Borrowers and lenders

My master's thesis is titled, "The Linguistic Effects of the Viking Invasions on England and Scotland," which should put it in contention for winning the Scholarly Research With The Least Practical Applications Award.

Even so, I still think it's a pretty interesting topic.  My contention was that the topography of the two countries are a big part of the reason that their languages, Old English and Old Gaelic respectively, were affected so differently.  England, with its largely level countryside and a networked road system even back then, adopted hundreds of Old Norse borrow-words into every lexical category, even though the explicit rule by Scandinavia (the "Danelaw") was confined to the eastern half of the country and only lasted two centuries.  Hundreds of place names in England are Norse in origin; any town ending in "-by" owes that part of its name to the Norse word for "town."  (Similarly. places ending in -thorpe, -thwaite, -foss, -toft, or -ness reflect a Norse influence; and all the streets in the city of York that end in -gate -- well, gata is Old Norse for "street.")  

The usual pattern is that languages borrow words for concepts they didn't already have covered, but Old English saw Norse supersede even perfectly good native words that were in wide use.  The result is that Modern English has way more words of Norse origin than you might expect, including many in the common, everyday vocabulary.  A few examples of the more than two hundred documented Norse borrow-words:

• window
• gift
• sky
• egg
• scare
• scream
• anger
• awkward
• fellow

Even the pronoun "they" is Norse in origin; the Old English words for "he," "she," and "they," hé, híe, and héo, respectively, were pronounced so much alike that it could be confusing knowing who you were talking about.  The practical English fixed this by palatalizing híe to she and adopting the Norse third-person plural pronoun ∂eira as our modern "they" and "their."

Gaelic, though, responded differently.  Scotland was (and is) rugged terrain, and the big settlements tended to be clustered around the coast and inland waterways.  Even though Scandinavian rule in Scotland lasted much longer -- Norwegian rule of the Hebrides didn't end until 1266 -- the influence on the language was minor, and largely restricted to place names (the -ey found in the names of lots of the islands of Scotland simply means "island" in Old Norse) and terms related to living near water.  The Gaelic words for net, sail, anchor, boat, ford, delta, beach, seagull, seaweed, and skiff are all Norse in origin, but of the common vocabulary, only a few are (including the words for noise, shoe, guide, time, and scatter).

[Nota bene: The Orkneys were a different matter entirely.  Norse rule in the Orkneys continued until 1472, and the people there actually lost Gaelic altogether.  Until the eighteenth century the main language was Norn, a dialect of West Norse, at which point it was superseded by the Orcadian dialect of Scots English.  The last native speaker of Norn died in 1850.]

Of course, English is an amalgam of a great many languages; not only did the Vikings leave their thumbprint on it, but the Normans in the eleventh century brought in a great many words of French origin.  Additionally, a lot of our technical vocabulary comes from Latin and Greek.  Until the eighteenth century, English was kind of a backwater language spoken only by people in one corner of Europe, so when scientists and other academics from different countries were communicating, they usually did so in Latin.  The result is that we still have a ton of Latin and Greek borrow-words in English, including most of our scientific, legal, and scholarly vocabulary.  To demonstrate how dependent the sciences are on Latin and Greek roots, the brilliant science fiction author Poul Anderson wrote a piece on the atomic theory using only words native to Old English -- and the result ("Uncleftish Beholding") sounds like some ancient mythological tale, and gives you an idea of just how much Latin and Greek have influenced the cadence of our language.  Here's a short excerpt to give the flavor, but you really should read the whole thing, because it's just that wonderful:

For most of its being, mankind did not know what things are made of, but could only guess.  With the growth of worldken, we began to learn, and today we have a beholding of stuff and work that watching bears out, both in the workstead and in daily life.

The underlying kinds of stuff are the *firststuffs*, which link together in sundry ways to give rise to the rest.  Formerly we knew of ninety-two firststuffs, from waterstuff, the lightest and barest, to ymirstuff, the heaviest. Now we have made more, such as aegirstuff and helstuff.

The firststuffs have their being as motes called *unclefts*.  These are mightly small; one seedweight of waterstuff holds a tale of them like unto two followed by twenty-two naughts.  Most unclefts link together to make what are called *bulkbits*.  Thus, the waterstuff bulkbit bestands of two waterstuff unclefts, the sourstuff bulkbit of two sourstuff unclefts, and so on.  (Some kinds, such as sunstuff, keep alone; others, such as iron, cling together in ices when in the fast standing; and there are yet more yokeways.)  When unlike clefts link in a bulkbit, they make *bindings*.  Thus, water is a binding of two waterstuff unclefts with one sourstuff uncleft, while a bulkbit of one of the forestuffs making up flesh may have a thousand thousand or more unclefts of these two firststuffs together with coalstuff and chokestuff.

Everywhere English speakers went -- which, for better or worse, was kind of everywhere -- we picked up and adopted new words.  The result is a rich, often confusing patchwork quilt of a language, with strange sound-to-spelling correspondences, remnants of grammar and morphology from a dozen different places, and weird attempts to blend it all together.  (I don't know how many times I told students that the plurals of hippopotamus and rhinoceros were not hippopotami and rhinoceri.  That'd be trying to pluralize them like Latin words, and they're actually Greek -- hippopotamus is Greek for "river horse," and rhinoceros for "nose horn" -- so if you want to be fancy about it, it'd be hippoipotamou and rhinoucerates.  But that sounds pretentious as hell, so let's stick with hippopotamuses and rhinoceroses.)

Anyhow, that's our excursion into our peculiar hodgepodge of a language.  Hodgepodge, by the way, is French in origin, from hochepot, meaning "a stew."  The hoche part comes from the Old Germanic word hocher, meaning "to shake."

Okay, I'd better stop here.  I could do this all day.

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Runes in Maine

Ready for a convoluted story?

