Viking compass, or Why is Iceland spar interesting? Viking Compass: The Mystery of the Sunstones

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Compass tattoo on bicep

A compass is designed to show direction to travelers. The device has retained its meaning in the symbolism of tattoos. However, its concept has been expanded and supplemented by related topics and interpretations.

When choosing such a symbol, focus on internal perception. The most successful choice of sign is always associated with the personal symbolism of the wearer.

Meaning of compass tattoo

The compass tattoo first appeared in the direction in the 19th century. This is a traditional thematic image whose meaning cannot be lost. The compass was not just a symbol, the sign protected the souls of sailors from various dangers of the changing elements of water.

The sea was believed to be filled with various inhabitants. These entities can harm a person’s consciousness and soul. The creatures that the sailors believed in had the power to confuse reality.

Old school compass tattoo

Perception distorted by their influence could lead to errors in calculations and actions. Therefore, the compass was an image that served as a talisman against such influences.

Today, the compass has a meaning that denotes the force of change. It is used by people who love travel and tourism. the meaning of the picture symbolizes freedom of choice, knowledge true purpose and a sense of inner direction.

Men's tattoos

Tattoo culture is cosmopolitan, which means it is possible to apply a design to a representative of any age and status. However, the compass design changes meaning depending on gender.

So for men the symbolism means:

symbol of fidelity and constancy;
determination and focus;
aspiration for success, self-realization;
love of travel;
Confidence in your strength.

Compass and map tattoo on forearm

Most often, the symbol can be seen on the skin of men who have reached a certain age. The drawing is popular among audiences aged 25 and older. This is directly related to the conscious choice of drawing as a way to find one’s place in life and confirm one’s achievements.

Women's tattoos

For representatives of the fair sex, the design has the broadest interpretation. He presents a lot of surprises to those ladies who chose a tattoo by chance.

Often symbolism is tied to the internal perception of the world. But in some cases it is just a skin decoration without meaning.

For girls, a tattoo with a compass means:

freedom in relationships;
adventurism;
love for random turns of fate;
inconsistency in interests;
search spiritual path;
lopan - a philosophical approach to existence;
runic - protection from dark forces, esoteric practitioner.

Compass tattoo on a girl's side

Variations on the theme of the compass are chosen by women seeking to find protection in practices. For many ritual actions, a compass is necessary, since the arrangement of objects is necessarily oriented to the cardinal points. The compass is applied to the skin in order to establish an indestructible connection between the energy fields and the soul of the wearer.

Places of application

Depending on the details of the interpretation changes. So the meaning of a hand tattoo carries the meaning of finding a way. A tattoo on the shoulder with a similar design emphasizes the passion for travel. A design applied to the shin or calf area makes it easier to find your life path.

The tattoo is applied in the areas:

on the wrist;
on the forearm;
on the foot
on the neck.

In the neck area, the symbol emphasizes that the owner is confident in his intuition and conscious choice. This sign emphasizes strength of spirit and knowledge of one’s purpose. The drawing simultaneously performs a protective function. It blocks the path of influences that can cloud the mind.

The image of a compass in the area above the heart emphasizes the search for a spiritual path. The image preserves the harmony of a person’s conscious and sensory experience. The drawing acquires the same meaning when applied to the shoulder blade.

When looking at photos of compass tattoos, the sketches can be divided into several groups. The most popular are realistic images. Schematic drawings are included in the list of directions:

old school
oriental
and Chicano.

Men's tattoos are often made in these styles.

To successfully create a sketch, pay attention to color. It is better to select the saturation of the gamut and the choice of palette according to skin color. The lighter and more transparent it is, the richer the choice. The shape and style depend on the structure of the body.

Compass tattoo on forearm

The choice of area will directly dictate the shape and type of expression of the drawing. Consult a tattoo artist, he will help you determine the best option according to your capabilities.

Compass tattoo video gallery

The impetus for this conclusion was an unusual find. In 2003, an Iceland spar crystal the size of a cigarette box was found among the wreckage of an English ship that sank in the English Channel in 1592.

The fact is that Iceland spar crystals have high birefringence. So, researchers believe that the ancient sailors of Norway placed the crystal in a barrel and lowered it into the water. When the sun's rays passed through it, a glow was observed, which indicated the location of the sun on cloudy and foggy days.

After the significant discovery, researchers and simply enthusiasts conducted experiments with Iceland spar in Arctic conditions. As a result, it was revealed that with the help of a crystal it is possible to determine the location of the sun with an error of only one degree.

