Tuesday, January 19, 2016

The Misleading Navigatrix - a story, and a Norse style wooden box

The Misleading Navigatrix

A Norse-style trapezoidal decorated box, and a story
Presented at Quest For Valhalla, October 2015

woodworking by Lady Madylyne Grey
story, box decoration and navigational research by Lady Simona della Luna

The completed box. Photo by Lady Madylyn Grey.

The story
There once was a great warrior, a leader of men and women, and he was called John the Beardless. For though he was a fearsome fighter and a cunning commander, he left his chin as hairless as a lad. Despite his lack of luxurious locks, his sign was known far and wide, and his foes knew to fear the sight of it. It was his custom to collect his fighters, and to travel with them to far-flung fights. He steered his ship with skill and speed, and never foundered upon rocks nor despaired in the face of a gale. However, even so talented a traveler may not know all things, and so this John relied upon the services of a slave navigatrix, who was simply know as the “beautiful woman who leads to victory.”


Now, for many voyages this navigatrix was faithful and unerring, guiding the vessel through fog and current, even to places that were new and strange. And many among the crew came to trust her word in all things related to direction, such that they ceased taking their own readings of the sun and the stars, and they forgot their own maps. 

None can now say what the cause was - perhaps it was an unkind word from one of the crew, perhaps she was simply bedeviled by the biting of an infestation of insects. But one day this navigatrix got into the vessel’s store of mead. And so stealthy was her theft, that none knew of it. The mead glugged into her gullet, and the casks she hid so that her crime would go undiscovered. But it was ill fortune for all - John the Beardless came to her then, and demanded to know the course to a war that was said to have many sparkling gems for the taking. Better yet, this place was said to have a great quantity of meat! The crew was ready, all eager to set forth in blood and chaos, their bellies full of fire, and soon they hoped full of roasted meat. The navigatrix knew that she must answer straightaway. If she delayed, it would arouse suspicion, and she knew she would be punished for her transgression. So she simply guessed at a course, hoping that the fog of the drink would not dim her almost-supernatural ability to guide the ship to its destination.

Alas! The course was a false one. And the crew traveled far along it before they came to realize that they had been mis-led. It took much difficult effort for them to eventually reach their destination. Worse yet, the story of the besotted navigatrix and the wayward journey began to be muttered in various ports. Some ruffians of the lower sort even grew so bold as to mock John, and to ridicule the skill with which he commanded his vessel.

There were two makers who lived near to John. They knew of his valor and his authority in combat, and they wanted to ensure that he and his warriors arrived safely at their engagements.  They took it upon themselves to provide him with a more trustworthy source of navigational information.
The inside of the box, with sunstones. Photo by Lady Madylyn Grey.

The box
A number of Norse wooden boxes and chests have survived to the present day. Some of them are trapezoidal, though there is no consistency to the angle, even within individual extant pieces some sides don’t have the same angle - the Mastermyer chest is visibly non-symetrical. Some are rectangular, and those are very similar to other wooden boxes made throughout Europe, but the trapezoid-shaped boxes seem to have been particular to the Norse. (1) We chose that design for the box that we made. The surviving boxes and chests tended to be of much larger size than what we have constructed - the Mastermyer chest was a large, well-stocked oak toolbox, (2) and many of the other chests and boxes were large enough to have stored clothing or blankets. Our box is much smaller, and is intended to hold little items such as small tools or jewelry. I believe that such small sundries boxes are likely to have existed (anyone who has ever had “stuff” has looked for a way to store it neatly), but I do not have archeological support for a trapezoidal box of this small size.

You can find a detailed drawing of the Mastermyer chest, as drawn in Arwidsson and Berg’s “The Mastermyer Find” plate 15, at Academia.edu.

The angles of our trapezoid are mostly regular, with the sides and ends set at a 7 degree angle. We also simplified the construction of the box, due to limitations of time, materials, and scale. The surviving large boxes tend to have nails and joinery, but we found that the antique oak wood we were using tended to split if we attempted to use even a small tack, and complex joinery was beyond our technical skill at the time (at least with so uncooperative a wood). Simona had previously acquired thin reclaimed antique oak boards in narrow widths and had hoped that the box would show the grain of the wood to good effect. Unfortunately, the thinness of the wood and its brittleness due to age meant that it was difficult to work with. The bottom piece split in half during construction, which is why the box bottom is now made of a pine veneer piece. The sides and bottom are simply glued in place with wood glue, since nails proved unusable. Slight gaps are filled in with a putty made from wood glue and sifted sawdust. The hinges are made of leather, and are also glued in place. The wood is finished with a light-colored Danish oil to bring out the grain and protect the wood.
The decoration
All marks on the box were made by wood burning, using modern equipment. The originally planned design was inspired by the carvings on the Gandersheim Reliquary, (3) the Bamberg Casket, (4) and the Cammin Casket, (5) and was to have been panels of gripping beasts, primarily dogs. I drew two of them very lightly onto the wood of the lid, intending to burn over the pencil marks. However, when I tried small curved designs on my test piece, I found that I could not achieve the level of precision required by such an intricate design at small scale. Woodburning is an unforgiving art - if you mess up, there is no erasing the damage. So I decided to do a much simpler, less risky twined vine design. It was burned freehand, and I erased the pencil markings for the gripping beasts.

