I have, however, a passing familiarity with some of the Norse sagas of the Middle Ages, and I am suspecting that what Latvian poetry there was in the C10 would have been similar in mode.

That is, it would have been what we call epic poetry, true epics being a culture's first attempts to record (often most artfully) much older oral traditions. Of related interested would be heroic poetry written about the same time or soon after, recording great current events, if often in highly exaggerated ways, since the poets would still be influenced by and wishing to live up to the standards of epic and myth.

Now, what would be the virtue of studying such poetry?

The Norse sagas and heroic poems have been especially interesting as the record from one side of the meeting of (at least) two vastly different cultures, two different kinds of cultures. They often record contact with the heirs to Roman and Greek history and culture, particularly the Irish monks, whose own records of those contacts are considerably more ... literal, we might say, or realistic, or fact-based, as one would expect of a culture very far removed from its own epic roots.

I am no expert in this field; I know just enough to know that there are some people who are, to know as well that they are learning things that might help us to understand our own historical pickle, if we ever paid attention.

To me, that should be one value of any kind of historical study. Great breakthroughs in historical understanding are seldom made by one individual doing all the work at once; they depend on dozens and dozens of modest monks slowly retrieving for us the stories of experiences and even great clashes of civilizations that have happened before us, that we sometimes look set to repeat out of sheer ignorance.

I suppose that funding that kind of work has seldom been popular in a utilitarian society. For a time in mid-C20 North America, it appeared that our culture had enough confidence to support such learning, and to support a basic grounding in it for more and more students from all backgrounds, ideally, perhaps, one day for all.

I also know nothing of Latvian sagas, although there is at least one major Finnish one. I'm personally using Norse saga information to try and infer pre-Norse sailing technology to try and understand to what extent the sea and lakes were seen as obstacles versus 'highways' in a treeless environment (Orkney) where boat-building may have been at a premium.

I *do* have to take a little exception to this:

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particularly the Irish monks, whose own records of those contacts are considerably more ... literal, we might say, or realistic, or fact-based, as one would expect of a culture very far removed from its own epic roots.

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Originally posted by aRoused:

I also know nothing of Latvian sagas, although there is at least one major Finnish one. I'm personally using Norse saga information to try and infer pre-Norse sailing technology to try and understand to what extent the sea and lakes were seen as obstacles versus 'highways' in a treeless environment (Orkney) where boat-building may have been at a premium.

This is fascinating to me, aRoused. Write more. I have once had the extreme pleasure of sailing to Orkney, ferry from Thurso to Stromness, cutting very close to the cliffs of Hoy -- the Pentland Firth is the fiercest water I ever want to sail on, and as it crashes against the cliffs ... my, but that was Burke's sublime. We were standing at the rails wondering about precisely these things -- how did those little wooden boats fare against such odds? The very place makes one think of those heroes. And yes, the islands are bald. Wonderful, strange land.

I *do* have to take a little exception to this:

As I'm sure you know, the various monks had political reasons to give the Norse bad press, both because they were being targeted by raiders, and also to berate their flock for lapses of faith. The Lives of the various early saints are filled with, well, with fables, quite frankly: St. Columba defeating a real, live dragon, St. Patrick driving all the snakes out of Ireland, that sort of thing. In contrast, the Sagas frequently relate the lives of people who actually lived, in fairly factual manner, and I'm drawing a distinction here between the Sagas and the tales of Odin, Thor, Frey and the other Aesir.

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Oh, that's ok -- as I note above, I'm mostly talking through my hat here, and I agree that the Irish monks, like the Romans, were often clever politicians and outright liars.

About the "people who actually lived," though -- if I could find my Prebble, I would copy to you a hilarious account of an encounter between some Scandinavian raiders and the local population somewhere on the west coast of Scotland. The Scottish records show that there was a very brief skirmish between the two sides, but then both sides embarrassed themselves by running away -- I think no one was killed, or even injured.

From that encounter, though, there emerged from the other side a heroic poem describing vast slaughter and great deeds. The poet was supposed to have been on board, actually, and I think it's believed that he was in the habit of writing his poems ahead of time.

Well, why not? When you're a bard, you know what your job is. At least, in those days, bards had jobs, eh?

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This is fascinating to me, aRoused. Write more. I have once had the extreme pleasure of sailing to Orkney, ferry from Thurso to Stromness, cutting very close to the cliffs of Hoy -- the Pentland Firth is the fiercest water I ever want to sail on, and as it crashes against the cliffs ... my, but that was Burke's sublime. We were standing at the rails wondering about precisely these things -- how did those little wooden boats fare against such odds? The very place makes one think of those heroes. And yes, the islands are bald. Wonderful, strange land.

