Re: Kensington Rune Stone


"Soren Larsen" <Wagnijo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> skrev i meddelandet
news:46d5aa27$0$87844$edfadb0f@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
sprocket wrote:
Eric Stevens wrote:

There is a line of continuity from the long-boats, through knarrs, to
the trading ships of north europe, on through the cog, hulk and
carrack ...

There was a fundamental difference between the Norse clinker- built
type of ship, in which the structural strength is in the skin, and
the later skeleton-framed boats, which were the type that dominated
from the 14th century or so to the end of sail.


This is a question of economy.

A skeleton first build boat can be build a lot cheaper than a lapstrake
build boat.






There's a very good
discussion of this in "The Good Ship" by Ian Friel, and it was this
increase in strength that made extended sea voyages routinely
survivable.

The lapstrake is actually the stronger construction method.



Perhaps the iron age technology of the Norse didn't give them
sufficient advantage over the stone- age natives to compensate for
their shortage of numbers.


Lets see.

The norse didn't try colonise Vinland but established a trading
station.

Trading went well for a while until the locals decided to attack the
station for whatever reason.

The locals didn't manage to overwhelm an unsuspecting norse trading
station, but got their behinds handed to them with the loss of only
a couple of norse lifes.

Trading was of course out of the question after this incident and
the norse packed up and left.

This has nothing to do with the norse being some kind of supermen
but in contrast to later settlers they came from a culture were
raiding warfare wasn't exactly unknown.

Trying to surprise and scare a viking age norse settlement
by a raid was tactic a lot less likely to succeed than attacking
later small european settlements .



And of course the fact that once numbers achieved a critical level,
the settlers acted as a reservoir of disease infecting the native
population and weakening their response, a kind of inadvertent
biological warfare. The "failure" of the Norse to introduce epidemics
is another argument for their presence only in the most minute
numbers, in the most peripheral areas- exactly as described in the
sagas.

Nobody except Inger is arguing for a substantial norse settlement in NA
proper and Inger is barking mad.

Correction - MANY apart from me (Inger) is arguing for a substantial norse
settlement in NA. Many good scholars have had problems being published due
to the brickwall. Same problem as we in Sweden had not so long ago when
arguing against those who maintained Uppsala as the startingpoint of Sweden!

Inger E



Soren Larsen

--
History is not what it used to be.




.

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