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Does the Chinon Parchment clear matters up at all?
The Templars were a rum lot, all right, quite apart from Da Vinci Code imaginings. At the time of their suppression in 1312 they were accused of worshipping a head, of spitting on the crucifix, and of sodomy. These habits were presumed to have been picked up in Moorish lands. In 1314, their Grand Master, James of Molay, protesting his innocence, was burnt at the stake by Philip IV of France.
Only in 2005 was it discovered why he protested so much. A scroll misfiled in the Vatican Secret Archives turned out to be the sworn account of the interrogation of Molay and his colleagues at the castle of Chinon. They admitted that on initiation into the Templars they had been told to spit on the crucifix and to denounce Christ, but they declared they had not meant it in their hearts. As for sodomy, none admitted it, and none had worshipped any head. |
You can get your own copy of it, but it's not cheap:
Only 799 copies of the 300-page volume Processus Contra Templarios (Latin for Trial against the Templars) are for sale -- each priced at $8,377, Scrinium publishing house, which prints documents from the Vatican's secret archives. |
Apparently, it was misfiled in the 17th century:
The official archives of the Holy See were systematically organised for the first time only in the 17th Century. |
I wonder why it was kept a secret during the pre-misfiling period?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/07/26/bohaa126.xml
http://www.usatoday.com/news/religion/2007-10-12-papers_N.htm?csp=34
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7044741.stm
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Hatty
Site Admin
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In: Berkshire
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The Telegraph article adds:
The importance of the Chinon parchment is that it proves that Pope Clement V had absolved these Templars from their crimes and cleared them of any taint of heresy. The subsequent dissolution of the order was the work of the French king's persevering campaign. |
which is tantamount to conceding defeat to the French king; the papacy lost control of, by all accounts, this extremely wealthy organisation.
You can get your own copy of it, but it's not cheap: |
The words 'bandwagon' and 'Da Vinci Code' come to mind.
Apparently, it was misfiled in the 17th century: |
The burnings, especially of the Grand Master, were carried out as a public spectacle; hard to credit the record of the dissolution of a chivalric Order whose members were the epitome of Christian Crusaders being lost amid a pile of papers in a dusty corner. It surely ranked as a momentous occasion.
Has the Chinon Parchment been carbon dated and analysed by anyone other than Vatican acolytes?
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Hatty wrote: |
Has the Chinon Parchment been carbon dated and analysed by anyone other than Vatican acolytes? |
The Fomenko camp claims this about carbon dating:
At present the c14 dating procedure runs as follows: archaeologist sends an artefact to a radiocarbon dating laboratory with his idea of the age of the object. Laboratory complies and makes required radio dating, confirming the date suggested by archaeologist. Everybody's happy: lab makes money by making an expensive test, archaeologist by reaping the laurels for his earth shattering discovery. The in-built low precision of this method allows cooking scientifically looking results desired by the customer archaeologist. General public doesn't realize that it was duped again. In general the archaeological artefacts are submitted to carbon 14 laboratories not to find the true age of the artefact, but to rubberstamp age suggested by the historians. |
I can't find the link, but they also claim that carbon dating methods can be off by about 1500 years. So then it wouldn't be so good for relatively recent dates.
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Here's some more carbon dating discussion I found:
My missus is an archaeology graduate; she tells me about something called 'Calibrated Radiocarbon dating'.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiocarbon_dating#Calibration
From that link;
A raw (radiocarbon) BP date cannot be used directly as a calendar date, because the level of atmospheric 14C has not been strictly constant during the span of time that can be radiocarbon dated. The level is affected by variations in the cosmic ray intensity which is affected by variations caused by solar storms. In addition there are substantial reservoirs of carbon in organic matter, the ocean, ocean sediments (see methane hydrate), and sedimentary rocks. Changing climate can sometimes disrupt the carbon flow between these reservoirs and the atmosphere. The level has also been affected by human activities--it was almost doubled for a short period due to atomic bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s and has been reduced by the release of large amounts of CO2 from ancient organic sources where 14C is not present--the fossil fuels used in industry and transportation, known as the Suess effect.
So the inaccuracies in the method are well known. But tree-rings come to the rescue;
The raw radiocarbon dates, in BP years, are therefore calibrated to give calendar dates. Standard calibration curves are available, based on comparison of radiocarbon dates of samples that can be independently dated by other methods such as examination of tree growth rings (dendrochronology), ice cores, deep ocean sediment cores, lake sediment varves, coral samples, and speleothems (cave deposits).