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The Pentland Firth can produce currents up to 15 knots at some times of day--it *is* as bad as it looked! To give you an idea, Ellen MacArthur averaged about that speed in her racing trimaran.

I suspect a lot of the managing to get about in boats came down to knowing the tides and knowing where was safe and where wasn't. Experience and local knowledge rather than raw seafaring/exploring skill. The original expedition to Greenland from Iceland lost something like 40% of its ships, although (as always) none of the heroes of the tale sank. In Orkneyinga Saga, there's a specific reference to a group of raiders timing their departure from Shetland so that the currents speed them south to Orkney, but at the same time prevent their opponents on Westray from sending a messenger further south with a warning. With the tide charts, I can say that the raiders left Shetland about 2-3 hours after high water at Dover. Fun stuff for me, but maybe dull scientistic stuff to the rest of you.

Orkney is so great, and so varied. If you put the west-facing flanks of Hoy and the white shell-sand beaches of Sanday next to each other, you'd never guess they were within about 30km of each other. Westray is my favourite, from having spent 6 weeks in good company digging there, but if I were to settle there I think I would look for a space in Orphir parish, facing south onto Scapa Flow.

For reading, I recommend www.orkneyjar.com , run by a local reporter who's passionate about the history/prehistory of the islands.

My favourite as-yet-unread heroic tale is the Gododdin: not Norse, but a Dark Ages eulogy for a group of several hundred chieftains from around Edinburgh who rode off to fight the Northumbrians and were annihilated, end of story. Seems a lot of effort on the part of the losing side, but there you have it, those crazy 'Celts' and all that sort of thing.

Of what I have read, the Havamal, or at least the portions of it offering advice for the young Norseman living-in-the-world is my favourite, in part because it offers very similar advice to a Nuu-chah-nulth text collected by Edward Sapir.

Edit: Got curious did some poking around: In 1835 a Krisjanis Baron was born. He collected (apparently) 1 MILLION Latvian folk songs (dainas? sp?). Apparently Latvia has more folk songs than any other country on the planet. Wow.

[ 11 February 2005: Message edited by: aRoused ]

Where is Westray from the main island (or the mainland, as we were amused to hear it is called locally)? Just east, if it looks south on to Scapa Flow? I wanted to go look at the sunken German fleet in Scapa Flow but we didn't have time. Have you ever seen it?

No, I've not gone diving to the fleet. I'm not a very water-positive person, except for boating.

Orphir parish is part of Mainland (formerly known as Hrossey). Westray is the furthest northwest island in the group. When you stand at the lighthouse at Noup Head, there's really nothing between you and Labrador. A lot of Orkney tends to slope downwards to the east and south, so the cliffs on the NW sides of islands tend to be very high, as you saw on Hoy. If you'd sailed further north instead of pulling into Stromness, you'd have passed a series of cliffs broken by a couple of wide sandy bays, one of which contains Skara Brae, followed by the memorial to Lord Kitchener, who died off Orkney when his cruiser struck a mine. Beyond that is the Brough of Birsay, a semi-island where a Pictish monastery is overlain with multiple phases of Norse longhouses. From there when the weather is clear you can see Westray

It's a fantastic place to do archaeology--a lack of urbanization and serious development, plus the ancient Orcadian tradition of building in stone (no trees!) means that even agriculture hasn't destroyed many monuments as it's simply too much work to pull them down or plough through them. Now the Stenness-Brodgar corridor (which you probably passed or visited if you went to Maeshowe) has been listed as a World Heritage Site.

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If you'd sailed further north instead of pulling into Stromness, you'd have passed a series of cliffs broken by a couple of wide sandy bays, one of which contains Skara Brae, followed by the memorial to Lord Kitchener, who died off Orkney when his cruiser struck a mine. Beyond that is the Brough of Birsay, a semi-island where a Pictish monastery is overlain with multiple phases of Norse longhouses. From there when the weather is clear you can see Westray

It's a fantastic place to do archaeology--a lack of urbanization and serious development, plus the ancient Orcadian tradition of building in stone (no trees!) means that even agriculture hasn't destroyed many monuments as it's simply too much work to pull them down or plough through them. Now the Stenness-Brodgar corridor (which you probably passed or visited if you went to Maeshowe) has been listed as a World Heritage Site.

