The vikings

Be prepared for a journey here. It’s not a short one, but it is one of the most rewarding and intriguing ones. History is beginning to make sense, and a larger picture can now be seen. It is the history of our forefathers, that has not been told yet in its fullness.

Now, how was it with them Vikings?

Were they the primitive, brutal thugs who ravaged on land and at sea with long beard and horns on helmets, raping and plundering wherever they went? 

Were they totally unaware of the larger world? So after 30 days on the roaring waves of the Atlantic with drinking, headbanging and sea shanting Eigil roared out: Hell, by Thor and Odin now we have just discovered a new country, God damn it, I think we call it: Iceland, Greenland, Wineland, Rusland, whatever … Skull! (Danish for cheerio, old chap, they drank from a skull of their foes, of course). Or maybe we should upgrade the cartoon image of those people and take a closer look at the real people.

Who were the Vikings, what drove them and why were they decided to leave their safe homes and sail across roaring oceans to perform shock and awe for the neighbors in the West? Were they just the barbarians or the Mongols of Scandinavia?

If you ask the British or the inhabitants of the present Normandy – remember ‘Nor-man-dy’ is actually named after immigrants, the Normans, the Vikings – then the answer will be a blank yes to the above questions. We can read it in the history books, everyone knows that of course. By the way, Eigil never used the word goddamn, for he was a heathen. But the Hell he knew, fore it was the Nordic ‘Hel’. And had we time and space, it would get really interesting, since ‘hel’ means ‘light’ in old Norse and Germanic. So we are dealing with one of the Christian inversions of meaning. But let’s leave that for another time.

On the whole, if you ask people who speak from a declared Christian or simply cultural Christian base, the answer will be that the Vikings were brutal and primitive pagans who beat up the poor, innocent good Christians wherever they moved. Listen to a BBC documentary on the subject, and you get within five minutes to know, that they were violent far into their black souls, because they simply came from a culture of violence. But then again the English establishment tends to portray all of the world’s peoples as barbarians.

This, off course is exaggerating slightly. I’ve actually visited the Viking Museum in York, and serious scientists and museum people have more nuances to offer that the BBC and the Church of England. They knew that the Vikings actually settled, assimilated, traded and even married locally. They were ordinary people, and not particularly primitive. Then can we get even closer?

By the way, let’s get rid of this one: They didn’t wear horns on their helmets. They were warriors, when they wore a helmet, not clowns. It’s the Celtic god Cern that wears horns – someone might have got it wrong there. There’s actually a world famous cauldron found in Gundestrup, Denmark showing this figure.

And while we’re at it: The poor innocent Christians that they attacked were not from the beginning of the Viking raids innocent but the very Frankish Empire of brutal tyranny, that previously had performed a massacre on their fellow tribesmen i Northern Germany and now threatened to conquer the whole Scandinavia. A fact that is never told by British and French contemporary chroniclers. And why would they, since they were paid by their king and church to write down their story.

Let’s take some advice from the Norwegian historical scholar and author, Maria Kvilhaug. She has a better offer than most.

The travellers

The Norsemen or Scandinavians, and we are talking primarily about the residents of Denmark, Norway and Sweden, were extremely well traveled. They knew perfectly well about the Kiev Rus. They sailed on the rivers of Eastern Europe. They came all the way to Byzantium / Constantinople / Istanbul. They sailed the Atlantic from the Skagerrak / North Sea to Greenland and America’s east coast. They were mainly traders and we find merchandise and objects in their possession coming all the way from India and China. Their mythology is similar at crucial points to the Vedic. Their cosmology is astonishingly modern.

A school of Russian historiography even ascribes the birth of Russia, Kievan Rus, to two Varangian brothers from Jutland, Denmark, one of the called Rurik who became a prince. Kiev is then the birthplace of Russia, so ancient Danes may have been a part of that.

Various strains came out of the north: the Goths, Burgundians, Lombards, Thervingians, Thingians, Kimbrians (the Welsh Kimeroi) … the list is long. The story goes that is was all about overpopulation. Was it now? Historians tend to project our habits and beliefs down through time.

Theotoburg

For a start, Scandinavians and Germans stopped the Romans march in central Germania already in year 9 BC. The Romans were heading north with three Roman legions, six cohorts of allied troops and three platoons of cavalry + the so called auxiliaries, today called special troops or mercenaries. As they went through Theotoburg forest, they had to stretch out in a thin strip of 20 kilometers. The rain was pouring down, the roads were muddy. Their leather-covered shields were heavy and their bowstrings of honored bowel were softened with water. Then came the ambush and now it poured down with Germans and Scandinavians. 20,000 Romans died, many killed themselves to avoid being captured. The Roman divisions to the south were then destroyed. Caesar Augustus is told to have knocked his head against a wall, crying, ‘Give me back my legions!’

The Roman soldiers were terrified of the dark, wet Teutonic forests, and their war machine build for columns of highly disciplined soldiers was useless in such an evironment.

A well produced German documentary can be seen here:
Germania: The Battle against Rome

Theoto-burg gave its name to ‘Teu-tons’. The incident meant that the Roman expansion towards the north never got further. It meant that the majority of Germania and Scandinavia (which of course were not the proper names then) never came under Roman influence in the rest of continental Europe and Britain. They remained themselves.

The incident in the forest testifies to several things. First, the Norsemen and the Germanic tribes had an extensive and effective intelligence service. Next, they possessed the ability to organize and mobilize an army that might not match in size but certainly in efficiency and strategy. Finally, their armed men have possessed great skill and their commanders have been skilled strategists. So by no means were they these wild primitive barbarians, as the Romans and later their heirs, the Christians, described them. It is documented that there was an entire Varangian elite corps hired to look after the Byzantine emperor as another Swiss guard. The Vikings’ name for Konstantinople was Miklagård.

It must be said that the Germanic tribes at the arrival of the Roman legions in year 9 were not a united organization, but that the success of the forest was due to Arminius, a son of Germanic nobility or chieftain family who had been kidnapped by the Romans for later was to serve as a spearhead against the Germans. A tactic used by the Babylonians, among others, who abducted sons of the Jewish elite by burning down the first temple in Jerusalem (?) – which was not in Jerusalem but in Tannis, Egypt, but that is a completely different story. This is what we read about in the Book of Daniel about the Babylonian captivity. It is the same tactic we see with the abduction of Vlad Tepech by the Turkish sultan. His victory over the Turks becomes so well-known that he later becomes a folk hero in Romania – and a cartoon character in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. In any case, the abducted young men turn against the abductors and exploit their insider knowledge against the Empire.

