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V. Illych L. posted:diet and varied exercise, i think is the consensus Again, it's not like the Irish, say, didn't have a long habit of stabbing each other.
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May 22, 2015 22:19
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HEY GAL posted:they said they were a mid thirties white nerd man with a beard and libertarian tendencies, and that could be any of us itt except the germans, the scandinavians, and me Rude. I'm a lapsed libertarian.
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May 22, 2015 22:22
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the JJ posted:Again, it's not like the Irish, say, didn't have a long habit of stabbing each other. I played a grand total of one game of Crusader Kings (at a friend's place since I don't really care about Paradox games enough to get any). I started in Ireland. Let in never be said there's someone more stabby than the Irish. I burnt the Norselands to a crisp. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to let the Irish rob each-other's churches for an amount of money much greater than the income of those churches? My mercenary armies Viking-d the Vikings.
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May 22, 2015 22:22
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my dad posted:I played a grand total of one game of Crusader Kings (at a friend's place since I don't really care about Paradox games enough to get any). I started in Ireland. Let in never be said there's someone more stabby than the Irish. I burnt the Norselands to a crisp. Seriously, who thought it was a good idea to let the Irish rob each-other's churches for an amount of money much greater than the income of those churches? My mercenary armies Viking-d the Vikings. All that sounds perfectly normal for most anywhere in that game, really. CK2 encourages you to act like a Disney villain and rewards you accordingly. Though there is one thing you can do that makes even the game call you a bastard, and it's not the sexual slavery.
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May 22, 2015 22:27
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P-Mack posted:The "pound" in this case was the Chinese jin so the weight was actually even worse, about 5.4 kg. Note that these swords were designed for slaying demons, so numerology would naturally take precedence over ergonomics when determining dimensions. I'm going to picture it looking like Cloud's... swordy thing from FF7 and you can't convince me otherwise. V. Illych L. posted:in reality, of course, most vikings didn't use swords because swords were expensive and also not as good for their style of warfare as e.g. bearded axes I assume bearded axes means something different than "the Vikings put literal beards on their war axes". Which admittedly is just about the most Viking thing possible. Vincent Van Goatse fucked around with this message at 22:30 on May 22, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 22:28
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the JJ posted:Again, it's not like the Irish, say, didn't have a long habit of stabbing each other. yeah, sure i'm not saying that the vikings were supermen or anything, but they did have a culture which tended to breed fairly formidable and vicious warriors, and lots of things factor into this, from the purely cultural (religion etc) to the absolutely material (diet, forms of exercise) to the combination (the political system, such as it were)
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May 22, 2015 22:32
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Cythereal posted:Though there is one thing you can do that makes even the game call you a bastard, and it's not the sexual slavery. Being a child of unmarried parents? 
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May 22, 2015 22:33
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I'm going to picture it looking like Cloud's... swordy thing from FF7 and you can't convince me otherwise. a bearded axe is a battle-axe forged with/as a hook so you can pull down the other guy's shield so your mate can knife him or w/e
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May 22, 2015 22:33
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HEY GAL posted:they said they were a mid thirties white nerd man with a beard and libertarian tendencies, and that could be any of us itt except the germans, the scandinavians, and me  I have no beard or libertarian tendencies. V. Illych L. posted:a bearded axe is a battle-axe forged with a hook so you can pull down the other guy's shield so your mate can knife him or w/e You have no idea how disappointed that makes me.
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May 22, 2015 22:33
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Cythereal posted:All that sounds perfectly normal for most anywhere in that game, really. CK2 encourages you to act like a Disney villain and rewards you accordingly. Though there is one thing you can do that makes even the game call you a bastard, and it's not the sexual slavery. Be born to an unmarried couple? ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:I assume bearded axes means something different than "the Vikings put literal beards on their war axes". Which admittedly is just about the most Viking thing possible. Sorry. It just means an extension on the head to make it longer with a bit less weight. 
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May 22, 2015 22:33
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I'm not nearly ruthless enough to play CK2 correctly 
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May 22, 2015 22:37
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ALL-PRO SEXMAN posted:
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May 22, 2015 22:45
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HEY GAL posted:and i have no libertarian tendencies What is your beard like though?
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May 22, 2015 22:51
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Hypha posted:What is your beard like though? luxurious, magnificent
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May 22, 2015 22:55
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fake
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May 22, 2015 22:55
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my dad posted:fake Maybe they did beard "scalping" in the early modern era?
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May 22, 2015 22:59
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this is me irl
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May 22, 2015 23:00
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HEY GAL posted:this is me irl Based on your description, I think you have mustache and beard confused.
