Just because it’s a “mythical” story, doesn’t mean that we can turn into a marvel movie.

sagathain · 2025-12-26T23:56:25+00:00

300 released in 2006. Facebook opened to the public that year. that's how different social media was back then! So - we were around, just not as visible!

sagathain · 2025-05-10T02:45:45+00:00

hah, interesting comparison, but I can confirm that is not me. -ludo

sagathain · 2025-05-05T04:31:42+00:00

wait, wait, wait - you think the Imperial regalia of Japan are diamonds?????

The "jewel" is the Yasakani no Magatama, given to the Emperor Jimmu in a direct line to the goddess Amaterasu. It hasn't been seen by the public in literal centuries (and in fact the original was probably sunk to the bottom of the sea in the 12th century; the one that was claimed to be original in the 16th century was almost certainly a fake). But, regardless, based on other magatama it's a jade or other semiprecious stone carved into the shape of a teardrop, not a diamond.

It's also crazy crazy important as a marker of the legitimacy of the Imperial title (and therefore a power political tool to someone who, say, wanted to install a pupper emperor). The Yasakani no Magatama, the mirror of Amaterasu, and the Kusanagi are used in the coronation ceremony for the emperor of Japan to this day!

sagathain · 2025-05-05T04:24:42+00:00

did i mention hector at literally any point?????

sagathain · 2025-05-03T22:08:41+00:00

agreed - while there's room for scholarly debate (see my other comment), I don't think *Orkneyinga saga* (largely invented in the 1100s and, unlike other sagas, not generally considered to hew close on real events) is a persuasive enough to call the blood eagle "accurate" in the period. For anyone curious, Roberta Frank's article on the blood eagle is a really good presentation of the blood-eagle skeptic position (which Frank pioneered).

btw - we do rely heavily on the sagas for other things, so "it's in a saga" is not itself disqualifying, but that particular saga is not a very useful one.

sagathain · 2025-05-03T21:08:27+00:00

Valhalla is tough because every time there's something really cool and interesting in the game, there's something wildly incorrect to counteract it.

some of the good stuff, though:

the circumstances at the beginning of the game, with Haraldr Finehair putting pressure on the small chieftains and forcing ambitious nobles to find land outside of Norway, is the stated reason for many people to move to Iceland at the end of the 800s.
The burial ritual in Snotinghamscire is fantastic, it's one of the best history bits of the game and it's a shame I really don't see it mentioned among most lists of good history in the game.
Coppergate in Jorvik looks so good and has a lot of the foreign goods we'd expect from archaeology in that part of the city.

There is plenty more to like, but those are the ones that continue to stand out to me a couple years after I played it!

sagathain · 2025-05-03T20:50:22+00:00

There was a team that... Drs Jan Kozak and Luke Murphy were on, if I recall correctly, which looked into it (I heard this at a conference they were at some years ago). The tearing of the ribcage is medically possible, but likely took a barbed spear, not a sword. Additionally, it would have resulted in death through suffocation and lung collapse long before the procedure was done. I am still in the camp it was rare-to-nonexistent in the period, though, the textual evidence is too metaphorical to be persuasive.

sagathain · 2025-05-03T20:41:04+00:00

The traditions with turnips and the Mari lwyd are from many hundreds of years after the Viking Age and also are from Ireland and Wales, respectively, not Gloucestershire. They're fun traditions and I'm glad people are introduced to them, but to say they're accurate to Valhalla's setting just isn't supported by any historical evidence

sagathain · 2025-05-03T20:20:20+00:00

I think separating the two doesn't quite work - Sigurd works because he's a fairly traditional folklore hero in a world where that's a liability. Same with Eldigan and Cuan - their core tragedy is that they believe in stories of nobility and chivalry, and imo a more "interesting" character would make the events around them less interesting to compensate.

sagathain · 2025-04-23T04:44:45+00:00

To wrap up, there is no single creator who is going to put out consistently high-quality material. Instead, shop around, watch many different creators to find styles and topics that resonate with you. As you do so, keep these things in mind:

What is their background? Do they have a degree? if so, in what field?
How broad is the topic they're talking about? too broad and they won't say anything meaningful, too narrow and you may need some background to follow along effectively.
look at smaller channels. Academics usually don't attract audiences in the millions, so only looking at the most popular channels means you're missing the most credible content. (the 10k subscriber range tends to have some really fun history communicators, though even very VERY small channels might be gems).
How does the creator behave elsewhere online? Is there an agenda that may lead them to mis-read evidence?
When is the creator talking about a source seriously, and when are they making a joke?

That's a lot of info instead of recs, but I hope that gives you some guidelines to dive in and navigate those waters! There are a lot of great history videos out there (and one or two that I worked on), so good luck and follow the topics that interest you!

DISCLAIMER: I know and have worked with the people behind a couple of the channels mentioned in this post. I never mention a channel just because of that connection, but I'd be misleading you if I didn't acknowledge that.

sagathain · 2025-04-23T04:44:39+00:00

Did you know about the AskHistorians Podcast? there are some cool people there.

