perfidy

The medieval 'New England': a forgotten Anglo-Saxon colony on the north-eastern Black Sea coast.

Although the name 'New England' is now firmly associated with the east coast of America, this is not the first place to be called that. In the medieval period there was another Nova Anglia, 'New England', and it lay far to the east of England, rather than to the west, in the area of the Crimean peninsula. The following post examines some of the evidence relating to this colony, which was said to have been established by Anglo-Saxon exiles after the Norman conquest of 1066 and seems to have survived at least as late as the thirteenth century.

According to these sources, what seems to have occurred is that, in the aftermath of the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, a group of English lords who hated William the Conqueror's rule but had lost all hope of overthrowing it decided to sell up their land and leave England forever. Led by an 'earl of Gloucester' named Sigurðr (Stanardus in the Chronicon Laudunensis), they set out with 350 ships—235 in the CL—for the Mediterranean via the Straits of Gibraltar. Once there, they voyaged around raiding and adventuring for a period, before learning that Constantinople was being besieged (either whilst they were in Sicily, according to the Edwardsaga, or in Sardinia, as the CL). Hearing this, they decided to set sail for Constantinople to assist the Byzantine emperor. When they reached there, they fought victoriously for the emperor and so earned his gratitude, with the result that they were offered a place of honour in his Varangian Guard.

...

Thus far the story, as outlined above, is clearly intriguing, and moreover largely supported by all of the available sources, both northern and Byzantine. However, perhaps the most remarkable and interesting part of the tale is found only in the Chronicon Laudunensis and the Edwardsaga, both of which may derive from a lost early twelfth century account, according to Fell. The Edwardsaga states that whilst some of the exiled Anglo-Saxons accepted the offer of joining the Varangian Guard, some members of the group asked instead for a place to settle and rule themselves:

[I]t seemed to earl Sigurd and the other chiefs that it was too small a career to grow old there in that fashion, that they had not a realm to rule over; and they begged the king to give them some towns or cities which they might own and their heirs after them. But the king thought he could not strip other men of their estates. And when they came to talk of this, king Kirjalax [Alexius I Comnenus] tells them that he knew of a land lying north in the sea, which had lain of old under the emperor of Micklegarth [Constantinople], but in after days the heathen had won it and abode in it. And when the Englishmen heard that they took a title from king Kirjalax that that land should be their own and their heirs after them if they could get it won under them from the heathen men free from tax and toll. The king granted them this. After that the Englishmen fared away out of Micklegarth and north into the sea, but some chiefs stayed behind in Micklegarth, and went into service there.

     Earl Sigurd and his men came to this land and had many battles there, and got the land won, but drove away all the folk that abode there before. After that they took that land into possession and gave it a name, and called it England [Nova Anglia, 'New England', in the Chronicon Laudunensis]. To the towns that were in the land and to those which they built they gave the names of the towns in England. They called them both London and York, and by the names of other great towns in England. They would not have St. Paul's law, which passes current in Micklegarth, but sought bishops and other clergymen from Hungary. The land lies six days' and nights' sail across the sea in the east and north-east from Micklegarth; and there is the best of land there: and that folk has abode there ever since.

In conclusion, the above points would seem to add some considerable weight to the case for the existence of a 'New England' on the northern and north-eastern coast of the Black Sea in the medieval period. Not only does it seem that the Byzantine Empire regained control of that portion of the Black Sea coast in this period, just as the Edwardsaga/Chronicon Laudunensis claim, but there also exists a quantity of medieval place-name evidence from this region that offers significant support for the establishment of English Varangian settlements there and a thirteenth-century account that appears to refer to the continued existence of a Christian people named the Saxi in this area, who occupied defended cities and were militarily sophisticated. In such circumstances, the most credible solution is surely that the medieval tales of a Nova Anglia, 'New England', in the area of the Crimean peninsula and north-eastern Black Sea coast do indeed have a basis in reality. This territory would appear to have been established by the late eleventh-century Anglo-Saxon exiles who had left England after the Norman Conquest and joined the Byzantine emperor's Varangian Guard, and their control of at least some land and cities here apparently persisted for several centuries, perhaps thus providing a regular supply of 'English Varangians' to the Byzantine Empire that helps to explain why the 'native tongue' of the Varangian Guard continued to be English as late as the mid-fourteenth century.

Sadly no information in the post on what happened to the Saxi - they were still around as late as the 1300s - but nothing on their ultimate fate.

Fascinating.

If the Soviet Union still existed, it would likely be in third place in the 2012 Summer Games:

Or, depending on how you look at it, second place. They'd be significantly behind the US in gold, but slightly ahead in overall medal count.

"Picture Alexander Hamilton. In 1805, as he lay dying at the hands of Vice President Aaron Burr, could Hamilton have credibly groaned to his seconds, echoing Romulus, “Go, and tell the Romans Americans that by heaven’s will my Rome America shall be capital of the world. Let them learn to be soldiers. Let them know, and teach their children, that no power on earth can stand against Roman American arms."

Twice in two days, through no real effort or bent of mind, I ended up discussing the possibility of Caesarism in America. This lays in the background. And, my absolute favorite bible verse.