Arminius operates under-cover with his group of prepared scouts and secretly organizes the Germans. At a given signal the legions and their pendants – over 20,000 men – turn off on their retreat. They are told that they can surprise the Germans if they follow a certain route. They should never have done that, because it’s a grim trap.

Next comes the emigration wave, as mentioned above. But some of them also returned again to Scandinavia. From Poland, for example. They felt free to move around in the area where the Romans were not allowed to enter. They developed an awareness that they were different, and the proto-fascist Empire from the south was not welcome. 

Democracy of the Norsemen

The Scandinavians had a hierarchical system for sure. But a relationship that is overlooked by posterity is that it was a truly democratic system. We have learned in school that it was the Greeks, the Romans’ role models, who invented democracy. Not so. The Scandinavians had it from the start, and it was far more genuinely democratic than the Greek, which is equally known for its despots, oligarchs and demagogues. Round Parliament and the Parliament For All (Altinget) is an ancient Nordic concept, and even today, the norse word ‘ombudsman’ is used untranslated in the English-speaking world. All free men and women could make their case in the Round Parliament.

The Viking Age had not taken place yet. We are talking about the time when the famous raids started. But what started them? Was it again just Eigill and the hairy bearded beastie boys who sat in the log cabin and drank too much mead, and before they went into the fence shouted: ‘Let’s fucking doooo it!’

By no means. Scandinavians monitored at the nearest what happened in the rest of the world. In the 900s, there was again a brutal Empire on the rise, Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne was a particularly aggressive emperor. A Christian emperor mind you! Here, however, there was no turning of the other cheek, no mercy, compassion, charity, forgiveness or other useless forms of Christian beauty. It might tell its own sweet story that Christianity was – at least – two things: a narrative and a practice, and that these two things NEVER had anything to do with another, nor was the initial thought that they should. But this is a story in itself.

Saxons in Northern Germania, originally a tribe that came from Jutland, had a very strong democratic tradition. But they were not Christians. Charlemagne spent 30 years destroying them completely. All their shrines were destroyed. The soldiers were given as payment right to plunder their cities, steal all their values and rape their women – before they finally beat them and their children to death. Rape first and murder afterwards, they were civilized men, not necrophiles… This was in fact practiced Christianity. Democracy was destroyed, and the dictatorship was established. If you think it’s like something similar is going on in a big way instigated by today’s Empire, so you’re absolutely right. Just a thought.

Dannevirke

Saxons fought for a long time. They tried to get the Danes to support them. The Danish king took this very seriously, but he realized that it was beyond his reach to intervene without destroying his own kingdom. This could mean King Helgi, brother of Roar and the father of Rolf Krake, one of the socalled Ulfungar, ‘the Children of the Wolf’. He is mentioned in Bjarkarímur Chronicle, the Gesta Danorum, Rolf Krake’s Saga, the Lejre Chronicle and the Beovulf. We can not here expect the monk Saxo Grammaticus, who was merely a scribe paid by the Catholic Church to portray the ‘legendary kings’, ie the Viking Kings as more than the pagan cartoons we know today.

It is from people like him, we have a distorted image of our forefathers, because they have been repeated in history books, school books, Christian chronicles and in our time in Hollywood style pop culture portraits with a Judeo-Christian agenda. I can say this a Christian and not as a worshipper of a pagan belief, so no agenda here – it’s just how it is.

In return, the Danish king allowed the Saxon refugees to come to Denmark. He took the threat from the south seriously which can be seen in that he reinforced the wall which already existed as a defense against the Christian invasion of Frisia (North Germany + the Netherlands) in about 740 AD. The wall was called Dannevirke. It is important to understand that it was a wall, a fortification primarily against Christianity and its representative, the Frankish Empire and its expansive brutality. We are still in the century before the so called Viking era.

A British self financed historical film maker, Pete Kelly, has done an impressive series of low budget videos, that can be seen under the title History Time. On Vikings alone there is several videos.

Before the vikings – Evolution of the Viking longship
A tour of Viking Britain
The real Ragnar Lothbrok
Vikings of the East – Igor and the Kievan Rus’
Irelands first Viking Age
The real Rollo and the foundation of Normandy

The last video is especially interesting, since it tells the story of Rollo and the Danish King Godfred and how they in principle smashed the empire of Charlemagne. In the French Chronicles there is an almost filmic scene, where Charlemagne stairs out of his window towards the East crying his salty tears of his life’s work crumbling. It reminds us of a similar scene with emperor Augustus weeping for his lost legions.

There is a gap between the ideologically and politically motivated Christian dogmas about Vikings / Gentiles and the historical facts. Eg. the stories of the ‘bestial atrocities’ at the raid on the monastery in Lindisfarne, one of the first Viking expeditions, originate from the monk Alcuin of York. He smeared so heavily in his use of biblical satanizations. But he was not present himself, for he was safely hidden off the roadside in a convent in France as an official for – guess who: Charlemagne, the emperor and mass murderer, whose main enemy at the time was – guess again: the now approaching raids of Norsemen.

The start of the raids

In 787 came the first counter-attack on a monastary in North Germany from the Danish side, but it was more like a trial balloon. Ten years after came the actual attack. It was at a monastery, where the they simply performed a sacrilege. How cruel howl the Christians! And that it was without a doubt. But the Danes did just exactly what the Christian soldiers in Charlemagne’s army had done at a much larger scale. It was simple and clear revenge. The Christians had in 772 attacked the Saxon holy place Irminsul where the Great Holy Pillar was erected. All the visitors had left their weapons outside the Sacred Grove. Charlemagne’s troops poured in, killing men and children and raping women.

But it was more that mere revenge, as we shall see. It was a strategy.

Later in the Saxon wars they caught 4,500 Saxon warriors. They were given the ultimatum to repent and be baptized or be executed. The Saxons dropped all together at the knees, which meant that they were ready to die and that baptism was worse than death. They were then forced baptized AND executed! And then the soldiers went crazy in all the villages.

