(Source: perfectamentecuadrado)
Cnut spent much of his reign establishing his Scandinavian empire – and for a short period he ruled England, Denmark, Norway and parts of Sweden. But it didn’t last long, and was to prove beyond the ability of his sons to maintain.
Queen Ragnhildr dreams of the birth of a gigantic tree in her garden, its stem rauðr sem blóð (‘red as blood’), its trunk fagrgrœnn (‘light green’) and its branches hvítar sem snjór (‘white as snow’), so long as to stretch over all of Norway and beyond.
Here is a specimen of common words in English that owe their origin to the language of the Scandinavians: bank, birth, bull, dirt, egg, gap, kid, link, race, skirt, sister, window, low, meek, rotten, shy, tight, weak, bait, crawl, dig, gape, kindle, lift, screech, thrust, they, their, then, aloft, athwart and many more.
While in MI, I attended a nålbinding class with Jack. Nålbinding is a technique that is estimated to predate knitting by about 1000 years! It is worked with shorter strands of wool yarn as opposed to one continuous strand from a skein. The only tool used is a flat, large eyed needle and your thumb. The stitches/knots are named after the archeological sites where they were found. (sweeeeet!!!)
Viking wire knitting is also a form of nålbinding.
In this project I am doing the Korgen stitch, using handspun, hand-dyed sock yarn from the Portland fiber gallery in Maine.
(via needinsomesweden)
Torgny Lagmann (Þorgnýr the Lawspeaker) speaks at Uppsala
A lawspeaker is a unique Scandinavian legal office. It has its basis in a common Germanic oral tradition, where wise men were asked to recite the law, but it was only in Scandinavia that the function evolved into an office.
The ancestors of the Icelandic horse were probably taken to Iceland by Viking Age Scandinavians between 860 and 935 AD. The Norse settlers were followed by immigrants from Norse colonies in Ireland, the Isle of Man and the Western Isles of Scotland.These later settlers arrived with the ancestors of what would elsewhere become Shetland, Highland, and Connemara ponies, which were crossed with the previously imported animals.
