Been waiting for months to visit a British Museum exhibition of the Viking world. Of course there were helmet and spears, shields and swords. The swords are disintegrating but they're lethal purpose and exquisite craftsmanship is still apparent.
I'm (we're) surrounded and largely unimpressed by complicated technology - smartphones and laptops tossed in our bag with no more care than a pad of paper or file folder. So I wonder why I was so in awe of the sophistication the swords. Perhaps it's the human effort it took to create it or you have a sense of how advanced it was at the time. There pretty things too:
The contents of a Viking man-drawer:
You snake around through the displays of coins and jewelry, implements and accessories. There's jade from the east, amber from Poland and stone crosses from Yorkshire. Then finally you come to the main hall with the ship - the main showpiece - and discover how the Vikings managed to get to all those places. And nick all their stuff! They've created a steel frame in the shape of a longship to cradle the surviving thousand year-old timbers which shows the real scale and shape of the ship. I'd seen it on tv on exhibition opening day, but it was many times the size I had expected. It's over a 100 feet in length. Stunning.
Imagine you're some poor little Dark Ages subsistence farmer living in a mud and grass hut and this enormous beast of ship suddenly sails up your river and into view. It's not just the magnitude of the ship and the terrifying appearance of the tattooed and painted (and filed-teethed!) Viking warriors inside that would stop you in your tracks. Surely this would have been the most technologically advanced thing they'd ever seen - beyond their imagination - and there couldn't have many people who didn't think 'yeah, we're definitely in trouble now'. Say you're walking along the road and out of nowhere an alien spaceship uncloaks and materialises in front of you. I think that might be a comparable 'uh oh' moment for us.