Today's journey is about the twistiest trip through mythology, fakery, and pseudohistory I have ever seen, linking the Vikings, the Templars, first century Judaea, and a farm in Maine.  It's the story of the Spirit Pond runestones, an alleged pre-Columbian runic inscription that one guy thinks proves that the Native Americans of the northeastern United States are direct descendants of Jesus Christ.

So pop yourself some popcorn, sit back, and let me tell you a tall tale.

In 1971, Walter Elliott, a carpenter from Phippsburg, Maine, claimed that he had found a stone with some odd inscriptions near a place called Spirit Pond. The inscriptions, he said, looked like Norse runes, so could this possibly be proof that the Norse explorers of the eleventh century, especially Leif Eiríksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, had made their way to New England?

Part of the inscription on the Spirit Pond runestone [Image is in the Public Domain]

The claim came to the attention of Einar Haugen, Harvard University professor of linguistics, and one of the world's experts on Norse runes.  Haugen pronounced the inscription a fake, claiming that the inscription has "a few Norse words in a sea of gibberish."  Specifically, he said that the use of the "hooked X" or "stung A" character (it can be seen in the top right word above, the second character from the right) was inconsistent with verified eleventh century Norse inscriptions, and in fact was eerily similar to the inscription on the Kensington runestone, found in Minnesota in 1898, which is universally considered to be a modern fake.

Pretty decisive, no?  But as we've seen over and over, a silly old Ph.D. and professorship in a subject doesn't mean that amateurs can't know more.  So the Spirit Pond stone has gained quite a following amongst the Vikings-in-the-Americas crowd.

And as we've also seen, there is no wild theory that can't be made even more bizarre.

Enter geologist Scott Wolter.  Wolter thinks that the Spirit Pond runestone is a genuine archaeological find, but it doesn't mean what its finder claimed -- that it was proof that Eiríksson, Karlsefni, et al. had made it to North America in the eleventh century.  He claims that it was brought to what is now Maine in the fourteenth century...

... by the Knights Templar.

Yes, the Knights Templar, that fertile source of speculation for aficionados of secret societies, which was forcefully disbanded in 1314 and has spawned wacky conspiracy theories ever since.  The Templars ran afoul of the powers-that-be, especially Pope Clement V and King Philip IV of France, mostly because of their money, power, and influence, and Clement and Philip had the leaders arrested on trumped-up charges of sorcery.  (To be fair, some of their rituals were pretty bizarre.)  Templars who weren't willing to confess -- and this included their head, Jacques de Molay -- were burned at the stake.

So, so much for the Templars.  Except for the aforementioned conspiracy theories, of course, which suggest that the main body of the Templars escaped, letting de Molay take the fall (some say de Molay willingly sacrificed himself to let the others get away).  But the question remained; get away to where?

Scott Wolter has the answer.

To Maine, of course.

So they sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to Maine, bringing along Cistercian monks who (for some reason) wrote in Norse runes, and the monks inscribed the Spirit Pond stone.  And Wolter says he knows what the runic inscription means.  Haugen, and other so-called experts, are wrong to say it's gibberish.  The Spirit Pond stone is an incredibly important artifact because it tells how the Templars came to North America, bringing with them the Holy Grail.

And you thought that its final resting place was the "Castle Arrrrggggghhh."

But that's another mistake people make, Wolter said.  The "San Gréal" -- Holy Grail -- is actually a mistranscription of "Sang Réal" -- meaning "royal blood."  In other words, the bloodline of Jesus.  Which means that the Templars were Jesus's direct descendants.  So they arrived in Maine, carrying the Sang Réal, and proceeded to have lots of sex with Native women (apparently ignoring the Templars' compulsory vow of celibacy), meaning that the Native inhabitants of eastern North America are descended from Jesus Christ.

All of this is just jolly news for me, because I am descended through my mom from various members of the Micmac and Maliseet tribes of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.  So here's yet another branch I can add to my family tree.

Of course, the linguistic world isn't paying this much attention, which pisses Wolter right off.  "These archaeologists have all been programmed [to believe the stones are fakes] and they can’t think outside the box," he said.

Well, sorry, Mr. Wolter.  "Decades of scholarly study" does not equal being "programmed," it equals "knowing what the fuck you're talking about."  Haugen's work in the field of Norse linguistics is the epitome of careful research and thorough study.  So I'm not ready to jettison his expertise because you'd like the northeastern Natives to be Jesus's great-great-great (etc.) grandchildren.

And as far as I can tell, Wolter seems to be thinking so far outside the box that from where he's standing, he couldn't even see the box with a powerful telescope.

In any case, I hope you've enjoyed today's journey through time.  It's not bad as fiction; kind of the bastard child of The DaVinci Code and Foucault's Pendulum.  But as a real historical claim, it's a bit of a non-starter.

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Vikings, auroras, and tree rings

The idea that people from Europe came to North America (long) before Columbus has not only generated interest amongst legitimate archaeological and historical researchers, it has generated a lot of nonsense.

One nonsensical bit is that the Mandan tribe not only descends from Welsh explorers (including quasi-mythical personages such as Prince Madog), but that they have blue eyes and their language is a dialect of Welsh.  None of this is even remotely true, but the story (which had dropped into well-deserved obscurity) regained currency with Madeleine L'Engle's novel A Swiftly Tilting Planet.  While I have to admit it's a decent story in other respects, the whole thing about Native Americans having blue eyes -- and worse, that blue eyes = good and brown eyes = bad -- is seriously cringe-inducing.  In any case, the Mandans themselves live in what is now North and South Dakota, which last I looked is nowhere near the Atlantic Ocean, so the claim is pretty ridiculous anyhow.

Other accounts describe encounters with Welsh-speaking Monacans of Virginia and Tuscarora of New York.  There is no evidence, linguistic or otherwise, supporting those claims.  The brilliant historian of Welsh history Gwyn Williams summed up such stories as "a complete farrago [that] may have been intended as a hoax."