What is Iceland spar?

First, let's get acquainted with calcite, which is widespread on the surface of the earth and is a rock-forming mineral. Calcite is a lime spar from the group of carbonates. IN pure form Calcite, depending on the degree of perfection of the crystal structure, is white or colorless, transparent. Impurities color it various colors. For example, an admixture of iron gives a yellow, reddish-brown color, nickel - green, manganese and cobalt - pink.

The transparent, coarse-crystalline variety of calcite is called Iceland spar. The name comes from the location where the first large deposit, Eskifjordur, was discovered in Iceland. This name appeared at the end of the 17th century, when crystals of this mineral began to arrive in Europe from Iceland. Later deposits were discovered in South Africa, Central Asia, Mexico, Russia.

The word “spar,” the name given to minerals with well-defined cleavage, comes from the German spalten, meaning “to split, split.” When struck, Iceland spar easily splits into regular rhombohedrons, that is, inclined parallelepipeds.

The mineral has a strong double refraction of light, so when viewing objects through it, the image doubles. This is where other names for Iceland spar come from - birefringent spar, optical spar.

Crystals can be enormous in size. It is believed that the largest crystal found weighed more than 280 tons. Nowadays, the most transparent crystals are mined in the Krasnoyarsk Territory; their weight reaches 500 kg. The Mining Museum of St. Petersburg houses a wine-yellow crystal of Iceland spar weighing about 300 kg.

The ideal transparency of this mineral has long attracted scientists. In 1828, Scottish physicist W. Nicol invented the polarizing lens. Currently, Iceland spar is a valuable raw material for the production of optical instruments, astronomical instruments, and laser equipment.

The best examples of Iceland spar crystals are not an ornamental stone, but can decorate the interior of a room, and also act as a talisman or talisman.

Astrologers claim that the Icelandic spar crystal is an excellent talisman for drivers, protecting them from accidents. Magicians and psychics believe that this mineral helps to reveal a person’s superpowers and clarify his consciousness.

One way or another, the Icelandic spar crystal will not leave lovers of stone beauty indifferent.

Ten years ago, divers retrieved from the cabin of an English ship that sank in 1592 a translucent parallelepiped carved from a piece of Iceland spar. In 2011 the group French physicists made a statement that this object is nothing more than the mythical Viking compass, the “sun stone”, which made it possible to determine the position of the sun in the sky even in cloudy weather. March 6, 2013 Journal of Physics and Mathematics of the Royal Society of London Proceedings of the Royal Society A published, which contains the results of experiments proving and showing that the discovered piece of Iceland spar is indeed a simple but reliable navigation device.

Now let's talk about everything in order. The sunken ship lies to this day off the island of Alderney, one of the Channel Islands that are scattered in the English Channel between the English and French coasts. The wreck site was discovered back in 1977 by a local fisherman: he raised a musket barrel to the surface along with his lobster traps. After some time, a cast iron cannon and several small artifacts were found there, including an ancient clay smoking pipe, tin spoon and bowl.

Real work on the ship began only in 1990, and the first results were published in 1992. Archaeologists were able to date the shipwreck to the early 1590s. They were helped in this by the discovery of lead weights with the monogram of Queen Elizabeth I. Such weights began to be cast only in 1587. The pound and two-pound examples found on the ship showed obvious signs of wear, therefore they had been in use for several years. Archivists also found a message about a shipwreck off the coast of Alderney in November 1592. The ship was carrying a courier to John Norris, the commander of the English troops in Brittany (the British at that time were helping the French king Henry IV fight the Catholic Spaniards on the continent).
The ship of the Elizabeth I era could not help but become a mecca for English underwater archaeologists, and the study of the wreck site off Alderney continued for another ten years. In 2003, divers examined a room believed to be the captain's cabin and found a compass (an instrument used to determine distances on a navigation chart) and a rectangular piece of whitish stone. The latest find interested Guy Ropars, a physicist from the University of Rennes (Rennes is the administrative center of the Brittany region).

In 2011, Ropar and his colleague Albert Le Floch told the press that for several years they had been working on the problem of the “sun stone” - an object mentioned in one of the Icelandic sagas that allowed medieval Scandinavian sailors to determine the position of the sun in the sky in cloudy weather .

