Chapter 9: Scandinavia in the Cold Winter
In the days waiting for spring, Ruriks life was not merely about nursing and sleeping. In his first winter, he received a gift from his mothera ne strung with amber beads.
Moreover, this was not an ordinary ne. The ne was made of five pieces of amber, each carved with a symbol. These symbols were actually Rune letters, the script of the local residents of Scandinavia, but they were not just mere letters.
People believed that it was Odin who, at the cost of one eye, obtained part of the power of the god of wisdom, Rune, and thus created this script. Therefore, it was a script with divine power.
Unfortunately, in this dark age, only a few people in any tribe mastered this script. In the Ros tribe, only the tribal elders and priests knew how to use it. It can even be said that the elders only took out the tribes treasured Rune-inscribed sacred objects, such as gold-iid wooden boards, during tribal sacrifices, to borrow the divine power of Odin and Rune to fulfill their prayers.
Of course, the only effect this prayer could achieve was to calm the minds of the tribes people and stabilize their emotions.
Nia put an amber ne around her sons neck as a blessing to him. Each of the five amber beads had a letter, and together they formed a word. Transcribed in Roman letters, it became SIGEL, which originally means sunlight, and by extension, signifies the victory of light over darkness.
Runic script was indeed the script of the Scandinavian tribes, but it was not amon script used by the general public. It was mastered by the tribal ruling elite, especially by professional priests, and ordinary people hardly used it in daily life.
If it were to be used, it would be embroidered on clothes or carved on the wooden beams of ones house, seeking peace and safety.
In the previous autumn, the chief Otto led his subordinates toplete all preparations for the Sogon voyage, such as pulling the required ships ashore for extensive repairs. They prepared food, fresh water, materials for ship repairs during the journey, and weapons for defense against enemies.
It can be said that Ottopleted the Sogon voyage very well.
While the men were preparing for the voyage, the women of the tribe spent two months in the longhouses of Rosburg, storing enough food for each family to survive the entire winter.
In the matter of storing winter supplies, the women had a significant say and were experts in this area.
They smoked and roastedrge quantities of fish and meat. They brewed sweet and slightly bitter wine with wheat obtained through trade or plunder, adding honey and dried cranberries. They also made a lot of bread with flour because the environment was dry, arge amount of durable dried bread was produced this way.
Meanwhile, they also went to tailors to make clothes, hats, and other household items.
Scandinavia was indeed barren, but this barrenness was only rtive to other regions. It had long formed a tradework around the Baltic Sea, and thiswork was not damaged by the rise and fall of Rome.
Completely different from the Mediterranean tradework, it enabled the surrounding tribes to develop rapidly.
The Baltic Sea tradework was formed before the Common Era, and it wasnt until the southern Germanic cousins of the various Viking tribes learned a lot of advanced technology in thete Roman period that the Jund Penins and the Scandinavian Penins entered the Iron Age.
Entering the long winter nights, almost all trade andbat activities came to a halt. Even the bravest seafarers needed a warm home with plenty of food. Or rather, they desperately needed a wise and virtuous wife.
For those brave Viking warriors at sea, once they lost the stable harbor in the rear and left the women of the tribe, it was hard for even the bravest to survive the cold winter until the next spring.
It was this harsh natural environment that forced the people of the Baltic Sea to always have the intention of migrating south. By the ninth century, this intention of migration became stronger.
The residents of the Scandinavian Penins and the Jund Penins were actually rtives of the southern Germanic tribes. After the catastrophic defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, Rome stopped its strategy of northern expansion. Rome eventually declined, falling under the constant erosion of the Germanic tribes. A significant part of the Scandinavians also participated in that grand migration.
Four hundred years after the fall of Rome, the Germanic tribes had established variousrge and small states and became more orderly, moving away from barbarism.
Scandinavia had always been isted. It was never ruled by the Romans, but Rome loved the wealth of the North. Apart from arge amount of animal fur, what else in the icy and snowy North could especially please the Romans in the Mediterranean region?
Of course, there was! One of them was amber!
Nia personally gave her few months old son Rurik an amber ne. Each of the five amber beads was as big as an adults thumb, which was really too big for a baby.