Then there's the Irish story of St. Brendan the Navigator, who supposedly crossed the Atlantic in a coracle with a group of monks, and which is shakier ground still.  The Brendan legend is so wound up in mythology and religious miracle stories that it's impossible to tell what, if anything, about it is true.  Even the Brendan enthusiasts don't agree on much.  "Brendan's Fair Isle," where the monks supposedly landed after defeating various sea monsters and demons, has been identified as coastal North America -- and also the Faeroes, the Azores, Madeira, and the Canary Islands.

There's no hard evidence of any of it.

More reliable -- and corroborated by actual science -- is the claim that the Vikings landed in northeastern North America in the late tenth and early eleventh century, founding colonies in what they called Vinland -- meaning either "land of grape vines" or "meadow-land," depending on which linguist you believe.  The Skraelings ("wearers of animal skins"), as they called the Natives they encountered, were described as unequivocally hostile.  (Funny how surprised the colonizers always seem to be when indigenous people resent someone walking in and saying, "Get out of the way, this is my home now.")  In any case, the whole enterprise is outlined in Eirík the Red's Saga, in which the eponymous Eirík, his son Leif Eiríksson, and their friend Thorfinn Karlsefni lead repeated expeditions between the Icelandic settlements in Greenland and the new ones in Vinland, and which is usually considered to be at least substantially true.

The whole topic was brought to my attention once again because of my sharp-eyed friend Gil Miller, who knowing my fascination with all things Scandinavian sent me a link to an article in SciTech Daily describing new research into the archaeological evidence at L'Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland.  L'Anse aux Meadows is the one and only certain settlement site by Europeans in North America prior to Columbus, and the current research -- using a clever twist on tree-ring analysis -- determined that the site was occupied in the year 1021, exactly a thousand years ago.

A recreation of the Scandinavian settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows [image licensed under the Creative Commons Dylan Kereluk from White Rock, Canada, Authentic Viking recreation, CC BY 2.0]

Between the sagas and the artifacts uncovered at L'Anse aux Meadows, the site seems to have flourished between the years 970 and 1030 C.E.  The problem is, trying to pin down the exact years of occupation of an abandoned settlement is not an easy task.  The key to the new study is an event that occurred in late 992 and early 993 (as verified by dendrochronological evidence from elsewhere, as well as historical records).  Apparently there was a huge solar storm that lasted at least a couple of months.  Historians from the era report vivid auroras that were visible way farther south than usual, and the tree rings show a sudden increase in the uptake of carbon-14, a form of carbon created by cosmic rays striking the upper atmosphere.  The researchers took samples of wood that were cut by the Scandinavian colonists at L'Anse aux Meadows, and after identifying the high C-14 rings in the wood -- corresponding to 993 C. E. -- they were able to determine that the wood had been cut from the living tree in the year 1021.

The research, which appeared in Nature last month, was led by Margot Kuitems of the University of Groningen.  The authors write:

Our result of AD 1021 for the cutting year constitutes the only secure calendar date for the presence of Europeans across the Atlantic before the voyages of Columbus.  Moreover, the fact that our results, on three different trees, converge on the same year is notable and unexpected.  This coincidence strongly suggests Norse activity at L’Anse aux Meadows in AD 1021...  This date offers a secure juncture for late Viking chronology.  More importantly, it acts as a new point-of-reference for European cognisance of the Americas, and the earliest known year by which human migration had encircled the planet.  In addition, our research demonstrates the potential of the AD 993 anomaly in atmospheric 14C concentrations for pinpointing the ages of past migrations and cultural interactions.  Together with other cosmic-ray events, this distinctive feature will allow for the exact dating of many other archaeological and environmental contexts.

It's always amazing to me when we can bring the tools of science to bear on historical or quasi-mythological claims.  The most famous one, of course, is Heinrich Schliemann's discovery of the city of Troy, supporting that The Iliad (minus the interference by various gods and goddesses, and possibly the involvement of a giant wooden horse) had its basis in a real war that led to the sack and burning of the city.  But here, we have far more conclusive evidence of a more recent event -- the arrival of Vikings in North America -- and are now able to state with confidence when it happened. 

Which is way more exciting that any spurious claims of blue-eyed, Welsh-speaking Natives.

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It's astonishing to see what the universe looks like on scales different from those we're used to.  The images of galaxies and quasars and (more recently) black holes are nothing short of awe-inspiring.  However, the microscopic realm is equally breathtaking -- which you'll find out as soon as you open the new book Micro Life: Miracles of the Microscopic World.

Assembled by a team at DK Publishers and the Smithsonian Institution, Micro Life is a compendium of photographs and artwork depicting the world of the very small, from single-celled organisms to individual fungus spores to nerve cells to the facets of a butterfly's eye.  Leafing through it generates a sense of wonder at the complexity of the microscopic, and its incredible beauty.  If you are a biology enthusiast -- or are looking for a gift for a friend who is -- this lovely book is a sure-fire winner.  You'll never look the same way at dust, pollen, algae, and a myriad of other things from the natural world that you thought you knew.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Mapping out a fraud

Ever heard of the Vinland Map?

Supposedly dating from the fifteenth century, this map shows the outlines of Europe, Greenland, Asia, Africa... and North America, which is labeled "Vinland Insula" (the island of Vinland).  The map surfaced in 1957, and was widely hailed as a genuine depiction of the Norse exploration of northeastern North America, drawn using information gathered as far back as the tenth century C.E.

Interestingly, the map surfaced three years before the discovery of the (authentic) Viking-era archaeological site at L'Anse-aux-Meadows, Newfoundland, the first (and at this point, only) certain Norse site in North America.  When tenth-century Norse artifacts were found there in 1960, it bolstered the claims that the map was genuine.  We know the Vikings made it to "Vinland," as per the stories of Leif Eiriksson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, and the Map seemed to indicate they'd made it a lot farther, possibly to what is now coastal New England and points south.

Very quickly, it became the center of a lot of wilder claims.  Ancient Aliens aficionados said that not only did it show that the Norse had visited North America and surveyed it closely enough to get a lot of the details of the coastline correct, it contained enough information to support that the drawing had been made from a higher vantage point -- i.e., from the air.  In a spaceship.  Because the Norse gods were actually Ancient Astronauts.

