Tag Archives: helge ingstad

Tuesday 12th November 2019 – I USED TO BE A WEREWOLF

full moon granville manche normandy franceBut I’m all right noooooooooooooooooooow!

What a beautiful full moon we are having tonight. And to be on the safe side, when I had my morning shower today, I shaved the palms of my hands just in case.

And there was plenty of garlic in my evening meal too – ready for when I go to Castle Anthrax on Thursday

Last night wasn’t as late as it might have been. I was actually in bed at some time round about 01:30. Furthermore, much to my own surprise as well as doubtless to yours, I was up and about long before the third alarm went off, sometime between 06:07 and 06:19.

There was time enough to go on a nocturnal ramble, but I’ll spare you the gory details. After all, you’re probably eating your evening meal or something. Needless to say, a member of my family put in an appearance during the night. And that’s enough to put the willies up anyone, especially me.

An early start and early breakfast meant plenty of time to deal with the dictaphone notes and by about 08:30 I’d done 6 or 7. And I’m glad that I stopped where I did because I’ve reached what might be called a turbulent period in my life when I fell into the pit.

A shower next and a general clean-up and then I was off up to the Centre Agora for a meeting. And the net result is that tomorrow I’m off to interview a rock musician. And on the way home, I was buttonholed by someone else and invited to do another chat to some different people about Uummaannaaq.

weird garage residence le manege granville manche normandy franceThe walk up to the Centre Agora was very pleasant and interesting, especially as I stormed once more up the bank as if I was on my way to invade Poland.

But I came to a dead stop when I was this garage or car port or whatever just here. I wonder what the architect had in mind when he designed this. It certainly can’t have been anything that any normal person might have been imagining.

Probably some Cossack’s daughter. After all she must know the Steppes.

On the way back from the Centre Agora I called in at LIDL for some shopping. Not too much because I’ll be away for a few days starting Thursday and there’s no point in stocking up with supplies that won’t be eaten.

But there were grapes on special offer again and I love grapes, as regular readers of this rubbish will recall. Which reminds me – just excuse me a moment …

After lunch I bashed on with the web site amendments and I have run aground there. I’ve reached the L’Anse aux Meadows pages now and I’m having a serious think about them.

When I wrote them back in 2010 I didn’t know anything like half as much about the Norse voyages to North America as I do now since I’ve been able to lay my hands on books by people like Carl Rafn, Arthur Middleton Reeves and William Hovgaard.

Rafn is a very interesting author because his Antiquities Americanae, written in 1837, was the first book to take seriously the Norse voyages to North America and the first to actually give scientific study to the Norse Sagas.

It was dismissed, even ridiculed, by many subsequent historians, even such reputable people as Nansen who described the sagas as nothing more than “works of romantic fiction”, but nevertheless inspired a great many people to take his work forward.

It led ultimately to William Nunn’s epic “Wineland voyages;: Location of Helluland, Markland, and Vinland” from 1914. Munn was the first person to pinpoint L’Anse aux Meadows as a Norse site (and as far as I am aware, the first person to pick up on Climate Change too) and which led 50 years ago to the excavations of the Ingstads and their discovery on the Norse ruins.

There was another phone call to be made too. I still haven’t received the paperwork for Caliburn’s insurance despite my conversation of 22nd October, so I rang them again. They told me that they hadn’t received my e-mail with my attachment, something that I find totally bizarre.

So I’ve sent them again. In the meantime they’ve sent me an attestation.

Then I started to pack up all of the rubbish in the living room. Cardboard boxes everywhere that needed moving out and an object that needs packing up ready for returning, as well as taking all of the rubbish out to the bins.

So much involved in the tidying up was I that I missed my afternoon walk. But seeing that I was already at 103% of my daily activity, I shan’t worry too much right now.

But tidying up, hey? What about that?

Tea was a burger on a bap with baked potatoes and veg., followed by fruit salad and blackcurrant sorbet. And it was all absolutely delicious.

trawler night granville manche normandy franceThis evening Iwent out for my evening walk. And straight away I was blasted by a wind the like of which I haven’t felt while I’ve been living here.