The survivors went to Denmark. The first Viking raid on the monastery was therefore revenge for Christians unspeakable atrocities. These Vikings – ‘Viking’ meaning ‘to take on expeditions’ – was by no means primitive people. They had an intelligence service, they knew exactly what military strategies and abilities, they were up against. They had heard that the kings of England and the Frankish was plotting to join forces and attack the indomitable and insubordinate Scandinavians. And it was here that our man Eigill and the boys put the mead jar aside and said, ‘Enough is enough! Here something must be done’. In other words, here starts the Viking period with one quick jerk in the form of a decision and a clear recognition of the fact that it was them or us.

Therefore they dropped their their quests just in the heart of the British and Frankish areas. Their attack tactics and their equipment was simply unbeatable. With their slim boats they could go almost unnoticed to the coasts and up the rivers. And as we know, important cities now capitols of European countries are seated by rivers. The ships could almost walk on land as modern landing craft. At the same time their navigation skills were formidable also on the high seas. A few decades ago scientists did an advanced computer analyzes of the rudder of a Viking ship – they had wondered about how a rudder of this thinness could steer a ship – and it was discovered that its design was nothing short of brilliant. Then they copied it to supertankers, the largest container ships in the world.

One might think that the Vikings did a form of terrorism, and it’s not far off. Quite similar to the terror that the Christian Franks had practiced against them, as we have seen. The Vikings simply scared the shit hell out of them. This in fact meant that the enemy stayed away for 400 years. So throughout the Viking Age the enemy would simply not even think of putting their fingers into the hornet’s nest. It was enough that the wasps were flying around in flocks and stinging. Quite effective one must say. The effect was exactly the same as with Theotoburg year 9.

The whole mythology of the cruel, brutal Vikings, the primitive dudes, that murdered, stole and raped, is dating from this very picture, that the Vikings themselves deliberately wanted to paint of themselves.

After the Viking Age, they of course were christened and went into decline. That is what Christianity as the formal state religion of the Roman Empire was all about: the opium of the people, weakening the strength of the ancient cultures. Then the masters of the new era wrote the victors history as the victors always do. It is the story we have today..

With this overview, let us take a flashback.

Ragnar and the World Map of the Vikings

The legend king Ragnar Lothbrok, who today’s television viewers know in a very aestheticized but reasonably well-researched and true-to-life version from the TV series The Vikings, is funny enough only according to Danish historians a so-called legend king, which means that he is more or less written off as actually historical figure. Because the sources are not unambiguous, he does not exist, which is kind of a strange logic. French sources disagree on his non-being, because they write that he sailed all the way into the Seine, occupied the Isle de la Cité, took the mayor and thus actually the king by the collar and said: Let go of the coins or we will ravage! Which, by the way, they had already done, but then: or we’re ravaging even more ! We’ll return to that story.

Personally, I have had the privilege of standing by Ragnar’s farm in West Zealand. There are locals in the area who know parts of the story that are not official, and which I – again a privilege for which I am grateful – have had the opportunity to gain some insight into. It was not Roskilde that was the royal seat, it was West Zealand, more specifically the area around the lake Tissø. Large amounts of gold have been found in the lake itself and in the fields in the area. An entire city of longhouses has also been uncovered. At the viewpoint at Ragnar’s farm located on a hill not far from the coast in the middle of Jammerland Bay, there was a view to the north to Kalundborg and to the south to Reersø. The fleet was in Lake Tissø, where there is a direct connection to the bay via Halleby river (we don’t actually call the streams rivers in Denmark, since we don’t have mountains high enough to generate rivers. Should alien ships approach either north or south, they would be detected in time and the fleet could be mobilized and be out in the open water before arriving. Vikings engaged their enemies on the high seas if they could get away with it, and we know this from some great naval battles with hundreds of ships that took place in the late Viking Age.

It is then here that it goes wrong for the TV series that has staged it to the magnificent Norwegian or Icelandic landscape, but it fits better with the aesthetics. This is the same thing they do in the film adaptation of Beowulf, where the King of Denmark lives in a Norwegian mountain landscape.

Ragnar’s sons were also not fairy tale characters – that is, apart from Danish historiography.

We are in the period after Charlemagne – the king of the Franks 768, Roman emperor 800, died 814 – that his kingdom disintegrates. As mentioned, he saw them begin and he cried his tears over it. Everything was in vain. The kingdom after him was divided into East Frankia, present-day Germany, Lorraine in the middle, Alsace-Lorraine on the border between Germany and France and West Frankia, present-day France. The successors were Louis the Pious and Charles the Bald. The last name must have fit, the first should probably have been the Skin Saint, for such kings were not saints. That the church consecrated the brutal Viking king Canuth the Holy was pure political flattery. Their neighbors to the northeast witnessed the Roman Empire 2.0 in disarray and took advantage of the situation.

Frankish sources say that Louis the Pious initially tried to set up the Danish king Horik (827-854) with his Jutland rival Harald Klak (812-852) to overthrow him. It failed, and in the coming decades a few small fleets of ships started, let’s just call them Viking pirates, attacked the Frankish coasts. It is here that Ragnar Lodbrok becomes one of the first sea kings in the Viking Age.

The northerners are also advancing over land. The Jutes inhabited North and Central Jutland north of present-day Fredericia, the Angles inhabited southern Jutland down over the present border with North Schleswig, the Saxons inhabited South Schleswig, and the Frisians inhabited present-day Netherlands, roughly speaking. Note the combination Anglo-Saxons, also known from the Anglo-Saxon immigration in England – Angelland (Britania is the Roman name). These tribes now take their land back from the Franks, and the wars had started as early as 772 and were called the Franco-Saxon wars (772-804). It was here that the Franks first came into contact with the inhabitants of Denmark, and this is where they were stopped by the fortification chain at Dannevirke.

The monk Einhard and Notker the Stutterer – these glorious names! – writes about how under Charlemagne there was ‘peace’, in the sense of Pax Romanorum, a forced imperial peace with the costs it had for the subjects. The shut-up-and-behave sort of peace. But there was at least peace from the ravaging tribes of the Northeast. Coast guards had been set up along the coast, and there were only scattered attacks from the pirates. When Denmark itself was united as a nation under Christian kings, the picture turns, and they themselves had to set up coastguards against the Wendish pirates who had bases in Northern Germany (the story of the Danish King Valdemar and his brother, Bishop Absalon and the figure Svantevit, the god with four heads on Rügen).

