Vikings: Valhalla - Netflix Series

Vikings: Valhalla - Season 2 | Official Trailer | Netflix
Netflix
I'm not too sure about this show. It's a good story, and the production values are pretty good, but I think they bit off more than they can chew. For example, they have Viking long ships, but they look pretty small, but this was back around the 10th century, so maybe the size is accurate.

There are three story lines. We've got Queen Emma of England dealing with her minister Godwin and some sort of treachery. 

We've got Freydis who escaped from Hagar's raid on Kattegut. She ends up in Jomsburg in Pomerania (coastal area of Germany and Poland). Jomsburg is ruled by a tyrant but Freydis prevails, though it's a close run thing.

Leif Eriksson and Harold end up in Russia where Harald comes up with a plan to get rich by taking a boatload of furs to Constantinople. At first I thought they would sail west through the Baltic, past Denmark, through the English channel, around France and Spain to Gibraltar and thence through the Mediterranean. But no, they are heading due south via an ice covered river. It's 900 miles as the crow flies, but given how twisty and turny the river is, it's probably twice that. Plus, the rivers don't connect. There is one flowing north toward Vogrovod, and there is the Dneiper flowing south past Kiev to the Black Sea, but it doesn't look like they connect. Since the route didn't jump out at me, I posted a question on Quora and Boris Ivanov confirms my thinking.

Would it have been possible to take a boat from Novgorod, Russia via rivers to the Black Sea back around the year 1000 AD?

No, that was impossible. The real route was more complicated, and it included travels by land. Here is a description from the Russian Primary Chronicle:

There was a way from the Varangians to the Greeks and from the Greeks along the Dnieper, and from the upper reaches of the Dnieper you can portage boats to Lovot [the Lovat river in Russia and Belarus], and along Lovot you can enter Ilmen, the great lake; Volkhov flows out of the same lake and flows into the great lake Nero [Lake Ladoga], and the mouth of that lake flows into the Varangian Sea.

The Dnieper Rapids were also usually crossed by portaging, because they were too treacherous to sail through them.

1,800 miles (two times 900) at 18 miles a day would take a hundred days. At one point in their journey someone mentions that they have been traveling for two months, so okay. You could probably make a entire show just about this journey, but we only get the highlights, like when the ice dam breaks and when the go over the water fall. Then there is the run-in with the savage Penchengs who capture our two heroes and decide to amuse themselves by cutting them.

 

Novograd to the Black Sea

The black lines trace the easily visible rivers. The rivers extend further but they get very small and very windy. Very small is a relative term. At Mogilev, which is about half way between the ends of the two black lines, the Dnipro (aka Dnieper) river is 250 feet wide.

They went to a lot of trouble to shoot the ice boat scenes:

Vikings: Valhalla Season 2 | Behind the Scenes: Ice River | Netflix
Netflix: Behind the Streams
Wikipedia page here.
Season 1 post here.

Eltz Castle

Eltz Castle
198 piece jigsaw puzzle

From Wikipedia:

Eltz Castle is a medieval castle nestled in the hills above the Moselle between Koblenz and Trier, Germany. It is still owned by a branch of the same family that lived there in the 12th century, thirty-three generations ago. Bürresheim Castle, Eltz Castle and Lissingen Castle are the only castles on the left bank of the Rhine in Rhineland-Palatinate which have never been destroyed.

From 1965 to 1992, an engraving of Eltz Castle was used on the German 500 Deutsche Mark note.

Eltz Castle decorates the homepage of the German Whitepages as a symbol of German culture next to BMW, Nivea Cream, a Thurn and Taxis postcoach or the facade of Deutsches Museum.

Incense Clock

Incense Clock

China, a thousand years ago. Kontextmaschine has the story, which ends with this bit:

But by far the method I was most taken with was one where you connect multiple types of incense into a single stick or a line of powder, so that each hour (or whichever unit of time) has a particular smell. I find that totally delightful for some reason. A very, very charming premodern way of doing things. Imprecise, but charming.

*sniffs* oh fuck I’m late

Via Astral Codex Ten

Cod Save the King

How Cod Saved the Vikings
I almost feel guilty about posting Veritasium videos. Almost every one he produces is great, so great that I can't really add much, but I'll give it a shot anyway.

The title on this one is poor. It might be better to call it How Cod Made the Vikings. He ties rickets, vitamin D and cod liver oil together. I remember hearing about rickets and cod liver oil a long time ago, but I never realized there was a connection, probably because rickets was never an issue. I'm taking vitamin D now. My wife recommended it.

Siege of Paris 885 - Jean-Victor Schnetz 1835

The bit about the Vikings laying seige to Paris was new to me, likewise the reason for the failure of the Viking's Greenland colony and

Scurvy

the British experiments to find a cure for scurvy:

However, it was not until 1747 that James Lind formally demonstrated that scurvy could be treated by supplementing the diet with citrus fruit, in one of the first controlled clinical experiments reported in the history of medicine. As a naval surgeon on HMS Salisbury, Lind had compared several suggested scurvy cures: hard cider, vitriol, vinegar, seawater, oranges, lemons, and a mixture of balsam of Peru, garlic, myrrh, mustard seed and radish root. In A Treatise on the Scurvy (1753) Lind explained the details of his clinical trial and concluded "the results of all my experiments was, that oranges and lemons were the most effectual remedies for this distemper at sea.”

I did know that the Brits originated the regimented use of citrus, I just didn't know how that came to pass.

The Last Kingdom

The Last Kingdom | Series 1 Full Trailer
The Last Kingdom is a BBC produced TV series. Season 1 is available on Netflix. We watched the first two episodes this evening. It's pretty good. It's based on The Saxon Stories, a series of historical novels written by Bernard Cornwell, who also wrote the Sharpe's Rifles series, which I really liked.

In an interview, Cornwell said: "For some reason the history of the Anglo-Saxons isn’t much taught in Britain (where I grew up) and it struck me as weird that the English really had no idea where their country came from." - Wikipedia

The story is set in the late 9th Century (877, I think the opening screen said). I thought this was like the time of King Arthur, but Arthur is from the late 5th and early 6th centuries AD. We do have some historical characters, like

• Guthrum
• Alfred the Great
• Odda, Ealdorman of Devon
• Æthelwold ætheling
• Edmund the Martyr
• Æthelred of Wessex
• Asser

There is a great deal of brutality, much like Game of Thrones, but we also have a young, attractive and rich couple who are obviously in love, but I'm not sure that word has even been invented yet. And they're on the run. I think this might be Hollywood plot number 867B, but it's well done, and the girl is pretty great. She has a brain and has no compunction about killing bad guys. She also saves our hero at least once an episode. I don't know why she isn't pregnant yet, unless she's using some of those pagan spells.

Update June 2018 replaced missing trailer.