Differences between revisions 60 and 61
⇤ ← Revision 60 as of 2026-04-16 07:24:50 →
Size: 44532
Editor: KeithLofstrom
Comment:
← Revision 61 as of 2026-04-16 07:40:11 → ⇥
Size: 45056
Editor: KeithLofstrom
Comment:
Deletions are marked like this. Additions are marked like this.
Line 446: Line 446:
 .p414 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings | Lord of the Rings ]] contains key elements of Viking myth and epic

 .p415 [[ | ]]
 .p415 [[ | ]]
 .p416 [[ | ]]
 .p417 [[ | ]]
 .p417 [[ | ]]
 .p417 [[ | ]]		  .p414 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lord_of_the_Rings | Lord of the Rings ]] contains key elements of Viking myth and epic, directly from the''Eddas''
 .p415 Star Wars inspired by Tolkien's ''Ring''
 .p416 (bad) analogy to "Silicon Valley". But then, the name "Silicon Valley" is also a bad analogy
 .p417 ... epitomize ... a path to happiness
 .p417 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liv_Arnesen | Liv Arnesen ]] and public speaker [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Bancroft | Ann Bancroft ]] (not [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Bancroft |actress Anne]]) first people to cross Antarctica on skis (NOT "on foot")
 .p417 [[ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greta_Thunberg | Greta Thunberg ]] (born 2003) 8 week voyage across the Atlantic in 2019

The Viking Heart

How Scandinavians conquered the world

2021 . Arthur Herman . 29 + 484 pages

948.022 HER . Murray Scholls Library

  • MAP: Viking voyages, originating in
    • southwest coastal Norway to Iceland, England, Ireland, France
    • Denmark to Germany, England, France, Spain, Italy
    • East coast Sweden to south Finland, Volga to Caspian Sea, Dnieper to Kiev, Black Sea, Constantinople

  • pxi Preface

  • pxv Norsemen genetic melting pot widespread in Europe

  • pxv Normans descendants of Norsemen, brought science and instruments to northern and western Europe

  • pxvii A Nation of Immigrants John F. Kennedy 1958 book @PSU

  • p030 Ch02 - Being Vikings

  • p033 Vikings genetically diverse, some Mediterranean and Middle East ancestry
  • p034 Vikings polygamous

  • p034 littoral

  • p034 Viking grave goods: bronze Buddha from Kashmir

  • p035 clinker-built boats, overlapping planks, nail points flattened tight with rove plate

  • p035 broad beam widest point of hull

  • p036 Vikings invented keel in 7th century

  • p036 18 inch draft fully loaded for inland waterways

  • p037 knarr cargo ship ("freighter") 3 foot draft Skuldelev 1 16 foot beam, 52 foot length, crew of 6 to 8

  • p037 turn from piracy to trade and settlement than piracy again
  • p037 five month winters

  • p037 bifringent polarized calcite for sun sighting obscured by clouds

  • p038 Vikings farmers and fishermen first, warriors second
  • p039 "uluk" for exile? Perhaps útlægð, transcribed poorly

  • p039 Ingolfr Arnarson Eric the Red

  • p040 Thing

  • p041 Iceland Althing est. 930, oldest legislature in the world

  • p041 rich or poor, one vote per household

  • p041 Eiriksgata tour of all households by prospective king

  • p042 weregeld compensatory damage for injury or killing

  • p042 1094 Iceland: 4,560 free men out of 80,000 population
  • p043 Viking marriage a business contract with obligations on both parties

  • p043 Danish daughters inherited half of brother shares, Varend Sweden daughters equal shares

  • p044 wife controlled assets when husband absent, parts with husband when she no longer desires him
  • p044 older women accumulated status, took over missing or dead husband's role