The Chains of the Improbable vs. The Chains of the Impossible | The Committee of Public Safety

from committeeofpublicsafety.wordpress.com

 

I have a stupid reason for why I don't post more often. I hope you are now asking yourself, "How stupid?" and not muttering, "And this is surprising how?" And that reason is this: I do not have the luxury of pursuing lengthy trains of thought. While individually, my wife, son, three daughters, dog, cat, work, natural catastrophes, neighbor kids and Global Warming may only interrupt me only occasionally; collectively they are derailing my lengthy trains o' thought on average about every three milliseconds.

So the Grand Thoughts that I wish to think remain unthunk. Which pisses me off a little.

Because I feel that a lot of the stuff I think about is just this close to congealing into something more than a pile of unordered ramblings. I sense the outlines of order and coherence, but can't get it down on paper, or pixels.

So, I am making a conscious decision to: a) stop leaving things in my feed reader in the now obviously futile hope that I will get back to them and write something about them; b) prune the feed reader so that I have less to obsessively read; c) read more books; and finally, d) post smaller bits as they occur to me.

In aid of d), there's this: Aretae talks about immigration. Some of this has now been addressed in his comments, and he's updated his post a little from when I read it this morning.

To lay it out Aretae-style, my thoughts went roughly like this:

• Anti-Immigration summary: fair.  If something is hurting us, well, maybe stopping is a good idea.
• That's a good argument for letting that one Haitian dude in.  When you're confronted with one guy, you could even say, hey, I'll personally take a haircut of $2 a day (a substantive, if not crushing loss of almost $500 a year) to help Jean-Paul or whoever get a real life in the home of the free and the land of the brave.  That's charity.
• Wait a minute, where's Hati, where these Hatians are coming from?
• But, in the world of freely-entered contracts and libertarian (left- or otherwise-) why does Jean Paul get to come here and unilaterally cut my income and take $500 out of the mouths of my Children?  Do I get a say in this?
• Put another way, am I really morally obligated to give up my income and so reduce the prosperity of my family to help others?  More to the point, if I decide that I don't want to, is it right for others, like Jean-Paul, to force me to lose that income?
• Stalin said that quantity has a quality of its own, or something like that.  One Jean Paul - hard working, thrifty and pious - he's okay.  But what about five million of his less upright, smelly compatriots who have made a wonderland of their homeland in the 200 years of their independence?  Does their collective presence in this country make it less likely that immigrant n will get the same benefit from moving here?  Does it make it more likely that subsequent income loss to American workers will be more than $2/day?
• Aretae talks monkeybrains™ about everything except left-libertarian issues.  There is no tribe of all humanity.  As commenter Lurking Apple put it, "You seem to be assuming a spherical immigrant on a frictionless border..."  People are different.  Different tribes have different abilities, beliefs, and attitudes.  If we allow too many in, we cease to be what we were.  That may be good, but most mutations are not beneficial.  What we are - or at the very least, were - was very good at creating staggering amounts of prosperity from the nothing but hard work, ingenuity and the occasional tariff.  Add tens of millions of (to pick just two) notably prospering Mexicans, notably peaceful Muslims  - we might just end up with a shit sandwich on rye.
• It seems to me that while we should assiduously and strenuously hope that other places - backward, poor, disease infested, Global Warming-afflicted, trounced by Colonialism and the Man (you know where they are) - might adopt our miraculously effective package of property rights, innovation, and win! to rework their lives in a way that seems best to them, but in any event a richer version than what they have now.  We might even offer classes or something.  But it is probably not our job, as a nation or a people, to provide that life for them there, and it certainly isn't our job to provide that life for them here.

Anywho, that's my small thought for today.

[wik] And here is this amusing, if harsh, take on Libertarianism.

The Onion, once again, nails it.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Preoccupied with recovery from a devastating 7.0 earthquake, seasonal floods, a widespread cholera outbreak, and chaos in the wake of disputed presidential elections, the weary Haitian people simply shrugged in resignation Tuesday at the sudden onset of Ragnarök, the end of the cosmos as foretold in Norse mythology. "At first I didn't even notice the writhing serpents spewing poison into the sky, but once I saw Loki demolishing everything in his wake, I was like, 'Of course,'" unemployed barber Jean-Paul Aucoin said as Tyr and the hellhound Garm battled behind him. "It's a little odd, since Haiti has no connection to Scandinavian folklore, yet at the same time it makes perfect sense." Aucoin then went back to loading rubble into a wheelbarrow as Sköll devoured the sun, plunging the island nation of Haiti into complete and total darkness.

Interesting, too, is the contrast with this earlier Onion piece on Haiti:

For most countries, a Category 2 hurricane, a devastating earthquake, and a massive cholera outbreak in the same year would cause its people—and its political leaders—to completely fall apart. But most countries aren't Haiti, and most leaders aren't President René Préval, the quiet mastermind behind the impoverished island nation's secret rise to unprecedented prosperity.

While many observers who can't see the big picture characterize Préval as a typical sycophantic politician who's overwhelmed by, and incapable of responding to, growing humanitarian crises, the president is, in fact, shrewdly devising a plan to turn Haiti's high poverty rate and woeful lack of education to its advantage and remake the country as a global economic superpower.

