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On Friday March 24th, I'd like to take the opportunity to answer Patreon supporters' questions in a video or videos. Please answer in a reply to this post if you have a question (short or long) that might be addressed in a video. If I get mostly short questions, I might make just one long video answering all of them, or I may make multiple videos dealing each with one question. We'll see what works based on what you would like to ask, so let me know what you're most curious about, and thanks as always for supporting my educational video series. 

Comments

Anonymous

What are your thoughts on the rumors that Vikings used strong soap to make their hair blonde? Is there any truth to that?

Anonymous

Not really linguistic in nature, but can you provide any insight on non-runic Norse symbology? Thor's hammer comes to mind, but I'm more interested in other symbols that represented the gods or different ideas, and whether certain symbols seen posted online a lot (e.g., the symbol for Gungnir) are sourced accurately. It's very hard for a layman to tell if a symbol has real historic value or if somebody just made it up recently and a dozen others repeated the same idea.

norsebysw

(the time to submit questions for videos has passed, but I can quickly give you a basic answer on this one) There are certainly artistic symbols on Viking-Age inscriptions, but the problem is we have no information about what they mean that actually survives from that period. For instance, the symbol sometimes called a "Valknut" today appears on some runic inscriptions, but never with any sort of name or explanation about its meaning; even the name "Valknut" is modern. Pretty much the only non-linguistic symbol from that period that we can confidently state the meaning of is Thor's hammer.