The hypothesis that “sun stones” are polished pieces of Iceland spar is not new; it has been studied a lot by archaeologists, physicists, and simply enthusiasts. An interesting optical property of this mineral - birefringence - was described back in the 17th century by the Dane Rasmus Bertolin. It's about that a ray of light passing through a crystal is split into two components and simultaneously forms two images on back side crystal. The rays have different polarizations, so the mutual brightness of the images depends on the polarization of the source light ( sunlight, as is known from the Rayleigh model, is polarized). By looking at the sky through a crystal and adjusting its orientation so that the brightness of the images is the same, you can determine the location of the sun.

In 2007, in the already mentioned physical and mathematical journal of the Royal Society of London, researchers from Hungary, Sweden and Switzerland appeared about the fundamental possibility of the Vikings using Iceland spar for orientation in difficult weather conditions. The article was received with great enthusiasm, and by 2011 the group of Guy Ropart and Albert Lefloch carried out a series of experiments with a piece of spar inserted into a special wooden case. It turned out that a simple device made it possible to determine the location of the sun with an accuracy of one degree - an excellent result.

Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou published a popular science book back in 1969, in which he first hypothesized the identity of the “sunstone” and Iceland spar. He also owns the term “Viking compass”. This and Ramskow's second book on Viking navigation, which appeared in 1981, were successful in Scandinavia. Norwegian Leif Karlsen, a professional sailor and “reenactor” enthusiast, published a book on Viking seafaring in 2003, in which he described his experience working with Iceland spar crystals.

Then, in 2011, Ropar and Lefloch specifically noted that their work is a hypothetical reconstruction: no one has ever found a single genuine “sun stone” at excavations. But then it became known that the University of Rennes had the opportunity to study the find from a ship that sank off Alderney. The study of the stone and experiments with it took about a year. Ropar and his colleagues showed that, despite four hundred years spent in water and sand, the crystal retained its optical properties and exhibited excellent qualities: the error in determining the position of the sun was approximately one degree.

Thus, Ropar managed not only to experimentally explain the successes of the Vikings in navigation, but also to change our ideas about the level of navigational knowledge in England in late XVI century. We now understand that at this time captains, at least some, did not rely only on compasses to determine direction, but also used the reliable Icelandic mineral. It turns out that in the half a thousand years that lay between the Vikings and Elizabethan sailors, the method was not lost, although no written information about it was preserved.

In the history of archeology, there are not many cases where the theoretical and practical justification of a hypothesis precedes the discovery of an artifact. A huge success for everyone – both physicists and lyricists. Surely supporters of the Vikings' discovery of the New World are already rubbing their hands in anticipation of new battles with their opponents, and the Elizabethan fanatics received yet another proof of the superiority of the British over other naval powers of that time. The Russian reader, perhaps, will grin and cannot resist quoting from “Eugene Onegin”: “And the distance of a free novel / Through the magic crystal / I have not yet clearly discerned.”

I like to search real cases, which are truly paranormal, which stand out as particularly strange and puzzling. Cases like this really spark the imagination and force us to try to explain what might be happening in the world and challenge our assumptions about what we think we know.

One of the strangest things that might be seen floating in the sky is a jellyfish, but there are actually numerous reports around the world of just that. These incredibly bizarre entities are reportedly very similar to a typical jellyfish that would be found in the sea, only in this case they float in the air, and in some cases they are described as being able to change density, color or size, and be able to become completely transparent, and there have even been cases of a kind of bioluminescence. They, according to various sources, move independently using some unknown form of forward propulsion or simply fly at the whim of air currents.

There have been particularly strange reports of encounters with the flying Medusa. In the 1950s, a policeman in England claimed to have seen Medusa flying low in the sky while he was riding his bicycle on patrol. He claimed that she was drifting right in front of him and that he had actually collided with her, describing the sensation as being similar to falling onto a soft blanket, and that she had a bit bad smell mold.

There was also a report from Florida in 1958, where a police officer named Faustin Gallegos found a translucent purple ball the size of soccer ball outside his house. He claimed that when he approached it, it seemed like some kind of dying creature, and when he picked it up, the thing simply disappeared in his hands.

Relatively recently in 2012, a man living in Perth, Australia was in front of his house one evening smoking a cigarette when his attention was drawn to a curious object when the light patterns of the stars were disrupted by something passing in front of them. At first he thought it might be a plane, but it soon became obvious that it was not a plane.

As it approached, the way it moved was similar to how a jellyfish would swim if it were flying horizontally. It was hard to describe, but it seemed to expand from the front, like balloon, and then uses that air to propel itself forward. He was about 100 meters taller than him and he looked at her for 10 minutes. After that, she left his sight. This was during a clear night sky in Australia.