  • p045 Shield maidens probably fictional

  • p048 Vikings "world leaders" in human trafficking
  • p049 Verdun, Magdeburg, Prague slave markets supplied with Viking captives, usually non-Christian Slavs
  • p049 Vikings supplied slaves for golden age of Islam
  • p050 Viking commerce was mostly slave commerce
  • p051 Vikings preferred intimidation to slaughter

  • p051 berserker irrationally violent

  • p052 Viking helmets conical, NOT adorned with animal horns
  • p053 most warriors clung to their shields, heroes were a foolhardy minority that caused most of the casualties
  • p054 berserker's life relatively short
  • p054 leaders, followers, and slaves shared the same shipboard space
  • p055 kings were chieftains approved by assembly of other chieftains and warriors
  • p055 no dynasties, succession disputes common

  • p056 Erik Bloodaxe killed five brothers to win throne of Norway, overthrown and exiled by sixth brother

  • p056 Harald Fairhair first real Norwegian king in 872

  • p057 Most early kings mythical
  • p058 most kings murdered, only four lived to a natural death

  • p060 Ch03 - The World the Vikings Made, Part One: From Russia to the British Isles

  • p068 Rurik 862 Varangian chieftain of the Rus

  • p070 capture of Armagh

  • p071 battle of Clontarf in 1014

  • p076 Isle of Man Godred Crovan

  • p079 "-by": farm or village . . . "-thorp" or "-thwaite": a clearing . . Scandinavian place names
  • p080 more than 600 Viking loan words in modern English

  • p081 cowrie sea snail shells from Gulf of Aden

  • p081 Domesday Book Scandinavian peasantry descendants 60% of Lincolnshire, 40% of East Anglia

  • p082 Sokemen between free and bond tenants

  • p083 Danelaw -> English Petition of Right -> US Bill of Rights

  • p105 Ch05 - Twilight of the Gods: Vikings, Kings, and Christianity

  • p106 Oleg added wheels to ships, assaulting Constantinople over land

  • p107 Viking soldiers Varangian Guard

  • p107 Rurik Novgorod

  • p108 Germans and Vikings similar pagan pantheon, Odin == Wotan "the furious one", patron god of Berserkers

  • p109 Poetic Edda no Germanic equivalent

  • p111 Ragnarok destruction of the gods

  • p112 Norse religion: destruction the source of renewal

  • p113 Eddas -> Wagner'sRing of the Nibelungen Tolkien'sLord of the Rings

  • p113 Tolkien founded Viking Club at University of Leeds

  • p114 hundreds of captives sacrificed routinely at the Upsalla temple complex

  • p114 primal Viking heart rejected compassion, sympathy, moral responsibility
  • p114 Islamic silver ceased arriving around 965

  • p115 Prince Vladimir chooses state religion

    • Orthodox Christianity, Latin Christianity, Rabbinical Judaism, or Islam
  • p115 Drinking is the joy of the Rus, Muslim emisssaries went home, similar for Jewish Khazars. Christian monkish abstinence rejected.
  • p115 Viking mercenaries aiding Constantinople impressed by majestic Orthodox festival. Vladimir destroyed pagan statues, baptized 988 February, and marries emperor's daughter
  • p116 prosperity and politics converted most of Scandinavia to Christianity

  • p116 ended expensive wasteful customs of sacrifice and grave goods and wergild

  • p117 eventually vendetta, violence, and bloodfeud ended

  • p117 feudalism feudum = grant of land

  • p118 Ripa? Denmark . . Birka Sweden

  • p118 four Swedish king "mercenaries" Harald Bluetooth Olaf Tryggvason

  • p119 Olaf Haraldson

  • p119 Olaf Skottkonung

  • p120 Olaf and son Anund Jacob christian but allow pagan sites like Uppsala to remain

  • p121 stave churches retained popular pagan decorations and architectures
  • p122 Viking sagas endure as popular epics, Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, etc.
  • p123 "Christian" King Olaf continued Viking raids across Europe