In a stroke of genius that will someday have the international community applauding, Préval has carefully crafted the persona of a leader who appears to kowtow to the 1 percent of the population controlling half the nation's wealth—and who appears to be leaving millions of homeless earthquake victims to their own devices. But what he's actually doing is setting the stage for a dramatic, albeit confidential, Haitian comeback.

Playing his usual coy self, Préval has been unwilling to speculate when all these carefully laid plans will bear fruit, but we guess it will be 2014, maybe 2015 at the very latest.

Which is the more likely? Foseti has an idea.

I remember back more than a decade ago, discussing this very issue with a friend of mine. I was not yet a reactionary, but looking back, this conversation was a sort of precursor. We were arguing about the source of Haiti's perpetual fuckedupedness. I wondered what would happen if a group like Executive Solutions or Blackwater or the like were to invade and conquer Haiti, and set up an enlightened dictatorship. Could Haiti be fixed? At the time I imagined that with the right policies and a suitably ruthless administration of justice, progress could be made. I mean, look what happened with Hong Kong, or Chili.

Once my friend got over his shock at such a suggestion, he argued against it, saying that 200 years of disfunction had probably left the incapable of benefitting from even the most enlightened rule. He was arguing from cultural effects, but now I think that causation runs the other way. Haitians are likely constitutionally incapable of benefitting from even the most enlightened rule, and that has resulted in 200 years of disfunction.

I think you'd have to elect a new people to make any real changes in Haiti's future. The similarities between the post-independence fortunes of Haiti and, say, Cote d'Ivoire are not coincidence.

[wik] Video no longer available, and sadly there's no context to even guess at what it once was.

[alsø wik] Is it proper to have a "wik" when there's no content before it?

[alsø alsø wik] Should this one be "alsø wik," and the one before be "wik?"

Fascinating article on the connection between batshit, sovereignty, empire and the reach of the constitution.

I stumbled on a 969-page typescript treatise which is kept in the library of the US State Department. Flipping through this great leather-bound brick of onion-skin pages, I gradually absorbed that the whole massive volume had been put together in the 1930s by a lawyer working for the US Government who’d been given a killer assignment. Apparently somebody had walked over to the desk of this poor functionary, scribbling away in some basement office, and said something along the lines of: “You know, we have a bunch of islands in the Pacific and the Caribbean—little islands. How about you figure out what the deal is with all these places, legally speaking.” I was holding the result: The Sovereignty of Islands Claimed Under the Guano Act and of the Northwest Hawaiian Islands, Midway, and Wake. And it was splendid to behold: nearly a thousand pages of intricate legal arguments and historical documentation on the strange history of the United States’ nearly invisible, but surprisingly vast, insular empire.

...The Guano Islands Act of 1856 arguably laid the legal groundwork for American imperialism.

I love sentences like that.

You can sort of see it [the language of the act] drift from talking about the waters and other resources “appurtenant” to the guano islands, to being used to talk about the relationship between the islands themselves and the United States. It was basically a fudge. A way of taking the places as possessions, while being careful not to call themterritories, since that implied constitutional entanglements. It was a way of taking the places without really taking responsibility for them within the federal system. The bill also carefully removed the language of “sovereignty,” since that, too, seemed potentially to entail various obligations under domestic and international law. And finally, to get the bill to pass, they also stuck in a bit about how the United States could get rid of the places if it wanted—that there was no commitment to hang onto these islands after the resources had been stripped or their utility otherwise terminated.

And the act passes in that form?

It does, and boom, there are all these wildcatters and roughnecks throwing up the Stars and Stripes on little mounds of manure all over the world. In the end, more than seventy such islands are actually secured under the act, and many more are claimed (unsuccessfully, for one reason or another). But that’s not the interesting part, really—although it’s curious enough, and there are some great stories about what goes down on these islands: shanghaiing Polynesian laborers, piracy (of course), mutiny, etc. Some of the islands are still claimed by various shady types. Indeed, a rather mysterious gentleman contacted me some years ago in connection with his alleged title to an uninhabited guano island in the Caribbean.

Awesome.

I downloaded this the other day, and I've just been enthralled.  It's really surprising - even when we no better, having read our Gibbon, we still imagine that Europe went from full-on Roman Empire glory straight into deepest Dark Age, without going through any sort of awkward in-between phase.  Pirenne's Mohammed et Charlegmagne is a perfect corrective for this - straightforward prose, well balanced scope, telling details and a good narrative organization.

The Germans, pushed into the Empire by the arrival of Attila of Hun fame, did not want to destroy the empire.  They wanted to use it for their own benefit.  The successor kingdoms set up - the Vandals in North Africa, the Visigoths in Spain, the Ostrogoths in Italy, a grab bag of smaller tribes in Gaul - were all integrated into a post-Roman system that was still largely Roman.  What's remarkable is how Roman, and how prosperous, these states remained.  Urban culture survived the Barbarian invasions, remained tied to the Emperors in Constantinople, and trade - in the form of Syrian and Jewish merchants - was still being conducted in volume.

