I immediately identified with Amy’s image of us as digital Vikings, and hereby pronounce myself….
ODDBJORG the Wanderer !!
The name has a certain resonance with this blog of course (space oddity), but also has some rather charming and appealing semantic associations in ancient saga literature, with sharp swords and world saving behaviour 🙂
You may want to create your own Viking identity, or add some Viking related thoughts, to Amy’s Kapsul page too… please do!
I rather fancy being so transported back to the mindset of the first academic job I ever had… I was a post-grad student, and got employed to teach a term of Old English poetry – such gems and pearls as The Seafarer and The Wanderer, along with the usual fare of Beowulf and Riddles… what a joy that was, and what a joy it is to think of it all again in this strange journey through cyberland, somewhere over the mooc, between seafaring and space invading
Hail Oddbjorg! Mine is less well thought out, but thanks to the wonder of Viking name generator I am…
Grundi the Furious!
I don’t know why I’m so furious. Maybe my longboat doesn’t have wi-fi.
http://www.wirral-mbc.gov.uk/OnlineGames/history/FunNameGenerator.asp
Hei Grundi! welcome to the marauding band 🙂 yes those endless seafaring expeditions without wifi can be rather tiresome!
i welcome you both into the world of the digital vikings. I can use my normal name which is Asbjørn – which translate into the bear of the gods, or something like that, i don’t know the english word for the norse gods which live in asgaard.
I’d rather be a Cylon (from “Battlestar Galactica”) than a Viking – all that pillaging, raping, and plundering (though courageous) does not create a very good association for me. Cylons, on the other hand, are perfect machines with feelings and flaws but with none of the weaknesses of a human body. As a historian, I do not see the past in glorious terms, but rather see it full of human folly and tragedy. One can only hope that the future would be brighter.
be whatever you like, I say!
but vikings have had a bad press, was Amy’s point, and the image constructed of them is just that… I certainly don’t see the ‘glory’ in history, I am mocking in my rapid uptake of the viking metaphor – what I see, more than anything, is the way stories are told, and why, and what choices we believe we have in the enterprises of living and of talking about it 🙂