Why the hell is that so important to you? I'm personally a lot more annoyed with faux "Norwegian" paraphernalia (a lot of which I see every day, because I live in a tourist town which wants to sell them what they want) than what people call themselves.
It's not Americans doing these things. I've met plenty of Europeans with exotic identity claims, romanticizing some past culture instead of the living culture around them - Viking metal rather than folk music, to put it like that (there are also of course responsible ways to enjoy exotic metal genres).
By making it into Americans vs. Europeans you're doing a bit of what you're criticizing yourself. Yeah sure, we all agree someone walking up to you and saying they're Saxon is embarrassing, but that sweet old lady from Minnesota who's done rose painting (a national romantic fad around the time her ancestors immigrated) for 20 years is part of a living culture, which isn't simply "American", even if she has outrageous Norwegian pronounciation and otherwise isn't someone you'd like to identify with.
Viking metal is a folk music tradition of Europe! Just a very modern one that postdates the invention of the electric guitar and Tony Iommi losing his fingertips in an industrial accident :)
A lot of Viking-themed metal is pretty historically uninformed and cheesy, although that's true of lots of metal and for that matter lots of other art.
> that sweet old lady from Minnesota who's done rose painting (a national romantic fad around the time her ancestors immigrated) for 20 years is part of a living culture, which isn't simply "American"
Hvis hun ser på seg selv som norsk, så har ikke jeg noe problem med det.
If she sees herself has Norwegian, I have no problem with that.
We should let people identify with whatever they want. Identity is deeply personal - that's kind of the whole thing with identity - and as long as you don't use your identity to argue for something that's objectively wrong (such as rewriting history to suit it) then it's fine. If someone wants to identify as the same kind of thing as me, I may be flattered or embarrassed or worst case offended, but let's go for the facts, not with the identity.
The Norse had a big fear of curses, the evil eye, the "strength in weakness". I think there's a wide theme in Norse legends, which is about spite and betrayal, but it doesn't work quite like we're used to. In Rigsthula, the social origin myth of the Norse, the first king is suggested to have taken the inheritance of his wealthier brothers by force - possibly by murdering them. And in the Norse creation myth, the gods also arguably seize the world from its original owner (and creates the world as we know it from his corpse).
So the theme is that all power is illegitimate, or at the very least seized/stolen, and the robbed want it back - and they will get it back eventually. All hubris will fall, not just for the individual non-god as in Greek mythology, but for the whole world and the gods themselves. The world three has tree roots, one to the well of the norns (fates), one to the poisonous worm Nidhogg who gnaws on the root and will eventually kill it, and one to Mimir's well, the well of wisdom, where you can maybe learn secret tricks of gods and rulers to postpone the inevitable.
So spite, or nid, dark power to break rather than to rule, is the ultimate danger to kings and rulers. To invite it by acts of cruelty, especially against the weak, is to bring ill luck upon yourself. Your followers, too, believe deeply in this, so they may abandon you if you seem to "draw in bad karma".
But those who are weak, and have nothing to lose, can dip into the power of spite and hate, and do things which would be unwise for a ruler to do, such as poisonings, betrayals, or vicious cruelty. They aren't evil for doing so, it's just the way the world works - if you run afoul of this, it was your own fault for inviting their hate.
Even demand for safety can be scornful, and "nid". Kings are supposed to trust in their own strength, and to some degree accept living with threats hanging over their heads. King Nidhad, in the story of Volund, listens to his wife's advice and hamstrings Volund. It's arguably self-defense since Volund certainly hates them, but it's still a scornful, cowardly act - which Nidhad and his family end up paying dearly for.
So yes, with respect to the Finnish and Sami neighbors, they would have feared them because of potential curses, but it wasn't because they were a magical people as such, it was simply were weak.
But Christianity complicated things. Odin, like the other pagan gods, is himself subject to the laws of fate and must be wise for his own sake, but the Christian God is almighty. You do not have to fear dark curses if He is with you. As a practical matter, they were a lot more willing to build walls and engage in other "cowardly" acts of self defense, and they could get away with it because their Christian followers didn't worry (much) that this would invite fate backlash. They were also a lot less afraid of things like public executions. It made possible much higher concentration of political power.
And no, the Norse didn't view that as simply fat idiots ripe for plunder. They admired all the great walls and splendor which concentrated political power had managed to build in Europe - things they had very little of at home. They did plunder, yes, but that was like a fox eating hens in a henhouse - he's still worried about the farmer.
A historian I respect - don't want to name him in case I accidentally misrepresent his ideas - has speculated that the Norse didn't mix with the Sami because having a separate tribe of hunters (no major reindeer farming back then) was useful to them. Almost like a caste. If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.
After the Danes returned to Greeland and first met the Inuit, the priests pushed for religious and cultural assimilation. Not strictly speaking linguistic assimilation, since they were good protestants who believed everyone had a right to hear the gospel in their own language, but it seems likely the language would have disappeared eventually if they got their way.
