Yes!

Thanks, Dar, and Good luck.

"Emerges from the moat." Hiya, ladies. It was a strange experience riding in Bob like Jonah rode in his whale. Stomachs are gross.

I agree with Caldazar.

Finished Chapter 7 today. Here's the email I wrote to Alan sending it in: __ Alan, I've decided Alcuin's just too vague for this and I was probably misinterpreting his letter, although I did put a thread in to be explored; rivers control communication, Fellows-Jensen claims that the Vikings burned down monasteries to impede communications, that's one thing rivers and monasteries have in common already, let's study this in more detail. Military knowledge--I grew up among the military, many family members served, all my brothers considered joining, I couldn't, and my university was next to a military one. I was highly interested with military theory as a kid. With those maps, I can say with relative certainty that what began the Viking Age in Europe didn't begin as any type of treasure rush--silver, bridal wealth, fame, if I don't know enough about the British isles and it could have well turned into that later. I've come to doubt they were any type of pirate, although the "hydra" idea for leadership is sound. In a conversation I had with Chris a few months ago, he told me with a straight face that asking a Viking to guard some remote territory on a river was a good strategy for dealing with them. If that territory was on a river, no way. The only reason New Orleans survived the Civil War was because it was on the Mississippi--the Union wanted control of the Mississippi delta and so put extra effort into getting it early. And the fact Coupland has found few Frankish coin hoards just reinforces the fact that this wasn't a treasure rush. This was something far deeper and more complicated. In another article, Coupland claims that the Carolingian army was just as capable as the Vikings, they just couldn't adapt to the guerrilla tactics Vikings used or assault the island camps, and I laughed. America would have won Vietnam handily if we had gone head to head with the North Vietnamese and we won almost every head-to-head battle, but we couldn't adapt to their strategy. We were still fighting WW2 in Vietnam and so lost it. Soldiers sometimes call this the "Fighting the last war mentality.” And so I've tried to dig into military strategy overall to explain that this was much more, with natural disasters allowing them to start it all. I couldn't find enough in the more famous Sun Tzu and so I've tried to dig into the more respected Carl von Clausewitz. See how you like it--I don't think this was my best writing and I wouldn’t be surprised if I have to moderate it quite a lot. Everything only started making complete sense about a week ago, but I'll be cleaning up until 29 February anyway. __

Too many people have given me blank stares when I've pointed out that Vikings were targeting rivers. Too much military illiteracy today. So, today, I decided I had to write in why. Never expected to have Carl von Clausewitz's On War open all day, quoting it on how rivers are important while writing about Vikings. Also trying to write an email to Alan to tell him how important this is too. Nowhere can a fortress serve so many purposes or play so many parts as when it is located on a great river. Here it can assure a safe crossing at any time, prevent the enemy from crossing within a radius of several miles, command river traffic, shelter ships, close roads and bridges, and make it possible to defend the river indirectly-that is, by holding a position on the enemy's bank. It is clear that this versatile influence greatly facilitates the defense of a river and must rank as one of its essential elements. (On War, p. 399).

Congratulations!

Charlemagne (r. 769-814) himself had to aid whoever negotiated with this first raider on a "monastery" in Northumbria, England (793), and I just came off an article today that the ninth century Frankish (French-German) money in Scandinavia is disparate; the three main theories of why the Viking Age started are silver, fame, or (the opposite of a dowry) bride price. Do those three--the map I've shown you, Charlemagne as early as 793, and coins, sound at all like that? I hope I'm not overlooking anything.

Thanks! Like one Mat Cauthon, I've always been interested in war.

Thanks! No one gets how crazy we scholars are until they actually discuss issues with us: after making those maps last night, I decided to remake them in the past few hours, which is always hard work. Just about every theory out there on why the age started are that Viking leaders began being expelled as the Danish"king" started to try to centralize the government, so that Danish territory became Denmark/Norway/etc, because of disorders of some kind back home, some were expelled, started raiding, and then the raids got more intense over time. But these "raids" don't look random at all: I don't know nearly as much about the British isles, which began being raided far before Continental Europe, since that's not what I studied, but my supervisor pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago that churches played a more important role than you'd think, with the rest of the society being illiterate. James, I like Cornwell too--he's a good author. I wish I could write a novel about what I'm looking at, but I haven't figured how to do it yet.

