Kobra compared to ancient swords for self defence

I have a 24 oz. 20" sirupati and a 37 oz. 25" sirupati and I keep hearing a 25" kobra calling my name:eek:-(my favorite smilie)
 
bura-trio.jpg


I own a 22" Kobra, by Bura, and it's the one on top. The middle blade is an 18" WWII and the bottom blade is an 18" GS, both by Bura as well.

I have not handled a 25" Kobra, but if it's anything like the 22" version, then you'll be well pleased with it. This thing is FAST, and one look at its spine will tell you it's no wimpy blade either.
 
I agree a Kobra is tougher than, at least, a katana (sorry my knowledge is very limited to katana area). Even if other conditions were equal, a katana is longer and gives more stress, and more tends to mis-hit on unexpected target at wrong angle. So a Kobra might be the best from comparison with katana.

But here are aome other points. A katana was a person on person duel weapon in 17-19 century, didn't required toughness. It had always been a sub weapon to bows and arrows at first, then to guns. In close quarter combat, spears were used mainly. It was more of a last resort than a sub weapon. Later, Japanese military in early 20th century took an anachronistic tactics to employ katana as CQC weapon. A total mistake! Their supporting staff left some memo that says only 1% of returned katanas were damaged in fighting. Other damages were caused by soldiers' daily act like using it as shovel, ax, hatchet on branches, rocks, helmets, soils. The memo says the ratio of taking damage was hardly different from excellent to "user" level.

In short, a katana was best fit for samurais who lived in city of centuries peace. It was too incapable of an average soldier's daily carry in war time. My life style is closer to former, but if I draw a sword for self defense, I'm afraid it might be like latter.

Eikervaeing, even though you feel other khukuri better for your purpose, I don't think you will trade a Kobra for it....
 
Thanks folks.

Nice pictures Kmark. You are making my mouth water when I see those knives.

Interesting statistics WrongFriend. You are right in your considerations.

Greetings
 
Welcome to the forum Eikerværing :)

Tom is indeed correct about early metal armour, but to my knowledge Germanic people early on (200 BCE) probably did rely more on heavy leather. And certainly wooden (rather than iron) shields were widely used well into the 'dark ages'. Though certainly later on some very advanced ring/chain-mail was deviced in Scandinavia & England (see the 'pictorial guide' on my Beowulf site [http://www.heorot.dk ] for some photos).

Ferrous mentiones spears - and, in England and Scandinavia, and I suspect the Roman provinces as well, spears were the usually weapon. Only 'nobles' would possess swords usually. Reasons for this are obvious.

But Eikerværing, so far as I know, your 'genealogy' is incorrect.. Celts are Celts - though in places like Scotland and Ireland, due to 'Viking raids' and settlements, many 'Celts' have substantial Nordic blood. Celtic areas in which there was little Scandinavian influence, such as Wales, we find the majority of the people are dark-haired (not blonde). I would take the nordish.com info with a grain of salt - they even admit that their info is mainly based on pre-1945 work, which has subsequently largely been invalidated. I know a bit of the physiognomy work and it's pretty mixed - the debate usually turns on 'Indo-Europeans' v. the 'inferior' indigenous inhabitants of Europe [=your 'Mediterreneans']. Most of it turns on skull shape, I can't remembr the technical terms at the moment, but the one is elongated and the other more rounded. Problem is, not only did no-one agree on which people had the greatest percentage of 'Indo-European skull types' but people disagreed on whether the 'elongated' or 'rounded' skull was the mark of 'Indo-Europeans'! Of course this sort of research often is grounded in or is suspectible to political agendas...

--B.
 
Wow, this is starting to build up into an interesting conversation. I never thought my question about Kobras would lead to this.

Thanks for your considerations beoram, and thanks for your link, I saved it to my favourites. I agree with you that wooden shields were used for a very long time in the north. But I am not sure if swords were only for rich people. All male graves ever found here in Norway from The Viking Age have a full set of weapons. Sword, shield, battle axe, bow and arrows, spear... all things... Swords were expensive for sure, but you didn't have to BUY a sword in those days you know... And the Vikings had an easy game in Europe so I believe they pillaged a whole lot of swords from the blacksmiths.

About my genealogy studies, they are correct.

