Mysterious Times

Here’s a nice example of how intelligent men and women were able to create beasts/demons from a compounded misinterpretation.First, in the early Middle Ages, some of the Viking dragon boats sailing out of Scandinavia missed the party to the south, where the pointy-headed ones were wrecking settlements in Britain, the Baltic, northern France, Spain and further afield. These ‘other’ Norse headed to the north and settled first Iceland, then Greenland and finally and, temporarily, the Canadian coast. In Canada and Greenland they came across the sub-arctic peoples of this area. These they termed the skraelings and Beach offered, a year and more ago, a brief description of an early Norse-Skraeling meeting, which ended predictably enough, in tears.

read more Skraelings and Demons – Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog.