Here is my sixth entry for this awesome game from 
This initiative is simple - what have I learned recently?
This week has ended up with a theme...
Vikings and Scandinavia!
Over the past few days I learned:
No. 1 - The Vikings had a much larger part in the development of English than I'd thought.
When I first started learning Norwegian, I realized fairly quickly that if you could think in Old English, you could translate directly across. According to this video, that assessment is very close - and even easier than that when you realize that a full 50% of our vocabulary is based on Old Norse!
Take our "th" sound. Almost all of those words are directly from Old Norse in one of two letters: Ðð and Þþ. (The"dd" in Welsh is basically ð again.)
Watch this amazing video for more information.
No. 2 - Bokmål (one of the main versions of Norwegian) was a top-down language.
To make it (possibly too) simple, when the Danes ruled Norway, there was a concerted effort to push Danish into the common spoken languages - the one of the countryside (landsmål) and the one of the city (riksmål - or rich speak). Riksmål was rebranded bokmål while landsmål was rebranded nynorsk - which is currently spoken predominantly in the western parts of Norway and into central northern Norway where the two language forms exist side-by-side. (Bokmål takes over again in the far north.)
Read more about it on Wikipedia.
No. 3 - Joiking is even more amazing than I'd thought!
An ancient soul-level form of music of the Sámi (who live in Sápmi region across northern Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia) was actually banned by early Christians who felt it was a form of spellcraft.
This form of music is less akin to lyrical songs, and more akin to painting a subject - the singer "becomes" its subject, the emotions - so I can get why they felt it was spellcraft.
(I've decided to emulate this in my fiction by having my healers sing their spells. I was instantly rewarded for this decision when several words in my first sung spell related perfectly to the mythology I've been writing for the past 10+ years.)
Read more from my musical foray.
And/or here's another that I didn't feature the other day...
No. 4 - Discovery of another good Norwegian musical artist - Kygo
I found this one quite on accident today while listening to some Imagine Dragons. Before I knew it, there was this song where they worked with Kygo, whom I'd not heard of before, but between the music and the scenic videos, I'm hooked. Here's one of my favorites:
No. 5 - I can read more Norwegian and Swedish than I thought.
(I was cruising through a Swedish newspaper looking for more cool things to share and had little trouble reading about the shooting in Houston as well as a tragic accident in Uppsala.)
I think that's going to be it this week.
Even if you're not entering the contest (why not?) what have you learned this week?
Crossposted at Steemit, Whaleshares, WeKu
Lori Svensen
author/designer at A'mara Books
photographer/graphic artist for Viking Visual
verified author on Goodreads
find me on Twitter
also on: Whaleshares, WeKu
Banner by 