When you find yourself in an historical place – as I often do – it is useful to look at the events which shaped the area and understand just how much the world has changed since that time. In the north of PommieBastardLande is a place called York, which has been continuously settled since before Roman times. Around the city centre of York is a great Roman wall that extends all the way around the old city. It is a very picturesque, scenic town, which still provides a taste of Ye Merrye Olde Englande.
It was also the place where the Great Heathen Army of the Vikings, under the sons of the semi-legendary Ragnar the Dragonslayer, smashed and pillaged and plundered the Anglo-Saxon countryside – before they were finally stopped cold by King Aelfred the Great of Wessex.
The Anglo-Saxons themselves were an amalgamation of the old Angles, and the German Saxon invaders, who landed back in the 5th Century. After the Saxons were defeated – some would argue by the also semi-legendary King Arthur – they settled the lands around them and assimilated into the native population. That is why Old English is a profoundly Germanic language, whereas Middle English is much more French – thanks to the Norman invasion of 1066.
And here’s an interesting thing about 1066 itself:
If not for a few minor twists of fate, England would have been a profoundly different place.
Not far away from the city of York, is a place called Stamford Bridge. In 1066, the Vikings, under the last real great king of their kind, Harald Hardrada, landed with a large force to invade England and conquer it. Because of a series of circumstances, some within and some without his control, the forces of the English King Harold Godwinson were able to crush and destroy the Viking forces – but with serious losses to the English as well.
Harald died in that battle, apparently partly because he wore only light armour and brought only lightly armoured troops with him. Supposedly, only 24 ships, of his original fleet of over 300, carried back what remained of the Viking army – though there is apparently some dispute about this, as the number may account only for the Norwegian ships, rather than the combined nationalities of the entire Viking horde.
His death marked the end of the Viking Age – from there onward, the Vikings largely ceased to be a relevant threat to European civilisation, though they left their mark quite deeply in the cultures of northern Europe.
The English forces, for their part, lost nearly a third of their overall force, and within just a few weeks, Godwinson faced a new invasion to the south of England from William the Conqueror, the bastard Duke of Normandy. (I use the term, “bastard”, in its classical sense, of an illegitimate son, which is precisely what Old Willy was.) Godwinson had to force-march his troops hard from the north of England, to the south, and was subsequently soundly defeated and killed at the Battle of Hastings.
The point of all of this is that history often hinges on just a few fateful events and facts. IF Harald had worn his heavier armour in the Battle of Stamford Bridge, or IF William had been forced to delay his invasion by just a few days more, or IF Godwinson’s troops had taken fewer losses, or IF the English had a real archery force at Hastings… and so on and so forth. Any one of these factors could have changed the history of the entire world, forever.
We live through similar times now, where just a single event can determine the outcome and nature of an entire theatre of war. It is important to remember, though, that those events do not occur randomly or in isolation. There is always a plan behind them, and we should always keep in mind the bigger picture wherever possible.
And now, seeing as this post is already rather late, let us get to the real reason why everyone is here. This week’s closing Instathot is Anna Beneshova, age 20, from Prague, Czechia. She is currently “a student at the University of Economics and Management in the city, majoring in sports marketing”. As you can see, she probably has at least some Russian blood in her, judging by her looks and her name.
(I think I have a couple of Czech readers, so I do have to ask them – why the hell do you people insist on using a Latin alphabet with lots of diacritics, like the Poles do, when the Cyrillic alphabet is quite literally specifically designed to denote the sounds of Slavic languages?!?!? I can easily understand what the sounds of a Slavic language, like Serbian or Croatian or even Czech, are supposed to be, when I read the lettering in Cyrillic – heck, I can even read Mongolian when written in Cyrillic. I just can’t understand it, of course. But it remains a major mystery to me why people insist on using a very sub-optimal alphabet for their languages like that. The only people that dumb were the Arabs, or so I thought.)
Now that I have provided your more-or-less-weekly dose of history and language lessons – happy weekend, everyone.
2 Comments
Don’t quote me on this but i think it has a lot to do with the Catholic-Orthodox split and church influence on linguistics. Also large parts of Central-SE Europe were under Rome for a long time, so even though they have ended up speaking Slavic they have just as long a history using the Latin alphabet. Makes sense if you consider the Slavic migration as more of a process of amalgamation of differing peoples.
As a mal-educated American (they only taught us one limited victor’s version of American history), I was taught practically no British or European history. How would the world have been different if the Normans had failed in their conquest in 1066? At the very least, how would England have been different?