I used to share your opinion because of the dark Walish people. But recent genetical studies on a molecular level have revealed that the "Celts" in Wales are not the same people as the REAL Celts in Scotland and Ireland genetically speaking. Originally the now extinct Mediterranean race lived in Europe (including Great Britain). Later you had a Celtic invasion into Europe which came to dominate most of Europe (that includes starting The Roman Empire). Only in the fringes of Europe like Wales did the original Mediterranean race survive. The situation for the surviving Mediterraneans in Wales was that they learned the language of the dominant ethnic group; the Celts. And they lost their original language. Many people believe that language tells something about ethnicity but that is a misconception. Just look at USA. Some settlers came from England, the rest were settlers from Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Italy and many many more. And today English is the American language...

So about the dark haired Walish people speaking Celtic, they are not speaking the language of their race. They are not a Celtic people (unfortunately many of them believe so...), they are a Mediterranean remnant.

Interesting to note is that the people who today live around the Mediterranean Ocean are not of the Mediterranean race (that race is virtually extinct except for in Wales). The people of South Europe today are a mix of Mediterranean, Arabian, North African, Nordic (Celtic and Teutonic), Alpine and Black African of the eastern African races. We call this mix the Latin race.

About the Celts being a Nordic race. Their language is a Germanic language (Germanic = Nordic) and their physical appearance is Nordic too, although bearing elements from the original populations that they displaced and/or absorbed. So I see no other option than that they were originally Nordics (and still are).

So I was right, and the recent findings of genetical studies is actually supported by maps at http://www.nordish.com/ . If you have that issue of The National Gerographic with a big article about Wales then you will find that it is referred to this new genetical knowledge there.

About the web site I referred to. It clearly informs that the work is old, yes. I am aware of that of course, and as you can see we can only use that site by reading modern day science in addition. But the advantage of that web site is that the maps and charts section has good data on actual physical differences measured in Europe. Things like hair colour, eye colour, height and scull shape have been measured in a methodical way so they are of proper quality. Of course the way of measuring sculls is different today, but as long as the method is the same in all the maps then you can actually look at those maps and compare different regions of Europe relative to eachother (but not with newer maps based on different methods). Because it is the relative difference that is interesting.

About political agendas. I have corresponded with one of the boys who have created that web site and asked him about it. And they don't mean to do anything but revitalize a hidden science. Maybe such a science could have a political impact one day... But it is up to us all if we chooce to do "good" or "evil" with that tool, just like a khukuri which can also be used for both "good" and "evil". (Good and evil are terms that doesn't really exist except for among children in kindergarden and in the public speeches of certain political leaders, but I found no better words to use, my deepest apologies...)

Greetings
 
The question of physical types and their influence on the development of arms and fighting techniques is part of a larger issue which, I believe, holds the key to understanding what ancient & medieval warfare was all about. This is long-winded, but it gets there in the end; and I think it's essential to bear these matters in mind in any discussion of ancient weapons and their use.

Basically, it comes down to objectives and agendas; when our ancestors went out to fight, what were they seeking to achieve?

Ask a modern soldier that, his answer will come reflexively; seek out and destroy the enemy. But that, I believe, wasn’t how most ancient fighters thought. They had a very different mindset, which we find hard to relate to.

We regard war as a bad thing, something to avoid, something to get over & done with as quickly as possible. That’s because we have a total-war mindset. In antiquity, however, nations were often almost constantly at war; and war was *not* total. As late as the 16th century, one of Shakespeare’s characters, remonstrating with somebody with nothing to do, says “Are there not wars? Is there not employment?”. In antiquity, war was always there, but always in the background. For one thing, war followed the agricultural calendar. People went to the wars during the off season (what the Romans called the ‘campaigning season’; the Norsemen were the same, only going ‘i viking’ when there was nothing to do on the farm), and came home to plough, plant and reap. With few exceptions, there were no professional or standing armies; soldiers were first and foremost farmers, and understood the priorities.