An eyewitness says: "I am very familiar with airplanes as I live relatively close to Jandakot airport and we see and hear them all the time. It was not just any machine. I shouted to my mother-in-law who was staying in the house to come out and have a look." She saw it too. I would say that I had the feeling that it was some kind of creature. It moved gracefully and sedately. big bird with a large flap of wings. It appeared translucent and remained at the same height and speed and did not make any sounds.

For my part, I would like to note that I was lucky to meet such a creature in 2013 while traveling in an uninhabited area in one of the harvested sunflower fields. Such a jellyfish simply hovered in the air at a height of about a meter in the middle of this field. When I approached her, she looked exactly like the jellyfish that I saw on the Black Sea, only she was not transparent white, but orange-red, but with the same body and tentacles. With one of them she touched me at shoulder level and I felt a hot burn, and a burnt stain remained on my T-shirt. While I was coming to my senses, this something very slowly and smoothly floated up and disappeared into the clouds.

After this physical contact with this creature, seeing what was really happening around ceased to be a big problem for me. I just started seeing everything.

Flying squid

In December 1999, a flying squid was observed in Vitebsk, in the Republic of Belarus. Two witnesses described the object as tubular or cigar-shaped, with a front that was round and asymmetrical and a rear that appeared blurry. It had blue and red colors and was somewhat transparent, as well as what looked like some kind of shimmering bioluminescence. He moved with some wavy movements and did not make any sounds during the flight, and after some time he disappeared into the clouds.

Eyewitnesses had the strong impression that this Living being and it somewhat resembled the animal known as the glass squid.

I personally observed the same creatures in 2016, in the summer in a hilly area, when a whole flock of such squids flew at a low altitude. The color of the bodies was blue; during flight they compressed, which apparently was done in order to move. Squids also swim in the ocean, but if the density of water exists there, then how they do the same in the air is not entirely clear. This flock disappeared not just in the clouds, but after flying into a large object that appeared from the cloud and had a similar shape. After this, the mother squid smoothly soared to the top and disappeared from view.

I understand perfectly well how such stories sound, but there is quite a lot of evidence from eyewitnesses that another life is boiling in our skies.

What could such creatures be? One idea is that they are a type of organism known as an “atmospheric beast.” Atmospheric beasts, or atmospheric lifeforms as they are often called, are organisms that live their entire lives floating high in the atmosphere, undetected people.

These creatures are most often described as having semi-solid or almost weightless bodies, and are able to regulate their density from almost negligible and invisible to more solid, depending on as yet unknown factors. Many theories have been put forward about how such seemingly fantastic organisms can remain in the air, such as air bubbles or very low body densities.

The appearance of these atmospheric beasts changes greatly. They have been variously described by eyewitnesses as amorphous and cloudy behemoths, floating jellyfish, translucent, vaporous blobs, floating rods, amoeba-like organisms, gelatinous filaments, and even dragons.

The sizes of atmospheric beasts also range from tiny and bird-like to giant monsters hundreds of meters long. These mysterious creatures are usually too high in the atmosphere to be seen with the naked eye, but sometimes they become noticeable for some reason.

I'm sure they decide for themselves whether to be visible to people or not. Over the years, there have been many reported sightings from around the world describing unusual flying monsters that don't fit into the usual picture of the animal kingdom.

Moreover, the variety of all possible forms of this unknown parallel life is simply off the scale and this can be compared with the number of living beings that fill the waters of the World Ocean. These same ones fill the air ocean and, by the way, it is not their only world, since they can fly in airless space. Such facts are also enough to speak about this with confidence.

The atmospheric ocean stretches above our head and it is filled with life, its whales, sharks, squids, dolphins, crabs and octopuses and even submarines, or rather air boats (UFOs), controlled by intelligent beings.

Land octopuses

Now let's move on to something just as weird. One thing that no one would normally expect to see walking the earth is an octopus animal, but there is historical messages about it. An earlier and very strange case comes from the battlefields of World War II, specifically the Battle of Okinawa, in Japan.

Lasting from April to June 1945, the battle was intended as the first step in a planned eventual invasion of the Japanese islands of Okinawa and the mainland. It was the largest amphibious assault in the Pacific Theater, and it was some of the fiercest, most intense, and bloodiest fighting in that theater. From here, among the thousands of corpses scattered after the fighting, strange stories emerged about encounters that some Japanese troops had with something very strange.

Japanese soldiers said that they saw something very similar to a large octopus moving around the scene of a brutal battle, which was collecting the corpses of soldiers. It is said that these creatures were about one and a half meters tall, and instead of gliding as one would expect from a normal octopus, they walked using their tentacles. Soldiers who saw these creatures claimed that they actually came to feed on the corpses of the fallen.

