Icelandic Vikings | We Will Rock You

THE VIKING BAKERY, Toronto
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Meet Helgi, the Icelandic Ruler of a Viking Group

"According to Helgi, “People think the Vikings were only about raiding and fighting. But they were farmers and families first.” The group regularly appears at Icelandic culture festivals, where they are often joined by other Viking enthusiasts from the United Kingdom, Sweden and even as far afield as Australia. Together, they re-create settlement villages and showcase skills such as Viking blacksmithing, raising Icelandic chickens and the surprisingly difficult art of horn blowing."
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Three giant Viking swords are now forever embedded in solid stone on a Nordic hill in Hafrsfjord, and stand tall against the sun as a reminder of an ancient battle that eventually unified the kingdoms of Norway and its people into one nation. The swords were forced through solid rock so that they can never be removed and such a battle never to occur again. They stand for peace, unity, and freedom, and the place where they are impaled is near the city of Stavanger in the Rogaland regio


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Three large swords stand on the hill as a memory to the Battle of Hafrsfjord in year 872, when King Harald Fairhair gathered all of Norway under one crown.
 
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King Harald was always known for his ability to bring together leaders to non-violent negotiations. To discuss, share information, and, crucially, communicate across boundaries particularly in the expansion and unification of Norway and Denmark in this era.

Fast-forward a little over 1,000 years to 1996, and short-range radio technology was in its very early stages, Intel, Swedish telecom company Ericsson, and Nokia were all working on different radio technologies. The three powerhouses quickly realized that the best way to drive the technology forward within the industry and avoid fragmentation would be to create a single wireless standard.

In December of that year, representatives from the three companies met at the Ericsson plant in Lund, Sweden to plan their industry-standard technology. Before they could get started, however, they decided that they needed a codename for the project while it was in development.
Intel representative Jim Kardash suggested that the temporary name be "Bluetooth," and his reasoning was simple: "King Harald Bluetooth ... was famous for uniting Scandinavia just as we intended to unite the PC and cellular industries with a short-range wireless link." The name stuck since then.
 
The Viking Technology that Conquered the World
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"The key to their successful raids was their ships, the speedy drakkar, technically superior to those of their rivals. In addition, they were able to orient themselves on the sea without a compass by using solar stones that allowed them to know where the sun was on overcast days. Thanks to their technology and their zeal for conquest, they reached the coasts of almost all of Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia and the northeast of North America and would also colonise Iceland and Greenland."

“Their warships were light and designed to be able to navigate up to one metre deep, so they could venture into rivers, marshes or approach the beach itself. There were riverside carpenters under the command of an expert who personally chose the trees that had to be cut down. The saw was never used,”

"Overlapping the boards that made up the ship’s hull, as it was being built, made it very flexible. They were also symmetrical ships, equally long in the bow as in the stern, which facilitated turning at great speed. These were ships made to transport people and to go very fast, which under favourable conditions could reach close to 30km/h (16 knots)"

"Thus, although they did not have a compass, “on the high seas they could know their location thanks to the Iceland spar, a type of calcite, which works as a polarizer, revealing a slight shine where the sun is.”
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