Tales from the North

Hi there! My g1-name is Hippieman-san and I come from a small country called Norway. We’re known for a lot of things here, like our tendency to eat fish that’s been buried for a few weeks, eating sheep’s head and last, but not least, Vikings.

Now in this first issue of Tales from the North I’d like to backtrack a little bit, to a simpler time, when your strength was measured by the amount of wives and “trells” you had, when the mjød ran free and plundering, pillaging and rape was common practice.

That’s right: We’re going to the dark ages, the age… of Vikings.

In order for you to understand why the Vikings were portrayed as they were, I’d like to clarify a few things about Vikings which you may or may not know.

For instance, Vikings never wore helmets with horns on them, except for some very select few who wore them for ceremonial purposes. For starters, horns were a rare commodity and they couldn’t just slap together a pair of plastic ones for show (obviously). Ivory, which was pretty much the only source of light colored horns at that time, came from Africa, a place where only a few Vikings had reached.

Now there’s a picture of a real, quite possibly one of the world’s only remaining, Viking helmet. Isn’t she a beauty?

Vikings were also usually painted as savages, brutes, men without honor who took whatever they pleased. Now I’m not going to sugarcoat it, folks. Vikings were notorious for their bloodlust and their lack of fear for death. Some Vikings were even taken in as bodyguards for the Emperor of Byzantine.

Before I go on I’d like it noted that quite a few, though unknown exactly how many, Viking tribes were peaceful and made their living trading and going about their business on their own. We’ll come back to this, though.

Now why exactly was it that these Vikings had little to no fear of death? It may sound cliché, or even a bit close minded, but the main reason so few Vikings feared the afterlife was because of their religious superstition. Basically it all comes down to Valhalla, the place the Vikings thought they’d go to when they fell in battle, which was a place where you’d fight, die, resurrect and fight again. These fights were only interrupted when Odin would hold a daily gild(feast).

Valhalla was said to be a gigantic hall in the even greater fortress of Åsgard. It was said that when you fell in battle, the Valkyries would bring you to Valhalla, where Odin would call upon every warrior present to fight when Ragnarok(the end of the world, when the tree of the world would fall) would come.

So basically a Viking would fight whenever he could for as long as he lived, hoping to die on the field of battle by someone else’s sword or arrow, so that he might honor his God, Odin, by always being prepared for Ragnarok.

To give you a scope of just how big Valhalla was imagined to be, it had 540 doors which were said to be broad enough to fit 800 warriors side by side. Now let’s say each soldier is about 1 m (or 3.2 feet) broad. 1 times 800 times 540 equals 432 000 meters, or 1 417 322 feet in width. Divide that by four and you get 108 000 square meters or 354 330 square feet. That’s a single room about a third the size of Norway.

End of Issue 1

That’s it for today’s issue of Tales from the North. I’ll be bringing you a new issue from the depths of the ice berg next week, as we continue our trip through these dark times of Scandinavian glory.

Also, a big Happy Fourth of July to all of my fellow American G1s!

Remember to check out my other blogs, the notorious Telling You Who You Are, One Survey At A Time (Check the bottom of the blog to see the full list)

Edit: Some might wonder "now what the heck does this have to do with gaming?". Those that do wonder, you'll get your answer in Issue number 2.