I guess I would be interested in explanations of different lengths of days by season, especially at high lattitudes.
I would think that Vikings in Iceland would have been pretty puzzled by a few hours of light in the winter and almost total light in summer.
Did they just assume it was Thor’s doing?
I guess I should add that I’m talking about people who had been to different places. Of course if Iceland was all you knew, you probably wouldn’t think much of it.
They knew it had to do with the movement of the sun. Back then they believed that it truly was the sun moving and not the earth. This time of the year they were hoping the sun would stop moving away and would return. After awhile you would think that they would have gotten used to it and not worry so much. :rolleyes:
Not dramatically different from what they were used to in Norway. That is, for the first settlers. Later generations would think it normal.
Why the rolleyes? Man, if I didn’t understand anything about science and every winter the sun went the hell away you damned well better believe I’m slaughtering a goat or a daughter or something to make sure it comes back.
Why would this have been more puzzling than any other sky movement, such as the daily rotation of the sky around the earth or the monthly phases of the moon?
It becomes obvious to anyone spending even a little time watching the sky (and prehistoric people spent a lot of time watching, as they suffered from an absence of alternative entertainment options) that the sky turns around the pivot of the north celestial pole, that objects closer to the pole are above the horizon for a longer time, and that the seven “wanderers” (the Sun, Moon, and five visible planets) move from north to south and back as they circle the ecliptic.
The “explanation” at the time was that these objects moved in overlapping daily and annual cycles around the Earth, because that was how the universe worked. Today we understand that the Earth rotates and that the planets revolve around the Sun in patterns determined by mass and distance and universal gravitation, but if you ask “why” enough times, it still comes down to “that’s how the universe works”.
Indeed. Why would they worry about that? It’s not like they believed the Earth was flat. What people in the Middle ages did believe, pretty much across the board, was that the Earth was in the centre of the Sun-Earth system. However, you can have a geocentric system with different day lenghts just fine.
Unless you, and your parents, and your grandparents, realized that this happens the same way, without variance, every year, and has for as long as living memory went back.
God does it, because he loves us.
But they also slaughtered a goat. Which just proves that the goat slaughtering works.
Yeah, well, we also do the Feast of the Unconquered Sun every year. Do you want to be the one to skip it? 'Cause it’s a looong winter and nobody has invented Netflix yet. Also, the longer it drags on the more starving you get.
Besides, even if you’re pretty sure it’s going to come back, that doesn’t mean it’s not a good excuse for a party.
Let’s have a virgin sacrifice! With goat meat! And mead! In fact, forget the sacrifice!
I’m pretty sure the Stonehenge-era folks had that pretty tightly buttoned down, and they predated the Middle Ages by an eon or two.
But did they tell anyone else?
Prior to the discovery of gravity as it related to heavenly bodies, a Sun that circled the Earth and wobbled north to south wouldn’t have made any less sense than a Sun that circled the Earth around the equator exactly. The only reason why it seems weird to us is because we know about conservation of angular momentum.
Are we excluding religious explanations? Because I distinctly remember a Celtic Myth that pitted the Holly King against the Oak King, with each of them wishing the world to be in total light/darkness. I won’t go into the exact legend because my memory is hazy, but they fought two battles a year, one at midsummer and the other at the winter solstice, where they’d eternally swap supremacy over the sun.
Obviously the Celts aren’t properly Middle Ages, but I believe the Scandinavians believed something similar, and to a normal, believing townsperson this would probably be all the explanation they needed for a big festival with a little blood and mead.
Or are we speaking post-conversion to Christianity?
Weren’t the big ocean-crossing expansions by Vikings basically following fixed lines of latitude? I seem to remember something about them having sun-based navigational tools which enabled them to do this. From Norway, you can go horizontal on a map and hit Iceland (or the Faroes, the Scottish islands or the north coast of the mainland), from Iceland to Greenland, and from there to Newfoundland (just about).
The days are changing length? We must not be burning enough witches.
But what the hell am I going to do with all these virgins?
Oh wait, never mind.