Crystals That May Have Helped Vikings Navigate Northern Seas
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
You can in fact see the polarization of light, and can train yourself to notice it in various situations. The phenomenon is known as Haidinger's Brush (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush) and one of the easiest ways I've found to see it is to look at an LCD monitor (i'm using a very old macbook pro). Stare at a mostly-white part of the screen and tilt your head from side-to-side while maintaining your gaze at a single area on the screen. When you tilt one way, you should see a weird yellow and blue blob pointing one direction, and when you tilt the other way that blob should be shifted 90 degrees.
The effect is -super- subtle.
Well, you can be smart and brutal at the same time. Vikings had a brutal culture because they needed it for survival, as they did starve over some periods of the year without it.
Even in Spain, with a much mild climate, Romans reported local people in the mountains pillaging the valleys in Winter as they got short of food. Romans forced those people to live in the valleys and gave them land to work.
It was more like a lifestyle, to navigate the waters. Just like today some people are born next to waters and are very comfortable there. Norwegian kids sometimes get a boat as a present when they're 10-12 years old. Still today.
So it was more likely a combination of skills like using sight, sound, feel, smell, birds, crystals and whatever else they knew that wasn't written down. I recently read that in the south pacific natives were navigating by sticking their body into the water and feeling the currents.
The human has a lot more than 5 senses after all.
There's no indication the Vikings ever used sunstones in navigation, but they _could_ have done (in a very theoretical sense, because I know of no one who used it effectively in actual navigation), so the idea gets trotted out about yearly, because it's fun alternative history.
"None have ever been found at Viking archaeological sites, but a calcite crystal was discovered in the wreck of a British warship from the 1500s, indicating it might have been a tool known to advanced ocean navigators."
... but this is wild conjecture at best. None of the written sources of that time (or, in fact, later) mention the use of calcite for navigation.
"Some historical evidence such as Icelandic legends have mentioned travel under snowy skies using sunstones and a study of a Viking wreck conducted in 2002 revealed that a crystal (Icelandic spar) had been onboard that was found near other implements used for navigation."
Maybe the navigator was a hipppie and had crystals and bird feathers on her/his dashboard, probably a mini dream catcher hanging from the rear vision mirror.
I think it’s a plausible explanation for a lot of things.
Imagine future archeologists unearthing a car found in s remote location and trying to explain the crystals and bird feathers and dream catchers.
Are we supposed to believe that no one had trinkets back then.
I imagine this is one of those scenarios where people well versed in the field of archeology do an eye-roll when they read a news article pertaining to their expertise. What’s the term for that?
Also, the couple of mentions of a sunstone in the Sagas is when on land, and not for navigation.
"One medieval source in Iceland, "Rauðúlfs þáttr", mentions the sunstone as a mineral by means of which the sun could be located in an overcast and snowy sky by holding it up and noting where it emitted, reflected or transmitted light (hvar geislaði úr honum).
Sunstones are also mentioned in Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar (13th century) and in church and monastic inventories (14th–15th century) without discussing their attributes. The sunstone texts of Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar were copied to all four versions of the medieval hagiography Guðmundar saga góða."
Perhaps you are making the statement that possession and understanding of such a mineral's capabilities is not definitive proof of them actually using to for navigation? I suppose strictly speaking that is true, but the leap of imagination is very, very tiny.
So what are you actually saying and why?
Oooh, maybe I'm part of a sinister conspiracy to bring disrepute to Scandinavian history.
No, I mean simply what I say: there is no proof for this conjecture (it's certainly not worth calling a 'theory') that sunstones were used by Vikings in navigation. Yet it keeps coming back. Every time I spend some time pushing back, but I'm getting weary of it, and perhaps I should let people believe in their crystals...
As to the 'very very tiny leap of imagination', I am afraid I have to disagree. Look into something like the Bris Sextant if you want to learn more about a real, actually useful, simple device that can be used for navigation. It's fiddly as hell yet still way more practical than optical calcite.
Eh...
You realize HN is not really the primary forum for this kind of debate?
> and perhaps I should let people believe in their crystals...
Oh, you're just a crank. Edit: And then after I refreshed you added an actual comment regarding the "leap of imagination" with a vague but distinctly condescending comment about something else.