Mysterious sunstones in medieval Viking texts could really have worked
Enlarge (credit: ArniEin via Wikimedia Commons)
When the Vikings first sailed to Greenland in the late 10th century, they didn't have compasses to guide them; that technology wouldn't reach Europe until the late 16th century. So how did they do it? A new computer simulation says an unusual method mentioned in an eight- or nine-hundred-year-old Icelandic saga would have been precise enough to get Viking ships safely to Greenland.
"The Viking legends (so-called sagas) refer to mysterious tools, sunstones, with which they could determine the position of the invisible Sun in cloudy or foggy weather," archaeologist Gabor Horvath told Ars Technica.
In The Saga of King Olaf, the titular king-who ruled Norway from 955-1030, around the time the Vikings settled Greenland-visits a chieftain in a remote part of the country to investigate some cattle thefts. There, he spends the night in a strange rotating house and has a strange dream, which the chieftain's sons interpret as a vision of the kings who would succeed Olaf as rulers of Norway. One part of the text describes a stone that allows the king to peer through dense clouds and snow to determine the position of the Sun:
Read 15 remaining paragraphs | Comments