Even the less up-in-the-stratosphere claims were given substantial momentum by the Vinland Map.  I remember when I was working on my master's thesis -- about the effects of the Viking invasions on the Old English and Old Gaelic languages -- running into an apparently serious study purporting to find evidence of borrow-words from Old Norse into various Algonkian languages, including Malecite, Abenaki, and Mi'kmaq.  The difficulty with this sort of thing is in determining whether pairs of similar words from otherwise unrelated languages are related genetically (i.e. from a common root) or are just chance correspondences; in fact, that was one of the more difficult parts of my own research.  Sometimes it's obvious, but that's the exception.  An example is the English word window -- the Old English word was eagþyrl and the Norse word at the same time was vindauga.

Doesn't take a linguist to figure that one out.

Most, however, are not that clear-cut, and it takes more evidence than "they sound kind of the same" to establish a genetic connection.  And the vast majority of linguists think that any similarities between Norse words and Algonkian words are chance -- and cherry-picking.  You can find those sorts of accidental correspondences between just about any two languages you pick if you're allowed to ignore all the pairs of words that don't sound alike.

In any case, the Vinland Map was considered support for the contention that the Vikings did get south of L'Anse-aux-Meadows, whether or not they left linguistic and/or archaeological traces.  This claim gained some credence when a physicist tested the parchment of the Map back in 1995 and found that it dated somewhere between 1432 and 1445, exactly as advertised.

Unfortunately, the age of the parchment is irrelevant -- because a study published last week by some researchers at Yale University, where the map is housed, found that beyond question, the Vinland Map is a fake.

The researchers were able to do an analysis of the ink used on the Map without destroying it, and found that it is unquestionably modern ink.  It contains anatase, a form of titanium dioxide first used in inks in the 1920s.  Also, it was discovered that one of the inscriptions on the map had been overwritten to appear as if it was a bookbinder's instructions to assemble the map pages in concordance with the Speculum Historiale, a thirteenth-century encyclopedia intended as a compendium of everything known to the intelligentsia of Europe at the time.

"The Vinland Map is a fake," said Raymond Clemens, curator of early books and manuscripts at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.  "There is no reasonable doubt here. This new analysis should put the matter to rest...  The altered inscription certainly seems like an attempt to make people believe the map was created at the same time as the Speculum Historiale.  It’s powerful evidence that this is a forgery, not an innocent creation by a third party that was co-opted by someone else, although it doesn’t tell us who perpetrated the deception."

My first response to reading this was to get really pissed off.  Not only does this claim have significant bearing on the subject of my own research, it muddies the waters considerably with respect to any legitimate claims that the Norse reached mainland North America.  Historical linguistics is hard enough; having some asshole create a highly-plausible fake -- good enough that it took sophisticated ink analysis to detect it -- makes it more difficult for those of us who just want to know what really happened.

Fakes in general really make me see red.  We already have the natural biases all humans come equipped with (confirmation bias, correlation/causation errors, and dart-thrower's bias, particularly) gumming up the works even for reputable scientists who are trying their hardest to see things clearly.  It may seem like a minor concern -- who really cares if a particular old document is genuine?  But truth matters, even if it's an argument about what might seem like academic trivia.

Or it should matter.  What's most troubling about this is that whoever created the Vinland Map evidently knew what (s)he was doing, and knew the subject well enough to fool historians for over fifty years.  (Well, some historians -- there were researchers who doubted it pretty much from the get-go.)  So the great likelihood is whoever perpetrated this fake was an academic him/herself.

And to me, that's unconscionable.

So that's our disappointing piece of news for the day.  It still seems pretty likely to me that the Norse did make it to mainland North America, but even if I'm right we're back to having zero hard evidence.  I guess I'm lucky that I chose the thesis research I did; there's no doubt the Vikings made it to Britain.  The monks at Lindisfarne would have been happy to tell you all about it.

At least the ones who survived.

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My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Grave conditions

When I retired in June of 2019, I made the big mistake of saying aloud, "Wow, I'm going to have so much free time now!"

Literally the week after my last day at work, we found out that one corner of our house foundation was sinking, and that if we didn't do something, the slab was going to crack, leading to the walls destabilizing.  Our house, basically, was sliding down the hill it was built on.

The upshot of it all was that we spent the next few months completely gutting our (formerly finished) downstairs so that foundation specialists could drill down, inside and outside, and install twenty-six hydraulic piers to prop the slab up and prevent further subsidence.  Pulling up the carpet and pulling down the wall coverings and ceiling uncovered a myriad other old-house problems, leading to a domino effect of increasingly costly repairs.  Almost a year later, we still haven't completed putting the downstairs back together, although I'm comforted by the fact that our house didn't fall down.

And at least we didn't find what a couple in Seivåg, Norway did when they pulled up the floor in their house to install insulation.  Mariann Kristiansen, whose great-grandfather built the house in 1914, was unaware that she'd been living on top of a Viking-era grave that archaeologists have dated to between 950 and 1050 C.E.

Amazingly enough, there were no ghosts involved.  I would have thought that a house built on a grave site would have been a perfect opportunity to bring out the ghosts, but no.  The whole thing, apparently, was handled completely pragmatically.

The grave came to light when Kristiansen found a bead of dark blue glass that at first she thought was the wheel of a toy car.  But when she poked around a little more and found an axe, she decided that her initial hypothesis wasn't correct.

It turns out that a layer of flat stones immediately beneath the house is probably the remains of a cairn built over a grave, although preliminary digging has yet to uncover any bones.  But the artifacts found are consistent with "grave goods" of the Viking era.

"I never heard of anything like that and I've been in business for nearly thirty years," said archaeologist Martinus Hauglid.  "They did a magnificent job, they reported it to use as soon as they got the suspicion that it actually was something old."