The ways of making war were also designed and rigidly controlled by the rich, the ruling classes; this control of the ability to make war was precisely how they maintained power. As early as the Lelantine War, in the 7th century BC, (described by scholars as ‘the first world war’), the opposing sides agreed an arms limitation treaty - not to use spears, arrows or slings, because with these weapons, a peasant could kill a nobleman, and that would be completely unacceptable. Classical Greek warfare was refined down into, literally, a test of physical strength, a shoving match like a football scrum. The objective was to make the other side run away; *not* to kill them - they were, after all, also noblemen, and quite possibly related to you by blood or marriage. Similar rules prevailed in parallel cultures - for example in southern Africa before Shaka, where warfare consisted of throwing spears at extreme range (thereby minimising casualties) until one side lost its nerve and ran.

War was a chance for the young nobleman to prove his worth; both as an individual, compared with other nobles, and as a member of the ruling class, as against the commoners. Medieval knights wore impenetrable armor, and knew they wouldn’t be killed if they lost - they were too valuable, since if they were captured, their families would pay huge ransoms for their safe return. Ancient societies tended to think not in terms of good/bad but of honor/shame; and war was where honor was earned. More than that, it was the *main* way of achieving these objectives, of earning and proving honor and worth; in some cases the *only* way.

In consequence, a warrior’s weapons were designed not only to cut and pierce, but to show class and display wealth; likewise armor. Ever since that primeval ban on arrows and javelins, aristocratic warriors (except, for some reason, in India) spurned projectile weapons as immoral (because they proved nothing; a poor weakling could shoot a rich champion in the back...) and poured their wealth into expensive, impressive swords, spears, axes. In a society where all metal was precious and rare, a mailshirt was the equivalent of a Lear jet; the ultimate status symbol. Accordingly, arms and armor developed not necessarily because they were efficient tools for killing and defence, but because they were impressive, they showed class. Ancient Greece restricted participation in war to the rich by specifying solid bronze plate armour. In classical Greek cities, social classes were divided up purely on the basis of wealth; if you could afford armor, you could vote, if you could afford a horse, you counted as nobility. By this means, all power, political and military, was kept out of the hands of the lower classes (a misleading term in a world where ‘urban proletariats’ were few and far between)

Physical type and physical strength depend to a large degree on nutrition. The people who fought in antiquity were by definition well nourished; they were the rich, after all. Accordingly, ancient warfare was designed to favor the physically strong. Strength was a sign of worth. Swords, in consequence, became longer and heavier; armour became more bulky and massive.

The ‘poor bloody infantry’, meanwhile, the peasant levies called up to follow their lords into battle; why were they there at all, when their contribution, as light infantry, was devalued and unimportant. Quite simply; they weren’t there to participate (except as cannon-fodder, easy targets for the chariots and the armored knights to score points on); they were there to *watch*, to see their lords in action, to be impressed; to take home stories of how brave, strong and invincible the noblemen were - with the implication that trying to change the status quo or get rid of these invincible nobles was a very bad idea. The Great King of Persia invaded Greece with a vast army, far larger than was needed, drawn from every part of his empire; the idea was so that everybody in the empire, from Turkey to India, would be made very much aware of how mighty the King was. When the plan backfired and a few miserable Greeks beat the Persians, the result was serious uprisings in many provinces of the empire; the lesson was learned, but it was the wrong lesson...

When these rules were broken, which was rarely, the world changed. The Athenian empire was broken when Gylippus of Sparta used bowmen and javelin-throwers to wipe out a huge Athenian army of warrior-gentlemen. The Roman general Marius, for political rather than military reasons, recruited a professional standing army from the urban poor, which ultimately went on to conquer the known world because it was trained to seek out and destroy enemies who were still playing by the old rules. The English cheated at Crecy and Agincourt by letting peasants with bows slaughter the flower of the French nobility, something which was so unspeakably alien to the French that they could hardly believe it. Shaka, prince of the insignificant Zulu tribe, conquered a vast empire in southern Africa simply by arming his men with stabbing spears and telling them to get in close and kill.

But these were exceptions to the rule; which was, that war is about gaining honor, not about killing; and that the trappings of war were governed by the same agenda.
 
