Pre-viking age scandinavia

you'd probably find this info in the cambridge history of scandinavia which is on bookzz so start there OP

>Have an alphabet and writing system that's comprehensive enough for most (if not a sizeable portion at least) of your population to be able to read and write
>Place honor and glory on a pedestal, routinely state that though men live temporary lives, their reputations last forever
>Have rich oral tradition in the form of sagas and myths
>Never
>Fucking
>Write
>Any
>Of
>It
>Down

WHY

FOR FUCK'S SAKE, WHY

These assholes scribbled runes on shit just to make it pretty. Motherfucking archaeologists found a scandinavian comb with a runic inscription that read 'I am a comb'. So why the hell did you decide to pass down all your stories, legends, and laws with oral tradition rather than fucking write it down?

Jesus Christ, in Iceland they had some guy whose only job was to remember the law, because they didn't fucking write it down until what, 1400-something? Runes are simple collections of straight lines, designed to be easily written and carved into stone. Was it that damn hard to keep meaningful records of any kind?

There's so much we don't know about Scandinavian society because they thought diaries were gay or something. Fuck, I never realized how mad I am about this.

It's a simple, easy to use alphabet too. Damn shame.
Meanwhile, Japanese history and chronicles has been written down using chinese characters for japanese phonology, a mix of japanese and chinese characters and a heapton of other convoluted methods of writing that include more than one ridiculously hard to use alphabets in the most backwards and complex way possible. While Japanese is one of the most phonologically simple languages.

Why did Scandinavians fuck up that badly?

I can kind of understand not having an access to paper or similar material complicating things, and I understand that technological advancement is not by any means linear, but the lack of any major written records, to me, just seems seriously, seriously strange.

Is it the distance from the med. basin? I can't really attribute it to tribal or cultural stupidity. Writing down stuff to pass on information to new generations has been a self emerging trend in most human civilizations. Race is irrelevant.
The Greeks reproduced tales orally until the classical period, when they started making records of all kinds of things besides: "Shipment of 10 cattle and 2 goats" like it was in the archaic period.

I just remembered the Norse proclivity for poetry, and skaldic verse. You'd think a love for poetry would just be another motivation to fucking write something down.

I've heard of writing tablets (basically wood-framed pieces of darkened wax, with an iron stylus) being used as something like a notepad, but it's more likely that for day-to-day recordkeeping, if anything, they just wrote shit down on wood or bone.

It's clear that they didn't put much stake in permanent records, beyond brief epitaphs on memorial stones. It's also clear that a *lot* of the Norse population was literate; not necessarily a majority, but enough that it was commonplace. They wouldn't have an alphabet and written language if they didn't use it, and common people *DEFINITELY* wouldn't know it if all it was used for was grave stones and occasional decoration.

So, the question is what the fuck did they use it for?

Reading and writing things down is for plebs

>båågä the gåätfucker gave ur mom dick here

>grave stones and the occasional decoration
many runestones were for marking the borders of people's land

Pre-Viking age Scandinavia=ancient Finns n shit

Insecure and ignorant Germaniacs will deny and turn a blind eye to all evidence.

>Jesus Christ, in Iceland they had some guy whose only job was to remember the law, because they didn't fucking write it down until what, 1400-something?
Not that late. they started autistically writing about everything pretty early.

we wuz vendels n shieet, we traded with the anglos mup da doo. google "sutton hoo burial".

Basically scandi and Britain warrior culture had close relations, interesting.

Scandinavia is interesting for the same reason the steppe peoples are interesting. They live in places where overpopulation happens frequently. So once a famine or something strikes, they move, and the civilized people starts acting shocked on how 300000 people just poped out of nothing.

The scandinavians (or germanics, basicly the same) moved south to places like rome for better lives. The three biggest examples of this is the migration of the chimbri/teutones, the entire migration era, and the vikings.

First overpopulation was in 19 century.
Scandinavia was empty even in 16 century.

Overpopulation doesn't mean what you think it does.
The concept isn't set in stone but changes with technology and climatic conditions.

Even today people are moving out of here (Scandinavia) to other countries to seek their fortunes.

They probably did write a lot down.
But the runic alphabet was not actually made specifically to carve in to stone, but in to wood.
Which means that most writing was done on wood, and as you all know, wood decays over time. So we are left with what they carved in to stone, bones, and surviving wood fragments if we are lucky.

there have been some finds (at least in norway) of short messages carved into small wooden pieces written in runes from the high middle ages (yes it was still in use then)

The way they talk about anal sex, rape and other shit suggest it ws writen by peasants. Chanses are that this is only a tradition inhereted from the vikings. They might have had plenty of texts, but it's just rotten way

>They might have had plenty of texts, but it's just rotten way
Exactly

>Christianization is the reason they ended up so different from each other.
kek, every territory in Europe has disparate linguistic groups, this as ancient people didn't reinforce language through books, media, or empire.

In nearly most Western European countries today, there are different regional dialects. Now imagine the ancient world when peoples migrated en masse to different geographic areas.

There is the natural drifting of language, Trading with different people which incorporates new words, and Mixing with other cultures(Feudal) which mixes vocabulary.

But go ahead, and blame Christians, you stupid barbarian.

Ever read Beowulf? Its obviously a legend, but it's mythologizing events that took place in 6th century scandinavia.

derp

Indo-europeans reached scandinavia 2500 years before the finno-ugrics

>Overpopulation happens frequently

I thought that was a bullshit myth the Romans came up with, though. Maybe overpopulation in terms of a greater population than the land can support, but it's not like Scandinavia is prime farmland, and historically it was really sparsely populated.

The best explanation I've heard for the Norse diaspora of the Viking Age is that for your average guy living in Scandinavia at the time, there just wasn't much opportunity at home. Unless you were the oldest son, you couldn't expect to inherit much, and unless you knew a valuable trade or ran a successful farm, you couldn't expect to make all that much either. So, you either went on expeditions to trade and/or raid for some wealth (and gain some solid reputation in the process), or you settled somewhere else more promising.

Norse armies like those lead by Cnut the Great were probably chock full of young, landless men who couldn't expect to gain much by staying home with their families, and mainly fought for money, land, and Briton poon.

>in terms of a greater population than the land can support

By this, I meant the amount of food it yielded. Scandinavia wasn't exactly a bread-basket, and their farming techniques were- by comparison to Franks and Saxons- a little primitive. You wouldn't see overpopulation where the land is bursting at the seems and there's no place for people to live. Looking back, I think that's what you meant in the first place, though.