  • p124 Olaf and Sven Forkbeard raided England for silver coin

  • p125 50,000 English coins dated 980-1051 in Scandinavian coin hoards
  • p126 Most of England surrendered to Sven Forkbeard, 158,000 pounds of silver tribute

  • p126 son Knut / Canute ruled England and Denmark 1018-1035

  • p128 Norway, Orkneys, Shetlands, Hebrides, and Greenland after 1028
  • p129 Canute gave his kingdom stability and security
  • p129 thane: ranks above ordinary freeman and below a nobleman

  • p130 1026 Battle of Helgeå won Norwegian crown

  • p240 Ch10 - "We Are Coming, Father Abraham": Scandinavians in the American Civil War

  • p244 Thousands of immigrants joined Union army, including author's great-great-grandfather Iver Jacobsen (Sorlie)

  • p247 Illinois Western Sharpshooters commanded by Swedish immigrant Colonel John W. Birge

    • UC Berkeley Physics Birge hall named after Raymond Thayer Birge, son of John Thaddeus Birge

  • p251 John Dahlgren Dahlgren gun, smoother curve and wider breech minimized explosions

  • p253 used on USS Monitor designed by John Ericsson

  • p255 Norwegian immigrant Quartermaster Peter Williams steered Monitor in the Battle of Hampton Roads against the Confederate ironclad CSS Virginia (salvaged USS Merrimack)

  • p321 Ch13 - Men at Work: The Viking Heart and American Democracy

  • p321 Lindbergh critic Gutzon Borglum (p239) also antisemitic ...

  • p322 ... but close friend of important Jews
  • p324 Hitler destroyed Borglum sculpture of Woodrow Wilson in Poland
  • p324 Borglum friendly with Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon

  • p326 F. Scott Fitzgerald 1936: "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function."

  • p327 Borglum chose the 4 Mount Rushmore subjects
  • p328 Mount Rushmore completed July 1939 for $1M ($24M, inflation to April 2026 dollars)
  • p328 Borglum died 1941 March

  • p329 Charles Sorensen Cast Iron Charlie, Ford Motor Company, sequential machining production, Ford Highland Park Plant

  • p329 William Knudsen The Great Dane, Ford Motor Company, senior operations manager

  • p331 Knudsen argued with Henry Ford, fired, then transformed Chevrolet with flexible mass production

  • p331 Knudsen president of General Motors 1937 to 1940
  • p331 appointed by Roosevelt as Chairman of the Office of Production Management, vastly increased war production
  • p332 Knudsen originated "arsenal of democracy" phrase, Roosevelt copied it
  • p332 1940-1945 US produced $183B of war material, 2/3 of all Allied production
    • 141 aircraft carriers, 807 cruisers and destroyers, 203 submarines, 88K tanks, 257K artillery, 325K aircraft, growing civilian economy
  • p334 B-24 half a million parts, 300K rivets of 500 sizes
  • p334 decades later, those companies produced COVID ventilators, respirators, test kits
  • p334 Freedom's Forge Arthur Herman Bvtn Lib 940.531 HER

  • p334 Carl Sandburg 1940 Pulitzer for six volume Lincoln biography

  • p336 hometown Galesburg Illinois sanctuary on Underground Railroad, population 14% African American

  • p336 "He is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them" - Lincoln

  • p337 "Chicago" poem by Carl Sandburg

  • p338 Carl Sandburg sings "My Name is Yon Yonson"

  • p340 Carl Sandburg's “Bomber”

  • p343 Norman Borlaug

  • p344 Borlaug age 2 Marquis wheat 1916 black stem rust

  • p344 40 acres, 12,000 plants, picking and husking a million ears of corn, arms raw and bleeding

  • p345 studied under Elvin Charles Stakman at U Minn

  • p346 Borlaug increased Mexican wheat yield from 760 pounds per acre to 2500 pounds per acre in 1968
    • "almost triple the harvest" (more than, 3.3 times)
  • p346 Nobel Peace prize 1970. Criticized by (less effective) social revolutionaries, cultural activists

  • p346 Marxist journalist Alexander Cockburn accused Borlaug of mass murder CITATION NEEDED

  • p347 people hungry all the time; in 2009, Borlaug said "When I was getting started, you couldn't avoid them"

  • p348 Ch14 - The Viking Heart Come Home

  • p349 1863 Denmark annexes Slesvig and Holstein after agreeing not to 11 years earlier

  • p350 Denmark lost, 60,000 ethnic Danes displaced, most to Denmark, but thousands to America
  • p351 fueled (pessimistic) modernist movement (Ibsen, Strindberg, Brandes, Munch) well into the 20th century
    • also fueled Scandinavian abhorrence of war

  • p353 Dark Age Gaelic poet Ossian forged by Scottish poet James Macpherson

  • p355 Nikolaj Frederik Severin Grundtvig fueled modern Scandinavian Viking mania

  • p358 Volsung Saga inspires Richard Wagner

  • p360 inspires English son-in-law race theorist Houston Stuart Chamberlain, "Hitler's John the Baptist", 1899 polemic The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century

  • p361 "half-Asiatic Jews"

  • p361 Thule Society 1919-1925

  • p361 political wing German Workers' Party Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, DAP; absorbed by Nazi party

  • p362 During WW1, neutral Scandinavia had unprecedented economic growth, continuing through Great Depression

  • p363 Affluent Nobel family of moves to Saint Petersburg in 1842 Alfred (born 1833) excels in chemistry

  • p364 invents detonator in 1863, blasting cap in 1865, dynamite (sorbents and chemical stabilizers added to nitroglycerine) in 1867

  • p364 gelignite and ballistite leading to cordite smokeless gunpowder

  • p364 Nobel brothers Ludvig and Robert purchase Azerbaijan oil refinery in 1876, growing a global petroleum enterprise

  • p365 Ludvig launches Zoroaster, first oil tanker in 1878

  • p365 55yo Alfred excoriated in premature 1888 obituary, announces Nobel Prizes in 1895

  • p366 Fridtjof Nansen 1861

  • p367 Nansen expedition crosses Greenland icepack on skis August 1882
  • p368 Nansen's ship Fram
  • p368 1922, Nansen helped repatriate nearly 500K WW1 prisoners, mostly Russian
  • p369 1921-22 food relief for nearly 2M Russian civil war refugees, along with Herbert Hoover
  • p369 Nansen awarded 1922 Nobel Peace Prize

  • p372 1936 book Sweden: The Middle Way by US journalist Marquis Childs

  • p373 Ch15 - The Viking Heart in War and Peace

  • p374 Finland given to Romanov Russia in 1809 (not book's 1814), kept Finnish (and Swedish until 1863) language

  • p375 Russia attacked Finland in 1939 Winter War

  • p375 Finns invent polttopullo, Molotovin koktaili

    • gasoline, kerosene, tar, and potassium chlorate

  • p375 General Carl Gustav Mannerheim

  • p375 Finnish motti" (cubic meter of firewood), entrapped enemy, pile of dead Russians, frozen almost at once

  • p376 Battle of Suomussalmi 48K Soviets vs 17K Finns, 1939 Nov 30 to 1940 Jan 8. Finns won with 2700 casualties, Soviets lost 27000.

  • p377 Finns eventually lost in March 1940, ceded huge swath of border territory, including the Karelian Isthmus (not peninsula) 400,000 Finns fled west

  • p379 Norwegian Vidkun Quisling founded https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasjonal_Samling and collaborated with Nazi Germany

  • p380 Norwegian Oscarsborg Fortress artillery detonates German heavy cruiser Blücher in 1940 April 9 Battle of Drøbak Sound

  • p381 giving King Haakon and his ministers had time to escape north, and then to Britain

  • p382 Denmark surrenders to Nazi Germany 1940 April 9

  • p382 British Navy occupies Faroe Islands 1940 April 12, Iceland May 10.