The grave site underneath the Kristiansens' house [Image courtesy of the Nordland City Council]

My first reaction was to wonder why other people had all the luck, since all we found when we ripped up the foundation was cracked plumbing and disgusting 1950s-era vinyl tile.  But a friend of mine pointed out that (1) living in upstate New York, it was unlikely that we'd find Viking graves anywhere nearby, and (2) it was probably better that we didn't find anything of the sort.  "This is going to be so expensive for that family, depending on the laws in Norway," she said.  "If you find bones here [in Canada], you’re on the hook for the cost of the archeologists, the exhumation, and reburial.  Could be 50k at least.  Not to mention the months of digging, your yard trashed, possibly your house.  A nightmare."

I hadn't even considered that downside.  I mean, we thought we had delays and setbacks in getting our house put back together; if we'd discovered some kind of valuable archaeological site underneath the floor, it's an open question as to whether we could even legally rebuild over the top of it.  At that point, the best option might be what Carol suggested, only slightly tongue-in-cheek, after finding out about the sinking-slab problem last June: "Hmm, let's see -- forty thousand dollars to prop up the foundation, or fifteen bucks for five gallons of gas and a box of matches.  Hard decision, right there."

I pointed out that twenty years in prison for arson was kind of a downside of the latter option, which she grudgingly admitted was a valid point.

I'm hoping that the laws in Norway support some kind of compensation for Kristiansen's find and the inconvenience thereof.  Archaeologist Hauglid gives me hope that'll happen.  "I guess, they will get some reward, that is normal in Norway, that people that find old artifacts get a reward from the state," he told reporters.

So I suppose I should be careful what I wish for.  I got enough of an object lesson in that by speculating about how bored I'd be once I retired.  At least we've now covered the floor back up, so anything down there is gonna stay buried.  Unless we're, like, sitting on top of a fault line or a volcanic vent or something.  Which, considering some of the other things that have gone wrong since we started this Adventure In Home Ownership, wouldn't be all that surprising.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one: acclaimed science writer Jennifer Ackerman's The Bird Way: A New Look at how Birds Talk, Work, Play, Parent, and Think.

It's been known for some years that a lot of birds are a great deal more intelligent than we'd thought.  Crows and other corvids are capable of reasoning and problem-solving, and actually play, seemingly for no reason other than "it's fun."  Parrots are capable of learning language and simple categorization.  A group of birds called babblers understand reciprocity -- and females are attracted to males who share their food the most ostentatiously.

So "bird brain" should actually be a compliment.

Here, Ackerman looks at the hugely diverse world of birds and gives us fascinating information about all facets of their behavior -- not only the "positive" ones (to put an human-based judgment on it) but "negative" ones like deception, manipulating, and cheating.  The result is one of the best science books I've read in recent years, written in Ackerman's signature sparkling prose.  Birder or not, this is a must-read for anyone with more than a passing interest in biology or animal behavior.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Reaping the whirlwind

George Santayana's words, "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," have been quoted so often they've almost become a cliché.  This doesn't make the central message any less true, of course.  A great many of the crises we're currently facing have been faced before -- making it even more frustrating that we're approaching them with the same laissez-faire, Panglossian breeziness that didn't work the first time.

Bringing up another quote, of uncertain origin but often attributed to Einstein, that insanity consists of doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.

If you can stand one more cautionary tale that (given our track record) we still won't take to heart in our current situation, consider the fate of the 14th-century Greenland Vikings.

During the last decades of the first millennium C.E., the climate improved, opening up northern ocean lanes and encouraging the seafaring Danes, Swedes, and Norse to go forth and colonize (or from the perspective of the prior inhabitants, to rape, loot, and pillage).  Eventually this led to the settlement of coastal Greenland, in the form of several small villages that considering the conditions, did remarkably well for about three hundred years.

Then they were hit by a double whammy.

The first was the Little Ice Age, a quick downturn of global average temperature that occurred for reasons still largely unknown.  The Arctic ice began to extend its reach, making sea travel difficult to impossible.  The second was that the Greenlanders had overhunted the source of their livelihood; walruses, hunted both for meat and for ivory.  Walrus populations collapsed, killing trade and cutting the Greenlanders off from their European cousins -- especially now that travel was hazardous enough that there had to be a pretty significant financial incentive to make the trip.  This piece of the puzzle was the subject of a new paper that came out last week in Quaternary Science Reviews, and is why the topic was on my mind in the first place.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Jensbn, Greenland scenery, CC BY-SA 3.0]

So the villagers were on their own as the food sources dwindled and the weather got steadily worse.  At some point, the last of the European Greenlanders died, alone and forgotten, and that was the end of the Viking presence in Greenland.  The thought of the final villager, waiting all alone for his own death, was such a deeply poignant image that when I first read about the story I wrote a poem about it -- a poem that won second place in Writers' Journal national poetry competition, and appeared in the January 1999 issue of the magazine.  It remains one of the high points of my writing career (and the only award I've ever gotten).  Here's the poem:

Greenland Colony 1375 

He goes down to the sea each day and walks the shore.
Each day the gray sea ice is closer, and fewer gulls come.
He wanders up toward the village, past the empty and ruined rectory.
The churchyard behind it has stone cairns.  His wife lies beneath one,
And there is one for Thórvald, his son,
Though Thórvald's bones do not rest there; he and three others
Were gathered ten years ago in the sea's net
And came not home. 

Since building his son's cairn,
He had buried one by one the last four villagers.
Each time he prayed in the in the stone church on Sunday
That he would be next,
And not left alone to watch the ice closing in. 

In his father's time ships had come.  The last one came
Fifty years ago.
Storms and ice made it easy for captains to forget
The village existed.  For a time he prayed each Sunday
For a ship to come and take him to Iceland or Norway or anywhere.
None came.  Ship-prayers died with the last villager,
Three years ago.  He still prayed in the stone church on Sunday,
For other things; until last winter,
When the church roof collapsed in a storm.
The next Sunday he stayed home and prayed for other things there. 