Out at sea was a trawler on its way back into harbour and the poor thing was struggling through the waves.

Even at this distance I could see that it wasn’t having a very easy time of it. Like I said, my hat goes off to whoever it is out there in weather like this.

full moon granville manche normandy franceOn and round the corner and into the shelter from the winds.

And here I could eve the spectacular beauty of one of the most perfect full moons that I have ever seen.

The one that I saw at the Phare des Monts on the North Shore of the St Lawrence in Québec in 2012 was certainly spectacular, but for completely different reasons and at a completely different time.

chantier navale port de granville harbour manche normandy franceThe moonlight was bright enough for me to be able to pick up some detail down at the chantier navale and in the outer harbour.

It’s not as clear as the photos that I took last winter, but that’s because this is a hand-held shot and the other one was on a tripod with a very long exposure.

However, I’m not going to be taking a tripod out in a wind like this. Regular readers of this rubbish will recall that it didn’t do the Nikon D3000 very much good at all.

trawler night granville manche normandy franceBy now, the trawler that I had seen out at sea was now close to home. And I bet that the crew members were relieved. And so was I too.

And having seen it safely home I headed for home too. At something of a run too and I managed about 300 or 400 metres before I had to stop for breath.

But I soon found my second wind because I was able to run up the top flight of stairs to my apartment. And that reminded me that coming back from my morning out, despite having come up the hill without stopping, I had run up both flights of stairs with no problem.

Rosemary rang me when I returned and we had a good chat for an hour. And now I’m ready for bed. The fitbit, or what’s left of it, tells me that I’ve walked (or ran) 11.2 kilometres today, or 132% of my daily total.

I really don’t know where all of this energy has come from though. I hope that I’m not going to en up paying for it.

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Tuesday 16th July 2019 – A NICE …

… pleasant surprise awaited us yesterday evening. We would be passing into a different time zone during the night and so we have set our clocks back one hour.

An extra hour in bed is always welcomed, especially these days when I don’t seem to be getting enough. But then that’s the story of my life, isn’t it?

Mind you, that’s not how it worked out, because we had the roughest seas yet. There were doors banging closed all over the place and trying to sleep under those conditions with all that noise going on was not easy. I also had to make a trip to the bathroom on one occasion, after having warned myself yesterday about the folly of drinking tea too late at night.

So all in all it was rather disappointing.

I made it up before the third alarm but don’t ask me how because I wasn’t feeling much like it, and then a stagger up on deck to take a few photos. And there wasn’t much to see except the rear end of the ship swaying about violently in the high seas, which was in itself quite impressive.

Instead, I went back down and started to edit a few more photos. But not as many as I would have liked because firstly the mouse froze and then when I went to restart the laptop it wouldn’t fire up correctly and I was there for hours.

Abandoning the laptop for a while I came up for breakfast. And we were rather few in number because of the weather, although as the morning wore on, the bad weather did subside somewhat. Nevertheless, it was quite interesting watching the chefs try to cook omelettes in the raging storm.

After breakfast the laptop still hadn’t fired up so I went to a talk on the “Vikings” (not the “Norse”, which annoyed me intensely) in North America. And what a dismal performance that was. Our lecturer insisted that the site at L’Anse aux Meadows is “Vinland”, even though not even the Ingstadts who excavated it have committed to that point of view.

Furthermore, he insisted that the Norse only ever came to North America for three years, even though there is written documentary evidence that they were still visiting “Markland” for timber until at least as late as 1347, and quite possibly much later too.

Finally he insisted that the Greenlanders simply “returned home to Iceland and Norway”, even though it is on written record that various Icelanders, Danes and Norwegians visited Greenland on several occasions over the next three centuries looking for them, which they would surely not have done had they known that they had “returned home”.

His lecture was full of falsehoods and incorrect suppositions and all in all, I was as disappointed by this lecturer as I am ever likely to be about anything. I was close to denouncing him as a fraud.