  • p382 US Navy took control of Greenland, captured German weather stations three times

  • p382 Neutral Sweden traded iron for German coal; 83% of Germany's iron in 1940
  • p383 Hitler assures Swedish king Gustav of continued neutrality
  • p384 Danes banned Communists and harbored German warships to please Nazis, protected most Danish Jews
  • p385 Quisling failed to recruit Norwegians for SS; 1942 announced "NS has so many members now, it doesn't need any more".
  • p385 Of 2170 Norwegian Jews, 775 were deported to Third Reich, 742 died in death camps
  • p386 Norwegians not good at hating, did not join Nazis or Communists

  • p387 Norwegian Leif Tronstad reached London 1941 October, described heavy water production at Vemork

  • p388 Einar Skinnarland radio operator for 1943 sabotage team

  • p390 four commandos executed by Nazi physicians, others shot

  • p390 Operation GUNNERSIDE

  • p391 Team given suicide pills; Hitler must never learn why they were there

  • p392 hiding from Quisling hird militias

  • p394 by the middle of 1943, no German industrial leader believed Germany could win

  • p394 Finn prime minister Gustav Mannerheim turns on Hitler in 1945, drives Germans out of Finland and northern Russia

  • p395 Finns laud Mannerheim as national hero
  • p395 Danish King Christian did not wear a yellow star, but he agreed with most Danes that Jews are part of "us" (though Danish Nazis were not part of "us").
  • p396 1500 Czech, Austrian, and German Jews received Danish residence permits
  • p397 Himmler declared martial law in Denmark to round up Jews, individual Danes helped 95% of Jews flee to Sweden
  • p398 Swedish diplomats helped Jews escape from Nazi-occupied Hungary

  • p399 Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg saved tens of thousands of Hungarian Jews from the Nazi death camps

  • p400 Wallenberg designed Swedish "Protective Passports"

    • blue and gold with three crowns on top ... not like this image

  • p401 "protected ghettos" by other foreign legations, including Americans

  • p401 Wallenberg demanded German general Schmidhuber prevent slaughter, successfully

  • p401 Wallenberg disappeared 1945 Jan 10, on the way to meet advancing Russians
  • p402 Russians may have assumed Wallenberg was American spy; he did work with OSS, getting help wherever he could.
  • p403 Sweden was blamed for collaborating with Germany, but they also cared for 180K refugees after WW2
  • p404 Swedish social democracy, cultural bonds "dating back to the Viking era" (?)
  • p404 Finnish/Danish/Swedish Americans 60%/55%/53% higher standard of living than homeland Finns/Danes/Swedes
  • p405 Minimal Scandinavian disruption by COVID-19

  • p406 Conclusion - The Viking Heart and the Land Beyond

  • p409 French political scientist Pierre Manent "... a fully human life ... a common life and a community"

  • p412 Tolkien helped found a "Viking Club" at University of Leeds

  • p412 composed poems and songs in Old English, Gothic, and Old Norse

  • p412 Songs for the Philologists

  • p414 Tolkien's trilogy an intellectual antidote to nazification of Norse myth and Viking legacy
  • p414 Hitler perverted the noble northern spirit

  • p414 Lord of the Rings contains key elements of Viking myth and epic, directly from theEddas

  • p415 Star Wars inspired by Tolkien's Ring

  • p416 (bad) analogy to "Silicon Valley". But then, the name "Silicon Valley" is also a bad analogy
  • p417 ... epitomize ... a path to happiness

  • p417 Liv Arnesen and public speaker Ann Bancroft (not actress Anne) first people to cross Antarctica on skis (NOT "on foot")

  • p417 Greta Thunberg (born 2003) 8 week voyage across the Atlantic in 2019

VikingHeart (last edited 2026-04-16 07:40:11 by KeithLofstrom)