Now even the gulls are going,
Riding the thin winds to other shores.  Soon they will all be gone.
He will walk the shore, looking out to sea for ships that will never come,
And see only the gray sea ice, closer each day.

The idea of a group of people sliding toward oblivion, ignoring the warning signs, and missing what you would discover only in retrospect was your last opportunity to escape, has a chilling resonance in our time.  What we're facing is the opposite of what did in the Greenland Vikings -- a human-induced climate warm-up.  Just last week, after an Antarctic summer that had an average temperature already poised to break the record, Esperanza Base on Antarctica's Trinity Peninsula recorded the continent's warmest temperature ever -- 64.9 F.  Ice is melting at a rate almost impossible to comprehend -- the average in the last five years is 252 billion tons melted per year.

But with few exceptions, the world's leaders are doing exactly what the poor Greenland Vikings did; carrying on as usual, expecting that things would work out at some point, all the while continuing to overutilize resources and ignore the warning signs.  The only difference here is that the climate cool-off that contributed to the collapse of the villages in coastal Greenland was a natural process.

Here, the warm-up is something we're doing to ourselves, and is due to a process that Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius warned us would lead to global warming -- in 1896.

But as long as things haven't hit us personally, it's easy to look the other way rather than give up our lavish lifestyles.  Even wakeup calls like the recent Australian wildfires haven't shocked the world's leaders into action.  Except for a lot of sad head-shaking about those poor people whose homes burned down, and look at the sad koalas, not a damn thing has changed.

I fear that like the last Norse Greenlander, we're going to realize at some point -- most likely when it's too late to act (if it isn't already).  It's hard not to despair over the whole thing.  And it brings to mind one last quote, this one from the Bible, specifically the book of Hosea, chapter 8:  "He who sows the wind reaps the whirlwind."

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This week's Skeptophilia book of the week is a dark one, but absolutely gripping: the brilliant novelist Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche.

Most of you probably know about the sarin attack in the subways of Tokyo in 1995, perpetrated by members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult under the leadership of Shoko Asahara.  Asahara, acting through five Aum members, set off nerve gas containers during rush hour, killing fifty people outright and injuring over a thousand others.  All six of them were hanged in 2018 for the crimes, along with a seventh who acted as a getaway driver.

Murakami does an amazing job in recounting the events leading up to the attack, and getting into the psyches of the perpetrators.  Amazingly, most of them were from completely ordinary backgrounds and had no criminal records at all, nor any other signs of the horrors they had planned.  Murakami interviewed commuters who were injured by the poison and also a number of first responders, and draws a grim but fascinating picture of one of the darkest days in Japanese history.

You won't be able to put it down.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The Spear-Danes, in days gone by...

Sometimes I can be a little slow on the uptake, I'll admit.

I think reasonably well, but I'm not quick.  Still, the other shoe does drop eventually, which is fortunate.  In the case of the article I ran across yesterday, it'd be especially embarrassing if I hadn't figured it out, as you'll see momentarily.

It began when a friend of mine sent me a link to a post on Latest UFO News entitled "UFOs, Vikings, and Bigfoot?"  Given my interest in all three -- my master's thesis was about the contributions of the Vikings to the Old English and Old Gaelic languages -- my friend thought I'd be tickled.  Which I was.  Apparently medieval Scandinavia was rife with paranormal goings-on, something I never realized when doing my thesis research.

At first it just seemed to be the same-ol'-same-ol' -- Thor et al. were ancient aliens, trolls were Bigfoot, and so forth.  But then the author, "Doc Vega," launches into a story about an Arab traveler, Ibn Fadian, who chronicled the doings of the Vikings back in the tenth century.

Vega is correct that Ibn Fadian was a real person.  His full name was Ahmad Ibn Fadian, and his first-hand account of not only the Vikings, but the Bulgars and the Turks, is nothing short of fascinating.  He states that Ibn Fadian's manuscript was the basis of Michael Crichton's novel Eaters of the Dead, which he calls "a very real account of events that are nothing short of remarkable."

So anyhow, Ibn Fadian, who Vega refers to over and over as "Ibn" even though "Ibn" isn't his first name (it means "son of" in Arabic), recounts the adventures of a Viking named Buliwyf who lived in a village in Scandinavia called Wyglif.  But he doesn't get to Buliwyf's story right away.  He first tells us about the depravity at a Viking funeral, which included lots of eating, drinking, sex, and human sacrifice.  Which, of course, is interesting enough, given the subject.  But then Vega's account (and supposedly Ibn Fadian's) takes an interesting turn.

The village of Wyglif, and the whole kingdom ("Rothgar"), were apparently under some kind of serious threat, and Buliwyf was the only one who was brave enough to face it.  In fact, Buliwyf took Ibn Fadian to see what the threat was about, and Ibn Fadian was appalled when he arrived at a farm house and saw that the family who had dwelled there had been brutally murdered, and their corpses partly eaten.  The villains who had done this, Buliwyf said, were monsters who lived in the woods called "Wendol."

The Wendol, Vega said, were clearly Sasquatches.  Because (1) ancient legends are admissible as scientific evidence, and (2) there are so many other verified accounts of Bigfoots eating people.

But this wasn't what bothered me most about this.  There was something indefinably... familiar about what Vega was telling us.  And I hadn't read Crichton's novel, so I knew it wasn't that.

So I kept reading.

Vega goes on to tell us that Lloyd Pye (he of the "Starchild Skull" nonsense) thought that the Wendol were probably Neanderthals, or perhaps Gigantopithecus.  Mostly based on the fact that both Sasquatch and the Wendol are described as "big," which I think we can all agree is sufficient to determine taxonomic status.

Anyhow, Buliwyf goes and kills one of the Wendol, and has an encounter with a giant sea serpent (further reinforcing his claim that this manuscript is 100% true).  But we then hear the bad news that Buliwyf had to face yet another challenge, which was...

... the Mother of the Wendol.

