Mo, back to your "burning man" Viking Ship, that must be a funeral. That's how they "buried" the great warriors is in a funeral pyre on his favorite ship, throw in some live young virgins for the warrior to enjoy in the after life and that was a Viking funeral. The hammer of Thor.

Jerk, pronounced Yurk, was Danish for shirt. Be-Jerk (Be-Yurk) was to be without a shirt. There was a group of Viking warriors who would take their shirts off and storm the shores, like at Lindisfarne, and absolutely just go crazy, no fear of death or consequence. They were called the Bejerkers, pronounced BeYurkers, which is where our word Berserk came from. They'd cook their dinners that night in the rib cages of the monks they slaughtered during the day. The language we are speaking is at its root half Danish and half Saxon because not only did the Danes conquer they stayed and tilled the soil and gave England many of its place names, cities and towns that end with "by" or "wich" and so on, each a reference to the place being a farm or a fort or a river crossing and such. Ski and Sky, raise or rear your children are all indications of the presence of the Danes. Wodin's Day and Thor's Day are others that we add to the Roman Sun Day and Moon Day. Alfred's descendents eventually purged the island of their ruling presence in East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria (they were never able to gain a foothold in Wessex thanks to Alfred) so they conquered and settled in Normandy across the channel, named obviously after "Northman" or perhaps "Norseman". Later they laid claim to the English throne, in another battle for succession, and William, a Dane really, took the throne, establishing Danish royal bloodlines until the present day.

People of that day I think rarely used the word Viking, which meant to travel up narrow rivers with their keel-less long boats, and referred to them as Danes. After the fall of the Roman empire the Saxons, Angles, Jutes and Frisians pushed the Celtics over to Wales, to Ireland and up into Scotland. 300 years later yet another Germanic tribe, the Danes invaded Britain and founded Dublin and Down Patrick. The Norwegian Vikings explored Labrador and the Swedish Vikings traveled down the Don and the Volga to the Caspian Sea and the Black Sea and traded with Constantinople and provided them with mercenaries. The word Slav, and our English word Slave, evolved from their treatment of the peoples on the way down. There were tribes of Swedes referred to as the "Rus" so it is understood that the Russian peoples probably are descendents of the Swedish Vikings.

A lovely subject that I have fancied very much over the course of my life and the above, if their are inaccuracies, is completely from memory. Its all a part of my interest in the history of English, as it evolved from the Aryan tribes who migrated from the Indus river valley, migrated to the middle east forming the basis of the Latin and Greek languages, Persian further north, and finally, the Celtics who covered most of Western Europe, this being the first wave of the great Indo-European migration from east to west. The second wave involved the Germanic Tribes and these bellicose peoples eventually settled in Britain, displacing the first wave Indo Europeans, and eventually speaking a language later historians called English. The English language came to the British Isles on the point of a sword.

The burning ship of the Vikings before they were tamed by Alfred. How did Alfred unite his peoples and tame the Danes? Why, Christianity, of course, the great unifier of European culture for a millennium or more, the holy ghost of the Roman Empire. The Vikings were known to be ruthless conquerors but now historians are discovering that they were really great traders and settlers.

The Burning Ship.