
Among the Norse Tribes: The Remarkable Account of Ibn Fadlan (1999) - Thevet
https://archive.aramcoworld.com/issue/199906/among.the.norse.tribes-the.remarkable.account.of.ibn.fadlan.htm
======
aksss
Penguin Classics has a great book containing translations of Ibn Fadlan and
other similar Arab accounts, and has a great introduction describing the Arab
world view of the time, particularly how the North was regarded.
[https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlan-Land-Darkness-
Travellers/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Ibn-Fadlan-Land-Darkness-
Travellers/dp/0140455078)

This book really torpedoed any romantic notions I had of those eras. Basically
you just had a lot of motorcycle gangs running around in the forest - imagine
Negen from TWD and you get an idea —- it would have sucked to have been alive
then. Fascinating talk of the slaving “season”, and comparison of prices for
buying a blonde-haired girl at various points along the river. Life was very
cheap and might made right. No thanks, man. Not to offend anyone, but it also
makes me appreciate the gradual changes that Christianity brought to those
forests and to European peoples in time.

~~~
contingencies
_appreciate the gradual changes that Christianity brought to those forests..._

To be fair, Christianity's position is that of chance, Europe could all just
as well have been founded on Slavic Paganism, Islam (arguably it largely is
and this is insufficiently recognized), Mongol pluralism or some similar
belief system. Any nominally centralized society capable of a rule of law and
literate record keeping would have had the same effect, if capable of gluing
together society long enough to create a surplus and decrease the risks of
increased specialization. See earlier civilizations, other parts of the world,
etc.

~~~
aksss
“What-if” speculation about history is often a fun and interesting. But it is
not history.

~~~
contingencies
All history is supposition, to some extent. _Lest men suspect your tale
untrue, keep probability in view_.

------
datameta
A fascinating excerpt: "According to Noonan, some 100,000 dirham coins, most
deposited between the years 900 and 1030, have been unearthed to date in
Sweden alone, and there are more than a thousand recorded individual hoards of
five or more coins recorded throughout Scandinavia, the Baltic countries and
Russia. In addition to inscriptions, the Muslim coins bear the year and place
of minting—vital details for modern numismatists and archeologists. One
excellent find in Uppland, Sweden contained a mixture of coins minted in
Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Isfahan and Tashkent."

------
adolph
See also Crichton's Eaters of the Dead

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7673.Eaters_of_the_Dead](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7673.Eaters_of_the_Dead)

~~~
hinkley
The screen adaptation (The 13th Warrior) is one of the better Crichton
adaptations. Banderas has top billing but he’s not the star, per se.

~~~
nkingsy
Still the all time cheesiest language switch.

Banderas sits up all night listening to them speak in another language. By
morning they’re all speaking English. When he speaks to them fluently, they’re
surprised and ask how he learned their language.

“I listened”

[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FdsCX8ccYXs](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FdsCX8ccYXs)

~~~
ComputerGuru
That reminds me of reading the original _Tarzan_ from 1912, in which Burroughs
writes of how a boy raised in the jungle with only animals for company came to
be able to read (and only later speak) English, all on his own.

Quoting for memory, after Tarzan finds some books and newspapers as a result
of someone’s previous tragedy in the jungle: “Tarzan, being of superior
intellect by virtue of being born to English parents, was able to figure out
the meaning of the symbols he found in the books and realized they were
forming words and sentences,” from which he not only learned to read English
but also devoured the books (textbooks?) and their content.

~~~
mcarmichael
The treatment in the actual text of the book is rather different, and goes
into some delightful detail concerning Tarzan's self-study program, which
begins at the age of 10 or so:

    
    
      "Among the other books were a primer, some child's readers, numerous picture books, and a great dictionary. All of these he examined, but the pictures caught his fancy most, though the strange little bugs which covered the pages where there were no pictures excited his wonder and deepest thought."
    

These are materials his parents has gathered to take to their Colonial posting
for the express purpose of educating their infant son over the next several
years; he just gets a rather late start on the program.

    
    
      "He did not accomplish it in a day, or in a week, or in a month, or in a year; but slowly, very slowly, he learned after he had grasped the possibilities which lay in those little bugs, so that by the time he was fifteen he knew the various combinations of letters which stood for every pictured figure in the little primer and in one or two of the picture books."
    

He takes several more years to piece together some of the mysteries of verbs
and modifiers... I've always found it a fascinating thought experiment about
language formation, given the era. In this context, I suppose the Hollywood
presentation of Tarzan could be considered an application of the critical
period hypothesis (had it existed at the time).

