Pictured: not overkill in the least
Side note, I would watch the hell out of a DVD special that showed the poor bastard soldier whose job it was to catch and kill the chickens.
Ragnar hears the screams and abandons his hunt to come and kick some MAJOR ass. One of my favourite details in this fight is how his leg is wounded and he actually stays wounded for the rest of the fight, limping and favouring the other side. Not many action movies/shows remember that getting hurt.. uh... hurts.
The other detail I love is how he throws the axe right into some guy's face. Mostly because a friend of mine grumbled about how BS and unrealistic it was.
To which I say, nay nay!
The Vikings were renowned for their axe-throwing skills. According to Professor Kenneth W. Harl's lecture 'The Vikings' (which is fantastic and I would recommend to ANYONE out there with interest in this subject), these guys could throw an axe up to 40 feet. With accuracy. Life is just unfair for anyone Vikings don't like, isn't it?
But is it truly accurate for Haraldson to be worried about Ragnar usurping his title? Eh.. not really. To be a Jarl, one needed to be wealthy and influential. Sure, Ragnar is becoming more and more well-liked while Haraldson loses supporters. But people still aren't going to be able to buy boats from Ragnar. He doesn't have enough land to lease to farmers who will pay him taxes. And even if all the gold from raiding made our protagonist richer, you would need the thumbs-up of the king or other Jarls. They don't mess around with the whole pseudo-caste system and two successful raids west wouldn't be enough to raise Ragnar's status to Jarl while the old one is still powerful and kicking around. Viking culture is pretty rule-heavy, it's not some sort of survival-of-the-fittest, Necromonger-esque tribe.
"You keep what you kill. After the proper rituals have been performed, laws have been observed
and permission is granted from both higher-ups and the citizens who could vote you in or out."
BUT... (and this is a pretty big 'but'. The kind Sir Mix-A-Lot would wax poetic about.) ... not all towns were run the same way. It is perfectly possible that Kattegat does things differently and succession is decided by power. It's highly unlikely... but since we don't have many sources on mid-level administration in the 8th century, it would be disingenuous to rule anything out.
Honestly, if all this were taking place, the smart thing to do would be for Jarl Haraldson to sort of adopt Ragnar into his family. Announce that he would take over on the event of the Jarl's death. Maybe promise his daughter, Thyri, to Ragnar, Rollo or Bjorn. (And not a half-assed bribe/promise like in the episode before) That way he would have Ragnar's supporters, and not worry about getting knifed in the back. Killing kin, even adopted kin, was the biggest no-no you could do.
But then again, if he acted from a place of logic and sanity, he wouldn't be our Jarl, would he?
In any case, Ragnar is terribly injured in the battle and needs to be brought to Floki's house. Floki immediately calls for ash bark, garlic and sage, and gets to work on fixing his friend.
Oooh... sorry, that's wrong. Floki might know what to do, but healing was pretty solidly a woman's job at this time. It wasn't until the Church took everything over and got rid of all the fun jobs for chicks that medicine became a male-dominated practice. Women would use herbs, runes and prayers to heal the sick and injured. There's also evidence that they would set bones and cauterize wounds, as Lagertha so wonderfully does.
Why the herbs? This is the best. They make the patient eat a bunch of smelly herbs and wait a short bit. Then the healer gets their nose right up in the wound's business and sniffs around. If she could smell the herbs, it meant something vital was punctured and different steps would have to be taken to heal.
Yeah, I hear ya, that's just nasty.
There's a pretty famous account of this happening in the Flateyjarbók, which is a beautifully long manuscript from Iceland. I have to thank the Viking Answer Lady here... I found a copy of it and had spent about an hour painstakingly translating it... only to see that she had already translated and sourced the exact passage I needed.
Thormod was a warrior who was injured with an arrow in battle. The arrow pierced near to his heart, so the healer woman prepared a concoction of herbs for him to eat. Thormod refused and gave her a ring before demanding her tongs so he could pull the arrow out himself. He did so and saw that the arrow was hooked and had brought out fatty tissue. He said, "The king has fed us well; I am fat, even at the heart-roots." Then he died because it turns out, pulling out a piece of your heart isn't very good for you.
Now we get to talk more about viking lore! Yay, lore!
Aethelstan, ever curious, asks the others how the world was created. Helga tells the old story of Ymir the giant, whose body fashioned Midgard. But it leaves out all the best parts!!
Once upon a time, there were two worlds--Muspell and Niflheim. Muspell was always boiling hot with flames dancing across the ground. Niflheim was always freezing cold with a bunch of rivers. In the middle was Ginnungagap, which was juuuust right. It was here that Ymir was born. He was a frost giant and evil. Along with him came the cow, Audumla, who licked ice from Muspell to live while Ymir drank her milk. From the sweat in Ymir's armpit came a man and a woman. One of his legs also fathered a son on the other leg. I'm not even going to try to work that one out.
While licking Muspell ice, Audumla created another man, Buri. Buri fathered Bor, who married a frost giant and had three sons: Odin, Vili and Ve.
"Hold up, dad. That makes you half what, now?"
Side note, can we never ever talk about how much slash fiction I had to wade through to get that picture. *shudder*
So back on track, Bor's kids decided that Ymir was a pretty terrible guy and killed him. Probably because he kept spawning more frost giants, but I speculate it was partially due to the leg-sex thing. Unfortunately, now they had a lot of dead giant on their hands and not a lot of living space to deal with it.
But the Norse gods didn't get where they were by not building stuff out of the corpses of their enemies.
They made the ground from Ymir's flesh and the mountains from his unbroken bones. The broken bones (as well as his teeth and jaws) became boulders. They circled this world with a sea made from his blood, using some to make lakes as well. Ymir's skull was so large that it could cover this whole world with the light coming through the cracks as the stars. Finally, they took embers from Muspell and threw them into the sky as the sun and the moon.
I was going to post an appropriate picture here, but I think I just spoiled part of Attack on Titan for myself. Also, there's more slash erotica to be had. IS NO TOPIC SAFE, INTERNET? So I'll leave this episode at that and go get some eyebleach.
Join me next time as I discuss Ship Burials, more Viking Lore and our new villain, King Aella!
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