Now the situation turned. After a collector comes a spreader, it is said, in this case a whole stack of spreaders. The attacks by pirates increase along the West Frankish coastline.

Dorestad in present-day Holland, a center for the minting of silver coins, was looted three times between 834-36, and the trading town at Walcheren near present-day Rotterdam in 837. King Horik writes in apologetic remarks to Louis the Pious that he disapproves of these expeditions, which may also show that he had very little control over his countrymen.

From 835, there are no longer scattered wanderers of pirates along the Frankish coasts but entire fleets with 100s of ships manned by up to 5000 waving warriors. Hell is loose at sea as well as on land. The fleet was led by a figure whom the sources call by the Franco-Roman name Reginherus, (Regin – king, herus – inheritance) which many believe is precisely their name for Ragnar Lothbrok. This is also where the legend literature about Ragnar begins, for his descendants would claim to be descendants of him. It is also here that modern historians become confused, which is in so far understandable, for Ragnar himself to be a descendant, a hereditary king of Odin himself. On runic inscriptions in the Orkney Islands, Ragnar is described as a celebrity – with furry trousers. One imagines that it could be convenient with a pair of wool trousers on an open longboat in the middle of the Atlantic.

King Louis successor, Charles the Bald in 841 donates Ragnar land in Frisia, perhaps for him to be a buffer against other attacks, but he falls into disfavor and loses it again. It is there in 845 that he arrives on the Seine in Paris with his fleet of 120 longboats and 5,000 men. The king gathers an army on the south side of the Seine to protect the monastery of Saint Denis with all the royal-ecclesiastical treasures from being plundered. Another part of the army marches up on the north shore.

Ragnar lands none of the places but enters on the Isle Cité in the middle and the king’s armies can do nothing but watch the inhabitants and monasteries being slaughtered and sacrificed to Odin for fear and warning. By blocking the island in the middle – on Easter Day as a particularly demoralizing day for the city’s Christian residents – he blocks the whole of Paris. King Charles agrees to pay 6,000 pounds of gold and silver to get rid of Ragnar, whose men are also starting to get sick. Ragnar later blames the monastery at Saint Germain on the city island for letting go of the plague that afflicted his men. Interesting note, because if the monks in 845 had knowledge of using infections as biological weapons, then it supports theories that the Black Death that hit Europe in 1347 could be a similar weapon.

The plunder of Paris at least forms – unfortunately for the Franks – precedence for 13 similar incidents where they have to pay the Danes debt. Is it the remains of this war booty that we find in Lake Tissø on West Zealand? King Horik, who was loyal to the Franks, struck down the pirates on his return and had some of them executed. We see in the following decades that many Vikings choose to emigrate from Denmark and settle in other settlements of like-minded people, for example in Ireland and the Scottish Isles, where they found perfect bases for their fleets. Large parts of England also consisted of the so-called Danelagen, which were Danish emigrants, among others. the anglers mentioned. King Ella of Northumbria was not been happy with these neighbors, for raids up the rivers would be an easy piece for Ragnar’s people. Horik was murdered by one of his nephews, and the exiled Vikings were allowed to return home to Denmark again. We do not really know where Ragnar ended up in his late days, but the legend that King Ella in revenge for his looting threw him into a wormhole is the legend that Saxo writes down. Other stories say that he died in a naval battle against Norwegian Vikings off the cost of Ireland.

The raids are not over and the eternal torment of the Franks for their emperor, Charlemagne’s invasion of the Nordic tribes, would never end. Another famous sea king, Rollo, again plunders Paris in the 880s. Most of England, meanwhile, had fallen into the hands of a stack of Vikings who called themselves Ragnar Lothbroks sons. Ragnar is credited with the laconic remark at his death (in the wormhole): Hear where the little pigs will grunt when they hear that the old boar is dead. The names of the sons were Ivar den Boneless, the leader of The Great Heathen Army and perhaps King of Dublin, Bjorn Ironside, who plundered the Mediterranean, later perhaps King of Sweden, Ubba, Duke of Friesland, Halfdan Ragnarson and Sigurd Snakeeye, born of a sorceress. We do not know if they were actually Ragnar’s sons, for he is already a legend shortly after his death.

In the heroic Krákumál named after his wife Aslaug Sigurdsdatter called Kraka? we hear Ragnars last words recited by poets. The first 21 verses list Ragnars exploits as a warrior – very picturesque, lots of blood, and also a bit monotonous. The rest of the verses, except for dramatic reasons last verse, start with the same sentence: We fought with swords. In the last 8 verses, however, the poet lets him philosophize about life and death as a warrior. It was the beliefs of the Vikings, that only fallen warriors were worthy to meet Odin in Valhalla:

We fought with swords.
Death is the happy portion of the brave†,
for he stands the foremost against the storm of weapons.
He, who flies from danger, often bewails his miserable life.
Yet how difficult is it to rouse up a coward to the play of arms?
The dastard feels no heart in his bosom.

We fought with swords.
Young men should march up to the conflict of arms:
man should meet man and never give way.
In this hath always consisted the nobility of the warrior.
He, who aspires to the love of his mistress,
ought to be dauntless in the clash of arms.

We fought with swords.
Now I find for certain that we are drawn along by fate.
Who can evade the decrees of destiny?
Could I have thought the conclusion of my life reserved for Ella;
when almost expiring I shed torrents of blood?
When I launched forth my ships into the deep?
When in the Scottish gulphs I gained large spoils for the wolves?

We fought with swords.
This fills me still with joy,
because I know a banquet is preparing by the father of the gods.
Soon, in the splendid hall of Odin,
we shall drink Beer out of the sculls of our enemies.
A brave man shrinks not at death.
I shall utter no repining words as I approach the palace of the gods.

We fought with swords.
O that the sons of Aslauga knew;
O that my children knew the sufferings of their father!
that numerous serpents filled with poison tear me to pieces!
Soon would they be here:
soon would they wage bitter war with their swords.
I gave a mother to my children from whom they inherit a valiant heart.

We fought with swords.
Now I touch on my last moments.
I receive a deadly hurt from the viper.
A serpent inhabits the hall of my heart.
Soon mall my sons black their swords in the blood of Ella.
They wax red with fury: they burn with rage.
Those gallant youths will not rest till they have avenged their father.

We fought with swords.
Battles fifty and one have been fought under my banners.
From my early youth I learnt to dye my sword in crimson:
I never yet could find a king more valiant than myself.
The gods now invite me to them. Death is not to be lamented.

‘Tis with joy I cease.
The goddesses of destiny are come to fetch me.
Odin hath sent them from the habitation of the gods.
I mail be joyfully received into the highest seat;
I mall quaff full goblets among the gods.
The hours of my life are past away. I die laughing.

One may ask oneself where they actually came from, those Vikings – before they became Vikings? Next, one may ask how far around did they actually reach? Here, new and surprising knowledge has recently emerged.

Where did they come from?

The short but useless answer: same place as everyone else. We have to take a walk around Harvey’s barn and stick the shovel down into the bottom layer of soil.

In the Pleistocene age, water levels were 100-130 meters lower in parts of the world. In the North Sea at least 50 meters. The ice age lasted in its entirety with ups and downs for 2.5 million years and ended 11,700 years ago. The end of the Ice Age matches Plato’s story of Atlantis’ downfall (which he had from his uncle, Solon, who had it from the Egyptian priests). If we just think of Atlantis as a coastal based civilization south of the huge ice cap, a civilization that inhabited the lands that became sea beds when the ice melted, then it is suddenly not a myth or a fantasy tale anymore. Underwater archeology fully confirms this to the extent that the remains of this global civilization have sunk even a layer deeper: beneath the seabed beneath the ocean. Thick layers of sediments have covered the remains making it extremely difficult if not impossible to dig out. But in some places they stick their heads out.

It was not only the oceans that rose, it was also the water levels on the continent that followed up. There has been a rich culture in the Sahara Desert, and old maps show a myriad of cities. But when the water disappeared and the desert settled, the cities disappeared under the sand. Sandlantis. In the Atlantic, larger land areas became archipelagos. The Azores is an example. In another article we shall explore the theory of Antarctica as the original Atlantis, but we have to take into account the Atlantic culture – or the first post-Atlantean culture.

As the waters rose, the inhabitants of the coastal areas moved inward and upward. They sought the highlands, One place is the Pyrenees. Another is the Armenian-Caucasian highlands. A third is the highlands of Lake Titicaca. The fourth is the Ethiopian highlands. Possibly also the highlands around the Altai Mountains in Central Asia. And at the Atlas Mountains in the Sahara Desert. In all these places, there are traces of a civilization that outdates our normal history writing. The population of the Pyrenees has the highest concentration of rhesus-negative blood type. In Basque mythology, they themselves even claim to come from a place called Atlantica. The Basque language is, as far as is known, only related to the ancient Armenian language. The holy mountain of the Armenians is Ararat – where Noah’s Ark according to the biblical text landed – a text borrowed from the Sumerians, as we know from the clay tablets. A population with a similar blood type are the Berbers in the Atlas Mountains. People with blue eyes, lighter skin and red hair.

Plato tells how the ancestors had to advance in a conflict which was the war of the titans, the war of the gods. It’s the same conflict described in the Sumerian script Enuma Elish. In the story of Noah’s Ark, we have to give up the naive image of a ship loaded with all the animals on the planet – who else than small children and fundamentalists believe in that anyway? It is about livestock and thus the restoration of agriculture after the disaster. It is precisely at this time that we see the first agricultural crops emerge in the area south of the Ararat mountain, nowadays Anatolia/Turkey. This is also where we see people with blonde or red hair and blue eyes show up. There is no conflict between the mythological, the archaeological, an ethnological, the genetic studies at that point.

Have we gotten a little away from the Vikings? – but wait, for now the Phoenicians arrive, the sailing people who predate the Greeks, the descendants of the ancient sailors. Bear with us and meanwhile take a look at a drawing of a Phoenician merchant ship:

The Phoeniceans

The Phoenicians have brought written language to the present – phonetics they call it. They have created what later became a sailing trade culture. It was from the city of Tire/Tyrus in Lebanon, the center of the Phoenician empire, that Princess Europa was abducted to the island of Crete on the back of a bull. Learn to read allegorical symbolism, and we know, what that means. It was the Phoenicians who created Carthage, who became Rome’s trading competitor and therefore by the way had to be destroyed, as the Roman senator Scipio repeatedly said at the end of his famous speeches.

The Phoeniceans were the ones who created the unsurpassed building style with the ultra-slender pillars we know from both Venice – the Venetians = the Phoenicians – and from the building style for which the Muslim building style took credit, but which was ‘borrowed’ from the Phoenicians (pst, it’s OK to borrow, just remember to say it …). King Hiram of Tire (Abiff) is said to have allied himself with King David and built his palace in Jerusalem – which was still Tannis in Egypt. Hiram kept in touch with Solomon’s son David. The Phoenicians extended their shipping routes out of the Mediterranean down the coast of Africa and up the coast of Spain to England. They have without any doubt crossed the Atlantic 2000 years before Columbus and possibly reached the Philippines. It is the architect Hiram of Abiff who is considered as the ancestor of the Freemasons.

Jews were not called Jews even in Roman times, Roman historians called them Phoenicians. They belong to a people who immigrated to Egypt called Hyksos, and who with Akhenaten broke with the priesthood in Upper Egypt and created a new dynasty in Amarna in Lower Egypt (lower = north). They are later the ones who were driven out – the Exodus – and who later post-rationalize their history and call themselves the children of Israel, the people of the Jews, etc. Josephus, the Jewish historian hired by the Romans – calls them the shepherd kings. The Egyptian historian Manetho from the 3rd century BC already says, that the Jews wandered in the desert before settling in Palestine (where did they wander, you can not spend 40 years in the Sinai desert?). Hyksos is Semitic like the Phoenicians viewed linguistically, the Europeans are considered Indo-European viewed linguistically.

Noah is said to have had three sons. They each represent their group in the oldest world. Sem, Kam and Japhet. They were of the same race and came from the Caucasus between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, ie present-day Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan and Russia. The Aryan peoples or Indo-Europeans are descendants of Japhet, the big brother of Noah’s family. The Greeks knew Japhet as Aiepatos. In Sanskrit, he is known as Prajabathi. The Romans knew him as Jupiter. The same name pronounced by different tongues.

