Tea at Trianon: New Research on the Vikings

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Thursday, November 4, 2021

New Research on the Vikings

From Inverse:

Meanwhile, Vikings used other cosmic forces — the Sun and stars — to navigate longships to new lands. They harvested the trees of L'Anse aux Meadows and built a life. Their adventures were chronicled and became legend. One thousand years later, scientists would extract wooden fragments from the earth and use new technology to detect those cosmic ray signals, revealing the earliest presence of Europeans in the Americas.
That is some synergy.
In a study released Wednesday in the journal Nature, scientists describe this process and how it led to the finding that Vikings were present in Newfoundland in 1021 A.D. Their study of the radiocarbon concentrations caused by that cosmic ray event allowed them to “overcome the imprecision of previous age estimates,” they write. This new date also represents the first known point at which human migration reached a full circle around the globe.
Co-author Michael Dee, a professor of isotope chronology at the University of Groningen, tells Inverse coming to this conclusion was “a long hard road,” made easier by the support of his expert colleagues.
“Sometimes when I get a quiet second to myself, I am very proud of what we have achieved,” Dee says, “and the thought that this may be a fact that endures for a considerable period of time.” (Read more.)