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Eric Stevens <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx > wrote:
On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 21:36:18 GMT, "Alan Crozier"
<name1.name2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Eric Stevens" <eric.stevens@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:37grn294o5rum19jqal90pclsun7jto1nh@xxxxxxxxxx
On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:14:51 GMT, "Alan Crozier"
<name1.name2@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Peter Alaca" <p.alaca@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:457b63f9$0$90828$dbd41001@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
I uploaded some material about early medieval Frisia,
in the first place on the Dutch terp region and the
important excavation of the terp Wijnaldum-Tjitsma,
and in the second place about the role of the Frisians
in the NW-European trade.
Three of the documents are (to my knowledge) not
available elsewhere on the web.
http://www.esnips.com/web/Frisia
Thanks Peter,
One of the nice things about coming back after a few days' absence
is
that, alongside the seemingly endless supply of new kooks, you have
been
finding useful stuff on the net.
There was a Swedish scholar, Elis Wadstein, in the 1920 who was
very interested in the period when Frisians dominated trade with
pre-Viking Scandinavia. He had a theory that Birka originally had
nothing to
do with "Birch Island" but meant a merchant town with its own
jurisdiction.
He cited other trading centres in Norway and the Baltic with
similar names (Biarkøy and Berkerøn in Norway, Björkö on Göta Älv,
Björk, and two places called Birkö on the east coast of Sweden,
Birkala and Berkö in Finland). He traced these names back to a
Frisian word "berek, birek".
His hypotheses were never accepted but he argued them very well and
he certainly wasn't a kook. There may have been a reluctance among
Swedish scholars to accept the idea of so much Frisian influence.
He would have encountered no opposition from Jurgen Spanuth who
argued that in times past the Frisian islands were both larger and
more densely populated than was generally credited (in the 1950s).
I'm not sure the approval would have been mutual. :-)
I understand. The problem with Spanuth was not his data but what he
did with it. Unfortunately, as he got older he went almost completely
off the rails, but what's new in that?
So the question is when he got older.
--
p.a.
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