The Semites are descended from Shem, another son of Noah. Same ethnicity, same race. Being Semitic is not a race, it is a lineage and a language. Shem had six sons who settled in what we would today call Babylon. Kham, the third son, settled in North Africa and from there we have the Berbers. Their language has nothing to do with Arabic, and centuries ago it was predominantly red-haired and had blue eyes. We still see them today

Israel after King Solomon’s death was divided into two kingdoms, the northern one, which retained the name Israel, and the southern one, the Kingdom of Judah. The word Jew comes from Jew-dah, Judah, the holy tree, the yew tree. It first appears in an Egyptian text, Merneptah’s stele from 1200 BC. The two kingdoms fought a war, and the Assyrians supported Judah, forcing the tribes of Israel westwards into Europe or upwards into Anatolia. In 528, Judah was further destroyed by a Babylonian king, and many were abducted to Babylon as slaves – the so called Babylonian captivity.

Only with the Persian king Cyrus the Great were the Jews allowed to return to Israel. Zionists should remember this when they howl about anti-Semitism, for Cyrus called himself Aryan = Ayrian = Iranian, which reads on his tomb monument. Also heard in the word Aries, the planet Mars – but we don’t want to involve aliens – yet 😉

Zoroastrianism was the original Persian religion and is considered the first monotheistic, ie long before the Abrahamic religions. Hyksos were also the first to introduce monotheism, basically with the Sun as god. There is a lot of discussion going on about whether Azkhenazim, who are European Jews, are fake Jews. It is a claim with modifications, for it is partly the Jews who did not belong to the kingdom of Judah (Jew-dah) and who were expelled. Part of the Azkenazim today have no roots left in Israel, for they are descendants of forced Khazars from the 700s Khazarian empire north of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea and into Russia. Their kagan, their king, could with some justification claim that he ruled a nation of Jews, for one of the vanquished tribes had taken the road across Khazaria. Later, they mingled with Jews in Europe.

Be patient still – for we are going for a walk around the Harveys barn once again. Let me just add as a teaser that we have named our country Danmark. One of the missing tribes was the Tribe of Dan. Still remember that we are not claiming here, that Danes are descendants of Jews but of the Caucasians who descended from Mount Ararat, where the waters receded, and who are the common root of all the tribes. We are descendants of a culture of doom that floated above waters. These are our Aryan ancestors.

I am totally indifferent to the fact that the word Aryan has been judged politically incorrect with reference to the fact that the Nazis were also interested in their ancestors. These cultural assassinations of concepts that contain an understanding of our common history must simply cease. They might also be interested in the Holocaust-frightened Jews that the bad boys they think gassed them in Auschwitz belonged to the same human race as themselves and had the same common origin. The same could have interested the bad boys at the time, but my bet is that they knew it very well, at least some of them.

Odins arrival

The Basques and Berbers have a predominantly rhesus negative blood type. The same goes for the European royal and noble families. There are old and surprising links and lineages, such as the Egyptian dynasties and a Scottish queen, after whom Scotland is named by the name of Scotia. Scythian emigrants from Syria settled in both Wales and North Jutland under the name Kimbri, Welsh: Kimeroi. They took with them a whole language with a cuneiform writing, Chimeric / Khumry. Rune writing is such a cuneiform language. Gaelic or Celtic is one of the only languages to have grammatical similarities with Aramaic, a Semitic language, and historian and author Ralph Ellis even goes so far as to say that Gaelic IS Aramaic, simply spelled and pronounced incorrectly.

The historian Josephus – the man inside the apostle Paul, surprise-surprise – wrote that the ten tribes were in large numbers on the other side of the Euphrates. They bear names such as the Cimbrians, Scythians, Goths, Celts, ie all the tribes that later formed the 10 distinct core nations in Europe. The Dan tribe left traces of names in their migration from the Scythian area across the Danube / Danube to Danmark (Danes spell it with an A). The third verse in Krákamál, where Ragnar tells about his exploits far and wide, reads:

We fought with swords.
We lifted high our lances;
when I had numbered twenty years,
and every where acquired great renown.
We conquered eight barons at the mouth of the Danube.
We procured ample entertainment for the eagle in that slaughter.
Bloody sweat fell in the ocean of wounds.
A host of men there lost their lives.

Hereby we are back on the main track again – and thank yourself for the patience. We hope you’ll se why.

The Vikings sailed along the rivers through Europe. If you were to go from the Black Sea to the Baltic Sea, it was possible except for a short distance, where the ships had to be towed over land, or the cargo had to be transferred to wagons pulled by horses and bulls. River boats would not have been like the later longboats. The Djepr river flows into the Black Sea just like the Danube, and its source is right up by Smolensk, where it flows down through Belarus. Another river Daugava flows into Riga in Latvia and springs north of Smolensk. The Nemunas River (Neman) forms the border between Poland and Lithuania and springs into Belarus. So there have been several ways to reach the Black Sea. The trip up the Danube would have brought travelers to Austria, where the Rhine also springs and runs the other way towards the North Sea.

One of the characteristics of Scandinavians – apart from a relatively high incidence of Rhesus negative blood type – is high tolerance to milk. It originates from our origins in northern Ukraine and southern Belarus, where the Slavic are also said to originate. Is there a similarity between the black soil in Ukraine and the fat soil on Funen, Denmark? Hold on tight in that regard. A Swedish historian points out the similarities between Finnish, Lapland and Estonian and Hebrew and suggests that the Neuris, as they were also called, are one of the 10 tribes that the Assyrians dragged as slaves out of the land of Canaan, the northern kingdom. Their New Year begins as the Hebrew March 1, and Saturday is their holiday starting Friday night.

The Icelandic-Norwegian chronicler Snorri Sturlasson, who wrote the history of the Norwegian kings, writes that under the leadership of a priest-king named Odin, they migrated from a place south of the Caucasus called Turkey via Russia to Scandinavia. He writes:

On the south side of the mountains, which lie outside the inhabited land, a river runs through Swithiod, which is properly called Tanais but was formerly called Tnaquisl or Vanquisl, and which flows into the Black Sea. The land with the peoples of Vanaquisl was called Vanaland or Vanaheim; and the river separates parts of the world, of which the eastern is called Asia and the Western Europe.