But the mercantile class in Denmark resisted development efforts, because if the Greenlanders became just another European people under the Danish crown, exploiting trade with them might become less profitable. People who were willing to live without European material comforts, such as they were, yet would sell you highly lucrative trade goods in return for comparatively little. The policy may have saved their language and culture, but at the cost of crippling economic development for a long time.
Maybe it was like that with the frontier/foraging Sami in the past, too. Kept apart in order to be easier to exploit economically. Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.
Another historian, which I will name - Johan Borgos - has written that the Lofoten islands were roughly 1 / 5 Sami, and that it was priests, the social elite, who first broke the taboo on marrying across the language barrier. Once they had done it, common people started doing it too, and so the language died out in that place. Not really from deliberate suppression effort (that came much later), but simply from "well, our parents speak different languages but most of the people we interact with speak Norwegian, so..."
Segregation can "work wonders" for preserving language and culture, but it's obviously often not a good thing. And to some degree, I think we have to respect our ancestors choices that they wanted bakeries, horn orchestras, cinemas, photography studios, tuberculosis sanatoriums, teetotaller lodges, baptists and salvationists, steam ships, traveling circuses, gymnastic competitions, revue theater etc. etc. in short everything modern, coded as "Norwegian" to them - rather than joik and reindeer and the few exotic things coded as Sami.
I don't give much credence to the theory though, having grown up in a part of Sweden where every village have their own "language"(we call them mål, which is like halfway between dialect and language, they're not officially recognised as minority languages, but they're more than just dialects: villages as little as 30km apart can't understand eachother at all, and one of them, Älvdalsmål, is notoriously more similar to Icelandic than it is too Swedish)
These are Swedish communities, as opposed to Sami ones, they've been integrated into the wider Swedish society since their founding, yet these languages are still alive today(though some are critically endangered)
There are degrees of integration. People from Älvdalen, should they choose to, could move to Stockholm and change their dialect (one of the ways you know it's a dialect, is that they understand you much better than you understand them). It's been that way for a long time.
And from what I understand Älvdalsmål is, like all dialects, getting rounded at the corners and getting more understandable to other Swedes.
Even dialects that sound incomprehensible at first, if you're a native speaker you'll get used to it quickly. The difficulty of Älvdalska is superficial, it's actually very close to what you're used to, so you'll learn to understand them and they already know how to understand you.
Sami is completely different. It takes a long time to learn. Go back 150 years, and very few Sami would be able to move to the capital and pass as Norwegian or Swedish, their accent would give them away even if they did know the majority language. Go back another 50 years, and they may simply not have been allowed to even try to pass in many places (as I recall, the first Sami priest in Norway, Anders Porsanger, was rejected by his Trondheim congregation. He was simply too weird for them, even though he was highly educated and of course spoke excellent Norwegian).
Älvdalsmål is critically endangered. You have the parallel existing älvdals dialect, which most people living in Älvdalen speak. Last I checked there was something like 5 living people who can speak älvdalsmål.
I'd argue that the reason locals understand you more than you understand them is, in these cases, that they're effectively bilingual. If they want you to understand then they'll switch to Swedish and you'll understand just fine.
There hasn't been anyone speaking only Mål in a few generations, in my estimate. You either speak both mål and Swedish, or only Swedish.
And no, you don't pick these up easily. I grew up in Rättvik. My grandmother used to speak rättviksmål on occasion (she was bilingual with Swedish) I can understand rättviksmål somewhat. I used to date a girl from Malung, who spoke Swedish usually, but exclusively Malungsmål with her mom. 3 years together and I still couldn't understand a single word she said to her mother. Mål is often conflated with the dialects of the same area, but they are 2 distinct things. Skånska is a dialect,I can understand it fine, even I have to focus a bit more than usual. Dalarna has a dialect too, the one Gunde Svan speaks on TV, it's easy to understand. Mål is separate, and much, much harder.
You're right that Sami is harder though. It does not share a common root with Swedish, so there are basically no similarities. Even German would be easier for Swedes as they're both Germanic languages, but they've diverged long enough ago that similarities are sparse these days.
“Mål” literally just means language, there’s nothing special or particular to Swedish regional dialects about it. You have the word “språk” from German “Sprach”, likely via Low German.
The term “dialect” is very fluid, and intelligibility is not a requirement. It is often a negotiated term that has more to do with culture or politics.
In China, they even call Cantonese and Hakka “dialects”, which is linguistically absurd, but serves a political purpose.
Saami were sparsely populating large areas - so they did not exactly live side by side with other people. And the more people came to live where Saami were herding their reindeers, the less space they had left to herd them. Throw in to that climate change into that as well. But to the contrary to what you are claiming here, Saami did assimilate into Norwegians and Norwegians also put a lot of effort in assimilation of Saami - mainly during the times, when religion was dominant form of identity, so it was done with good intentions - like all the major crimes against humanity.