Thanks to Mistress Amata Amati d’Arezzo for her assistance with woodburning tools and technique.
The runes
The runes are Younger Futhark. Transliterated into the Latin alphabet, the Old Norse inscription reads 
Nyta sa’si ef Siri ofdrykkja.

Translated into English, the message means
Use this if Siri is (excessively) drunk.

“Siri means 'beautiful woman who leads you to victory' in Norwegian" (6)
Thanks to Master Ivarr Runamagi for his assistance with translation and transliteration.
Inside the box
Natural straw is used as a padding material to protect the contents.
Thee padding material protects a piece of Icelandic spar. I purchased it from an online science supply company. (7) There is speculation that the Norse might have used a “sunstone” to find the position of the sun on overcast days, (8) and some real scientific research has been conducted to look into the question of whether the technique works in practice. (9) Unfortunately, actual mention that the Norse did, in fact, do this seems limited to passing references in two sagas. In Hrafn’s Saga, Guðmundr gave Hrafn several valuable gifts, including a sun-stone. Olaf’s Saga has the following description:

The weather was cloudy and it was snowing, as Sigurðr had said it would be. Then the king had Sigurðr and Dagr called to him. After that the king had someone look around outside, and there was no clear sky to be seen anywhere. Then he told Sigurðr to say where the sun had got to. He gave a precise indication. Then the king had a sun-stone brought out and held it up, and he saw where the beam of light pointed from the stone, and it pointed in exactly the direction that Sigurðr had said.(11)

A single possible sunstone was found in the wreck of the Alderney Elizabethan shipwreck from 1592, together in a box with some navigational dividers. That crystal has been studied at length.(12) The researchers who studied the Alderney crystal point out that when exposed to high heat (such as might be found in a Norse cremation burial), calcite shatters into small pieces. While this might help explain the absence of sunstones from archeological excavations of cremation graves, it does nothing to prove that they were ever there in the first place.

In experimental archeology we must answer three successive questions:
  1. Does the technique even work? Under ideal circumstances, can we even get the proposed concept to work as expected? 
  2. Could people in the past have possibly done it? Did they have access to the necessary raw materials and techniques? 
  3. Did people in the past actually do it? Do we have convincing evidence, whether archeological, written, or otherwise presented, that give us proof that this specific technique was in use in the time and place under consideration? This will remove a great number of things we know they “must have” had - some items don’t preserve well, and so tend to be absent from the archeological record. Some practices were considered trade secrets, or were taboo, or were so commonplace that they did not seem to warrant writing down at the time. An absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it does leave us in the realm of guesswork.

In the case of Viking sunstones, we may never find positive proof for the third question. Without that proof, sunstones must remain only an interesting area of speculation. 
How to use a sunstone
One method is suggested by Les Cowley:

Blue sky is a product of sunlight Rayleigh scattered by air molecules. Its light is preferentially polarised with the electric vector perpendicular to the sun's rays and the polarisation is almost complete at 90º from the sun. Analysis of the polarisation gives the sun direction and so any device that splits blue skylight light into two polarised components and compares their intensities can act as a sunstone or sun seeker.

An Iceland Spar, calcite, crystal is just such a device. The crystal, built of arrays of negatively charged carbonate and positive calcium ions, is highly anisotropic. Light entering the crystal splits into two polarised components which travel in different directions. It is 'doubly refracting' and objects viewed through it appear doubled.

Place a paper sticker, or blob of Viking Stockholm tar, on the crystal top face and as seen through the bottom face it is doubled. Hold the crystal to the sky with its upper face level and rotate it to and fro. The two images change in intensity. When they are equally dark - a condition that can be judged rather precisely - the crystal long edges point in the sun's direction.

