Sea Stallion

[Idiens]

Earlier this year there was a thread on the Sea Stallion's planned voyage from Denmark to Dublin. The BBC showed a documentary on the voyage last night.

http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/scien...re/7171577.stm

[hellosailor]

The rudder is a surprise to me, last I'd heard they used steering oars or boards ("st'rboard). No moving parts to break under the waterline.

The author doesn't seem up on Vikings though. They didn't pillage because they were stuck without a credit card--they had and could have carried money. But the Norse culture centered around independent land owners (farmers) who were citizens in a democracy (like Rome, with slaves) that taught one must be both a warrior and a poet at the same time.

In the fall, after the farmers brought in their crops, they went viking (it's a verb) to prove they were warriors and to bring home booty. No excuses needed, that was the culture.

Sadly they had no flavor for conquest or empire--because the roamed, sacked, burned, pillaged, all over their known world, from the interior of Russia and the Volga River, all the way down around to Constantinople and the Sudan.

It was only in the 20th century that historians figured out their "tall tales" of "blue men" and "burning decks" meant they had sailed into the tropics. The Old Norse language has no word for "black", the closest word they had translates as "the blue-black color of ravens" and the "blue" men were a mistranslation for "black" men. They got to Africa.

A most peculiar culture, a shame that they were converted by bribery and deceit, and they're no longer around to tell AlQueda which end to stick it up.

[LiamM]

I was lucky enough to see the Sea Stallion as it arrived in Malahide, a few km's north of Dublin and plan to wave them off on their return to Denmark next summer.

The 'blue man' comment is interesting - in Irish 'fear gorm' is the translation for a black man though 'gorm' is blue ('dubh' is black). Obvoiusly a connection. It seems reasonable that the widly travelled, hairy assed Vikings told us about the blue men and we adopted the term into Irish.

In school we were told that 'An fear dubh' was the devil and so a new term was needed when we encountered black men. However, I have found that the teachers lied a lot.

On arriving in Ireland the Vikings quickly tired of looting and pillage and, instead, founded cities, avoided local politics, traded like demons and canoodled with the Gaelic babes.

Which is probably why we eventually asked them to leave. Three hundred years later.

[hellosailor]

Three hundred years?!

No doubt because the Norse had mead, but needed to step out to get the whiskey.

[Idiens]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

The rudder is a surprise to me, last I'd heard they used steering oars or boards ("st'rboard). No moving parts to break under the waterline.

They were using a multiply leather strop to hold the steering oar to the stbd aft hull and allow the oar to swivel and steer. It failed twice. They did emphasise that there were a lot of unknowns as to how the Vikings really did it, that was their researchers' best estimate and since it failed, it was probably not the right way.