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We drove up to Skara Brae and spent a couple of hours wandering around -- for those who don't know, Skara Brae is a [stone age?] network of underground houses, stone-walled rooms connected to one another by passages -- you explore them now by looking down into them. I believe that they were only discovered a couple of generations ago -- they're right next to a beach, had been covered for eons by soil, but then a storm blew the covering off -- is that close, aRoused? It is a magical place -- those rooms look quite cosy, actually, tidy little stone benches and all.

We did see something else to the north as well -- would that have been the monument to Kitchener? Or the monastery? I have a photo of self standing beside the signpost to Twat.

And then of course we drove to Maeshowe and the Ring of Bro[d]gar, and on up to Kirkwall, which I thought was the most charming city.

Orphir -- is that the parish that has the church built by the Italian prisoners during the war? Didn't they build it out of tins or something? We drove by there as well but in a hurry to make the ferry that day -- I'd love to see the chapel.

Orphir is where the Earl's Bu round chapel ruins are, so it's not where the Italian Chapel is (which is...well, South Ronaldsay but not sure of the parish). It's truly impressive--I actually was more struck with the 'stone' statue of St. George out front (cement over chicken wire), simply because it was made so well from such cast-off materials.

Kirkwall is great, Stromness is probably more picturesque and less touristy, but I like my modern comforts when I'm on a dig, and when I've been up there the past couple summers we've stayed in a big four-story pile of stone in Kirkwall. The welcome is always worth the trouble of getting there, and of course there's the cathedral and museum and Earl's Palace to visit on days off.

I hope I can dig there again this year.

Heritage, the conservation of heritage (whether that be physical objects or documents or what have you) is a growth field in archaeology at present. People are finding out that heritage (like Latvian heroic poetry and folk songs) plays a huge role in the negotiation of identity. Fairly self-evident, but the ways in which people can and do employ heritage in those negotiations is very poorly understood at present.

For example, I just attended a paper presenting a participant-observation 'take' on the Hilton of Cadboll cross-slab. The locals are arguing with the National Museum to try and get it back in situ, but of course the museum doesn't want to let go of it. Hmm, a bit like First Nations artifacts, in a way..

They erected a nice bust of him there on top of a square column, and they used to gather in the summer on his birthday and play Finlandia, which we thought was splendid. I'm not sure that they've been back lately, which is a shame. I came to love Finlandia especially for its associations with our place and those happy years, so I intend to be one of those later overlays that enriches older traditions.

aRoused, this is the first I've learned of the Hilton of Cadboll, but I know Tain and Dornoch (hee) a little -- gee, I wish we'd known to go look.

And such a thing. My first reaction was surprise at seeing Celtic knots on the symbol side, because I thought that those only came along with the Irish colonization. But then, I guess if there was a cross side, a Celtic cross, this must have been post-colonization.

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Originally posted by skdadl:
aRoused, this is the first I've learned of the Hilton of Cadboll, but I know Tain and Dornoch (hee) a little -- gee, I wish we'd known to go look.

And such a thing. My first reaction was surprise at seeing Celtic knots on the symbol side, because I thought that those only came along with the Irish colonization. But then, I guess if there was a cross side, a Celtic cross, this must have been post-colonization.

This is much more subtle history than I've known before. I always thought that the Picts had just been overwhelmed/absorbed, and then lost.

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Yes, Hilton is a bit off the beaten path of the A9 running north from Inverness. As a town, it's something like second from the bottom in terms of prosperity indices for Scottish towns. Not a bad area, just a lot of poor pensioners and such. In that vein, it's interesting that the desire for having the stone returned to them (a replica stands there now) *isn't* economic, but is couched in terms of 'Shandwick and Nigg have their stones, but ours has been taken away to Edinburgh, and we'd like it back' (Shandwick and Nigg are a few miles up and down the road). The stones aren't even really seen as Pictish, but are linked to more recent tales of Danish princes, etc, in the popular imagination.

As the the origin of the Cadboll stone, it's a cross-slab, so it dates to after the conversion of the Picts by Columba. Some symbol stones don't have crosses on them and are assumed to date to pre-Christian times. The Celtic knots, well, Picts were most likely a Celtic nation and accepted as such by their neighbours. They just got unlucky by being (as far as we can tell) late in producing written works compared to their Anglo-Roman and Irish neighbours, so their story didn't get passed down to us. The Irish colonization, I assume you mean the arrival of the Scotti into Dalriada? Mostly now it's thought the Scotti married into the Pictish royal family and then eventually took over in one of those dynastic succession moments. It doesn't fully explain why the Pictish language seems to have almost disappeared except in some placenames, and it doesn't explain why Pictland became Scotland so quickly, but if it did, I'd likely be out of a job!