Norway
Category archives for Norway
Professor Steve Steve Studies Norwegian Archaeology
Posted by Martin R on September 7, 2007 I spent most of the past week with Professor Steve Steve at the Internationales Sachsensymposion in Trondheim, Norway. We had two and a half days of paper sessions and one day’s bus excursion in the vicinity, all pertaining to post-Roman archaeology. Here the professor is studying a Roman/Migration Period large-scale iron production site at Heglesvollen,…
Grim Lords of Black Metal
Posted by Martin R on September 1, 2007 My Norwegian buddy Torkel reminded me of the wonderful site TOP 10 MOST RIDICULOUS BLACK METAL PICS OF ALL TIME. These guys are beyond words. And there’s a second collection that I hadn’t seen before! Satan laughing spreads his wings, as TV comedian Ozzy Osborne used to sing back when I was just an evil…
Going to Trondheim
Posted by Martin R on August 24, 2007 Almost half of Aard‘s Dear Readers are based in the US, nearly a fourth are in Sweden, and the remaining fourth is dominated by people in the UK, Canada and Australia. Alas, the citizens of my Scandy neighbouring countries show very little interest in the blog, and so I don’t know if I have any…
Beachcombing the Shores of Time
Posted by Martin R on July 18, 2007 Over at my buddy Frans-Arne’s blog Arkeologi i Nord I found a great quotation from Norwegian archaeologist and anti-Nazi politician Anton Wilhelm Brøgger (1884-1951): “Det vi vet er så uendelig lite mot det som er hendt. Arkeologen er som den som går langs en strand og finner småtterier, skyllet i land fra et forsvunnet skib.…
Brief Mountain Summer
Posted by Martin R on July 6, 2007 [More blog entries about hiking, Sweden, Norway, mountains; fjällvandra, Sverige, Norge, Dalarna.] Spent Monday through Wednesday on a trip to Lake Grövelsjön in the mountainous northwesternmost corner of Dalecarlia province. The lake is sausage-shaped with one end in Sweden and the other in Norway. On Tuesday my wife and I hiked around it, a walk…
No, That Norwegian Guy Was Not an Inca Indian
Posted by Martin R on June 29, 2007 There’s a newsbit doing the rounds of international summer-starved media about a funny cranium found at St. Nicholas’ church in Sarpsborg, Norway during excavations headed by Mona Beate Buckholm of Østfoldmuseet. The cranium belonged to a batch of bones surfacing when some rose bushes were moved. Radiocarbon dates them to most likely the 11th century…
Norwegians Dig Rock Art
Posted by Martin R on June 15, 2007 Most rock carvings have very little archaeological context: people who search for them tend to remove hastily any layers on top of them, and they quit digging when they reach the edge of the carved panel. But in recent decades, there has been a trend among Bronze Age scholars to dig beside the panels and…
Karl Hauck 1916-2007
Posted by Martin R on June 8, 2007 An old sorcerer has passed away. Karl Hauck was the single most influential contributor to the iconology, the interpretation of mythological imagery, of 1st Millennium AD Northern Europe. Hauck’s interpretations built upon solid knowledge of later written sources, most importantly the Icelandic literature of the High Middle Ages. They were sometimes fanciful, always creative, and…
You Can’t Grok Its Multiplicity
Posted by Martin R on May 4, 2007 [More blog entries about archaeology, religion, vikings, vikingperiod, Scandinavia; arkeologi, religion, vikingar, vikingatiden.] Thursday morning I stopped by the Royal Library in Stockholm and read a paper by Johan Callmer in the great big symposium volume concluding the Vägar till Midgård project (“Roads to Middle-earth”). I was mainly there to check what he had said…
Book Review: Cambridge History of Scandinavia
Posted by Martin R on May 1, 2007 [More blog entries about archaeology, history, Scandinavia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway; arkeologi, historia, Skandinavien, Danmark, Norge, Sverige.] Archaeology consists of a myriad of weakly interconnected regional and temporal sub-disciplines. My work in Östergötland is largely irrelevant to a scholar in Lapland and entirely so to one in Tokyo. Larger interregional syntheses are rare and tend to…
