I’m back from my holiday and the first photos which I need to share are of course the Northern lights ones. Yes, I saw the Lights. And where I saw them was pretty extraordinary as well. We were staying at the Muotka Wilderness lodge in Finland, and one evening we went out snow shoeing. We travelled across the deep snow, in a temperature of about minus 10 degrees, shooshing through the eerie night-time forest. We all had head torches, but…
This post is a last minute attempt to identify some important things I should know abut the places I am visiting… … especially about the food! I’m presenting the information in short form, as I only have two more sleeps before I leave. Woohoo! And so I don’t have time for finessing. I started by asking myself what each country is famous for, and I selected the following: Then I wanted to check out the food items in country which…
If you’d listened to the historians and archaeologists a couple of decades ago, they would have said that all the Viking warriors were men, and that any references to female Viking warriors was myth. It was accepted that, when more advanced methods of determination were absent or unavailable, that a grave belonged to a man it is contained weapons and to a woman if it contained keys. (Really ?) Then, in 2017 further tests were carried out on a skeleton…
If there is one thing that I have learnt in my research of Vikings and Norse history, it’s that the line between myth and reality is blurred to such an extent that we might never know which is which in some cases. Norse mythology has come to us through writings which have been dated to around the thirteenth century, notably the Poetic Edda and the Prose Edda. Both are retellings of original Norse myths in the form of sagas. The…
While researching the Viking History timeline I became amused with the names of some of the characters in history. So, I decided to gather them as I went and have presented them altogether below. Note that the dates presented below are estimates, and in some cases the birth date has been left out altogether since there is apparently no reliable source from which this can be determined. Harald Wartooth (690 – 770) was a semi-legendary King of Denmark. His mother…
Let’s start this post clarifying the different spellings. As you can probably guess, “fjord” is the Norwegian spelling and “fiord” is the English spelling, so I will standardise with the Norwegian spelling (although in earlier blogs I was probably not particularly discerning!?) The next thing I want to cover is the difference between a fiord and a sound. So, both fiords and sounds are valleys which have been flooded by water. However, fiords are formed when a glacial valley is…
Further measures were introduced from 1908 onwards; e.g. Finnish parliamentarians were required to be Finnish officers of the Imperial Russian Army, plus all Finnish civil and governmental positions were now open to Russians to apply for. Sources:
While this trip doesn’t necessarily fall into the category of being extremely remote, it is nevertheless distant. Having said that, pretty much everywhere is distant from Australia?! So let’s start with the trip itself, and share where I’m traveling to. On the map above, the trip starts in Sweden with a key to the stops presented in the table below Destination More details about the ‘how’ Stockholm, Sweden (A) First stop, after some 23 hours flying time. Argh! Copenhagen, Denmark…
This timeline started as a history of Scandinavia. Quite quickly I realised that I was far too optimistic to think that I would have the time and energy to translate the full and vibrant history of this part of the world into a blog post! It was taking me ages! And I wasn’t even at the end of the Viking era! So, I changed my plan and decided to make it a Viking History instead. This was a much better…
The “why” I am asking here has two connotations: To start with the blog question, and to introduce this new Remote series… Even before I embarked on my trip to Svalbard and Greenland, I had started the planning for this next one. I knew that we are currently in a period of exceptional solar flare activity which is ideal for viewing the northern. And so, I felt some pressure to take advantage of this and venture back north. Catching a…