This was the moment that the light bulb went on.  You probably figured it out in the first paragraph, but cut me some slack, here; I seriously was not expecting this.  In fact, I said aloud to my computer, "What the fuck?  He thinks that Beowulf is a true story?"

The answer is: yes, he does.  Buliwyf is Beowulf.  Rothgar is Hrothgar.  (That one should have been a dead giveaway.)  Wendol is Grendel.

Besides how long it took me to figure it out, there are various things that are amusing about all of this.

The first is that the best guess of the origins of the Beowulf legend lie in the late 5th century, a good 400 years before Ahmad Ibn Fadian took his amazing voyage with the Vikings.  So while Ibn Fadian may have recounted Beowulf's exploits as a legend he'd heard, he was four centuries too late to have participated in them (or anything related to them).  And that's assuming that they have any basis in reality at all.

The second is that I should have caught on right away, because Beowulf is far and away my favorite ancient legend.  I've read it many times (I especially love Seamus Heaney's wonderful translation).  It's a story that is capable of transporting me effortlessly back into a different millennium.

But the funniest thing about all of this is that I like Beowulf so much that I named my dog Grendel.  I chose this name because Grendel-the-Dog looks like he's made of spare parts; he seems to be the result of putting about six different incompatible breeds of dog into a genetic blender.  Similarly, Grendel-the-Monster is the tragic figure he is because he was a composite being -- not quite human, not quite beast, caught in the undefined middle.

Henrietta Elizabeth Marshall, Grendel (1908) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And for comparison purposes:

Grendel the Dog, a.k.a. "Cream Puff" or "Mr. Snuggles"

So okay, the name "Grendel" wasn't such a good fit, personality-wise.

Anyhow.  We apparently have yet another person who thinks that a wild legend was a historically-accurate retelling of actual events, and then got the chronology wrong by 400 years.  And who didn't even catch on that Michael Crichton's story was a novelization of a myth, which thus added a second layer of fiction on top of the first.

I mean, I can be slow sometimes, but I'm not that obtuse.

Captain Odin of the spaceship Valhalla

Last night, I was working out at the gym, and one of the televisions was showing a program about a subject I know and love: Vikings.

My MA is in Scandinavian historical linguistics (yes, I know I teach biology.  It's a long story).  As part of my thesis research I read a good many of the sagas, some in the original Old Norse, the culmination of a passion for the subject I've had since I first found D'Aulaire's Book of Norse Myths when I was in elementary school.

"Odhin," by Johannes Gehrts (1901) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So I was tickled when I saw the program being aired, even though I had a chill run up my spine when I noticed that it was on the History channel.  Given the name, you'd think that the History channel would show programs related to history.  You'd be wrong, although I guess the more accurate name of The Woo-Woo Bullshit channel wouldn't attract sponsors very well.

So I watched the program for a while.  And it turned out to be an episode of...

... Ancient Aliens.

I'm not making this up.  My first thought was that the contention of the show was that the Vikings were aliens, but it turns out that no, they're not saying that.  That would be ridiculous.

They're saying that the Vikings were helped by aliens.

The show featured a couple of legitimate scholars, Kirsten Wolf of the University of Wisconsin - Madison's Department of Scandinavian Studies (which, coincidentally, is where I took my courses in the Old Norse language) and Timothy Tangherlini of UCLA.  Both made coherent and academically relevant statements regarding the history and culture of the ancient Norse, which were (of course) immediately misinterpreted by the wackos who wrote the narrator's script.

"The Vikings were enormously sophisticated in terms of technology: ship-building, bridge-building, fortress-building," Wolf said, which is true, but then the narrator jumped in with, "But many researchers remain baffled at how the Vikings became so socially, politically and technologically advanced, especially while living in the cold, harsh environment of the North...  Just how were the Norse Vikings able to manage such technological and geographical feats?  Are their fortresses and journeys to unknown continents evidence that the Vikings had access to extraterrestrial knowledge?  Ancient astronaut theorists say yes, and believe the proof can be found by examining the religious beliefs of this mysterious people."

Yup.  Those poor ol' scholars, always "baffled" at how "mysterious" everything is.  Good thing we have raving wingnuts like Phillip Coppens and David Hatcher Childress to weigh in on the situation and rescue us from our ignorance with conclusions such as Thor's hammer being a "kinetic weapon," Odin's ravens Huginn and Muninn being "spy drones," and Odin's seat up on Hlidskjalf being "the captain's seat on a spacecraft."

I wonder if it's aerobic exercise to pound your head repeatedly into the wall, because that's what I ended up doing, watching this show.

At least that's better than what Drs. Wolf and Tangherlini most likely felt like doing.  After realizing what idiocy their names had been associated with, publicly, I'm guessing they probably both wanted to commit seppuku.

I kept watching, though, in the fashion of a person witnessing a slow-motion train wreck.  A couple of times, I actually laughed out loud, so it's probably a good thing that the gym was otherwise empty.  One of the best points came when Phillip Coppens explained that the dwarves, mentioned many times in myth collections like the Eddas, were actually...

... the "Grays."  Yup, the same alien creatures we see in such historical documentaries as The X Files and Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Here's what he said, verbatim, or near as I can recall:

Are they real dwarfs, or somehow more mythical, or whether the label “dwarf” actually stuck to them because they were somehow smaller?  And of course today, we often describe the gray alien archetype as dwarfish as well, simply because they are smaller.

Of course, Philip.  Whatever that means.  And along the same lines, I'm guessing that the trolls were the Vikings' way of describing the "Rancor" from Star Wars, and the elves were invented because J. R. R. Tolkien was a time traveling ultra-intelligent extraterrestrial being who went back to the 9th century and told the ancient Norse about Legolas et al.

But watching this show wouldn't have been the complete experience it was without a commentary from Giorgio Tsoukalos, he of the amazing hair, so I was positively tickled when he showed up.  Tsoukalos had this to say about Valhalla:

Valhalla was not a figment of our ancestors’ imaginations, but it might have been some type of an orbiting space station.  The reason why I’m saying this is because we have a description of Valhalla: it is an incredible description of a place that has weird attributes.