Round about 11:30 the laptop finally staggered into life so I was able to attack the photos and that took me up to lunchtime. And, to be on the safe side, I backed up the data

After lunch, I finally managed to buttonhole the ship’s naturalist (not “naturist”) and showed him my photos of sea mammals. he told me that they were white-beaked dolphins. They hunt in packs, with one acting as the principal fish-scarer, aiming to panic the fish into a big huddle so that the other dolphins could catch them easier.

It was a busy afternoon. Next we had a visit to the bridge where the cadet officer explained the ship’s equipment to us, and then there was a lecture on the basics of the language of Greenland – basically an Inuit-based language with Danish influences.

Finally I was summoned to the cruise director’s office. Being a non-American, the ship can’t take me beyond Greenland unless I am in possession of an Electronic Travel Authority. I actually do have one so they took a photocopy of it.

Dinner this evening was rather different. I ended up at a table hosted by the ship’s photographer. There were about 6 of us and we all had quite a lengthy chat for about two hours and decided to form a little on-board photography club. That’s always good news because anything that gives any sort of help whatsoever is always well worth it.

This evening there is a folk music concert by two Icelandic musicians but I’m not in the mood. I’ll crack on with some more work and seeing that we’ll gain another hour at some point during the night as we move into Greenland time, I’ll have an early night too and hopefully make the most of it.

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Wednesday 11th January 2017 – WHAT A BAD NIGHT!

Just as I said, I was in bed early last night, and was soon asleep. But then I awoke at about 00:45 when a noise on the radio awoke me, so I switched off the laptop and went back to sleep.

And then it all happened.

All I can say is that I must have had a nightmare, because I had one of those dreams that was extremely disturbing and which made me sit bolt upright. and it wasn’t just the fact of the dream either but the person who was the central character and all of the people who surrounded her. It was such a graphic, disturbing dream that I couldn’t go back to sleep and ended up typing it up on the laptop to make sure that I didn’t forget it.

But I must have gone back to sleep because the alarm awoke me at 07:00, and for some reason we had a most astonishing cacophony from the church bells and I’m not quite sure why. But never mind anyone else in the building, it probably would have awoken the dead too.

At breakfast I was on my own, and then I came back down here to carry on with my research. I started to read the report of that Finnish expedition to Labrador. And it’s come up with a couple of interesting facts.

  1. There’s a lengthy discussion of the Churchill Falls and the Bowdoin Canyon into which the Falls descends. A huge pile of statistics that will be of great interest when I start to write about my trip out in the Wilderness of Labrador to visit the Falls
  2. Even more interestingly, you need to remember that this is the period 1937-1939, long before the discovery of the Norse remains at L’Anse aux Meadows on Newfoundland. And yet there’s a map in the preface of this expedition’s report where they discuss the Norse settlement of Newfoundland, and as far as the small scale of the map can isolate, the expedition places Vinland in round about the same area that Helge Ingstad discovered the Norse remains (although Ingstad hesitates to identify them as “Vinland” and as you already know, I don’t think that it corresponds at all with the description given in the Norse Sagas). It’s a little-known fact that L’Anse aux Meadows was identified in 1914 as the location of “Vinland” by an insurance agent and amateur historian called William A Munn in his book “Wineland voyages;: Location of Helluland, Markland, and Vinland”, but Munn isn’t listed as a source by the Expedition, and so I’m now more intrigued than ever before about the source of this Expedition’s information about the location

Just before lunch I went out to the supermarket on the corner for a baguette and came back with a black plastic box as well – another one in the waste bin and I now have a dozen of them ready for packing, whenever that might be.
And I also had a major crash-out this afternoon too, but that’s hardly a surprise.

Tea was delicious – potatoes, carrots, broccoli, gravy and a vegan Linda McCartney pie. That was the best meal that I’ve had for quite a while. And my djervushka from the Ukraine was there too. I have to make the most of my time with her because she’s leaving on Friday, having found a studio for herself. I wonder if she needs a flatmate?

And there are more new people here too – but I’ve not had the pleasure of their company as yet.

Tonight I’m looking forward to my bed. As well as having a shower and a shave, I have a clean bedroom and fresh bedding. I’m all set up for a good night’s sleep but whether or not I’ll have one is another thing.

Who – or what – is going to interrupt me tonight then?

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