Vikings were a product of mixing people of different origins. And that is a consistent result across whole Europe. The same thing applies in Western Europe, just as in Eastern Europe. And that applies to Norwegian vikings, even if they had a chance to colonize some empty lands - they still also took wives from other places than just Norway.
They were not that much more sparse than their neighbors. They typically moved with the seasons, so maybe they needed a little more space (a summer place and a winter place at the very least), but not radically more so. After all, the Norse had summer pastures in the mountains too.
Reindeer herding is younger than people think, as I said. Until the major predators were exterminated, it wouldn't have been possible to have herds of the sizes we're used to. Land wasn't the limiting factor for herd size. Until eastern Norwegian immigrants came in the 1750s on, and settled inland - a crazy thing to do according to locals since of course you wanted to live by the sea where the fish, the money were, and it was cold inland - there wasn't much land use conflict.
There were no centrally organized assimilation efforts until von Westen at the earliest. And while he was zealous about rooting out superstition and customs which he saw as pagan, he was also protecting the language, teaching people in their own language (for a generation after Westen, Sami were said to be more educated than other northerners, and you see it in the censuses!) and certainly wasn't putting people into encomiendas or otherwise forcing them to change their material way of life.
> If people live side by side for 1000s of years, I think that's fair to speculate - there has to be a reason they didn't just assimilate into each other.
Yeah, they had completely different lifestyles that were reliant on completely different biomes. The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra. Neither could live where the other lived, they spoke languages from completely different families, they had completely different cultural traditions. Neither side had much that the other side wanted. Of course they didn't assimilate, how could they?
But when the industrial revolution came and iron ore was discovered up north, suddenly the desire to assimilate them (or genocide them...) appeared, because now they had something that the people in the south wanted very, very much.
> Though already in Harald Fairhair's day, it seems there were also Sami living among the Norse as boatwrights and smiths and maybe also as wandering professional hunters, hunting livestock predators for bounties - we know that kept going for a long time.
My understanding is that the Norse respected the Sami as a people different from them, and were a little bit afraid of their "magic", because they didn't understand it. They were perfectly happy to live apart, and do a little bit of trade in goods and services. Why go north to raid the Sami, when you could sail south and raid the fat and rich English or the French instead?
> The Norse were farmers, they needed farmland and a little bit of forest for wood and hunting. The Sami were reindeer herders, they needed tundra.
This is a common stereotype, but it's simply not accurate. Intensive reindeer herding didn't become a thing until the major predators and the wild reindeer were wiped out. Sami lived very similarly to the Norse - a bit more semi-nomadic, and a bit more adapted to use marginal land maybe, but they held sheep, fished and farmed just like their neighbors. And once intensive reindeer herding took off in the 17th-18th century, still it was a minority who lived from that.
There were raids done against Saami as well, though it is right - more profitable raids were better down south. In much later times there were also slavery raids done that included Saami people, though this cross over into times that were past viking Age as well by cultures that evolved from vikings, where there are different opinions what can be defined as vikings.
Could that actually be connected? There are a LOT of Chinese engineers and researchers working on all these models, I assume they would like to take some vacation days, and it makes sense to me to time releases around it.
Scaling laws mean that there's not much need to actually scale things to the skies. Instead, you can run a bunch of experiments at small scale, fit the scaling law parameters, then extrapolate. If the predicted outcome is disappointing (e.g. it's unlikely to beat the previous scaled-to-the-sky model), you can save the really expensive experiment for a more promising approach.
It would certainly be nice though if this kind of negative result was published more often instead of leaving people to guess why a seemingly useful innovation wasn't adopted in the end.
Minecraft Pocket Edition for Xperia Play
-> Minecraft: Pocket Edition
-> [Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition, Minecraft: Gear VR Edition,
Minecraft: Apple TV Edition, Minecraft: Fire TV Edition,
Minecraft: Pocket Edition]
-> Minecraft
(It is colloquially "Minecraft: Bedrock Edition" when Mojang is
distinguishing it from other versions. Note also that despite all
being named "Minecraft", different platforms are separate
licenses, but the Windows 10/11 license is bundled with Java Edition)
RubyDung
-> Cave Game
-> Minecraft: Order of the Stone
-> Minecraft
-> Minecraft: Java Edition
Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition
-> [Minecraft: Xbox One Edition, Minecraft: PlayStation 3 Edition,
Minecraft: PlayStation 4 Edition, Minecraft: PlayStation Vita Edition,
Minecraft: Wii U Edition, Minecraft: Nintendo Switch Edition]
(This was the 4J Studios version, now deprecated as some platforms
are unsupported and on some platforms it is superseded by Bedrock.
It is sometimes referred to as "Console Edition" but this was
never official.)
As I recall the C++ reimplementation of Minecraft predates the Microsoft sale. Unless they did a complete rewrite I don't know about, Bedrock is distantly based on the old mobile/console version of Minecraft.
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