Eikerværing - yes, an interesting discussion.. You don't mind if I debate some of points with you? I have an open mind, so you could convince me on some points perhaps ;) [caveat - I have no political agenda and from Eikerværing's comments I assume he does not either. So whoever the 'true Celts' are and what it means to be dark-haired or blonde-haired or whatever doesn't have any bearing on worth as a person or intellectual capacity, &c. Some 'races' may have some overall physical characteristics - larger bones and larger frame, better resistance to cold, or heat, &c. This latter point is what I think is the starting point for the sword-discussion]

Originally posted by Eikerværing
I agree with you that wooden shields were used for a very long time in the north. But I am not sure if swords were only for rich people. All male graves ever found here in Norway from The Viking Age have a full set of weapons. Sword, shield, battle axe, bow and arrows, spear... all things... Swords were expensive for sure, but you didn't have to BUY a sword in those days you know... And the Vikings had an easy game in Europe so I believe they pillaged a whole lot of swords from the blacksmiths.
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My readings on this area say that essentially swords were restricted to the rich, and a sword was a valuable heirloom (no-one would throw a sword away, if it was broken, it was repaired). This surely becomes less true in later periods as better mining and refining techniques were developed (though the overall quality of swords decreased - pattern-welded swords become much less freq. in later periods).

About my genealogy studies, they are correct.
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an open question, surely..

I used to share your opinion because of the dark Walish people. But recent genetical studies on a molecular level have revealed that the "Celts" in Wales are not the same people as the REAL Celts in Scotland and Ireland genetically speaking. Originally the now extinct Mediterranean race lived in Europe (including Great Britain).
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It is good you mention that race and language are separable. But it's actually easier to talk about a 'culture' in terms of language rather than 'race'. But, in any case, assume that race x originally spoke language y, one would have to provide a good explanation for why they changed languages. Welsh is a Celtic language, just as Irish and Scotch Gaelic - so if the Welsh aren't really Celts, why do they speak a very similar language to the 'true' Scottish and Irish Celts? The different genetics of Scotland and Ireland would seem to me to be much more easily explained if one realises that Scandinavians long inhabited Ireland (Dublin is a 'Viking' name) and of course invaded both Scotland and Ireland, but not Wales.

Later you had a Celtic invasion into Europe which came to dominate most of Europe (that includes starting The Roman Empire). Only in the fringes of Europe like Wales did the original Mediterranean race survive.
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How did Mediterraneans make their way into Wales? And why Wales and not Ireland, for instance? Actually, the Celtic domination was earlier on, and due largely to advanced smithy techniques (and thus better swords), though the Celts quickly became marginalised later on obviously.

About the Celts being a Nordic race. Their language is a Germanic language (Germanic = Nordic) and their physical appearance is Nordic too, although bearing elements from the original populations that they displaced and/or absorbed. So I see no other option than that they were originally Nordics (and still are).
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I'm a linguist, so here I do have specialised knowledge. Nordic is not the same as Germanic, which is why I used the different word. Nordic is a subset of Germanic.. West Germanic includes English, German, Dutch, &c. North Germanic = 'Nordic', including Norwegian and Icelandic (in 'west north germanic') and Danish, Swedish, Gutnish (east north germanic). East Germanic is extinct, so far as I know, but was represented by Gothic and the eastern north germanic ('nordic') languages have at least so east germanic influence.

But Celtic (Irish, Welsh, Breton, &c.) are definitely not Germanic (or Nordic) languages, whatever the 'racial' type. Celtic is a distinct branch of Indo-European, just as Italic [Italian, French, Spanish, &c.], Greek, Indo-Aryan [Hindi, Persian, &c.], &c. are.

The only surviving 'European' language is actually Basque. Indo-Europeans are from somewhere further east, probaly the Black Sea area and swept down into Europe and western asia and quickly became dominant (at least linguistically).

I'm aware of some of the genealogical studies you refer to in connexion with the British Isles. But they are tracking 'Viking' influence - meaning post-AD invasions. Actually, supposedly, the Saxon strain can be distinguished from the Viking strain, though Norwegian/Icelandic cannot be distinguished from Danish.

Enough for now.

cheers, Ben
 
Good stuff, all. Like being back at the University, gettin' my medieval studies degree...

..No bears were harmed or mentioned in the weaving of this thread...


Keith
 
Fascinating discussion, guys...I am an English major and history minor who almost went into linguistics as a specialty. You are refreshing my interest in this fascinating field, as well as the added angle of interest in how all of these factors (body type, etc.) figured into the development of weaponry.
 
First this reply to Tom Holt, later a separate reply to beoram.

Tom Holt you are an oracle of historical insights. This was highly interesting. I enjoyed reading it very much.