To be effective the sun must be low - as needed anyway for the Viking horizon board - with moderately blue sky overhead. The sun seeker does not work on completely cloudy days because any light from blue sky beyond them is depolarised by multiple scattering from the cloud water droplets. (13)

Feel free to try it yourself, though you’re likely to find better results when the sun is low in the sky.  


The Vikings, if they used sunstones for navigation, might have had other tools as well. A partial wooden instrument from the 11th century was found in 1948 in Greenland. It has been proposed that this might be a sun compass, or that it might instead be a sun-based position finder.(14, 15) Some researchers have even proposed that the “sun compass” might have been used together with one or more sunstones. (16)

You can find a photograph of a possible sun compass at http://phys.org/news/2013-04-errors-viking-sun-compass-hint.html.

1. WN “Vels” Lucas, “Norse Boarded Chests”, Baroque Pearls, posted on 5 August, 2013  https://baroquepearls.wordpress.com/2013/08/05/norse-boarded-chests/. I was unable to find current museum information from the museums that hold the surviving boxes. 

2. Greta Arwidsson and Gosta Berg, The Mastermyr Find, A Viking Age Tool Chest from Gotland, Larson Publishing Company, Lompoc California, 1983. Available at https://www.academia.edu/6344172/THE_MASTERMYR_FIND_A_Viking_Age_Tool_Chest_from_Gotland 

3. One image of the original walrus ivory covered reliquary may be found here: http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/casket.shtml. A very clear silver-gilt replica made around 1900 is visible here: http://www.historicmedals.com/viewItem.php?no=283. I was unable to find the Gandersheim Reliquary on the page of the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum in Brunswick, but that may have been due to my lack of language skills. The website does not have an English translation.

4. In the collection of the Bayerisches National Museum, described as possibly having been carved in mammoth ivory, http://www.bayerisches-nationalmuseum.de/index.php?id=545&tx_paintingdb_pi%5Bdetail%5D=9

5. A copy is in the collection of the National Museum of Denmark, http://samlinger.natmus.dk/DO/1264. The original is said by The Viking Answer Lady to have been destroyed in WW2 during the firebombing of Dresden, http://www.vikinganswerlady.com/casket.shtml. 

6. John Biggs, “Steve Jobs Was Against The Name “Siri” Before He Was For It,”
Tech Crunch, published 28 March 2012, accessed 11 October 2015, http://techcrunch.com/2012/03/28/steve-jobs-was-against-the-name-siri-before-he-was-for-it/


8. Just Google “Viking sunstone”; you’ll find dozens of breathless “news” articles going on about how the Vikings must have used these things. Typically they contain a few well-chewed references to the Alderney shipwreck crystal, puffed up with enough unsupported speculation presented as fact that even the History Chanel would blush.

9. Environmental Optics Laboratory (Eötvös University) papers 69, 80, 100, 115 which mentions the crystal’s possible use instead for determining latitude and local noon, 116, 118, 120, and 121, found here: https://arago.elte.hu/?q=node/3


11. Anthony Faulkes, editor and translator, Rauðúlfs þáttr, Viking Society for Northern Research, University College London, 2011, p. 17, also available at http://www.vsnrweb-publications.org.uk/Raudulfs%20thattr.%20text.pdf

12. Le Floch A, Ropars G, Lucas J, Wright S, Davenport T, Corfield M, Harrisson M. 2013 The sixteenth century Alderney crystal: a calcite as an efficient reference optical compass? Proc R Soc A 469: 20120651. http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspa.2012.0651


14. Lisa Zyga, “Errors on Viking sun compass hint at alternative purpose” Phys.Org, published 30 April 2013, accessed 15 October 2015, http://phys.org/news/2013-04-errors-viking-sun-compass-hint.html

15. Balázs Bernáth, Miklós Blahó, Ádám Egri, Barta András, Gábor Horváth, “An alternative interpretation of the Viking sundial artefact: an instrument to determine latitude and local noon”, Proc. R. Soc. A 2013 469 20130021; DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2013.0021. Published 11 April 2013, accessed 15 October 2015, http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/469/2154/20130021

16. Balázs Bernáth, Alexandra Farkas, Dénes Száz, Miklós Blahó, Ádám Egri, András Barta, Susanne Åkesson, Gábor Horváth, “How could the Viking Sun compass be used with sunstones before and after sunset? Twilight board as a new interpretation of the Uunartoq artefact fragment” Proc. R. Soc. A 2014 470 20130787; DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2013.0787. Published 26 March 2014, accessed 15 October 2015, http://rspa.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/470/2166/20130787.short?rss=1 


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