I finally got maps done in the last hour, through QGIS and Paint: yes, it looks EXACTLY like a well-coordinated military campaign. It floored me, really. The Vikings as jolly pirates with weird hats has always been a myth and we've known it, but, if anyone has mapped it before me, no one else'd noticed how deliberate this looked. A friend of mine got as far as noticing they liked rivers before I did, but, when I talked to Chris shortly before I made the connection, he seemed completely unaware of what that means. Manias, yay: I got a hypothetical Danish port to start from, then ended up spending two days on it, taking screen shots of GoogleMaps, measuring distance in a straight line, (as well as how long it'd take to drive there, lol), went so far as to find maps about how dry/wet the summers were, and finally wrote a little screed saying we need to get out of Frankish nobles' heads about political regions, think about this geographically, and found myself sending it to my two supervisors and Chris. Now, here's the map I made today of all the first assaults combined: Dorestad began being pounded annually after 834, Antwerp was raided in 836 and then we don't read about Antwerp again until the tenth century even though it was still an active port according to archaeology, by 841 a Viking was "guarding" Dorestad, and someone went after Rouen, and it just went on, once a city was hit, they didn't stop. The distances didn't match if they were just "raiding," ships hugged the coast and there were plenty of wealthy cities in between those targets, but there's no major rivers in between. Having control of river mouths gives you A LOT of power: you can control who comes and goes on it, and so it always has in war. Now, when communication is only in person or in written word and few people can read, think how much more power that'd give you! I don't think this is anywhere near a real army trying to conquer what's now the Netherlands, Belgium, and France: the Danes were anything but united, but this doesn't look like a treasure hunt.

Thanks! I've written 2, then 1, now this week I'm on 7. Might seem odd, but beginning, end, then string the middle through. And I've been having a hard time, I'm trying to create maps. One of the more surprising things I found in this is that, at least in Western Europe, mapping out the first Viking targets' territories and their common terrain doesn't make these look like treasure hunts at all. It looks far more carefully planned than that. Even though the first targets weren't always in the same political regions or cities, geographically, they were all on the same river deltas in the same order. Mapped out, what happened looks exactly like a well-coordinated military campaign. I found this out in May, when I had finished my final case study of two raids that happened more than ten years before Europe began being attacked continuously, and something was quirky about them all. And so, you know how inspirations can drive you; for two days I got up Google Maps, brought up all the first targeted cities and regions, and started measuring the distances between them all, but also noting how much territory, including wealthy cities and "monasteries" they sailed by in conducting these raids. And then, when I started mapping the first raids that happened when the Vikings started raiding continuously, they were targeting the same places as these first sporadic raids. But, what I had done to discover this, basically, was what 20 years ago would have been to take out an atlas, ruler, and draw lines. I couldn't just take a picture of GoogleMaps and place it in there! So, I had to content myself with writing out the distance in the chapter, a city they curiously passed by, and leave it at that. Now, I have GIS technology, something called QGIS, and man is it clumsy. You have to create "layers" for just about everything you add to it All I want to do is measure distance and show the line on a map--(and the map is imported from GoogleMaps, what can you do), but I haven't figured it out yet. I've got the map, I've got the longitudes/latitudes of each target, and I've found the tool you use to measure distance, but haven't managed to put it all together yet. I've never been all that good at technology, and so maybe this is just me, but it is so frustrating.

Aye, Elgee, I can give you three links: one on the "Approach" (I've embedded it, creepy but useful) and two links of people searching and finding them. Looking at the link again, shoot--it seems people have been searching for the Russian one, Русский язык по методу Натура by Arthur Jensen (not sure I spelled that right), but as of a year ago, might not have found the book itself, if there are pictures confirming it existed.. People are actively searching for these old textbooks. For some reason, this method/approach/whatever somehow vanished, surviving only in Latin. https://forum.language-learners.org/viewtopic.php?t=8022 https://vivariumnovum.it/risorse-didattiche/propria-formazione/metodo-diretto-applicato-alle-lingue-moderne I can tell ya, whoever wrote Familia Romana knows how to make you laugh.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided I might need a refresher course on Latin, to get through the viva. I'm painfully slow and always need a dictionary. So I decided to try this: ""Familia Romana" a Latin textbook that teaches it through the "Natural" method--it's not trying to have you translate it, but understand it--with illustrations and more, so that everything is in a context where you can understand it. Everything is in Latin, and I know that might sound intimidating, but it starts with a map of the Roman Empire and it's naming different places and where they are on the map, like "Roma in Italia est," (Rome is in Italy), so the first words are all put in context where you can see it. And so you jump into Latin, and you don't get out. And WOW is it different--you don't need to get out. You learn how to read it itself, not how to translate it. I've since searched around the web to see whether any other languages are taught the "Natural" method. Isn't that exactly why going to a foreign country helps so much if you're trying to learn its language? Strangely enough, I haven't been able to find all that much: there are a few nineteenth-early twentieth century books I've found now freely available on Google for French, Russian, and Spanish, but Familia Romana, for Latin is the only one I've found that's printed.

Wow, nice!