If dendrochronology needs a little more explanation, here is a page about it;
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dendrochronology
Calibrated Radiocarbon dating and Dendrochronology together are remarkably reliable. |
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Ishmael
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In: Toronto
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EndlesslyRocking wrote: | The Fomenko camp claims this about carbon dating: |
There are more material criticisms made as well and, as Fomenko explains it, dendochronology can afford no comfort to Carbon Dating.
No matter. If the document in question was established to be of a more recent vintage, this would be no hindrance to historians. They would simply claim that the surviving text is a hand-made copy of a lost original. This is, in fact, what is claimed for almost all pre-Renaissance documents in our possession.
Nag Hammadi and Dead Sea are two famous exceptions.
The former was dated to 348 CE +- 60 years.
And that just seems dishonest right there.
How can the last digit be given unless there was ever only one test performed? Did all the participating laboratories get the same exact year within the same exact error margin? (or does my source merely report one of many test results?).
If for nothing else, however, our epistemological alarms should fire over the fact that the result obtained is precisely aligned with expectations.
It is a rule of Applied Epistemology that we should be most suspicious of our findings when they confirm our hypotheses. It almost always means our testing methods are deeply flawed (contrariwise, the hypothesis has its best hope when the tests fail to confirm it).
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Hatty
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In: Berkshire
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They admitted that on initiation into the Templars they had been told to spit on the crucifix and to denounce Christ, but they declared they had not meant it in their hearts. As for sodomy, none admitted it, and none had worshipped any head. |
A while back someone equated the Baphomet with Mohammed. Idolatry, indeed pictorial depictions of the Prophet or anyone else, and unnatural sexual practices are strictly verboten in the Qu'ran, whereas (I'm guessing) spitting on the Cross etc. would be viewed more leniently. If a 'Moorish' element really existed in Templar rituals, the sins of sodomy and worshipping an idol would be the ones most vigorously denied. Which doesn't mean sodomy wasn't practised covertly (in a TV programme about Richard Burton, the Victorian explorer, Burton, who apparently was frequently propositioned in Cairo, claimed the prevalence of homosexuality in the ME was due to religious interdiction).
Did the word "Baphomet" as opposed to 'a head' really appear in the transcript of the trial or contemporary reports?
Wiki says:
However, the charges about the worship of an idol named Baphomet, were unique to the Inquisition of the Templars.[3][4] As Karen Ralls has pointed out, "There is no mention of Baphomet either in the Templar Rule or in other medieval period Templar documents".
It would seem the name arose as a result of nineteenth-century fascination in all matters relating to the occult.
Wiki adds:
"According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the name's first appearance in English was in Henry Hallam's 1818 work Middle Ages, reproducing an early French corruption of "Mahomet", a common variant of Arabic محمد Muhammad"
though this is disputed.
There've been various stabs at finding its meaning, eg.
Idries Shah proposed that "Baphomet" may derive from the Arabic word ابو فهمة Abufihamat, meaning "The Father of Understanding"
yet this supposedly important figure only seems to occur in conjunction with the Templars which begs the question why wasn't the cult of Baphomet more widespread.
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Hatty
Site Admin
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In: Berkshire
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The same goes for the 'Vikings' by the way. The "viking raids" of Britain, I am largely convinced, are events in the Mediterranean mistakenly moved to Northern Europe. |
The Moorish invasion of Spain is given as 711 AD and Cordoba rose to become the leading light of Europe, greater even than Constantinople in some accounts though taken over by another dynasty, the Abbasids, in the mid 8th century. Is there an overlap between Abba- and Vi- (avi means 'father') and -sid and -king?
Interestingly, an Abbasid caliph on his way to do battle against Byzantium purportedly passed through Haran the capital of the caliphs under the Umayyads, the predecessors of the Abbasid rulers in Spain, and gave the city an ultimatum to convert to one of the three great religions, Judaism, Christianity or Islam; they wisely chose the latter. Sounds uncannily like a re-telling of the story of the Khazar empire.
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Jorn
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Ishmael wrote: |
The way I see it is that, if Fomenko is right, the language we call Anglo-Saxon can still be quite real. It just isn't necessarily Anglo-Saxon. For that matter, the people called Anglo-Saxons might still have been real, but the historical events with which they have been associated are untrue.