We know - though I haven't gotten to that part in the book yet - that in the dark ages, the money economy collapsed utterly, western Europe was largely isolated from the rest of the world, and literacy took a powder.  But it certainly wasn't the Vandals and Goths that did it.

The version I downloaded is just images of the pages - not OCR'd - but I'll put up some quotes over the next few days.  Fascinating stuff, and relevant as well to the ongoing discussions here, and in Aretae and Foseti-land.

[wik] Link to book.  Free download, though you should consider flying to Belgium and giving money to his heirs.

In light of my last post, it makes me wonder, again, how history might have unfolded without Islamic conquests. The continuity of Classical civilization, without the interruption of the Dark Ages; the Eastern Roman Empire not reduced to a nub and finally destroyed by the Turks; North Africa, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, Anatolia - all would have been Christian, and speaking Greek or Latin. Persia likely would have eventually become Christianized, rather than converted to Islam. The Crusades never would have happened, for sure, but without having to claw back up from next to nothing, Europe would have been further along by the turn of the millenium.

The European discovery of the New World, and their exploration efforts in general might have been delayed by centuries, since Christians would have controlled access to the Red and Black Seas, and thus trade with the Orient.

Very different, indeed.

It is commonly thought that the barbarian Germanic tribes (ancestors of later barbarian French and Germans) invaded the west Roman Empire, extinguished the light of culture and learned urban life and brought about the dark ages so impressively imagined in this work.  Further, it is also thought that Islam, in conquering large swaths of the east Roman Empire and North Africa, did not have the same effect; rather, they preserved the learning of the Classical world, saving it up until it could be translated into Latin by industrious scholars in the late middle ages in Cordoba.

Thinking about this, it seems strange.  Why would the Arabs, renowned through later ages for their contempt for learning, have preserved the corpus of Greek and Latin literature?  The muslim armies bursting out of Arabia in the seventh century were no where near as civilized as the partially Romanized Germans.

And thinking more, in my reading about Belisarius and Justinian in the period right before the Islamic breakout, the German successor kingdoms in the west - Italy and North Africa - were, while not exactly up to par with Augustan Rome, not uncivilized.  The cities were still there, still trading, Latin was still being spoken and the ruling classes learned it and aped the manners of their Roman predecessors.

Well, this guy thinks that the Islamic - Arab expansion in the seventh century was the real cause of the Dark Ages:

Henri Pirenne’s posthumously-published Mohammed et Charlemagne (1938) presented to the academic world the results of a lifetime of research and study. His conclusions were stunning. The accepted narrative of western civilization, he maintained, was erroneous in a fundamental way. Classical civilization, the literate and urban culture of Greece and Rome, did not die as a result of the “Barbarian” Invasions of the fifth century. On the contrary, the great cities of the west, of Gaul, of Italy, of Spain and of North Africa, continued to flourish as before, this time under Germanic kings. These monarchs enthusiastically adopted the Latin language as well as Christianity, and regarded themselves as functionaries of the Roman Emperor — who by now however sat in Constantinople. Literature, as well as the arts and sciences, Pirenne found, continued to flourish in the western provinces until the middle of the seventh century. At that point, however, everything fell apart. Now, quite suddenly, a darkness — complete and total — descends. Gold coinage disappears and the great cities go into terminal decline. Within a generation, Europe is in the middle of a Dark Age. The light of classical civilization is utterly and completely extinguished.

What, Pirenne mused, could have caused such a total and dramatic disintegration? The conclusion he reached was almost as dramatic as the civilizational collapse he described. It was, to use Pirenne’s own phrase, explainable in one word: Mohammed. It can have been no coincidence, argued Pirenne, that all the luxury items of Near Eastern origin, which were commonplace in western Europe until the early seventh century, suddenly disappear in the middle of that same century — just at the moment Islam spread throughout the Middle East and North Africa. Islamic war and piracy must have closed the Mediterranean to all trade and strangled the economy of western Europe. Since the great cities of the west were dependant for their existence upon the luxury items imported from the east, these soon began to die. With the cities went the wealth of the kings, whose tax revenues disappeared: Local strongmen, or barons, seized power in the provinces. The Middle Ages had begun.

It was thus Islam, and not the German barbarians, who had caused the Dark Age of Europe.

Interesting.  John O'Neill, who wrote that post at Gates of Vienna, has written a book about the subject, Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization. Downloadable, and at a reduced price of only $10.