Swithiod is Scythia, a huge land area from Belarus and Ukraine and into most of Central Asia. The river described is, Don. Don and Volga almost run together, but then Volga ‘regrets’ at the last minute and run out into the Caspian Sea. There is a channel today, of course. Snorri writes further:

A large mountain range runs from northeast to southwest, dividing the Great Swithiod from other kingdoms. South of this mountain range is a place not far to Turkey, where Odin had large estates. In those days the Roman chiefs traveled far and wide in the world, subduing all peoples; therefore many chiefs fled from their dwellings. But Odin, who had knowledge in advance by his clairvoyance, knew that his descendants would settle in the northern continent. Therefore he put his brothers Ve and Vilje to rule over Asgaard; and he himself with all the gods (Goths) and a lot of other peoples emigrated first to Gardarike and later south to Saxony. He had many sons; and after creating a kingdom in Saxony, he put his sons to rule the country. He himself went north to the sea, and took up residence on an island called Odin’s island – nowadays Funen, the middle island of Denmark.

As an old Odense resident, I know that the Odin Tower was located on the old cult site (Odin’s cove, Oden-se) for Odin on Bolbro hill just west of Odense. It was 175 meters high and was Odense’s Eiffel Tower. It was blown up and sunk by the Nazis in 1944, who believed that the people of Funen (Fyn) needed a lesson. Snorri thus traces the Norsemen, the Celts and Germans back to the Caucasus and northern Turkey. The question is: where was Valhalla then, the paradise of the gods?

The place name in the text called Garðaríki is the word of the Varangis for Russia. Then first, Odin’s travel company took the trip around Russia. Where in Russia is not reported, but with the distance and the landscapes with huge forests, it would be almost unthinkable if they did not choose to follow the waterways a long way along the road. I would suggest all the way. From the Black Sea there is a river connection via the Volga River to ?? and the Sheksna River to Lake Beloyes north of Moscow. From here it is 100 km to Lake Onega, the largest lake of Europe, where today a canal runs that widens and completes a smaller river. Rivers from here begin to flow the other way in an western direction. From the Onega River, the river Svir runs to Lake Ladoga close to nowadays St. Petersburg and via the Neva River to the Gulf of Finland = the Baltic Sea.

It was the story of the gods or the Goths. In Sweden, Gutungarna (children of the gods) and Skjoldungarna (children of the shield) are described as Odin’s descendants. Götaland and Gothenburg still bear the name.

And the other 10 tribes? Snorri only goes back to Vanaland and not back to the tribes’ emigration from there common landing place in the northern kingdom of Palestine. The French Huguenot Jakob Abbedie writes in 1723 in a treatise called Le Triomphe de la Providence et de la Religion:

Unless the ten tribes of Israel have evaporated into the air or sunk into the ground, they must be the Gothic tribes that arrived in Europe in the fifth century, overthrew the Roman Empire and formed the ten nations of modern Europe.

After fleeing as a Huguenot from the French Catholics, the Abbedie was dean of Killaloe, Ireland. The Irish monks were Christians before the Romans and they have preserved a knowledge of their sources and their history from before the Romans began tinkering with history.

Four of these tribes, the East Franks, the Bavarians, the Swabians, and the Saxons, became Germany after the split of Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire in the ninth century – although Germany as a nation state is much later.

Beyond all borders

Lets have a look at the travelability of the Vikings:

• They are descendants of the first sailors in human history, for they come sailing out of nowhere and land on the Caucasus.
• In Snorri’s description, the ancestral figure assumes the character of a human figure rather than a god and takes the trip around Russia, Saxony – does he end up there? – in Odense. Odense fjord is not quite like Roskilde fjord but of quite a nice size, perfect as a landing place for ships.
• The Vikings commuted backwards and sailed into Poland, the Baltics and Russia via the rivers and all the way back to Miklagård / Constantinople.
• They were everywhere in the British Isles and the Faroe Islands.
• They were around France and Spain and one of Ragnar’s sons ravaged around the Iberian Peninsula until they were defeated by the king of Asturias.
• Later we see them in the Mediterranean. The Normans fought down on Sicily (999-1017), and there are accounts of Varangians operating from the other side. The later Norwegian king Harald Hårderåde was a mercenary of the Byzantine emperor.
• Norwegian sailors come as far north as Svalbard and Jan Mayen – fuck, it must have been cold!
• From Norway they come to Iceland in the 700s.
• Erik the Red – exiled three years for a murder in Norway – gets lost and discovers Greenland. The name is is advertising stunt to entice compatriots to colonize the ice island.
• The son Erik the Red, Leif the Happy takes the trip around Vinland, probably somewhere on Newfoundland and maybe a little south.

Is that what we know? Well, here comes a surprising twist. Hold on tight to the chair seat: Danish Vikings took the trip around Paraguay! Here they lived for 250 years between 1000-1250. Have you ever heard that story before?

A dead dog

The story apparently begins with a witty anomaly: the Inca dog, the so-called pecuaris. In 1885, a stack of mummified dogs were found, buried 1000 years ago under the Zoo of Lima’s. In recent DNA tests, they do not match dogs that were present at the site at the time. On the other hand, they match perfectly with the type of Danish shepherd dog that has been found in bog finds and huge mounds on the island of Als in Southern Jutland! Already here one is a little doubtful, but the onset is so striking, that one has to pursue the case, which then people who have done.

A series of hopeless speculations – scientific nonsense when it is worst and most embarrassing – is that Danes must have given them to the Norwegians, who gave them to the Icelanders, who gave them to the Settlers in Greenland, who took them to Vinland, where they gave them to Indians who did not want to have them and gave them to Canadian tribes who also did not want to have them and gave them to tribe-after-tribe-after-tribe until they reached Mexico, where they also did not want to have them and on through Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Venezuela, Columbia – where they, yes you have one guess: did not bother to have them and on to Ecuador and finally along the coast to the Peruvian highlands, where the poor creatures through god -by-how-many-years were broomed and shoveled around two continents just to end up with a stack of hearty Incas with sheep who could see some benefit of them. And then they at least die off and become mummies, yes that’s how it goes. But does anyone believe in a story that gets more and more long-haired the longer it gets pulled by the tail?