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I read Fomenko a couple of years ago, and think he is correct in much of his critique, but I could not accept the etymologies he presented.
Nothing ever get worse, and the Russians could not even beat the tiny nation Sweden alone against Karl XII. That the Swedes could not beat even tinier Denmark-Norway after that, is further proof that the Russians could not have been a world power in the past.
The time before Karl XII, the Swedes used to beat the Russians, as for the time after, Sweden never dared a war. I don't claim the Russians are as technically competent as the Swedes, but they are not idiots either, so wars between Sweden and Russia have always been a game of having the most soldiers.
If one assumes some form of the Normanist School, that the Routsi or Swedes from Roslagen founded Russia, or if one assume Slavs did it themselves, all the free land would explain the the strong population growth that turned Russia into a world power.
Ishmael wrote: | If the first historians in Britain were "Anglo-Saxons", they may have been trying to explain their own origins. The documents to which they had access actually pertained to another place but they did not know this. Everything they read was interpreted as having occurred in Britain.
On the other hand, I am skeptical that the Anglo-Saxons ever did exist. They are not a people who survive in any tangible sense outside of the pages of history. |
I can agree with this.
Ishmael wrote: | The same goes for the 'Vikings' by the way. The "viking raids" of Britain, I am largely convinced, are events in the Mediterranean mistakenly moved to Northern Europe. If I am right then Scandinavians were never Vikings.
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The Vikings never existed, and there are no historical sources that claim they did. They were called Northmenn, Eastmenn, Danes, Varangians, Normans etc.
In the sagas it was sometimes called to "go viking", but mostly it is described that they harried or burnt an area.
The whole Viking thing seems to have been invented in Britain, as a way to separate them from the Normans.
One of the few things I am certain of though, is that what we today call the Viking ship, evolved in Scandinavia, mostly along the Norwegian coast.
That (almost) ALL the oldest vocabulary for shipping is of Norse origin, before it later became Dutch and then English as time moved on and the ships became bigger, is for me a big limit on what theories I can accept.
The main reason for why I am so sure the Viking ship evolved in Scandinavia, is the geological landscape called Strandflat along the Norwegian coast, combined with the almost impossibility of transporting anything over land, because the land is so rugged.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strandflat
There are also archaeological finds that show the whole evolution, but these could of course all be fakes. The Problem with this is that new ones are popping up all the time, and they look like what has been found before. This means we must still be faking them.
Ishmael wrote: | Keep in mind that the Anglo-Saxon invasion is now being openly questioned by archaeologists, their having been unable to find any evidence for it. The latest thinking now claims that Old English was merely adopted by the British People as part of a cultural package gained from mere continental 'influence'. |
I kind of doubt the Anglo-Saxon stuff myself, as I think the Roman empire is the German Roman Empire.
If you had something like the Viking ship, you could settle peacefully by making a fishing village and trade Fish with the locals. You could also create cities, and if the locals tried to rob it, you could muster your allies, and go on a punishment expedition.
As the "vikings" intermarried, the locals learned to make ships themselves, and as the ships got bigger, Scandinavia could no longer compete, because of their tiny population.
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Ishmael
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In: Toronto
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Jorn wrote: | Nothing ever get worse, and the Russians could not even beat the tiny nation Sweden... |
This is excellent! Argument from principle. An outstanding anlysis.
However, I will counter.
The question is, "Which Russians?" Fomenko argues that the "Russians" who were the world power were not the Russians of today (though, really, he clouds the matter---I think for nationalistic reasons). I believe that, according to his timeline, Russia was already split into a long-running civil war in 1700.
I will also say this.
Though nothing ever gets worse, most things do get better---and at an uneven pace. That the Mau-Maus beat the British Army does not prove the British empire impossible. Kenya's capacity to resist the British simply improved at a faster pace than did the imperial hold upon the African state.
...wars between Sweden and Russia have always been a game of having the most soldiers. |
Fomenko would argue that the split in the former Imperial Russian state deprived Moscow of its best, mounted units.
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Ishmael
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In: Toronto
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Jorn wrote: | The whole Viking thing seems to have been invented in Britain, as a way to separate them from the Normans. |
I don't buy it. I think all of this is invented History---including the Normans.
That (almost) ALL the oldest vocabulary for shipping is of Norse origin, before it later became Dutch and then English as time moved on and the ships became bigger, is for me a big limit on what theories I can accept. |
Mick has already demonstrated the perils of any attempt to timeline the evolution of language. Which form of a word came first is a very thorny question. You can't make the assertion without laying out your evidence.