He continues,

...the Byzantine Empire, which Glick [whose book O'Neill is savaging, - ed] asserts suffered little or no economic dislocation. Before commenting on the seventh century, we should note that the sixth century, just before the rise of Islam, was an epoch of unparalleled splendour for Byzantium: Justinian reasserted Imperial control over Italy and North Africa, and both he and his successors presided over a prosperous and opulent civilization. Great monuments, both civil and ecclesiastical were raised, and science and the arts flourished. This was the situation that pertained as far as the reign of Heraclius, in whose time Byzantium first came into conflict with Islam. Cyril Mango is one of the world’s foremost authorities on Byzantine history, a topic which he has covered in several volumes and numerous articles. Here’s what he says about the Empire in the seventh century, from the reign of Heraclius onwards:

“One can hardly overestimate the catastrophic break that occurred in the seventh century. Anyone who reads the narrative of events will not fail to be struck by the calamities that befell the Empire, starting with the Persian invasion at the very beginning of the century and going on to the Arab expansion some thirty years later — a series of reverses that deprived the Empire of some of its most prosperous provinces, namely, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and, later, North Africa — and so reduced it to less than half its former size both in area and in population. But a reading of the narrative sources gives only a faint idea of the profound transformation that accompanied these events. … It marked for the Byzantine lands the end of a way of life — the urban civilization of Antiquity — and the beginning of a very different and distinctly medieval world.”(Cyril Mango,Byzantium, the Empire of New Rome, p. 4) Mango remarked on the virtual abandonment of the Byzantine cities after the mid-seventh century, and the archaeology of these settlements usually reveals “a dramatic rupture in the seventh century, sometimes in the form of virtual abandonment.”(Ibid. p. 8) With the cities and with the papyrus supply from Egypt went the intellectual class, who after the seventh century were reduced to a “small clique.”(Ibid. p. 9) The evidence, as Mango sees it, is unmistakable: the “catastrophe” (as he names it) of the seventh century, “is the central event of Byzantine history.”(Ibid.)

Constantinople herself, the mighty million-strong capital of the East, was reduced, by the middle of the eighth century, to a veritable ruin. Mango quotes a document of the period which evokes a picture of “abandonment and ruination. Time and again we are told that various monuments — statues, palaces, baths — had once existed but were destroyed. What is more, the remaining monuments, many of which must have dated from the fourth and fifth centuries, were no longer understood for what they were. They had acquired a magical and generally ominous connotation.”(Ibid. p. 80)

So great was the destruction that even bronze coinage, the everyday lubricant of commercial life, disappeared. According to Mango, “In sites that have been systematically excavated, such as Athens, Corinth, Sardis and others, it has been ascertained that bronze coinage, the small change used for everyday transactions, was plentiful throughout the sixth century and (depending on local circumstances) until some time in the seventh, after which it almost disappeared, then showed a slight increase in the ninth, and did not become abundant again until the latter part of the tenth.”

We know that the loss of the Syria and Egypt were a huge blow to the Byzantines. (Who, of course, didn't call themselves Byzantines - they were Romanoi.) Eliminating the Germanic kingdoms in North Africa and Spain would have done no less harm to the economies of the west. And we know that later, the Arab states to the south and east of the Med were a huge barrier to trade - the entire European exploration effort was largely an attempt to bypass that blockage. Arab pirates and fleets in the Med were a constant threat to European trade in the Middle Ages and beyond. Why should we imagine that it was any different a few hundred years earlier?

O'Niell goes on to discuss evidence of the prosperity and wealth of Visigothic Spain:

And so it goes on. One dark inference and assertion based on unsubstantiated sources after another. Take for example his comments on mining and metallurgy under the Visigoths:

“The economic regressiveness of Visigothic Spain is well illustrated by the failure of the Goths to carry on the vast mining enterprise begun by the Romans, who removed from Iberian pits a wide variety of metals, including silver, gold, iron, lead, copper, tin, and cinnabar, from which mercury is made. The relative insignificance of mining in Visigothic Spain is attested to by the winnowing of the full account given by Pliny to the meager details supplied by Isidore of Seville, who omits any mention, for example, of iron deposits in Cantabria. The most important Roman mines have lost their Latin names, generally yielding to Arabic ones -- as in Almadén and Aljustrel -- probably an indication of their quiescence during the Visigothic period and their revival by the Muslims. The Goths may have allowed their nomadic foraging instinct to direct their utilization of metal resources. In some areas mined by the Romans they probably scavenged for residual products of abandoned shafts that remained unworked, and metal for new coinage seems largely to have been provided by booty captured from enemies or from older coins fleeced from taxpayers.”

Read that again carefully: The only evidence he has that mining declined under the Visigoths is the “meagre details supplied by Isidore of Seville” and the fact that the most important Roman-age mines in Spain are now known by Arabic names. This hardly constitutes convincing evidence upon which to make such a sweeping statement; and it stands in stark contrast to the vast wealth, in gold, silver and precious stones, that the Arabs themselves claimed to have carried off from Spain.

Sounds interesting. O'Niel has guest posted at Gates previously - and I had checked out his book, but it seems to me that it was $20 before. At ten, I think I might pick it up, or else find a copy of Pirenne.

[wik] You can download a copy of Pirenne's Muhammed and Charlemagne here at scribd.

I've acquired a fair number of heretical and contrarian beliefs. I think I'll let this one slide, for now. Still, it's an interesting theory. An Italian Nuclear Engineer has assembled evidence that the Trojan War happened not in the Mediterranean, but in the Baltic.

