Do you ever think about the origin of countries?

Sometimes, like who invented Italy & why is it shaped like a big boot?

I like history, but I’m no good with it. What I’m interested in knowing is Viking history. How did they start out, and if they were the ones who eventually became the Gauls and other people centuries ago, who shared similar cultures and traits as Vikings. (like the Scots and the Irish) Also I’m very ashamed to say that I know very little about Normans and Saxons and how those people came to be. Most likely settlers, but when? There has to be an origin to all of this somewhere.

@ucme And why is Norway shaped like a penis.

@Symbeline The Vikings carved it that way with their mighty swords, to show their virility & dry sense of humour.

This keeps reminding me of a porn comic I saw about Vikings, but that which I probably shouldn’t post here. Lol.

Haha, humping their “longboats” offshore eh?

Nah, the comic was kinda funny. But it includes the trite inter racial shit that is the boon of pornography. The comic shows these Vikings traveling to places like Africa and raping all the women. Then the women enjoyed it, and wanted more Vikings, which eventually led to mixed race offspring.
We return to the present day in Scandinavia, where all the girls want the black guys, and where the local men, mostly pictured as metal fans with long hair are left with no girls interested in them. Sort of like, history bites you in the ass and all. The comic is filled with ridiculously huge penises that go all the way down to the ground, I’m wondering who the intended audience was here. Lmao. It’s completely trite, racist and outrageously stereotypical, but I couldn’t help laughing.

But this has little to do with history, and yeah I think there was longboat humping, too. Offshore, at that.

@Symbeline Yeah, last thing I wanna do is derail sweetypie @KNOWITALL‘s thread, I hear she smacks hard.

@ucme I’ve never got in a physical altercation my entire life, so I think you’re safe..lol

I like the rambling threads that lead to other things anyway, and I started looking at paganism and viking history, so…I’m susceptible, too.

Derail- I don’t care at all. :) Weird facts are interesting though so anything like that is appreciated!

@KNOWITALL God bless you my child, oh wait…he already did :)
I remember this jigsaw I had as a kid, it was a kind of animated map of Europe.
Spent hours on it only to find one bloody piece missing, the entire continent neatly put together & what piece went awol? The Isle of Wight, tiny pointless little island off the south coast of England. I was forced to pretend it’d been blown out of the water by international bad guys just to make sense of the hole staring out at me from the incomplete puzzle.

(Getting back on topic) @Symbeline That period of European history (and the thousand or so centuries before it) are my specialist area, and I can tell you this:

The origin of the majority of northern and western European peoples came from early bronze age tribes which migrated westwards from the Danube basin in Eastern Europe. As the Bronze Age evolved into the Iron Age, these people became the Gaels, the Celts and later, Saxons and Vikings. The Gaels, whose migration took them through the Mediterranean and into the Iberian penninsula (or Gauls as the Romans named them) were around long before Vikings but it’s not necessarily true to say that the Gaels became Vikings. They shared common ancestry and there was a lot of crossover between the two cultures, which is why Celtic and Viking art are so similar. But in the end the two races existed concurrently with one another.

That’s a very good question, I believe Alaska belonged to the Russians once.
Namibia was once known as German West and was given to South Africa as South West by the Germans, later South Africa left South West now known as Namibia because the boarders were to big for South Africa to control.

And England (sorry @ucme) shipped off as many of the criminals and orphans as possible to other locales. I hear Canada was built on orphan slave labor. America was mainly adventurers (think Titanic), second and third sons who wouldn’t inherit estates and even criminals fleeing their home countries for a new start.

Don’t forget Australia, convict island as was.

@ucme that’s interesting about Australia, I did not even knew that.

It was in the 18th/19th centuries, British jails were massively overcrowded so the government of the day saw fit to ship the surplus out to Australia.

A 93 year old late friend of mine and I went to the American Indian museum in DC few months ago and surprisingly discovered horses were not native to America. They were brought by the Spaniards and native American Indians bred them.

Not the kind of answer needed here I know but that was pretty interesting I hope. : )

And there are Hispanics in Colorado (and other Southwestern states that once were Mexico) who proudly say,“Our families didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!”

@mazingerz88 That IS cool, they say America wouldn’t have thrived back in the day without horses. I’m completely in thrall with Indians, especially Cherokee.

@downtide Very interesting. Seriously. I always figured that the Vikings became most of the other later Europeans, due to all the traveling. So not only is it not the other way around, but there isn’t any direct link say between Vikings and Gauls besides them sharing some of the same ancestry. (my ancestors are Gauls, for a second there I thought I might have Viking blood in me haha)
Any good sites where I can read about some of this? Wiki isn’t really helping me out. Also what about Scotland and Ireland? Weren’t those Vikings who settled there? (I have no basis for this, I just sort of assumed)

Well, actually, America DID survive without horses until about 1500. At least, the Indians did.

What I think is cool too is the origin of the races.