Vinland Saga - Vol. 25 Ch. 178 - Sailing West Part 12

[Nihilist1]

Yukimura probably just watched some nat geo documentaries and decided to add nessie for some spices lol.

 

[RayS]

Lol, this manga is like an antiquated sci-fi story based on ancient tales. Y'know, when they tried to explain myths and fairy tales with some prehistoric beasts surviving and didn't understand that this "explanation" will be later seen as naive, just as the old stories were.

 

[sssr]

@Northern Norse cosmology during the Pagan-Christian transition period clearly said the world was a disc, so the Vikings did believe that the earth was flat. When people talk about the Flat Earth Myth today, one important detail tends to be forgotten. That is, educated people - those who understood that the earth was not flat - accounted for less than 1% of the population. The vast majority of people believed whatever they're told by their leaders and elders. Said leaders and elders were more than likely to be uneducated or, if educated, not necessarily in natural philosophy. These leaders would very likely just resort back to cultural myths and traditions if the question was asked of them. If you're an Odin-worshipping uneducated Norseman, it's very likely you would have thought the earth was flat simply because you'd never met a monk educated in the classics in your entire life. When you met one, it's also more likely you'd be doing something nasty to him in the next 5 minutes. Education wasn't what a Viking would have been looking for in a monastery after all.

Now, sailors were a special subset of the population who probably came from an uneducated background before the 14th century. As modern-day people we are inclined to think that they would not be able to perform their trade without (what to us is) the basic understanding that the earth must be a sphere. However, this is an anachronistic way of thinking emerging from the way technical trades are taught to modern tradesmen. Tradesmen in the medieval world didn't need to understand why or how something works, just that it did. Sailors could function perfectly well in their trade without an understanding of how the world was shaped. Most of them would have lacked a conception of "the world" to begin with. We in fact know this to likely be the case from the extensive studies done on Polynesian sailors in the early 20th century. These sailors were perfectly capable of long-distance navigation in the Pacific, sometimes even crossing the ocean directly without doing any island-hopping. They were able to do stellar navigation and they had a concept of inertial navigation. However, when they were asked to describe the shape of the world, they would often just get confused by the question or simply return to their creation myths for a description. The sailors could see the curved horizon, but none of them bothered to even consider what it meant in terms of the shape of the world. The Vikings most likely also had this kind of attitude.

 

[boldmonkey]

The real question is how its descendants ended up in Loch Ness.

 

[danaxf4]

thank you for the chapter

 

[no0neknows]

that was fast!

 

[NoraDaimio]

Wow, can't believe Vinland Saga just arrived in Vinland after all these years... Talk about a slow burn!!

Thanks for the TL as always !!

 

[Gem-Bug]

I love the sequence of thalassophobic mythology/folklore, scientific thought, and I guess cryptids <3

 

[hollyguild]

I choose to believe!

 

[fluffykunat]

holy shit that scares me

 

[ShaiHH]

The average person, struggling for survival on his small plot of land, will likely never have thought about the shape of the world after all.
There's no reason to, when the furthest you will go from your home is the next village or maybe - when your far-travelled - a bigger town in your region.

 

[Northern]

@sssr

Very well said, and you raise some interesting points about old Viking mythology and beliefs.

However, as you probably remember, by 1000 the Vikings were largely Christian, with only a few notable exceptions like the Jomsvikings. They were married into royal houses from the Cordoba Caliphate to Byzantium, and had sent their children to be educated in Rome and Miklagard.
And the real Thorfinn Karlsefni, Gudrid Thorbjarnardottir, Leif Erikson and Canute the Great were all literate and avowed Christians. I think it's more than likely that they too were aware of basic medieval European cosmology.

 

[tzunzz]

ok the world is not THAT round

 

[BirchJuice]

Decent chapter and finally after so many years...
@tzunzz: Wat?

 

[Abedeus]

@ShaiHH

And yet ancient Greeks, who at most had to travel few hundred kilometers or less during their travels, figured it out using shadows and simple math.

 

[Cerisine]

There is no way that you can directly observe the curvature of the earth from sea level... and even at the elevation of a passenger plane, any curvature you see in the horizon's line is because your field of view is circular, rather than it being an indication of the earth's shape.

Not that vikings should be expected to know this, but anyway.

 

[Giblow20]

Thorfinn the Flat-Earther

Edit: Is that fookin Nessie!?!?

 

[Ironclad]

 

[UnluckyGrape]

@Abedeus I think that was the Egyptians and their obelisks and the Greeks just kinda went "yeah, that sounds right"

 

[nzrock]

@Northern I think you forgot that Thorfinn did not grow up as a sailor, he technically has only been one for a few years.
Also I'm pretty sure them turning full on Christians and such, will follow once they landed.
All in all, looking back with everything that's happened to him and his crew so far, it makes sense why they believe in flat earth.