Category: Uncategorized

datvikingtho:

magelet-301:

darkbookworm13:

hogna-lenta:

prokopetz:

note-a-bear:

shrewreadings:

sunshinetrooper:

black and asian vikings 100% definitely existed (also, saami vikings)

you know how far you can get into eurasia and africa by sailing up rivers from the baltic and mediterranean seas? pretty fucking far, and that’s what vikings liked to do to trade

then, you know, people are people, so love happens, business happens, and so ppl get married and take spouses back home to the frozen hellscape that is scandinavia (upon which i’m guessing the horrorstruck new spouses went “WHAT THE FUCK??? FUCKING GIVE ME YOUR JACKET???????”)

and sometimes vikings bought thralls and brought them home as well, and i mean, when your indentured service is up after however many years and you’re a free person again, maaaaaaaaaaaaybe it’s a bit hard to get all the way home across the continent, so you make the best out of the situation and you probably get married and raise a gaggle kids

so yeah

viking kingdoms/communities were not uniformly pure white aryan fantasy paradises, so pls stop using my cultural history and ethnic background to excuse your racist discomfort with black ppl playing heimdall and valkyrie

Also we KNOW they got to Asia and Africa. 

Why?

Because Asians, Africans, and Vikings TOLD US SO. 

Also, we know there was significant mercantile trade between Scandinavia and parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Northern India, Kashmir, North and Eastern Africa because there is evidence in burial sites.

Check that out: the goods Vikings and Scandinavians were getting from their trade with the rest of the world was so important they buried themselves with it, as part of their treasure hordes.

We KNOW this.

There’s a reason you can still see many of the trade routes from the ancient world etched into the very earth.

Plus, we know that some Scandinavian cultures that participated in Viking raids had established minority communities of ethnically Mongolian folks living among them during the periods when such raids were common, and it’s difficult to credit that none of them would have signed on.

Islamic Ring in Viking Grave

Vikings in Persia

Black Vikings

Vikings in North Africa

Buddha statue in Viking hoard

Vikings brought Native American woman to Europe

Unflattering texts in Arabic about Vikings

Original text by Ahmad ibn-Fadlan

More about the Islamic World and Vikings (some Vikings converted to Islam! sort of sketchy site tho)

Viking technology came from Afghanistan

More on trade route determination via metallurgy

… is that enough? 🙂

I love this post, learning the history of this topic is fascinating.

@datvikingtho vikings for you

the Norse were fucking hardcore

neurodiversitysci:

dragon-in-a-fez:

it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.

example:
it’s been well-documented for a long time that urban spaces are more
dangerous for kids than they are for adults. but common wisdom has
generally held that that’s just the way things are because kids are
inherently vulnerable. and because policymakers keep operating under the assumption that there’s nothing that can be done about kids being less safe in cities because that’s just how kids are, the danger they face in public spaces like
streets and parks has been used as an excuse for marginalizing and regulating them out of
those spaces.

(by the same people who then complain about kids being inside playing video games, I’d imagine.)

thing is, there’s no real evidence to suggest that kids are inescapably less safe in urban spaces. the causality goes the other way: urban spaces are safer for adults because they are designed for adults, by adults, with an adult perspective and experience in mind.

the city of Oslo, Norway recently started a campaign to take a new perspective on urban planning. quite literally a new perspective: they started looking at the city from 95 centimeters off the ground – the height of the average three-year-old. one of the first things they found was that, from that height, there were a lot of hedges blocking the view of roads from sidewalks. in other words, adults could see traffic, but kids couldn’t.

pop quiz: what does not being able to see a car coming do to the safety of pedestrians? the city of Oslo was literally designed to make it more dangerous for kids to cross the street. and no one realized it until they took the laughably small but simultaneously really significant step of…lowering their eye level by a couple of feet.

so Oslo started trimming all its decorative roadside vegetation down. and what was the first result they saw? kids in Oslo are walking to school more, because it’s safer to do it now. and that, as it turns out, reduces traffic around schools, making it even safer to walk to school.

so yeah. this is the kind of important real-life impact all that silly social justice nonsense of recognizing adultism as a massive structural problem can have. stop ignoring 1/3 of the population when you’re deciding what the world should look like and the world gets better a little bit at a time.

Empathy and universal design are for more than just people with disabilities.

Also, I love this quote: “it’s always amazing to watch adults discover how much changes when they don’t treat their perspective as the default human experience.”