Compelling evidence that the events of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey took place in the Baltic and not the Mediterranean

• Reveals how a climate change forced the migration of a people and their myth to ancient Greece

• Identifies the true geographic sites of Troy and Ithaca in the Baltic Sea and Calypso's Isle in the North Atlantic Ocean

For years scholars have debated the incongruities in Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, given that his descriptions are at odds with the geography of the areas he purportedly describes. Inspired by Plutarch's remark that Calypso's Isle was only five days sailing from Britain, Felice Vinci convincingly argues that Homer's epic tales originated not in the Mediterranean, but in the northern Baltic Sea.

Using meticulous geographical analysis, Vinci shows that many Homeric places, such as Troy and Ithaca, can still be identified in the geographic landscape of the Baltic. He explains how the dense, foggy weather described by Ulysses befits northern not Mediterranean climes, and how battles lasting through the night would easily have been possible in the long days of the Baltic summer. Vinci's meteorological analysis reveals how a decline of the "climatic optimum" caused the blond seafarers to migrate south to warmer climates, where they rebuilt their original world in the Mediterranean. Through many generations the memory of the heroic age and the feats performed by their ancestors in their lost homeland was preserved and handed down to the following ages, only later to be codified by Homer in the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Felice Vinci offers a key to open many doors that allow us to consider the age-old question of the Indo-European diaspora and the origin of the Greek civilization from a new perspective.

This other article has some more thoughts:

There is a well-known statement that “Homer is not a geographer”. This is due to one simple problem: when Homer describes a location, this often does not conform to reality. For example, Strabo wondered why in the Odyssey the island of Pharos, situated just outside of the Egyptian city of Alexandria, was said to lie a day’s sail from Egypt. In reality, it wouldn’t take five minutes. Places like Rhodes were never described as an island by Homer, though you would think he would describe it as such. The location of Homer’s Ithaca does not conform to reality either. Dulichium, the long island, has never been identified, for where it is supposed to be, there is nothing. Professor John Chadwick thus concluded: “there is a complete lack of contact between Mycenaean geography as now known from the tablets and from archaeology on the one hand, and Homer’s accounts on the other.”

Most observers have hence claimed that Homer never visited the locations, made the landscape up, etc. But some recognise that if Troy was not Hissarlik , Homer’s Pharos may not have been near Alexandria… and that would mean that the entire Iliad and Odyssey may not have occurred in those locations in and around the Mediterranean Sea that have become associated with them at all. So if not there, the question remains: where?

One important clue comes from Plutarch, who wrote that the island of Ogygia, mentioned in the Odyssey, was situated “five days sail from Britain, towards the west.” Indeed, such a location would make sense of Homer’s description of the site: a large number of seabirds is said to fly around Calypso’s Cave on Ogygia and the North Sea and its islands are far better known for their large number of seabirds than the rather tranquil coasts of the Mediterranean Sea. Elsewhere, Homer refers to the wild or singing swan, which is found in Siberia and Scandinavia, whereas Mediterranean countries only know the silent swan. Furthermore, the movement of the tides is often evoked by the bard, in both literal and figurative senses; but the tides are notoriously undramatic in the Mediterranean Sea, but all the more impressive along the shores of the North Sea.

This would place Homer’s epic in northern Europe, which may seem startling at first, but not to such well-respected authorities as Stuart Piggott: “The nobility of the [Homeric] hexameters should not deceive us into thinking that the Iliad and the Odyssey are other than the poems of a largely barbarian Bronze Age or Early Iron Age Europe.”

So Europe, but where in Europe? For Felice Vinci in “The Baltic Origins of Homer’s Epic Tales”, the answer is the Baltic States, along the coastlines of Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Poland, etc. As to the location of Ogygia, for Vinci it should be identified with the Faroe Islands, specifically the island Kalsoy.

Kalsoy

Vinci is not the first to argue for a Scandinavian setting. It was also offered by the Swedish historian Martin P. Nilsson. Others, such as Bertrand Russell, stated that the Mycenaean civilisation originated with fair-haired northern invaders of Greece. One obvious question is why a Northern European story would become the backbone of the Mycenaean – Greek – civilisation in Southern Europe. For Vinci, the answer is simple: when the climate began to change and grow colder, these people were forced to migrate south. One tribe, the Achaeans, reached the Peloponnese and founded the Mycenaean civilisation. The migrants had brought their legends with them, but the geography of the north did not transpose on the south, hence the discrepancy.

So where precisely does Vinci locate these battles? The Iliad is placed along the Gulf of Finland and the Odyssey in and around Denmark. Troy itself is Toija in Finland; Thebes is Täby in Sweden; the Peloponnese was Zeeland, in Denmark. Vinci’s argumentation is linguistic, showing similarities in place-names, but hence suffers from a potentially fatal flaw, as most of these names cannot be traced back to before ca. 800 AD. This means that a gap of two to three millennia exists; as mentioned by Vinci himself, these people left their homeland in 1000 BC, so how can we be certain where was what, as there was no continuous tradition present?

Still, it is clear that there is some connection between north and south Europe, for there was trade between these Baltic states and Mycenea, as revealed by the large quantity of Baltic amber that was found in the most ancient Mycenaean tombs in Greece.