How about a straight and simple explanation: The Danish Vikings taking a stack of dogs with them when they crossed the Atlantic with the middle currents? Is there evidence for that?

One of the reasons the story never reached the public is, that the French scientist and archaeologist who discovered it, Jacques de Mahieu, was a member of the 33rd Waffen-SS grenadier division named Charlemagne. Logic: he belonged to the enemy, so therefore we must not deal with his discoveries. Bold logic by the way … But when we know the hidden logic of elitist prohibition practices, then we know that everything that they declare forbidden to deal with, that is what they themselves are very interested in, because it is … really interesting!

King Ipir – who on earth is that?

Canuth II also called Canuth the Holy had 1700 ships in his fleet for the western expansion. For long trips on the high seas, the Vikings had developed a particularly large woolen sail. According to the report, they go ashore at Santos in Brazil, today the port city of Sao Paolo. That trip alone is absolutely dizzying and must have taken at least half a year. Which route they chose we can only guess from calculations of ocean currents and winds, but look at the map, Sao Paolo is on par with South Africa.

Look at this map of the ocean currents. Would it be possible? Absolutely. You would have to follow the currents down the west coast of Africa and turn right with the South Equatorial current and turn left with the warm south going stream – and you are there. Mnjaaa, but the Vikings would not have been able to do that, for it takes seafaring skills … OK scientist, listen to yourself.

From here they could sail up the Tieté River all the way up to the Tres Lagoas, where the rivers Sucuriu, Tieté and Paraná / Rio Grande run together. Archaeologists note that there was a detour and an establishment of a settlement in Ourinhos up the Paranapanema River. From here it is 150 km – as the crow flies – on foot to a locality near the current Pedro Juan Caballero just across the border in Paraguay called Ivity Pero, which means The Bald Mountain.

What were they going to do there, and how did they know what to look for and how did they know the nearest road? They apparently did not fumble around blindly, they had maps and knowledge, others had been there before them, and they had a mission of great importance.

However, they did not choose the direct path. The Jesuits following the conquistadors – no surprise that these scoundrels were on the trail, the inner circle knew it all back then – in 1609 located the Paraguayan Storting – the general assembly of the Viking democracy – to Ciudad del Este, Paraguay, another locality along the great rivers. Rather, the sailors took the road further along Paraná to Salto del Guaraya and further down to the confluence with the Paraguay River, which has given the country its name. You can sail across the country until you reach a strange little pocket at the border with Bolivia.

The Bald Mountain is located in the middle of a national park today, where they have put … an airport ?! Well yes, imagine any peaceful national park with a noisy helicopter landing pad. A German engineer, Fritz Berger, who worked for the Paraguayan army, encountered the site in 1942, and they dug 23 meters into the mountain until they encountered an object that was impossible to penetrate with either drill or explosive, and which seemed to be part of a large underground chamber. Two years later, the Germans send a submarine loaded with pneumatic drills and serious explosives to the site. So, they are losing the war, and then they have the time and energy to do archeology! They also find that they have encountered a material of unknown type harder than the hardest concrete and unknown to science, and that they have to give up.

I know, this is straight out of an Indiana Jones movie, but this is actual historical and documented facts. The Nazis looking for ancient artifacts and entrances to the Inner Earth. Well, I didn’t make that up, the Nazis did! Were they not looking for that i Tibet and on Antarctica? Didn’t they send and expedition to Rennes le Chateau in Southern France looking for ‘an artifact’? You know that thing from the Da Vinci Codes. Were they not everywhere with their Ahnenerbe squads? Ahnen = forefathers, Erbe = inheritance.

Geophysical tests of the mountain show, that there is a tomb complex with 800 rooms! They always call it tombs, you know, Tomb Raider, Raiders of the Lost Arc, pyramids are tombs, Stonehenge is a tomb, etc. without ever having found any dead. But de Mahieu considered it to be the burial place of the Great White King Ipir – Ivity PERo is named after him – and other nobility from Tiahuanacu in Bolivia on Lake Titicaca, and that it was 14,000 years old! It’s a long way to Titicaca, which is close to the capital of Bolivia La Paz, 1400 km as the crow flies, so why the heck would you choose such a remote location? That is, unless the place hides secrets other than corpses and mummies.

May we also mention here that the whole myth of Paititi, known from the conquistador language as El Dorado, that is, the story that the Inca king should have hidden all his gold for the Spaniards, is confined to a certain impassable area in Bolivia, 500 km north of Titicaca by name Madre del Dios. Aerial photos have shown that there are structures with over 20 pyramids buried in the dense jungle. The Jesuits, of course, were wildly interested in the place, but they never really managed to locate it. A single Jesuit monk thought he had been there, but he was no longer heard from. The structures are today buried in meters of jungle sediments, and we just have to think about how far ahead we will go before the today classic Mayan complexes were uncovered in the jungles of Guatemala and Mexico. They lay there for 1000 years without anyone having any idea of their existence.

So, the sunken Atlantis is buried in both ocean sediments, desert sand and rain forest vegetation. There you go! And should we not say: Buried under an ice core. You may have noticed rumors of a lot of strange activity with certain areas of Antarctica. The same areas, that Google Gestapo have retouched to nothingness.

Ivity Pero, the burial site inside the Bald Mountain in Paraguay, was thus the place that the Danish Vikings had been sent out to guard for 250 years. Rune inscriptions found in a complex of 150 caves in the Amambay jungle run up to 1000s, ie more than in Scandinavia itself, the homeland of the runes! Some have been translated from this South American futhark dialect. Cerro Guazú is the place and it is located just 40 km south of the Bald Mountain. Pictures of Odin riding his horse Sleipnir are also there.

At the Bald Mountain of Cerro Cora National Park is a strange phenomenon, a 100 meter high and 2 km long thing called Itaguambypé, which means fortress. The mountain range is simply hollowed out and fortified.

So what happened to the settlement of Vikings? They disappeared. There is no indication that they were exterminated by the local enemy tribes, although it is reported that they were attacked by a surplus army of jungle tribes. PUFF! they disappeared. The Germans reported on tunnels 150 km long that they encountered. Can one move freely in the area as a tourist today? Correctly guessed, you can not, because it is military territory. Why are we not surprised?