The main reason for why I am so sure the Viking ship evolved in Scandinavia, is the geological landscape called Strandflat along the Norwegian coast, combined with the almost impossibility of transporting anything over land, because the land is so rugged. |
On the other hand, Mick has previously claimed that the so-called "Viking" ship was unfit for ocean-going voyages.
There are also archaeological finds that show the whole evolution, but these could of course all be fakes. The Problem with this is that new ones are popping up all the time, and they look like what has been found before. This means we must still be faking them. |
I'm unsure what historical claim you imagine hinges on the evolution of ship forms. Enlighten me.
...I think the Roman empire is the German Roman Empire. |
You got it. That's precisely my own thinking.
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Jorn
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Ishmael wrote: | I don't buy it. I think all of this is invented History---including the Normans. |
Even invented history has to conform to some form of reality.
Norwegians are still often called Northmen rather than Norwegians in all the Germanic languages except English, and it is also the name we use about ourself. If there were no Northmen, how come we are still called it today?
Swedish have two forms for Northmen, one for Norwegians (norrmenn), and one that includes all the Nordic peoples (nordmenn).
They even have a swear word version for Norwegians called Norr-bagge, that is still used when Swedes are mad at us for something. The average Swede or Norwegian have however no idea what "bagge" means, or why it is offensive.
A bagge is a male goat, and the official explanation is that it reflected the Swedish view of Norway as a country only suited for goats. I don't buy this, as Norwegians are proud of their landscape, as it is very beautiful and mighty, if not very practical, filled with rocks, hills, dales, fjords and mountains.
It has been common to write local history for a long time in Scandinavia, and many farms have private letters back to the reformation. Norwegians also seem to have carved the Norwegian coat of arms on all sorts of stuff for way longer than the 1700.
While it is possible to forge official history, private history is way harder to fake for a state.
From what I have read of obscure Norwegian history collected by amateurs, as I didn't trust the professionals, seems to fit pretty good with official history back to the time after the reformation, although why something happened, is often remarkably different in different sources.
You only come so far back with these sources, and the explanation might be that the Dano-Norwegian King is supposed to have ordered a collection of all ancient documents and stories for publication at some time, but what we got back, was basically fairy-tales. It's a while since I read about it, but IIRC the book that was later published was "Hundreviseboka" the hundred ballade book.
Proof I like that show history contains some truth, are stuff like how Norwegians, Swedes and Danes build their farmhouses differently. If you drive by car around Sweden, it is still easy to see when you cross into the previous Norwegian or Danish landscapes, based on the look of the farms alone. For the previous Danish landscape, the Danish dialect is hard to miss as well, although they do write Swedish and use Swedish words.
I renovate old houses for a living, and it has been tradition for carpenters to hide newspapers, old clothes, children's shoes, recites, letters etc within walls and floors, a tradition I still follow.
When I think about it, I will start carving the present version of the Norwegian coat of arms on stuff I make as well.
On the last job I did, I found a bunch of old newspapers from 1914, describing the war, and how soldiers became shell shocked. I also found newspapers from 1982, and put them all back with a couple of modern newspapers.
Ishmael wrote: |
Mick has already demonstrated the perils of any attempt to timeline the evolution of language. Which form of a word came first is a very thorny question. You can't make the assertion without laying out your evidence. |
I am sorry, but I am sure I will do it again, as I tend to think that what is logical for me, is logical for others as well, kind of forgetting that they don't have the same information.
I am working on a long post on the subject. I won't build it on classical etymology, but rather runic patterns within the Norwegian and Swedish vocabulary.
I'm unsure what historical claim you imagine hinges on the evolution of ship forms. Enlighten me.
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This is another post for a thread I am working on, and that I will finish after I have posted this.
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Jorn
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Ishmael wrote: | The question is, "Which Russians?" Fomenko argues that the "Russians" who were the world power were not the Russians of today (though, really, he clouds the matter---I think for nationalistic reasons). I believe that, according to his timeline, Russia was already split into a long-running civil war in 1700.
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I am totally fine with this, as my theory is that it was the Swedes that were both the Russians and the Huns of old.
Ishmael wrote: | Though nothing ever gets worse, most things do get better---and at an uneven pace. |
If technology improves at an uneven pace in an area, it is not that area that evolved the technology in the first place.
