Fornvännen's spring issue (2010:1) is now on-line and available to anyone who wants to read it. Check it out!
- Michael Neiss analyses the intricate animal interlace on a weird new 8th century decorative mount. It looks like it might be Scandinavia's earliest book-cover fitting! Did it adorn the cover of a manuscript of the gospels or of the Elder Edda - or of something I shudder to even think about?
- Ylva Sjöstrand finds thought-out structure among the innumerable elks carved on rocks at Nämforsen during the Neolithic.
- Henrik Klackenberg and Magnus Olsson discuss a papal lead seal found in Scania and suggests an explanation for how it ended up there.
- Evert Baudou tells the story of the first lectures in archaeology at what would become the University of Stockholm and puts them in their context during archaeology's early period of social establishment.
- Christian Lovén rounds off the debate about Romanesque chancel apses.
- Carl Löfving challenges the consensus dating of the runic door-ring from Forsa.
- Torbjörn Brorsson joins the ranks of field archaeologists warning us about the consequences of the currently heightened cost competition in Swedish contract archaeology.
- Elisabeth Iregren and Helena Schramm Hedelin call for clearer and more explicit rules for the repatriation and reburial of human remains. As osteologists, they don't like reburial. And I agree: reburying archaeological bones is like reburying silver hoards, copper-alloy jewellery or pottery. The only reasons to do so are non-scientific and the outcomes are anti-scientific.
- Thorsten Lemm presents the place-name milieu around the world's southernmost Husby hamlet, once a royal manor, this one in Schleswig-Holstein.
- Frans-Arne Stylegar reports on the find of a portable altar stone, a piece of repurposed green Roman wall tile, in Vest-Agder, Norway.
- Jan Peder Lamm announces the publication of inter-war Swedish-Lithuanian collaborative fieldwork at the hillfort of Apuole.
[More about archaeology; arkeologi.]
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Joakim Goldhahn on early Swedish rock art documentation
Frans-Arne Stylegar et al. on two bronze…
Elks carved on rocks -is it possible to find a correlation in artistic style with organic (dateable) artefacts? My interest is partly personal, as my home village of Norrfors, Umeå, has a multitude of what is (to date) the most northerly elk rock carvings.
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"or of something I shudder to even think about?"
While the Scandianvians had contacts with the arabs *after* the eight century, the book would be too early to have been a version of Abdul Alhazred's Necronomicon. Maybe some goth or Irish manuscript regarding the Deep Ones?
Regarding inferred North European contacts with Chtonians during the medieval period, see related literature at Miscatonic University, Arkham (original manuscripts in Europe were hunted down by the SS-Ahnenerbe 1933-45 and destroyed during the bombings, but Dr. I. Jones managed to get most of them copied and sent to Arkham in time). (also, see The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross)
To my knowledge, the northern elk-dominated rock carvings find parallels only in rock paintings. Carved bone rarely survives up there.
(OT) Martin and other non-Brit Europeans: This could be a way to get relevant literature from British publishers without going bankrupt over charges for postage and packing: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=pe_73771_2229…
I would recommend "Archaeology and Language" as a starting point, even if some parts of it is a bit dated. Also, lots of tomes about Stonehenge (you can never have too many books about Stonehenge) :)
Martin, sorry to derail the thread, but this is a cry for help: "White Apocalypse" claims to be based on "science"!
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Holy fucking shit!!! This is some neo-Nazi Von Däniken wannabee who claims that aryans reached the Americas before the Indians, and were exterminated by the "mongol" hordes!
http://www.amazon.com/White-Apocalypse-Kyle-Bristow/dp/1453768475/ref=s…
The book is fiction, but claims the plot is based on "science".
I cannot ethically enter a negative review without reading the book, but any Americans who have, please, please give it the rating it deserves! (doubles over, vomiting)
Birger Johansson, :) You beat me to it! I was going to go on at length about "the earliest known written references to the Elder Gods, pre-existing the Necronomicon", and reference Stross' works of scholarship.
This is what I get for lingering of a morning at Pharyngula. Late to the party. *sigh*
There is no doubt that the book-cover fitting must be from the pseudoepigraph Liber Eibon Ballensis, of Eibon Balle, the hyperboreal cousin of the well known Mhu-Thulanic wizard Eibon.
This is indeed substantiated by the existence of a 11th century rune master who signed his work "Raudhballir", Balle the Red. I suppose in English he would have been named Willie the Red.