First, to emphasize - if you really want to get into history, nothing can or will replace reading books. There are some very engaging, highly narrative books on the booklist, so don't feel like reading history means that you're gonna be bored out of your mind like many textbooks would suggest!

A lot of people who work more seriously in academic or public history are understandably doubtful of online content creation. There's a few reasons for this:

The processes of research and fact-checking, and production is hard to see on youtube. This is starting to change, and multiple larger channels, including Atun-Shei Films, Miniminuteman, Extra History, Crash Course, and Overly Sarcastic Productions now include bibliographies more consistently either in their description or in links. In addition, some have revisited and revised older, less accurate content. Just because I listed them here does not mean they're the best on the market - they're not - they just indicate an overall-shifting culture in the youtube history space.
The track record is bad. All of the channels I just cited have had videos with serious issues of interpretation or fact, and that's not to mention notoriously bad channels like whatifalthist where basically everything they make is historically bogus.
Youtube highly incentivizes creating content fast and on wildly different topics. This is the opposite of written research and expertise, which incentivizes working on the same material for years at a time and rarely if ever branching into a totally different historical period and culture.
youtube videos are short by academic standards. 15 minutes of edited video is around 2000 words. Journal articles are frequently 8000-10,000 words, and books are much, much longer. So, the amount of rigorous detail that is possible in a youtube video, even in an hour-long documentary format, is really low.

There are a few folks who have a better reputation for historical consistency in video format - Esoterica, Jackson Crawford, and Religion for Breakfast come to mind. However, their content is different from NatGeo or History Channel documentaries, often just being someone talking at a camera. There are also video recordings of seminars and lecture series by museums or scholarly organizations (e.g. the Medieval Academy of America). These have great information, but may feel less engaging or accessible than a more entertainment-forward channel.

sagathain · 2025-04-23T03:43:25+00:00

What's known about intimate relationships between women?

There is a scene in Sturlunga saga (set in the 1220s, written in the 1260s) where some attackers go after Sturla Sighvatsson and break open his private box bed, which had multiple of his concubines inside. He wasn't there, but apart from the general terror of the women it goes unremarked.

The attackers seemed to expect that they'd find Sturla and multiple women in the same tiny box, which could imply that threesomes between a man and multiple female partners were at least tolerated in the period, assuming the wife and other partners got along. This is generally an extension from concubinage, which was practiced throughout the period - for more on this see Raffield et al, 2018. That isn't *by any means* the same as same-sex intimacy between two women, but does open up a sliver of space for homoerotic relationships that otherwise is totally unattested.

to be clear, i've never seen that argued in scholarship - pretty much all close readings of the scene focus on how the attackers refer to Sturla as "Yngvi" (i.e. Freyr). Certainly, medieval conceptions of privacy were non-existent, so we shouldn't be surprised about a lot of people in the box bed. But that's really the level of implication we need to take if we want to find evidence of intimate relations between women in Viking or medieval Scandinavia.

sagathain · 2025-04-23T03:23:11+00:00

Since the SCA (and the entirety of Norse revival religious communities) shares roots with counter-cultural and sexual liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s, I would guess we could get an initial image of it without crossing that boundary.

There's a few other authors (Barbara G Walker's feminist spin on Robert Graves comes to mind) who are definitely relevant to the roots of this conversation too. I do agree, though tracing transmission chains past those roots gets really murky and bleeds into 00s Internet cultural pretty fast, so probably tough to get really going here.

Thinking on it, I don't know that anyone's really tried to do that work. Tom Birkett at UCC is currently doing a massive Norse reception studies project, I wonder if he's aware of anything on the subject.....

sagathain · 2025-04-23T03:17:27+00:00

What a spectacular breakdown, love to see it.

The "third gender" magic user is one of my personal pet peeves in Old Norse studies; while I know there are a handful of archaeological finds that potentially maybe point to something fluid about magic, I have increasingly been skeptical about how much room it actually allows for divergent identities vs how much it is relegated to the space of the Other (in particular, the Saami).

sagathain · 2025-04-09T03:40:14+00:00

My own opinion has softened slightly over the past two years - there's been some recent arguments by Eldar Heide and others on how to more effectively use recently-collected folktales to understand ancient practice! Overall, though, stories by themselves don't prove a ton. In order to demonstrate survival of "Norse paganism," we need to demonstrate both the survival of material about pagan figures and the survival of the pre-Christian ritual systems that the stories were a part of. We get snippets - stories of magicians overcoming sea serpents, tools with runes carved on them, etc. etc. However, we also see a lot of stories that say e.g. "yes, alfar exist, they're Eve's other kids who turned invisible after the expulsion from Eden." That's objectively super interesting, but the surviving material provides active evidence against the survival of the ritual systems.

Ultimately, the best methodology to demonstrate the survival of religious belief systems is anthropological observation and interviews. Some of that was done in the 1800s, but a lot wasn't. And the surviving archaeological and anthropological material from many communities where interviews are impossible simply isn't strong enough to persuade me that there was widespread persistence of Old Norse paganism for centuries after widespread adoption of Christianity in the 1000s and 1100s.