The way you picture the way the nobility managed to manipulate the peasantry and thereby maintain their power is highly interesting from a biological point of view. In my field we make calculations of how historical societies were structured in order to spread the genes of the dominant social group at the expanse of the lower ranking individuals. I have read one biological article about this issue concerning the great civilizations in Egypt, Aztec Mexico, Inca Peru, imperial China and imperial India, but nothing about Europe. So if your knowledge in European military history was combined with some old demographic records in Europe proving the reproductive advantage of the nobles, then you might have a an article to publish in a scientific journal. But don't do it without the help of a human behavioural ecologist. I know there are a couple of those in England so you could easily find some help.

I just have some comments to fill in about it all. You are talking about warfare and society in Europe, with rich upper classes ruling the peasants. Well, if we are to talk about Scandinavia as a part of Europe then I must add that the situation was different here. There was no aristocracy or nobles in the European degree. We had cheiftains who answered to the people and the people could kill the chieftains if they behaved unwise. But when there was warfare done by the Vikings it was very often a struggle for land (there was a lack of land) or retaliation (blood feud), and not an upper class showing off in order to maintain power.

Norway has little soil for agriculture, so in those days we had a surplus of young men with no land. They gathered up in a bunch and raided Europe for land to settle and wifes to find, and they were free men doing that, not controlled by anybody. In fact when one of our chieftains set out to conquer an English king he faced a dilemma. He had to lead the young warriors outside English farmland on their way to the king, because if his men saw farms they would simply kill the local farmer, take over his farm (and wife some times), settle there and leave the campaign.

So no European social structure in the north as you can see. Here things were more individualistically based.
But honour counted very much among the Vikings too, similarly to the European nobles. Except here honour was much a matter of not fearing to retaliate and take blood vengeance, in addition to being a great warrior.
Interestinlgy enough Vikings too like the European aristocrats had ideas about bloodlines. It seems they prized their clan's blood (race) by the achievements of their forefathers.

How this Scandinavian difference from the European mainland would have manifested itself in weapon technology and tradition I have no idea. But I guess perhaps the weapons here would be made simply just for killing and not so much for showing off like in upper class Europe? And common people here were well nourished, so that must have allowed for a fair size on the weapons I assume.

Greetings
 
This is nice beoram. Let us talk.

I can't make sense out of the information you have about swords being rich men's priviliege in the north. In Norway all free men were obliged to have weaponry, and most men were free common farmers, so logically they all had at least axe or sword, depending on their preference. Over 2000 swords have been found in the Viking graves of Norway alone, so it sounds very common. And besides all I ever heard about in my history lessons was that everybody had a sword and everybody needed to learn how to use it. Iron was easy to obtain in Norway you know, we had much naturally occuring iron.

I have made an error. The people of Wales are not different from the Irish. I checked it in a new source. And I read that the genetical studies of the Y-chromosome shows that the men of Wales and Ireland are identical (nothing mentioned about the Scots though). The intensity of this special Y-chromosome was highest on the west coast of Ireland (98%) and lower in the east of Ireland (reflecting foreign influence). This special Y-chromosome is only found elsewhere in a substantial frequency the Basque population.

However the female X-chromosome of Wales and Ireland does not seem to be unique in Great Britain, in contrast to the very special Welsh-Irish Y-chromosome. The reason for no female specialty in Wales and Ireland is that in the old days the men posessed farms by inheritance while women had to move to a different farm when they got married. So the women were more responsible than men for mixing the genetics of Europe.

Could it be Celts living in Wales and Ireland since they speak Celtic languages? Personally I don't think so. I checked with this site http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/mlcr/mlcr01.htm
and several other sites too and I can only find old Greek and Roman historical descriptions of the Celts as tall, white skinned, blonde haired and blue eyed. This is clearly not what is reflected in Wales and the western fringe of Ireland where there is so much dark people.

So the conclusion must be that the male blood line in Ireland and Wales (maybe also Scotland) is largely a remnant of a population that was once widely distributed in entire Europe, since it is also found in the Basque people of the Pyrenees. This completly matches the theory of that there was a dark Mediterranean race widely distributed in Europe a long time ago. And this race survived only in the fringes of Europe (British Isles and inaccessible mountains of the Basques) where the later migrants didn't venture.