In the Ros tribe, quite a few people had their own nes, often made of shells and amber, or other gemstones.
In Scandinavia, amber was not a rare thing. If a merchant could transport it to the Mediterranean region, they would make a fortune.
On ordinary days, the dragonhead warships of the Ros tribe mostly served as trading vessels, and their trading partners were the tribes of the southern Otherweya.
If life was generally stable, the people of the Scandinavian region engaged in their traditional maritime trade in the Baltic Sea for thousands of years, and the inevitable maritime conflicts did not make them eager to leave.
But indeed, there was a force in the shadows forcing them to leave this increasingly cold ce.
That force was the climate.
Rurik was born in the early ninth century, and the climate of Europe began to turn colder in the seventh century. From then on, all of Europe faced a cold period thatsted for four hundred years.
However, the people of that great era only instinctively felt that their homnd was too cold.
The Scandinavian Penins was a world apart. It had arge number of fjords and streams, and there were as many as 50,000 inds in the sea. Those inds were sometimes refuges, sometimes settlements.
The traditional climate of southern and northern Scandinavia was very different.
For example, the current settlement of the Ros tribe, Rosburg, was actually located in the Norgay area of northern Scandinavia. This area had many mountains and fjords and small ins between the mountains. Thend here was barren, and the climate was the coldest. If there was any advantage, it was that the ce was easy to defend but hard to attack. A stream ran through the entire Rosburg, providing them with an inexhaustible supply of fresh water.
Another point was that the Rosburg, backed by the mountains rocks, the tribes craftsmen discovered copper mines. Although the craftsmen were not capable ofrge-scale smelting, they did not have an intense demand for copper. Making bronze rivets to build more ships was entirely manageable.
After all, the Ros tribe was also part of the Otherweya tribes, but the Norgay area was not originally the domain of the Otherweya people.
Hundreds of years ago, the ancestors of the Ros tribe forced the Ural people who lived here to migrate northward and upied thisnd to build Rosburg.
Most Otherweya people settled in the ins of the south, called Sveand, which literally means thend of the Otherweya people.
Sveand was a in area with a climate rtively suitable for growing wheat and supporting arge number of cattle and sheep.
Because the poption of the Otherweya tribes was notrge, the natural resources here were sufficient to support the people.
However, the poption of the Otherweya people was growing, and various tribes began to border each other, andpetition directly began. In thepetition,rger tribes annexed smaller ones, and a movement to integrate all Otherweya tribes was happening. Eventually, they would inevitably form a stateSweden.
But in this only movement of the Otherweya peoples merger, the Ros tribe was not involved.
Perhaps, the fate of the Ros tribe was not to blend into Sveand but to create a more miraculous future in another world.
Whether it was the various tribes of Sveand or the Ros tribe in the northern Norgay area, they now had to face the ever-expanding power of Denmark.
The ninth-century Nordic region was too cold, even the once thriving wheat in the richest Jund Penins of Denmark was not as good as before.
With arger poption, the many Danish tribes in the Jund area fought each other due to livelihood pressures and traded more frequently.
Their expansion to the south was contained by the powerful Frankish state, and their northern expansion attempts led them to upy the Jund area, sessfully bordering the northern Otherweya people, and conflicts immediately urred.
Even the current Danes and Otherweya people could not imagine that they would fight over the southern part of the Jund area of Scandinavia for hundreds of years.
The Danes also developed westward, beginning to trade and conflict with the Norwegians facing the North Sea until they crossed the North Sea and entered Britain.
The Danes of the Jund Penins were the first to record andunched the plundering of Britain in AD 794, thus opening the Viking Age.
In the year Rurik was born, that plundering had only been 27 years ago, and all the tribes around the Baltic Sea knew that they could cross the sea with swords for trading.
However, a very interesting thing was that the Ros people had long realized their remoteness and could notpete with those brave Danes. They desperately sought opportunities for development to the west of the sea.
It was the cold that forced the Ros tribe to do so until they entered argeke and found a wide river. Sailing upstream, they encountered a group of people who spoke a differentnguage, affluent but of averagebat strength. There, it seemed like another world!