~~~
ComputerGuru
In less ethical times there have been experiments with children left to raise
themselves in contained environments to discover - among other things - how
people learn to speak, but unfortunately the experiments always ended in
disaster because the moderators were unable to devise a method whereby they
could guarantee the survival of the subjects but without influencing their
behavior.

------
stareatgoats
These norsemen were known "by the ethnonym Rus (pronounced "Roos"). The origin
of this term is obscure, and though some claim it stems from the West Finnic
name for Sweden, Ruotsi, there is little agreement." (from article)

But "according to the most prevalent theory, the name 'Rus', like the Proto-
Finnic name for Sweden (Ruotsi), is derived from an Old Norse term for "the
men who row". (from
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rus%27_people))

The ethonym is traceable in names such the eastern Swedish district of
Roslagen (from where a lot of these norsemen presumably set sail), as well as
'Rus'sia.

~~~
tldsfgiuoisdf
The name also occurs in Kievan Rus'

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#Origin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kievan_Rus%27#Origin)

------
ducaale
Extra History made a video about him recently
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSURd15qfWQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSURd15qfWQ)

------
emmelaich
I'm fascinated by reports that Muhammad had lighter skin than most of his
fellow Arabs, and had tinges of red in his hair. Also quite tall.

Possibly some Norse genes in there?

~~~
keenmaster
People in the Near East (Syria, Lebanon, etc) had genes for light skin before
most of Europe did, with the exception of Scandanavia. "Whiteness" may have
arrived in Europe in three waves, one of which came from the Anatolian farmers
that introduced farming and urban life to the continent. Those same farmers,
who were similar/near to the Syrian farmers that invented agriculture,
interbred with the continental European hunter-gatherers. So technically, a
large % of Europeans can say that they have Middle Eastern ancestors and that
they got the roots of civilization from Syria. That's without getting into the
huge gene flow that later came in from the Caucuses/Indoeuropean Yamnaya
culture.

What I found really interesting was that 10,000 BC, Britain was populated with
blue-eyed people with dark skin. They got mostly replaced by Anatolians, who
then built the Stone Henge and occupied Britain for a few thousand years.
Anatolians were then replaced by continental Europeans (who by then had been
breeding with the progeny of other Anatolians for thousands of years). At
least while the Anatolians were around, the remaining dark-skinned natives,
who were dwindling in number, resorted to inbreeding so as not to dilute their
genes. Clearly they didn't care for lighter skin.

Ya, archaeogenetics is a real trip. The field can upend our already flimsy
notions of race and the narratives that come with it. Modern sequencing
technology is yielding huge new results on a frequent basis.

~~~
throwaway894345
This sounds fascinating. Can you link to more information?

~~~
danans
Cheddar Man: DNA shows early Briton had dark skin

[https://www.bbc.com/news/science-
environment-42939192](https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-42939192)

7,000-Year-Old Human Bones Suggest New Date for Light-Skin Gene

[https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-
gatherer-g...](https://www.livescience.com/42838-european-hunter-gatherer-
genome-sequenced.html)

Ancient human genomes suggest three ancestral populations for present-day
Europeans

[https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6639](https://arxiv.org/abs/1312.6639)

Early farmers from across Europe directly descended from Neolithic Aegeans

[https://www.pnas.org/content/113/25/6886](https://www.pnas.org/content/113/25/6886)

------
subsubzero
Interesting comment:

>The men, he observed, were tattooed with dark-green figures "from fingernails
to neck.