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May 22, 2015 23:06
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HEY GAL posted:this is me irl other things in the wallace collection.jpeg wallace collection is super close to where I live I've seen that painting so many times lol
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May 22, 2015 23:07
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my dad posted:My brother visited Vienna, and he tells me most of the armors in a museum he visited were really drat short, though. I heard that was mostly due to armors on museum display are often not set up in a manner that would be more appropriate for how they would be worn, making them a bit more stocky.
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May 22, 2015 23:12
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Disinterested posted:other things in the wallace collection.jpeg 17th century best century
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May 22, 2015 23:14
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Cythereal posted:All that sounds perfectly normal for most anywhere in that game, really. CK2 encourages you to act like a Disney villain and rewards you accordingly. Though there is one thing you can do that makes even the game call you a bastard, and it's not the sexual slavery. The guy who most seemed to be playing CK2 irl ended up being labelled "Charles the Bad" and ended up being burned in a hilarious bedchamber accident. If only he had fallen off a balcony or something....
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May 22, 2015 23:15
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sullat posted:The guy who most seemed to be playing CK2 irl ended up being labelled "Charles the Bad" and ended up being burned in a hilarious bedchamber accident. If only he had fallen off a balcony or something.... My favorite actual historical death is that of Lord Franceso II of Lesbos. A scorpion got into his bedroom, and he screamed for help. The weight of a bajillion servants and guards running in collapsed the room, and he was the only one who got killed. The scorpion escaped.
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May 22, 2015 23:20
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V. Illych L. posted:yeah, sure I'd argue it had a lot more to do with the fact that your typical 'viking' as warrior in myth is either a. literally a viking i.e. a raider or b. ye olde Norman-type who ended up a top a feudal system in the warrior-aristocrat role since they were descended from aforementioned raiders and were the ones who came out on top. So I think you're getting this super-warrior myth because they guys who got remembered are, perhaps, kinda selected for in that class of gently caress-you-in-the-face and were, generally, either rolling in on people unprepared for war at that particular moment or riding, quite litereally atop a feudal-warrior system that, in that particular moment, happened to really reward being top dog with horses and poo poo, but by that time you're removed from that whole Scandinavian homeland thing. The Saxons and Irish had equally long histories of quarelling and feuding and, despite not being Aryan ubermench did pretty well at kicking the vikings out once they tried to actually settle in for good.
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May 22, 2015 23:22
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HEY GAL posted:they said they were a mid thirties white nerd man with a beard and libertarian tendencies, and that could be any of us itt except the germans, the scandinavians, and me I wish I could grow a beard that didn't look like total poo poo
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May 22, 2015 23:24
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HEY GAL posted:they said they were a mid thirties white nerd man with a beard and libertarian tendencies, and that could be any of us itt except the germans, the scandinavians, and me Hey man, thats unfair, god dammit I shave every morning and twice in the afternoon. it turns out a katana is not a really great razor, but what am I gonna do? I paid for it, might as well use it
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May 22, 2015 23:32
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Keldoclock posted:Hey man, thats unfair, god dammit I shave every morning and twice in the afternoon. My friend in the army had to do this when he was at military academy because he's a hairy mofo.
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May 22, 2015 23:47
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the JJ posted:I'd argue it had a lot more to do with the fact that your typical 'viking' as warrior in myth is either a. literally a viking i.e. a raider or b. ye olde Norman-type who ended up a top a feudal system in the warrior-aristocrat role since they were descended from aforementioned raiders and were the ones who came out on top. So I think you're getting this super-warrior myth because they guys who got remembered are, perhaps, kinda selected for in that class of gently caress-you-in-the-face and were, generally, either rolling in on people unprepared for war at that particular moment or riding, quite litereally atop a feudal-warrior system that, in that particular moment, happened to really reward being top dog with horses and poo poo, but by that time you're removed from that whole Scandinavian homeland thing. yeah but the raiding vikings were generally just blokes who went out to raid according to everything we know again, a trained warrior was likely to be at least as solid as a viking, but trained warriors were rare and everyone in those societies was a viking. once they settle into less lovely regions, they stop having the society and doing the things that make them formidable i think you're reading something from my posts that isn't [meant to be] there, i'm not arguing that they were somehow inherently better or that any viking was better at fighting than any saxon or w/e, i'm just saying that norse society at the time made everyone a decent fighter in a way that more sedentary or purely agricultural societies just didn't way i see it you could be saying two things here: 1) that warrior societies don't exist historically or 2) that viking-era scandinavian society wasn't a warrior society, and i don't see how either of these claims fits with historical evidence V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 23:52 on May 22, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 23:48