The reason for the Mediterranean areas of Great Britain now speaking Celtic is the gradual movement of female lines in Europe (X-chromosome analysis). Women teach their own language to their children. So both languages spread among both the ethnic groups by intermarriage, but Celtic became the dominating language in the end just because the Celts were dominant compared to the Mediterraneans. Same thing happened in South America too when the Spaniards and Portuguese invaded the Indians and made them loose their original languages in the areas where they intermarried and mixed.

You asked why the Mediterraneans made their way into Wales. Well, then you have to ask why did anybody ever bother to emigrate anywhere in ancient times? Great emigrations of entire tribes happened a lot in ancient times. They were looking for a place to live. The point is that entire Europe (except for the very north) was once a Mediterranean region, until other groups invaded and took over. Europe is just one long history of repeated waves of various ethnic groups invading and expanding. It was the norm and not the exception. War was a way of life and all men were warriors in tribal times.

I know that Nordic is just a group within the Germanic language family. I just tend to use Nordic as the best racial description for the most ancient and "pure" Germanic race. Once again an academic question can be raised about this theory too.

Since you are a linguistic you must be right about Celtic not being a Germanic language. I know that they are separate groups but I assumed that they had the same recent origin since the Celtic race was the same as the Nordic race by appearance (refering to those ancient historical writings).

I have to correct you on one thing, you probably wrote things in a bit of a hurry. You say that Basque is the only surviving European language. Well, you also have Finnish-Ugric among Finns, Sami people and Hungarians. They all speak separate languages but their language group is not Indo-European.

Well... conclusion is that people of the Celtic speaking areas of Great Britain are a mix of Mediterranean and Celtic, and perhaps some Anglo Saxon or Viking?

Greetings
 
Eikervaering wrote -

"I just have some comments to fill in about it all. You are talking about warfare and society in Europe, with rich upper classes ruling the peasants. Well, if we are to talk about Scandinavia as a part of Europe then I must add that the situation was different here. There was no aristocracy or nobles in the European degree."


With respect, I disagree.

As far back as the Germanic tribal society described by Tacitus, the Scandinavian countries followed the same pattern as the rest of Europe - hierarchical, dominated by an elite class holding power by virtue of birth, ruling through prestige and honour gained through military exploits. At the head of the pyramid, the king; below him his jarls, below them their vassals holding their land of their immediate superior, down to the small farmers at the bottom of the scale. Scandinavian heroic poetry and saga reflects this, as does the historical record.

There are factors which tend to blur our view of the Viking age. First, Scandinavia was materially poorer than the rest of Europe; its nobles were less splendid, therefore to us the look less like nobles than the Italian princes, the French barons &c. More important still, the country we know most about was the smakllest and the least typical - Iceland; a republic instead of a monarchy, settled in large part by dissidents escaping from the Norwegian regime. Because so much of what we know about Scandinavia is filtered through the writings of Icelandic scholars, writing with an Icelandic viewpoint & mindset, we get an obscure picture.

But even Iceland follows the European pattern. There's no king, but there are noblemen, the gothi, who in practice make all the decisions; below them the middle-rank owner-occupier farmers, the bondi (equivalenrt of the English yeomen); below them the landless classes, men like Eyvind in Hrafnkel's saga, effectively without rights or redress against their social superiors unless they can obtain the support of a rival nobleman. In Iceland, being descended from the right families was all-important; hence the (to us) interminable genealogies with which the sagas are permeated. To their original readers, those genealogies were all-important; a man's descent decided who he was.

And where more do we find the cult of the noble warrior than Viking Scandinavia - a society where men regularly went out of their way to pick a fight - any fight, with anybody - because through war alone was honor to be gained; and in a society where material wealth is scarce, honor is more than ever the only way of keeping score, proving who is better than who. Viking arms & armor reinforce the point. The pattern-welded Viking sword was an amazing display of wealth, taking hundreds of man-hours to make, richly decorated, valued as the supreme heirloom.

IMHO, Scandinavia in the Viking age is about as typical of the honor/shame culture, hierarchical/oligarchical medieval European society as you're likely to find.
 
Originally posted by Eikerværing
Hey, you people are all really helpful here. This is my first forum ever but this one is truly alive. What is "the cantina" by the way? Several of you people use that term.

OK, a long time ago and far away, HI was on the predecessor to bladeforums. A lot smaller and easier to keep track of who forumites were and what they were like. Got that?

So one day I ventured the opinion that the HI forum there made me think of the bar scene ( on Tatooine? ) in the first Star Wars. Because the occupants were definitely very weird but nice. So others liked the idea and started calling it the Star Wars Cantina.

Then as folks came thru Reno and stopped in to Uncle Bills home, he started calling it the Cantina and Stage Stop. Because underneath the modern exterior, there still are parts of the old west all around here if you look hard enough. A lot of it.

I trust this has answered your question about the Cantina, and everything is now clear as mud.

It helps to remember what Mark Twain said about Nevada - that here "Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting over."
 
Yes Holt, your informations are right. I am aware of these facts. Norway had a hierarchy with at least 7 different social levels of free men. And yes, the culture was all about being the great warrior and we were more battle crazy than any Europeans.

When I wrote:"There was no aristocracy or nobles in the European degree", I meant the difference in material wealth between Scandinavia and Europe as you pointed out. I was talking about the **degree**. And I also aimed at the difference in social control a chieftain had over his men compared to what I heard was the case in Europe. I believe that to retaliate against or punish an aristocrat was unthinkable for a peasant in Europe. In Norway it was even in the law that a chieftain/king who misbehaved against his people would be killed or chased from the country. I also remember that one king was sacrificed by the farmers to the Norse gods because of a couple of years with poor harvests in a district in Sweden. So it seems to me things were a bit different. The people had more power compared in a relative **degree** to Europe. And this was a direct result of their warlike nature that you pointed out. Also it was a result of that the people were not citizens of any of their chieftains/kings. They were citizens of their clans. This kept the power balance between the people and the kings.

I don't think we disagree about anything at all. The magical word here is **degree**.

Greetings.
 
This thread gets my vote as the Most Informative Post in HI Forum history. I've learned more in thirty minutes of reading than I did in five years of college (I'm slow, and changed majors often). Thanks to all participants.
 
I second Tom's statements, but would add on the topic of the Gothi:

The Gothi was the "all Gods man" in Iceland, and he himself was the spiritual leader of the folk that made offerings or gathered at his hof.
In addition, the Lawspeaker was a secular leader of the people, much like a personal legal representative. The gothis and lawspeakers held no sway over the people, other than their opinions and the aforementioned honor points. SOme rich farmers had at least as much if not more power politically and socially.

If a gothi or lawspeaker (or rich farmer, for that matter) in iceland did something that the folk did not like, they would pretty much ignore him, or worse.

I just thought the gothi in Tom's comments was painted a bit too powerful, where sagas and other texts point to the gothis and lawspeakers as "the leaders among equals."

And many gothis and lawspeakers met together in the Icelandic version of the Native American 'Great Council,' Called the "thing" or "althing." The gothis and lawspeakers played major roles as elders, similar to the coucil meetings of the Anglo-Saxon 'Witun.' Weapons were stowed, people partied, law cases were head, and sometimes ritualistic duels were fought...

Sorry, getting further away from the original. Read a great book called "Parliament Plains of Iceland," by Thorstein Guthjunsson, an author and historian I stayed with in Iceland. Excellent info on all things Althing.Hee hee.

Keith
 
I found some info on internet. http://www.arild-hauge.com/arild-hauge/religion.htm

It is in Norwegian so I will translate the vital part:
"Seen in a political perspective the Norse idea of justice promoted a spread of power - power to a great deal of actors. The king could not split his actors into individuals directly under his command. The clans stood in between as a balancing element, since it was they who were managing the responsability of justice. The Christian Right, on the other hand, later made way for a new system where the individuals became citizens directly under the king and the church. The clan as a balancing factor was thus removed. King and church overtook it's power."

In Norwegian for those interested:
"Sett i et politisk perspektiv fremmet den norrøne rettstankegangen spredning av makt - makt til en mengde aktører. Kongen kunne ikke splitte medspillerne sine inn i individer direkte under sin kommando. Ættene sto i mellom som balanserende element, da det var de som forpaktet rettsansvaret. Kristenretten, derimot, brøt senere veien for et nytt system der individene ble borger direkte under kongen og kirken. Ætten som balansefaktor ble fjernet. Konge og kirke overtok dens makt."

Greetings
 
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