That Ogygia is clearly not situated in the Mediterranean Sea, seems clear. Its vegetation does not conform to the Mediterranean climate. And in Homer’s epics, there are frequent references to fog, even snow, and of how the sun does not seem to set but instead lingers just beyond the horizon, a phenomenon that is typical for summer in the northern regions. In the Odyssey, we read: “Here we can perceive neither where darkness is nor where dawn is/ nor where the Sun shining on men goes down underground / nor where it rises.”

Furthermore, the sea is never described as being bright, but grey and misty. The characters wear tunics and “thick, heavy cloaks” which they never remove, not even during banquets. The sun or its warmth are seldom mentioned in the book, yet are what would immediately come to mind in a Mediterranean setting. Indeed, there is nothing in this geographical description that hints at a Mediterranean setting; even if Homer was not a geographer, he should at least have known what a typical Mediterranean landscape looked like – as he is believed to have lived there. Instead, it seems he lived elsewhere…

Though Vinci may be right, Piggott is most definitely right: the Achaean warriors used chariots to move across the battlefield, a method of fighting that was unknown in Greece. But similar chariot fighting was described by Julius Caesar when he invaded Britain; what he witnessed, seemed taken word by word from Homer’s accounts. Furthermore, the “great walls” of Troy (never said to be made out of stone) could be identical with the palisades around various megalithic tumuli and Celtic settings. The sweet wine the warriors drink may seem typically Mediterranean at first, but we now know that wine was grown in northern Europe, but that honey was added… making the wine indeed sweet; such an addition was not required for Mediterranean wines, and once again, it seems Homer’s heroes were thus fighting elsewhere. Finally, in Homer’s account, everyone drinks from bronze chalices, which is typical of Celtic customs – and largely absent from Mediterranean cultures.

There's more at the link.  It seems somewhat plausible - we know that the ancestors of the Greeks came into Greece from the north - they could have brought their tales with them.  At the end of the bronze age, there was a lot of migrations, cities destroyed across Egypt, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, some of that certainly included the proto-Greeks who took over from the Mycenaeans.  I don't know what evidence there is of bronze age ships in the Baltic - but this sort of literary detective work is what ended up in the discovery of L'ans aux Meadows in Newfoundland, all from clues in the Eddas.  Might have to read some more on this one.

In a lot of the discussions in this little corner of the internets - Aretae, Foseti, Devin, Isegoria, Borepatch, me - we seem to get occasionally stuck in our arguments over terminology.  Aretae, in Democracy - A Curse? and in the comments lumps together personages like Louis XIV and Lenin.  Me, I think there's a world of difference between the two.  From his anarcho-libertarian pov, he isn't resolving the distance between the two.

I see a monarch, an authoritarian on one hand; and a totalitarian on the other.  The two types of leader produce different types of outcomes.

So, why don't we identify nations and times where we thought things were working?  We can all agree that Soviet Russia, Maoist China, Hitler's Germany were all trainwrecks, for obvious reasons.  Aretae has pointed to the Swiss Confederation as a successful (and over a long period, too) nation emitting lots of magical problem-solving growth.  The formalists have pointed to Hong Kong and Singapore.  Other nations that have been mentioned, too - 18th C England, slightly earlier in Holland, 19th C America.

What are we forgetting?  The Hanseatic League?  Argentina before Peron?  Chile after Pinochet?

If we can point to a place and time that had a happy thing going, we can maybe suss out what factors were contributing to the success at that time in that place.  Then, we can compare them.

If we can come up with a list in the comments, maybe we could break, and do a little googling, and come back with some thoughts on each.  Or better, research one that is not to our inclination - Aretae should do Singapore, and I should do low government Holland, and so on.  What say you?

The History Channel is not without its critics

I think the worst offender here is the History Channel and all their programs on the so-called "World War II".

Let's start with the bad guys. Battalions of stormtroopers dressed in all black, check. Secret police, check.
Determination to brutally kill everyone who doesn't look like them, check. Leader with a tiny villain mustache and a tendency to go into apoplectic rage when he doesn't get his way, check. All this from a country that was ordinary, believable, and dare I say it sometimes even sympathetic in previous seasons.

I wouldn't even mind the lack of originality if they weren't so heavy-handed about it. Apparently we're supposed to believe that in the middle of the war the Germans attacked their allies the Russians, starting an unwinnable conflict on two fronts, just to show how sneaky and untrustworthy they could be? And that they diverted all their resources to use in making ever bigger and scarier death camps, even in the middle of a huge war? Real people just aren't that evil. And that's not even counting the part where as soon as the plot requires it, they instantly forget about all the racism nonsense and become best buddies with the definitely non-Aryan Japanese.

Not that the good guys are much better. Their leader, Churchill, appeared in a grand total of one episode before, where he was a bumbling general who suffered an embarrassing defeat to the Ottomans of all people in the Battle of Gallipoli. Now, all of a sudden, he's not only Prime Minister, he's not only a brilliant military commander, he's not only the greatest orator of the twentieth century who can convince the British to keep going against all odds, he's also a natural wit who is able to pull out hilarious one-liners practically on demand. I know he's supposed to be the hero, but it's not realistic unless you keep the guy at least vaguely human.

The whole thing, here.

Andy Grove discusses how start-ups will not necessarily be a jobs engine for the American economy:

You could say, as many do, that shipping jobs overseas is no big deal because the high-value work -- and much of the profits -- remain in the U.S. That may well be so. But what kind of a society are we going to have if it consists of highly paid people doing high-value-added work -- and masses of unemployed?

Since the early days of Silicon Valley, the money invested in companies has increased dramatically, only to produce fewer jobs. Simply put, the U.S. has become wildly inefficient at creating American tech jobs. We may be less aware of this growing inefficiency, however, because our history of creating jobs over the past few decades has been spectacular -- masking our greater and greater spending to create each position.

...There’s more at stake than exported jobs. With some technologies, both scaling and innovation take place overseas. Such is the case with advanced batteries. It has taken years and many false starts, but finally we are about to witness mass- produced electric cars and trucks. They all rely on lithium-ion batteries. What microprocessors are to computing, batteries are to electric vehicles. Unlike with microprocessors, the U.S. share of lithium-ion battery production is tiny.

That’s a problem. A new industry needs an effective ecosystem in which technology knowhow accumulates, experience builds on experience, and close relationships develop between supplier and customer. The U.S. lost its lead in batteries 30 years ago when it stopped making consumer-electronics devices. Whoever made batteries then gained the exposure and relationships needed to learn to supply batteries for the more demanding laptop PC market, and after that, for the even more demanding automobile market. U.S. companies didn’t participate in the first phase and consequently weren’t in the running for all that followed. I doubt they will ever catch up.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Screenshots from google, offered with next to no comment:

This is what people want to know:

Mild enough, but getting worse:

Let's run with this:

Interesting. What about...

Hmmnm.  Let's go further afield:

And...

Two weeks to the traditional tapping of the keg and the start of the 175th Oktoberfest.

That's THE Oktoberfest, not your local beer festival that lamely goes by the same name and serves swilly beer for a couple hours in the park while a band plays Kenny Loggins covers and most of the people around look like they'd rather be someplace else.

Bavaria, friends. Munich. Dirndls and lederhosen. Oktober-fucking-fest.

If you care to see how the world's greatest party is shaping up, look here.

If you care to cry yourself to sleep tonight certain that you will never have that much fun, just remember to cut lengthwise down the vein, not perpendicular.

[wik] Or, you can thank Jebus that the game Herzerljagd, advertised at the above link and which asks, "Can you see those sweet girls on your screen? Maybe you can win their hearts, but at first you have to shoot them", doesn't load right and is unplayable in IE.

Court rules lesbians are not just from Lesbos

Tue Jul 22, 2008 12:21pm EDT

ATHENS (Reuters) - A Greek court has dismissed a request by residents of the Aegean island of Lesbos to ban the use of the word lesbian to describe gay women, according to a court ruling made public on Tuesday.

Three residents of Lesbos, the birthplace of the ancient Greek poetess Sappho whose love poems inspired the term lesbian, brought a case last month arguing the use of the term in reference to gay women insulted their identity.

...(continues)

Related:

... Straight Lesbians Want Their Identity Back
... Also, a quote for which I cannot, for the life of me, find a link on the web, Cliff Clavin of Cheers referring to someone as being "...from the island of Lesbos", which I remember thinking, at the time many years ago, was both hilarious and totally made up.

The BBC reports "Fierce fighting in Somali capital", a "battle" complete with

...heavy artillery fire in Mogadishu. Both sides claimed to have won the battle, fought with mortars and rocket-propelled grenades, inflicting high casualties on the other.

Sounds serious. And it would continue to sound serious if you didn't read the whole piece. One side says it killed 10 enemy fighters (likely exaggerated); the other side says it killed 21 (likely exaggerated). Another four hapless souls, noncombatants, were killed in the crossfire.

So this fierce battle with heavy artillery exchanges and high casualties actually yielded under 40 dead?

I'm not trying to come across as bloodthirsty here, but I think the BBC is overstating things a bit. By which I mean a lot. I don't have a number of casualties in mind that, once reached, we've left "skirmish" and are into "battle". But if you tell me there was a fierce battle with heavy artillery and high casualties...I'm thinking Verdun and Kursk and Normandy and Inchon and Hue City and Khe Sanh. I'm thinking Mars and Marduk and the right-effing-hand of Satan. I'm not thinking of so much high-explosive posturing.

And hey not for nothing but if these clowns shoot artillery like our old friends, the Liberian infantry, handle small arms it's no wonder these wars take 30 years to fight.

At least now I have something I can plan to do after retirement.

Deutsche Welle's picture of the day for 25JUN:

Am Mittwoch (25.06.2008) wurden in Kerbela, 80 Kilometer von Bagdad entfernt, 115 weibliche Polizisten in ihren Dienst entlassen. Sie hatten in der irakischen Stadt die Polizei-Akademie besucht.

On Wednesday in Karbala, 80 kilometers from Baghdad, 115 female police officers left for their service. They attended the Iraqi city's police academy.

[wik] Dig it- Murdoc found another pic from what might be the same activity. Not sure whether the chador/burqa is ideal field gear, but they seem to have it together in the weaponry department.

AKs and Glocks- like peanut butter and chocolate.