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August 24, 2006

Folk and Culture Remainders

I have a few browser windows open with items of interest - need to log them here so I can reboot!

First, a fascinating expedition in Gotland, Sweden, to investigate about 100 graves at the Viking Age Port of Trade at Frojel:

This woman with all here possessions is one of about 100 graves investigated at the Viking Age Port of Trade at Fröjel, Gotland, Sweden. It is an example showing how and where on the body we find the objects she has had on her, when buried.

And here is one lady they have found:

viking lady


Second, if you like heavy metal music, then you might want to take a listen to the track "Cry of the Blackbirds" off the new Amon Amarth album "With Oden on Our Side".

Third, there is an interview with the director of what I hear is a most excellent version of Beowolf called "Beowulf and Grendel". I can't wait to get this one:

SG: Well it was great. We had a very very challenging shoot. We were suppose to shoot in the summer but we got delayed until the late fall...in Iceland. And it was the stormiest autumn they had had in years. We had 150k winds, we had flying rocks ,and we lost three base camps. It was really intense. With a lesser cast they would have been very unhappy. But Gerry, Stellan and the rest just kind of embraced it.
beowulf and grendel


Fourth, the Vikings return to the Haffenreffer Museum. Includes two free lectures
on the Brown campus: "The Sagas, Oral History, and 'Neo-Literalism'" and "The Lure of Providence: Vikings, Romance, and Archaeology".

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Posted by keg at 10:35 PM

August 8, 2006

The Library of Alexandria

The Royal Library of Alexandria, in Alexandria, Egypt, was once the largest library in the world. The library was a major research center, and contained many priceless works on mathematics, science, culture, history, literature, and religion.

The history of the library was featured on Daily Kos's Science Friday feature:

In 2004, a team of Polish and Egyption archeologists found the remains of what is believed to be the Great Library. It is, if anything, larger than legend. Among the impressive ruins are thirteen sweeping lecture halls with raised podiums, estimated to be able to accomodate over 5,000 students. The last great bastion of early scientific thought it now seems was indeed a reality, the flicker of knowledge it preserved once burned brightly in the ancient city of Alexandria.

However, the library was burned by a Christian mob, then invading Muslims in 646 CE destroyed the remainder, reportedly even burning the books to heat bathwater. Europe soon fell into the Dark Ages.

What would the world have been like had these great works of the Library of Alexandria remained? Jason Pitzl-Waters of The Wild Hunt wonders too:

The "ghost" hiding in this story is one of religious tolerance and the shifting from a "pagan" empire to a Christian one under Constantine. The order of tolerance for all faiths under his Edict of Milan soon evolved into favored status for Christians, repressions of Jewish and pagan religious expression, and finally the outlawing of all non-Christian faiths under Flavius Theodosius in 392. This edict from Theodosius lead to the eventual destruction of the library.

In the end power corrupts. No faith pagan or otherwise can avoid atrocity when married to the needs of empire. While some like to speculate on how much "better" or "worse" our present would be if the Roman Empire had not turned Christian in the end I prefer the option of the Deist freethinkers who founded our nation. The separation of Church and State.

Indeed, science is working hard to restore another example of previous knowledge carelessly destroyed by the misguided faith of a major religion - the writings of one of the greatest mathematicians of the world, Archimedes, was erased after a Christian monk scrubbed the text and overwrote the manuscript with prayers.

After all:

The good Christian should beware the mathematician and all those who make empty prophecies. The danger already exists that the mathematicians have made a covenant with the devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of hell. -- Saint Augustine

One can wonder what the world would be like had the indigenous religions of the different tribes of people were not replaced by the imports of "modern" religions like Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. Indigenous or native beliefs and faiths were born and shaped by specific groups of peoples early in the evolutionary growth of humanity, and so have a certain purity and essence that the major imports cannot ever capture or evoke.

While it is extremely regrettable about the loss of the Library of Alexandria and Archimedes' writings, let us hope that similar book-burnings do not happen again. (Though, sadly, I discovered quite an extensive list of book burnings that have occurred throughout history, including, if you can believe it, Harry Potter books).

Finally, below are some links to indigeneous religions (thanks Tina!). If you know of others, let me know and I'll update the list.