Which is such an amazing feat of logical deduction that I can hardly think of a response, other than to say that my classroom has some "weird attributes" and it is not, so far as I can tell, an "orbiting space station."

At that point, I kind of gave up, stopped staring at the television with my mouth hanging open, and went over to use the weight machines, figuring that even if my brain had been turned to cream-of-wheat, at least I could work on my biceps.

So this, my dear readers, is why I don't watch television, except for when I'm at the gym.  I should have changed the channel, really.  Next time I will -- I'll try to find something more sensible and intellectually stimulating than what the History channel has to offer.

Reruns of Gilligan's Island should fit the bill.

Viking dinosaurs

One of the main differences between skeptics and woo-woos is what we each think to be "sufficient evidence."

I ran into a great example of this yesterday, on S8intCom Blogger, which bills itself as "A Biblical View On Science."  (You are told on the homepage that "s8int" is pronounced "saint;" but by my linguistic analysis, "s8int" would be pronounced "satan-t," which is probably why they felt that the reader should be advised on how to pronounce it.)  In any case, most of the site is devoted to "proving" that the Great Flood of Noah happened, as per the Book of Genesis, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that evolution is a big fat lie, and so on.  But one page struck me as especially interesting.  It was entitled "Ancient Viking Brachiosaurus," and makes the claim that the early inhabitants of Scandinavia depicted dinosaurs on their art -- because, well, real dinosaurs existed during the Viking age.

As evidence, they produce photographs of artifacts like this one, next to which they have helpfully superimposed a photograph of a brachiosaur skull and an artist's rendition of a brachiosaur, to make sure that you don't miss the similarity:

They also bring up the mention in Norse myth of giant serpents, like Ni∂hogg, the dragon who spent his time gnawing on the "World-Tree" Yggdrasil, and Jörmungandr, or "Midgard's serpent," the giant serpent that lay underwater, coiled around Midgard ("Middle-Earth," or the home of humans).  And this, we are told, is sufficient evidence to buy that dinosaurs were contemporaneous with humanity.

Okay, where do I start?

Let's begin with the artifact itself.  Even the S8intCom people admit that it hasn't been authenticated as being of genuine Viking make; in fact, they got the photograph of it from eBay, where it is being sold for $140 by some guy from Latvia.  Now, understand, it might be authentic; I'm not saying I have any reason to believe it isn't.  And questioning the artifact's provenance is only the beginning of the problems here.

A more serious problem is that dinosaurs of the genus Brachiosaurus are only known to come from the Morrison Formation, which is a Jurassic Age sedimentary rock formation... from western North America.  There were related forms, including Diplodocus, Apatosaurus, Camarosaurus, and others --  but the various long-necked sauropods seem to have been largely a group confined to what is now the western United States.  (There is some evidence from the fossil record that similar species may have occurred in North Africa, but that is uncertain.)  In any case, what's pretty clear is that at no time in the past did Brachiosaurus and his cousins stomp their way around Scandinavia.

Well, the Vikings were great travelers, right?  Maybe they saw live brachiosaurs on their travels, and were impressed (who wouldn't be?), and depicted them in their art.  Okay, but the problem is, they also depicted other things, like trolls, multi-headed giants, flying horses with eight legs, guys with magic hammers, hundred-foot-tall wolves, and boars made of gold that can run through the air.  And as far as I can see, S8intCom isn't claiming any of that is true.  They pick the one thing from Norse myth and art that supports their claim -- that dinosaurs coexisted with humans -- and conveniently ignore the rest.

We also have the additional problem that the two actual examples of dinosaur-like creatures mentioned in Norse myth -- Ni∂hogg and Jörmungandr -- aren't, really, all that dinosaur-like.  Ni∂hogg, in fact, lived underground, but liked visitors -- and he could talk, spending his time in riddles and abstruse arguments with any who would listen.  (Tolkien's talking dragons Smaug and Glaurung were almost certainly inspired by Ni∂hogg.)  As for Jörmungandr, he was thousands of miles long, and lived underwater, and was the offspring of the god Loki and the giantess Angrbo∂a.  Neither one of these sounds like any dinosaur I've ever heard of.

Last, if the dinosaurs were contemporaneous with the Vikings, why haven't we found any bones?  Or teeth?  Or anything?  There are animal remains that date from that age -- some that have been mummified, or partially fossilized (full fossilization usually takes longer than 1,000 years), and others that have had their bones or teeth fashioned into things like knife handles, jewelry, and the like.  Why no 1,000 year old dinosaur parts?

What I find most maddening about this whole thing is that the writers at S8intCom want to take a tiny part of scientific research -- the actual dinosaur bones themselves -- and an equally tiny part of antiquarian research into the art and myth of ancient Scandinavia, and effectively jettison the rest in favor of their own favorite Bronze Age mythological explanation of the world.  The rest of science -- that the Earth is a billion years old, that the dinosaurs (with the exception of the lineage that led to birds) died out during the Cretaceous Extinction 65 million years ago, that evolution is correct as per the evidence -- they ignore or argue away.  The depiction of things like flying horses and hundred-headed frost giants is considered the fanciful ravings of ignorant pagans, but a piece of dinosaur-like Norse jewelry is a valuable find that could overturn everything we understand about paleontology.  They're perfectly willing to take 1% of the evidence, and use it to support the ridiculous ideas they already had, and ignore the other 99% as misleading or downright wrong.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I'd just love it if the Norse myths were true.  They've always been my favorites, even if they take kind of a harsh view of the universe, what with the man-eating wolves and evil jotuns and fierce Valkyries, and the world getting destroyed at Ragnarokk, and all.  But at least they're better than the biblical myths, with an all-powerful, but petulant and capricious, god basically smiting the crap out of everyone for such egregious offenses as collecting firewood on the sabbath or eating shrimp or wearing clothes made of two different kinds of thread.  Given the choice, I'd take my chances with Odin and Loki and Thor.