I wonder what these tattoos represent and why they were so heavily tattooed.

~~~
082349872349872
Some wild guesses: representation would be one's identity. Maori are supposed
to have used depictions of their moko[1] as equivalents to signatures among
us, and I can imagine it would be helpful for traders to be able to describe
their agent, several months away, by their tattoos instead of relying on
personal introductions.

As to being heavily tattooed, I'd imagine it implied an elite status proof-of-
work. It takes several sessions with a cooperative artist to do a full body
tattoo, and if one "doesn't deserve" the body art, that leaves a large window
during which poseurs would be liable to retributive violence from the legit.

Then again, maybe they just enjoyed body art. For instance, I could easily
imagine a Rus tattooing a new islamic dome (albeit in green instead of
golden[2]) for every season they spent trading, far away from home.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kwIkF6LFDc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kwIkF6LFDc)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpuBgLBrhfo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpuBgLBrhfo)

------
Cthulhu_
I love original sources / historical witnesses, when it comes to both the
vikings and arabians, so much of it is muddled by entertainment and media.
That said, there's some made by historians; The Last Kingdom, books and
Netflix series, is a pretty good take on history.

Anyway for more things like this, there's Voices from the Past on youtube,
which is a guy narrating travel logs, e.g. from the first Japanese visitors to
the US. Really interesting bits in there, like how they recognize a horse and
carriage for what it is but still disassociate and need to be told how to use
it, or shock at how a hotel is fully carpeted, or funny bits where the guy
doesn't recognize an ash tray and puts the ash in a bit of paper up his sleeve
instead (consequences ensue).

~~~
contingencies
For a similar rare account I can recommend _Ennin_ , a Japanese monk who
visited Tang Dynasty China and wrote about it from ground level. Most
chronicles were official and thus missed the juicy details.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ennin)

------
FirstLvR
i love the adaptation "The 13th Warrior"... is somewhat a B movie with some
superb performances by Banderas and Vladimir Kulich

cannot imagine Buliwyf without thinking on Kulich

------
kissickas
"nabith" translates to wine. I wonder, what were they drinking?

~~~
menybuvico
Mead.

------
lonelyasacloud
It's fascinating to see how certain groups and civilizations like the Vikings
end up being acceptable, even venerated in our society despite their horrific
behaviour (by current standards at least).

For example:

\- Roman empire, slavery, crucifixion, invasions ... where to start, perhaps
400,000 deaths in the Colosseum alone
[https://darkrome.com/blog/Rome/7-bloody-colosseum-
facts](https://darkrome.com/blog/Rome/7-bloody-colosseum-facts),

\- Celts - slavery
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts#Society](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celts#Society),
human sacrifice [https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/did-the-
ancient-c...](https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/did-the-ancient-
celts-practice-human-sacrifice)

\- Spartans with their Helot's [https://allthatsinteresting.com/krypteia-
sparta](https://allthatsinteresting.com/krypteia-sparta)

\- Arab empires
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade)

\- Ottoman's -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire),
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janissary)

\- Mongol's, up to 40 million deaths [https://www.history.com/news/10-things-
you-may-not-know-abou...](https://www.history.com/news/10-things-you-may-not-
know-about-genghis-khan), sack of Baghdad
[https://www.warhistoryonline.com/medieval/the-sack-of-
baghda...](https://www.warhistoryonline.com/medieval/the-sack-of-baghdad-
in-1258.html)

Are widely acceptable in our current society.

What is about societies like the Vikings (invaders, human sacrificers and
slave traders
[https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/12/151228-vikin...](https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/12/151228-vikings-
slaves-thralls-norse-scandinavia-archaeology/)) that means they don't get
talked about in the same way that Germany's Nazi regime is? Is it politics? Or
just time? But how come some groups statues and iconography are "acceptable"
while others are not?

(sorry for the long post that's wandered off topic ;-) )

~~~
eggsmediumrare
Not sure why you're being downvoted.

~~~
tokai
Its off topic, long (because of unneeded links, instead of content), and the
argument is based on a perceived idea that Vikings are only revered. The nazi
mention makes it almost seem like the comment is angling for drama.