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HEY GAL posted:The Vikings were probably better nourished than people in more dense populations, which would have allowed them to get bigger? I dunno. Both of those sides would have been way better nourished than early modern people though; I saw Eugene of Savoy's buff coat in a museum in Vienna and I'm about his height but my shoulders are like, a quarter again as broad. If there was a difference in exposure to illness and disease it could have played a part too, incidence of childhood illness has a big impact on adult height. It's one reason Europeans have surpassed Americans in stature, their commie health care breeds bigger bodies. This whole discussion is rather silly and poorly supported anyway edit: I went ahead and looked up estimates of typical heights for Vikings and non-vikings, summarized in this source: http://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/6645917.pdf 10-11th C Sweden 176.0 cm 9-11th C Iceland 172.3 cm 12th C Norway 170.2 12th C Britain 168.4 13th C Sweden 174.3 Curious if there's actually evidence vikings were especially burly, in addition to being a few cm taller than the average Brit. Probably safe to assume not. Squalid fucked around with this message at 00:15 on May 23, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 23:55
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V. Illych L. posted:yeah but the raiding vikings were generally just blokes who went out to raid according to everything we know Except that not everyone was a viking and plenty of other societies (again, Irish, Saxon, etc.) had similar traditions of going out and loving with each other and were plenty good at that. The viking's advantage was that they came out of nowhere at times and places of their choosing and had whole boats of dudes up and ready while their victims were going about their business. Yeah, going viking was a thing many (cetainly not all) Scandies did at the time but cattle raiding (or defending cattle raids, or feuding, or what have you) was an equally common passtime in many places. E: In response to your edit, I'm disputing that they were uniquely a 'warrior society'* and that this, rather than, say, the fact that they got to pick and choose where and when they fought led to their successes, which is how you phrased it. Well, that and they excersized more(?) and ate better (sometimes). *Nearly every society is a warrior society since warrior societies tend to kill non-warrior societies the JJ fucked around with this message at 00:01 on May 23, 2015 |
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May 22, 2015 23:55
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the JJ posted:Except that not everyone was a viking and plenty of other societies (again, Irish, Saxon, etc.) had similar traditions of going out and loving with each other and were plenty good at that. The viking's advantage was that they came out of nowhere at times and places of their choosing and had whole boats of dudes up and ready while their victims were going about their business. Yeah, going viking was a thing many (cetainly not all) Scandies did at the time but cattle raiding (or defending cattle raids, or feuding, or what have you) was an equally common passtime in many places. p. much anyone went viking. i have never read anything that indicates anything else than going viking being a completely normal thing for your average coastal peasant/fisherman to do. there's even recorded instances of them dumping off people at the faeroe islands because it turned out they got seasick easily, which isn't really something you do to your picked warriors i agree that surprise was their main advantage, and the main reason that those raids were so successful, but there is a reason why the norse conquests happened, and i see no other simple explanation for it than norse society being a particularly warlike one in this period. it certainly wasn't social cohesion or strength of numbers that did this, and it's also not because the french/sicilans/slavs/saxons/whoever were genetically or religiously inferior
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May 23, 2015 00:04
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the dynamic i'm picturing is basically similar to the dynamic of the "barbarian hordes" in the forms of various steppe tribes that would every so often emerge from asia and completely clown their opposition, only with boats instead of horses
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May 23, 2015 00:07
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the JJ posted:Except that not everyone was a viking and plenty of other societies (again, Irish, Saxon, etc.) had similar traditions of going out and loving with each other and were plenty good at that. The viking's advantage was that they came out of nowhere at times and places of their choosing and had whole boats of dudes up and ready while their victims were going about their business. Yeah, going viking was a thing many (cetainly not all) Scandies did at the time but cattle raiding (or defending cattle raids, or feuding, or what have you) was an equally common passtime in many places. That was my understanding as well - at least in the early Middle Ages it was one thing to defend yourself against raids from "those assholes on the other side of the hill wot stole our cattle after we looted their storehouse" and another thing when absolute strangers appeared out of nowhere and did the exact same thing. Local threats were understood, could be watched, and you had a reasonable heads up when the neighbors were going to get drunk and swing by at night, so you could gather your fyrds and make sure they had a warm welcome. The only things that set the Norse apart were their above average skill with shipbuilding and navigation, which let them reach out and raid people a lot further away with the element of surprise. Over time, the success of the viking way of business meant that the Norse ended up having more of an 'adventuring' warrior tradition which at least gave them more historical exposure as invaders, mercenaries, etc, although we're talking about the late stage Viking period at that point. It's still not certain that they were actually overall 'better' warriors than say the Franks, Anglo-Saxons, or other European cultures. There's also a bit of a side factor that if you're raiding your local neighbors there's usually cultural norms in place to limit the amount of damage and violence inflicted - after all, those assholes are cousins and you might need their help one day to gang up on those bigger assholes that live down by the swamp. Because the Norse were raiding non-neighbors outside their local culture there was nothing to prevent them from going all out, since it's not like they were likely to ever see their victims again, and the certainly didn't have to worry about revenge raids on their own settlements.