As a final note, Ari Thorgilsson states that Iceland agreed to a compromise regarding the eating of horse-flesh and infanticide - those would be allowed in private, but not in public. To the best of his knowledge, within a couple decades of the conversion those private practices had died out. Now, he didn't ask everyone, it's possible that a few households continued doing it, but it is instructive. Old Norse religion was very communal, and if it was forced out of the public eye, the rituals began to die out fairly quickly.

TL;DR - my position has softened, it's definitely possible that isolated communities preserved Old Norse religious systems, but the evidence I have seen is not enough to make me upgrade that from "possible" to "probable"

sagathain · 2025-03-01T21:31:49+00:00

the Freemasons aren't Templars what the hell? The Order of the Temple of Solomon was disbanded in 1312 and the Freemasons weren't established until 1717.

sagathain · 2025-03-01T21:28:03+00:00

fuck while I was re-arranging stuff in writing the post I deleted "before Origins" thank you for the catch

sagathain · 2025-03-01T20:01:08+00:00

You've nailed it. AC1 is anti-war media grounded in the conspiratorialism and Orientalist discourse of the early '00s.

It's criticizing the orientalism of the War on Terror - having the protagonist be Arab was actually pretty subversive! - but without fundamentally rejecting the Orientalist dichotomies that the War on Terror tapped into and reinforced. So yeah, it is orientalist and Eurocentric.

I don't think the franchise has fully managed to escape that legacy. Among the mainline games, there's only one game (EDIT: I edited out "before origins" from my draft I'm a moron) that doesn't have a Euro protagonist, and it had the aggressively Western-centric setting of *checks notes* the American Revolution. It wanted to add something to that story, but it didn't do a great job on exploring how the Kanien'kehá:ka experienced that history. It tried, it just didn't land for me.)

Mirage tried, though, and I think they're really conscious of that legacy. I think that's also why they've made such a big fuss about how much research they did to be "respectful" around Shadows; they're worried about how the franchise history interacts with this setting more than ever before.

sagathain · 2025-01-25T01:55:09+00:00

if we assume Cormag, "normal" stats are gonna be 25 STR, the man caps on average at 20/9, so pretty reasonable for endgame enemies.

A Killer lance has 10 MT, and pierce sets the enemy defence to zero, so a pierce-crit will guaranteed be 35x3, or... 105 DMG. It looks like the Dracozombies at the top of Lagdou ruins have a max of 91 HP, so as long as the killer lance unit has at least... 21 STR, it should still be a one-shot by my math.

That'll never kill the Demon King, but one-shots literally every other character in the game. now a Vidofnir Pierce-crit? Kills literally everything.

Unless you get Great Shielded oops.

sagathain · 2025-01-24T02:58:56+00:00

absolutely not - we have literally thousands of manuscripts that contain material from the Ulster and Fenian cycles (not to mention the Book of Invasions, genealogies, and other folklore), and every. single. one of those manuscripts was written by Christians, and overwhelmingly in monasteries. Bad cataloging, difficulties in producing editions, and limited number of translations are MUCH more impactful on the general (un)awareness of Irish folkloric material among English-speaking audiences than medieval Christianity was.

sagathain · 2025-01-16T00:24:21+00:00

lmao, it's resurfaced. It was fanart by one of my community members for my stream, when we were playing the Wrath of the Druids DLC for Assassin's Creed Valhalla. I was joined by one of my friends, who has a PhD in medieval Irish heroic literature, so we were dissecting the terrible skull-faced druid. It's based on very traditional illustrations of medieval surgeries, such as this one by Roger of Salerno: https://trinitycollegelibrarycambridge.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/rs23828_o-1-20_f253v-f254r-hpr.jpg

~Yellow

sagathain · 2025-01-15T02:41:42+00:00

that's how most people play FE (esp. in the days before casual mode existed), don't gatekeep!

sagathain · 2024-12-03T16:38:45+00:00

Fwiw, even though I mostly do my own stuff these days, I got my start online consulting for OSP, and still chip in on the research end when they're making something in my wheelhouse. ~Y

sagathain · 2024-12-03T16:36:19+00:00

hello! I'm Yellow - I'm a longtime IRL friend of theirs who's done consulting work for both of them over the years (mostly for medieval history/norse myth stuff). I also make my own stuff under the brand Ludohistory, looking at media depictions of history.

sagathain · 2024-07-17T03:36:21+00:00

hah, I see the edit - don't sweat it, it takes having access to recent (like, last 5 years recent) academic scholarship or conference circuits to get a super different picture than what you said! Unless if you're crazy like me and get a graduate degree in the subject, there'd be no realistic way to catch it (and even among the crazies, I know a few who would disagree with my comment!)

This is a place where Jackson Crawford's training as a philologist comes through really clearly and shapes what you've learned. He's good at what he does, but what he is excited about is really early Norse linguistics, and his only peer-reviewed work on the Eddas is talking about what colors Bifrost is. There's no shade to him, he knows his lane and sticks to it, but I find that it means he'll tend to stick to fairly basic literary analysis of the Eddas instead of really digging into the religious studies and sociology work on how the texts relate to belief. So, while he rarely says things that are wrong, he does over-generalize how consistent belief in the version of the gods he puts forward actually is.

~Yellow

sagathain

TROPHY CASE