Fomenko would argue that the split in the former Imperial Russian state deprived Moscow of its best, mounted units. |
I never bothered to read that part. I rather spent my time with the German revisionists, or tried to find out stuff myself.
I don't speak Russian, but I have noticed a pattern: where we have gard they have grad. If you remember my sentence about the steerman standing on starboard side steering his ship after the stars, a tsar could just mean he who steers.
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Hatty
Site Admin
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In: Berkshire
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Jorn wrote: | I am totally fine with this, as my theory is that it was the Swedes that were both the Russians and the Huns of old. |
Because the Normenn had gone west? Rather similar to the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.
If you remember my sentence about the steerman standing on starboard side steering his ship after the stars, a tsar could just mean he who steers. |
That's a really brilliant observation.
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Jorn
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Hatty wrote: | Because the Normenn had gone west? Rather similar to the Ostrogoths and Visigoths.
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No. The Swear and their allied landscapes were organized in Hundreds while the Norwegians, Goths and Danes have been organized in Reids before we got our modern conscription armies.
A hundred was an administrative division which was geographically part of a larger region; it was formerly used in England, Wales, South Australia, and some parts of the United States; similar divisions were made in Denmark, Southern Schleswig, Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Norway. Other terms for the hundred in English and other languages include wapentake, herred (Danish, Norwegian Bokmål), herad (Norwegian Nynorsk), hérað (Icelandic), härad or hundare (Swedish), Harde (German), Satakunta or kihlakunta (Finnish) and kihelkond (Estonian).
...
The term hundare (hundred) was used in Svealand and present-day Finland. The name is assumed to mean an area that should organise 100 men to crew four rowed war boats, which each had 12 pairs of oars and a commander.
Eventually that division was superseded by introducing the härad or Herred, which was the term in the rest of Scandinavia. This word was either derived from Proto-Norse *harja-raiðŠ(warband) or Proto-Germanic *harja-raiða (war equipment, cf. wapentake). Similar to skipreide, a part of the coast where the inhabitants were responsible for equipping and manning a war ship.
Hundred
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+++ Cant get the () to work in the links, so if you visit the link, you need to press county subdivisions afterwards
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*** The Gothlands in current Sweden used to have Herreids like us, and many of them still deny they are Swears to this day.
From what I have read of Gothic, it looks to me more like the dialect spoken in the current Gothlands of Sweden than any form of German.
The descriptions given in the Sagas, and German legends, also fits better with it taken place in Sweden and Holland/Frisia.
The Volsung saga is the most famous Germanic legend, and Sigurd is the tragic hero of the story.
Sigurd (Old Norse: Sigurðr) is a legendary hero of Norse mythology, as well as the central character in the Völsunga saga. The earliest extant representations for his legend come in pictorial form from seven runestones in Sweden[1] and most notably the Ramsund carving (c. 1000) and the Gök Runestone (11th century).
As Siegfried, he is one of the heroes in the German Nibelungenlied, and Richard Wagner's operas Siegfried and Götterdämmerung.
As Sivard Snarensven(d) he was the hero of several medieval Scandinavian ballads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigurd |
I had never heard of the ballades of Sivard Snarensven, but Snarensven= Snares-swedes is recognizable for modern English speakers as well.
Borgland=Burgundy is described as filled with Castles, something Holland seems to have been at the time. The Rhine also has a central position.
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Wile E. Coyote
In: Arizona
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Jorn wrote: |
I don't speak Russian, but I have noticed a pattern: where we have gard they have grad. If you remember my sentence about the steerman standing on starboard side steering his ship after the stars, a tsar could just mean he who steers. |
Huh .... Tsar is a variant of Beserkergang (beSERKer) Bear or Wolf shirt.
Hrolf's Saga tells of the hero Bjarki, who takes on the shape of a bear in battle:
Men saw that a great bear went before King Hrolf's men, keeping always near the king. He slew more men with his forepaws than any five of the king's champions. Blades and weapons glanced off him, and he brought down both men and horses in King Hjorvard's forces, and everything which came in his path he crushed to death with his teeth, so that panic and terror swept through King Hjorvard's army..." (Gwyn Jones. Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas. NY: Oxford Univ. Press. 1961. p. 313).
In King Harald's Saga they are called ulfhedinn or "wolf-coats,"
This trance-inducing shape shifting, skin-wearing warrior/shaman occurs everywhere.......
CF Robin Hood.
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