslims, but the Vikings being pagan made it easier to propagandize them as being a literal satanic horde.
bombolo 4y ago
Did the inquisition and the vikings even exist at the same time? According to wikipedia, no. Vikings were gone a good century before the inquisition existed at all. > Is that true? Probably not. The dates don't seem to even match for it to have happened.
vintermann 4y ago
First, you probably mean incursion, there was no Scandinavian inquisition. And no, it isn't true. First, remember that by the time the first churches were built on the Scandinavian peninsula, Christianity had existed for about 700 years. Before that time, Christian ideas had perculated up and been incorporated, in garbled form, in Norse religion. And even after that, they had 300 years to get to know what it was about until being Christian became a civic obligation like it was in the rest of Europe. The viking raiders absolutely were savages, but the Norse did not identify with them, the way we equate them today. For them, viking was just the word for pirate, and if you did it - as could be tempting, seeing your neighbours come home with loot - you still probably wouldn't want to brag about it.

sandos 4y ago

They should have went in the winter? Who wants the dark winters up here...

sigg3 4y ago

Yeah, I remember seeing runes in the Aya Sofia in Istanbul.

mcv 4y ago

Summer jobs? Considering the climates, I'd expect them to do it as winter jobs. Raid England during summer, serve the Byzantine emperor in the med during winter.

hummus_bae 4y ago
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JPKab 4y ago

Relevant song: https://youtu.be/LeSOQ_qM6xs https://youtu.be/LeSOQ_qM6xs

lumiukko 4y ago
Other relevant song: Turisas - Varangian Guard https://youtu.be/8kIv7ZJOyB4 https://youtu.be/8kIv7ZJOyB4 Those were the guards of the byzantine emperor, which were vikings that travelled to miklagard/constantinopolis/istanbul for such "summer jobs".

aleksiy123 4y ago

But they can circle until they drop dead I have not come this far To end, but to pursue my own thread To join The Varangian Guard

farseer 4y ago

>>She went to Venice at three different times of the year, to see how the light from the sun fell at different angles and cast varying shadows on the worn runes. Is this really a thing or BS?

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ElfinTrousers 4y ago

It just occurred to me that these guys must have gotten terrible sunburns from the combination of pale Scandinavian skin and bright Mediterranean sun. No wonder they fought so fiercely: they were always incredibly annoyed.

caseysoftware 4y ago

In late 2019, I was at the Viking Museum in Stockholm and they had a map marking where they knew Vikings had visited (and likely raided) and where they had probably visited (and likely raided). Not surprisingly, it was most of the North Atlantic and down through Gibraltar. What surprised me is that Egypt and Israel were on the "probably" list.. which seemed plausible if they just kept going down the coast of North Africa.

bitwize 4y ago

I'm not surprised to hear the Vikings went where the money was. The epic Beowulf describes Hrothgar as a Danish king who would give generously of his treasure in order to recruit the strongest, fiercest warriors (hence the kenning "ring-giver"). I always thought there were considerable parallels between this and the tech industry, at least when times were good and interest rates low.

sercand 4y ago

As a person from Mediterranean, It finally makes sense the 5% of Nordic genes in my 23andMe result.

marcusverus 4y ago

I read a fascinating book about the Vikings recently that touched on this topic. One really interesting tidbit was the route they took.[0] At first blush, I'd expect them to have sailed/rowed their longboats counter-clockwise around Europe, through the straights of Gibraltar and into the Med. But they actually took much more direct route--straight through Europe! They'd go east through the Baltic Sea, up a navigable river like the Daugava to a point where that river neared the Dneiper river, at which point they'd jump out and hump their boats down to the Dneiper, which would carry them to the Black Sea. The world has small for a very long time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_from_the_Varangians_to_the_Greeks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_from_the_Varangians_to_t...