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May 23, 2015 00:19
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V. Illych L. posted:p. much anyone went viking. i have never read anything that indicates anything else than going viking being a completely normal thing for your average coastal peasant/fisherman to do. there's even recorded instances of them dumping off people at the faeroe islands because it turned out they got seasick easily, which isn't really something you do to your picked warriors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyrd Note the three things no man is exempt from, there. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_warfare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%A1in_B%C3%B3_C%C3%BAailnge http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_Ireland#Warfare Note, though they do settle in these areas, eventually they get their asses kicked. A lot of norsemen went raiding. Mostly they stabbed people who weren't ready and in particularly they liked fighting monks, who, yes, didn't do a whole lot of fighting. And they got Normandy after they lost http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Saint-Clair-sur-Epte. Admittedly, after being tremendous pains in the rear end. "I have an idea of history formed by pop culture and I can't think of any other explanation" isn't great history work. Plenty places in the post-Roman world had plenty of warring going on and you're not going to see professional armies until, like, Hegal's age. Yeah, warrior-aristocrats do become more of a thing, but note, they do so by supplanting the every-man-a-soldier model.
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May 23, 2015 00:28
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Terrifying Effigies posted:That was my understanding as well - at least in the early Middle Ages it was one thing to defend yourself against raids from "those assholes on the other side of the hill wot stole our cattle after we looted their storehouse" and another thing when absolute strangers appeared out of nowhere and did the exact same thing. Local threats were understood, could be watched, and you had a reasonable heads up when the neighbors were going to get drunk and swing by at night, so you could gather your fyrds and make sure they had a warm welcome. The only things that set the Norse apart were their above average skill with shipbuilding and navigation, which let them reach out and raid people a lot further away with the element of surprise. See, you're being articulate where I'm not. Various peoples (the Irish, in particular) also did some of that small boat raiding for a while.
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May 23, 2015 00:34
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my dad posted:Being a child of unmarried parents? Fair play, but if you're part of the Byzantines you can order your prisoners blinded or castrated. Doing the latter to a child makes the game call you out on being a particularly unpleasant individual.
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May 23, 2015 00:40
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In general how accurate is the TV show "Vikings?"
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May 23, 2015 00:43
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HEY GAL posted:they said they were a mid thirties white nerd man with a beard and libertarian tendencies, and that could be any of us itt except the germans, the scandinavians, and me I'm a 20 something socialist thank you very much. 
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May 23, 2015 00:48
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Kanine posted:In general how accurate is the TV show "Vikings?" Not very.
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May 23, 2015 00:52
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haha jesus you're ornery about this. my main sources are (as i've been perfectly open about) the sagas and the way they portray scandinavian society of the time, supplemented by history books, admittedly mostly on the accessible end of the scale look, my thesis was: the vikings were a Warrior Culture (tm) in conjunction to being forced into a lifestyle remarkably well suited to making decent fighters - notably, the combination of fishing, foraging, hunting and agriculture that you found in scandinavia to a greater degree than e.g. england making for relatively well-fed (relatively!) and well-trained men. this, you may note, is entirely consistent with their "edge" withering away once they settle down and/or the locals get their act together, because that lifestyle is very particular to surviving the scandinavian coastal landscape with the technology available at the time now, you're countering this by saying "yes, but everyone was a fighting all the time and lol exercise go watch a movie or something you terrible hitlerite you" which is a somewhat uncourteous mode of argument and, more importantly, doesn't actually address anything i've been saying beyond flatly denying it or assigning it to irrelevance the relative renown of norse warriors in the relatively brief time span between lindisfarne and stanford bridge is a matter of historical record. part of this is based on the legend of raiders, which can be explained mainly by boats, but what about the rest of them? the varangians, the easterners, the ones that actually did conquer large parts of the established realms of their time - was that simply aggression? is aggression and willingness to successfully invade very diverse places not a sign of a warrior culture? the only thing you've countered in your post there is a notion that i never espoused, i.e. that the vikings were somehow invincible
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May 23, 2015 00:54
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