62
votes
Accepted
Is rye bread Turkish?
Q Is rye bread Turkish?
Are Swedes Africans?
If you find the 'African Swedes' question senseless, then you see the level of absurdity the ad is playing on. If you answer 'Swedes are Africans' in the ...
- 80k
40
votes
Is rye bread Turkish?
Well rye itself (the grain) appears to have first been domesticated in Anatolia, around 6,500 BC. So of course Neolithic people there (modern Turkey) would have been the first to make rye bread.*
As ...
- 114k
34
votes
Accepted
Did early northern Europeans drink alcohol?
Yes.
Residue analysis has found chemical signatures consistent with the presence of honey, and organic compounds associated with fermentation suggesting that mead was being drunk by the late ...
- 76.9k
19
votes
Why were Germanic languages able to spread over much of northern Europe after 500BC? Did they mostly replace Celtic?
I'm seeing two different questions to address in here: What happened to the Celts, and Where did all these Germanics come from?
What happened to the Celts? They got culturally absorbed by the Romans.
...
- 114k
13
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What was the relationship between Angles, Saxons, and Jutes; and the Vikings?
The short answer is we're not sure.
When the Roman State was in decline and had to withdraw from England, (coincidentally?) Germanic tribal power was on the increase. That left a power vacuum in ...
- 114k
12
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What were medieval, Viking-Era, Scandinavian laws regarding rape?
My thesis is the one sempaiscuba♦ suggested. Your question is far more complex than one might think on first glance. In the short, it varies from place to place and it depends on where the crime was ...
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11
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What were medieval, Viking-Era, Scandinavian laws regarding rape?
As far as I'm aware, the law codes of Norse communities in the Viking-Age weren't written down, but were rather memorised by "law-givers". These gradually became more-or-less standardised by the end ...
- 76.9k
10
votes
Did early northern Europeans drink alcohol?
Mead was the alcoholic drink of northern Europe, particularly "Celtic" northern Europe, e.g. the British Isles and northern France. It also figures prominently in the literature of the Scandinavians. ...
- 104k
9
votes
Accepted
Why did Danish people not "connect" with neighbor nations until Viking Age?
Note: I'm taking "Danish people" to mean people that lived in Denmark.
they could have attacked what is now Germany, Poland, Belgium, Holland and even Lithuania and France, traveling near the coast,...
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8
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Insect consumption in late middle-ages in the Northern Europe
The evidence for this is overall scarce, given the low status of peasant food and most of the animals involved in such a frame, even though their sheer number of species to consider is extremely vast.
...
- 80k
7
votes
Accepted
Is there any historical evidence of a significant population of middle eastern people in iron age Northern Germany/Southern Scandinavia?
This 'early semitic influence on Germanic languages' is a 'popular' speculation. That is popular with very few scholars, linguists, but apparently a good seller.
After listing a few similarities ...
- 80k
6
votes
Why were the Scandinavians not as expansive as other Europeans in global colonization?
Short Answer:
There was a sum of factors:
War
Weather
Population
Willingness
Long Answer:
Population, as highlighted in the comments, is part of the answer. But only a part, because the Netherlands ...
- 5,893
6
votes
Accepted
When were weapons banned at the Thing assemblies in Norway?
What exactly happened at early things is sparsely recorded, if not to say for really earlier times wholly non-existent as traditional sources. Without written sources, things get complicated.
But we ...
- 80k
5
votes
What were medieval, Viking-Era, Scandinavian laws regarding rape?
Most countries' laws distinguished between "citizens" and "others," such as foreigners, or domestically held slaves. So what the Vikings considered "legal" when perpetrated against foreigners abroad ...
- 104k
4
votes
Accepted
Where is this map of Scandinavia (Nicolaus Germanus, 1467)
A version or very similar map can be found in the book The discoveries of the Norsemen in America : with special relation to their early cartographical representation
by Fischer, Joseph, 1858-1944; ...
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4
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Why did Danish people not "connect" with neighbor nations until Viking Age?
A few answers have pointed out the relative ease that you can get to England, so I won't go that route with this answer. I'll go with wealth and militancy, along with some revenge.
England could be ...
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3
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What is the origin of heraldic buffalo horns?
An article about the origin of Viking horned helmets has a paragraph about this. It seems that the use of such horns in German and Scandinavian crests became common in the thirteenth century. While ...
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3
votes
When were weapons banned at the Thing assemblies in Norway?
After more research it appears, that weapons might have not been allowed in Norwegian Things (or at least Gulathing) at all and were only used as a way of showing agreement in Germanic tradition.
...
- 305
3
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Why were Germanic languages able to spread over much of northern Europe after 500BC? Did they mostly replace Celtic?
A recurring theme of European history is the "drift" south--toward warmer climes. For instance, "Norsemen" left Norway and ended in Normandy, Swedes migrated to the south shore of the Baltic; Poles ...
- 104k
2
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Why did Danish people not "connect" with neighbor nations until Viking Age?
Before 450, Denmark was inhabited by the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes (from south to north). Geographically, the Jutes especially were the predecessors of the Danes. In the migration period, these three ...
- 3,270
2
votes
Did early northern Europeans drink alcohol?
Romans brought wine. Before that the people of Northern Europe drank some kind of beer. Even in the Roman times the imported wine was expensive.
- 38.1k
1
vote
Is rye bread Turkish?
Maybe No!
People in northern France and England started just because to eat a great deal of 'rye bread'. They didn't have a favorable opinion of it – they called rye bread "black bread" and whined ...
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible