Is that a trend for the future? This book may be a harbinger that marks a sea change for researchers…in that they no longer see a need to interpret an ancient culture through its own lens…or at the very least, an objective lens…but instead will modern-morphize ancient cultures by interpreting them through the ever-more-skewed lens of modern politics. With this book, scholars and researchers seem to have lost their objectivity. To say otherwise is imagination at work once more. ‘Lawful murder of’, and ‘acceptance of’, share no overlapping space on a Venn diagram. Any such bottomers were literally the bottom dregs of society enemies or slaves, and not ‘men’. It WAS the Viking’s most egregious insult…to insinuate homosexual bottoming for sex…and earned you death.
The Vikings had additional laws that made it lawful to kill someone who insulted a man in a way that implied he was used as a woman for the purposes of sex. That critically flawed ‘guess’ tainted the rest of the book for me, since the book contains other information we have not seen from other Norse scholars…then perhaps some of these other new insights are also fiction. Since they were so strict about gendered clothing, to the point of specifically making laws to prohibit it, for the author to ‘guess’ that vikings may have accepted the wholly modern idea of transgenderism is fictional hubris. There is no question these laws existed they were written about and this record is accepted by all other scholars. A man could be fined or divorced if he wore clothes that were too effeminate. If you want a good picture into the culture as well as the history, this book is immersive.īut at one point it raised a huge red flag, in that it does contradict most other scholars on some key points and most notably…it contradicts some of what the Vikings had to say about themselves in their eddas and laws.įor example, we know that Viking laws prohibited the wearing of clothing of the opposite sex. Tries to gain insight into the causes that contributed to their culture.
Wonderful read, full of insights into Viking life that not only bring their culture to life, but are more in-depth than I’ve seen before.
0 kommentar(er)