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Posted by keg at 12:47 AM

August 5, 2006

Kennewick Man

Kennewick Man is the name given to the remains of what are "believed to be the oldest and most complete set of skeletal remains in North America" and that were found in Washington State in 1996.

There has been a long legal and political debate over who gets access to the remains. Modern American Indian tribes claimed the remains for their own, and wanted to immediately bury them. Scientists, with a find this rare and important, wanted to study the remains to shed light on the earliest inhabitants of North America.


A federal judge in 2001 ruled that scientists can study the remains, mainly because there are no links between the 9,000 year old remains and modern American Indian tribes. Though many people refer to American Indians as "Native Americans", more and more scientific evidence reveals that modern tribes are hardly native to North America, any more or less than descendents of early European colonists to America. The evidence suggests there were several waves of early humans to North America - American Indians were a wave (not the first), and Europeans were another.

So the Kennewick Man was likely from a wave prior to those of American Indians and Europeans. Hopefully the scientists will continue to be allowed access to the remains for study.

From an article about the man who actually found the Kennewick Man remains:

Will Thomas was standing in knee-deep water trying to finish off a couple cans of Busch Light.

He saw a roundish brown rock in the river near his foot and thought he would play a joke on his buddy Dave Deacy who was standing nearby onshore.

"I thought I could pull it off like it was a head," Thomas said.

The rock was stuck in the thick mud, so Thomas had to take a firm right-hand grip to free it while clutching his beer safely in his left hand.

Oddly, the rock wasn't heavy.

Then he saw teeth.

"It was a jaw dropper," Thomas said. "It was a human skull, no doubt about it."

As proof of the huge interest folks have in the Kennewick Man:

At 94, Warren Dexter of Elkhart, Ind., has been researching and following the story for only a year, but he's also hooked.

In Kennewick Man, the retired photographer and longtime fan of early history said he's found a welcome debate about North America's earliest inhabitants and support for his belief that other peoples traveled to North America besides the Native Americans.

"A lot of our history is being covered up by not acknowledging that the waterways, rivers and lakes were used (as highways)," he said.

This last quote is particularly interesting. Because of recent scientific advances, some scientists believe that Europeans could have been some of the first visitors to North America.

Most people know that Leif Ericsson travelled to North America around the year 1000, which beat Columbus to North America by some 500 years. But even prior to the wave of modern American Indians, some think that early Europeans or their ancestors were initial North American inhabitants. Certainly the fact that a reconstruction of the Kennewick Man looks much like Star Trek's Patrick Stewart is not proof, but there are other pieces of evidence that also open this possibility.

Indeed, in order to preserve the right of scientists to investigate the Kennewick Man remains propelled some native European religion groups to support the scientists in their legal battle with modern American Indian tribes:

McNallen is glad Kennewick Man finally is being studied.

He said he fought to study Kennewick Man because he thought an alternative spiritual perspective needed to be presented besides that of the Mid-Columbia Indian tribes, which want to rebury the bones.

The Asatru gave up their fight in 2000 because the lengthy legal battle was requiring too much time and money.

He and his wife said they are interested to see if future DNA testing would unravel the 9,000-year-old skeleton's ancestry.

"There are some good reasons to believe that Kennewick Man was an ancient European," said McNallen, who travels with a pewter amulet of Thor's hammer laced around his neck, a drinking horn and a bottle of mead. "I don't think that's been disproved."

The Asatru leader said there is strong evidence that early Europeans made their way to North America thousands of years before Columbus.

"Clovis points bear a striking resemblance to points found in France and Spain," he said.

He believes early Europeans may have crossed an ice bridge called the Atlantic Crescent between Europe and North America during the ice ages.

"There is enough evidence to consider this seriously," he said. "It's not a fringe phenomenon."

Finally, here is a video of an interesting interview with Stephen McNallen, the Asatru leader in the above quote.

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Posted by keg at 10:19 PM

August 4, 2006

How to Pronounce the Runes

I made a simple recording of a pronunciation of each of the 24 Elder Futhark runes.

Listen to a pronunciation of the Elder Futhark (.MP3, 1:10, 1.1MB).

I've issued this recording under the Creative Commons License. While you can click the link below to investigate the details, basically you can listen to it and copy it as you like - you just can't use it commercially or derive works from it.

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.5 License.

[ recording updated 6 August 2006 ]

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Posted by keg at 9:17 PM | Comments (1)