In the summer of 1961, a 29-year-old truck driver named Arcimedes Sanchez was driving along a steep mountain road through the Basque mountains in Spain around 11 p.m., along with an unnamed companion, on his way to the town of Puerto de Barazar. As they turned the corner, their headlights came across a strange and rather monstrous creature standing on the side of the road, prompting them to stop the car.

They claimed to have seen a “hairy octopus” that stood and was about one and a half meters tall, with glowing eyes and “tentacle-like” appendages on its sides. The witnesses became numb and the creature froze, this continued for several minutes, after which the guys jumped into the cab and the driver pressed the gas.

The creature did not fly into the air, but simply gracefully jumped out of the way of the car using its tentacle legs.

The frightened people quickly drove away, leaving the creature behind and never seeing it again.

For my part, I can only confirm the existence of such creatures. I saw the same octopus here in Russia one of the summer nights 2014, when I met this something while returning home from a garage located on the dark outskirts of the city. The octopus climbed over three rows of garages and disappeared into the darkness of the night towards the nearby forest plantations. Tentacles, small stature, glowing saucer eyes.

Land squid

In December 2014, there was an eyewitness report on The Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) regarding an outlandish bipedal creature that was seen and almost hit by a car in the vicinity of Carmel, in Highland County, Ohio, USA.

The witnesses, a former Marine and his wife, had just moved to the area, and one evening they were driving along a rural road through a wooded area towards their home when a six-foot tall creature with muscular, highly flexible, tentacle-like legs and a tubular body without any - hands or head ran in front of their car and disappeared into the forest on the other side of the road, deftly avoiding a collision with the car.

Here we looked at strange cases of encounters with flying or land jellyfish, squids and octopuses that appear in the most strange places. So what are they? Some unknown species? Aliens? Interdimensional anomalies?

Based on my experience, I can only say that all of them taken together are...

July 23rd, 2018

You probably remember how we discussed who . Here in the sagas about the Norwegian Vikings there are references to the mysterious and magical “Sun Stone”, with the help of which sailors could determine the position of the sun. In the tales of St. Olaf, the Viking king, along with other magical objects, certain mysterious crystals are also mentioned, so the possibility of the existence of these stones was in doubt for a long time.

Brave Viking sailors did not know a magnetic compass (which, moreover, is useless in the polar regions), but at the same time they had excellent navigation in the sea, sailing to Greenland and North America. One of the ancient Icelandic sagas (late 9th - early 10th centuries) describes an episode of Viking sailing in cloudy weather, when it was not possible to navigate by the Sun: “The weather was cloudy and stormy... The king looked around and did not find a single piece of blue sky. Then he took the sun stone, raised it to his eyes and saw where the Sun was sending its ray through the stone.”

Back in 1967, Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou put forward an explanation for these legends. He suggested that the ancient texts spoke of transparent minerals that polarized light passing through them.

Indeed, a polarizing filter aimed at a cloud-covered sky makes it possible to determine where in the sky the polarization of light is maximum and where it is minimum, and from here understand where the Sun is. Sunlight itself is not polarized, but clouds polarize it. This method of navigation was only discovered in the 20th century and was used in polar aviation until the advent of the radio compass and satellite navigation, but the Vikings may have known it thousands of years ago. By the way, bees use it on cloudy days, as their eyes perceive polarized light.

In 1969 and 1982, Ramskow's books were published on the sun stone and Viking solar navigation (illustrations from nordskip.com).

Since the light from the sky is also polarized according to the Rayleigh sky model, sailors could look up through the stone by slowly turning it in different directions.

The coincidence and discrepancy of the polarization planes of the light scattered by the atmosphere and the crystal would be expressed in the form of darkening and brightening of the sky as the stone and the observer turn. A series of such sequential “measurements” would help to find out with some decent accuracy where the Sun is.

Experts have put forward several candidates for the role of sunstone - Iceland spar (a transparent version of calcite), as well as tourmaline and iolite. It’s difficult to say exactly what mineral the Vikings used; all these stones were available to them.

Iceland spar (left) and iolite (right, photographed from both sides to demonstrate strong pleochroism) have the right properties to try to navigate the hidden Sun.True, no one has yet conducted a convincing experiment with the stones themselves in the vast sea to finally confirm the beautiful version of the cunning navigation of the ancient Scandinavians (photos by ArniEin/wikipedia.org, Gerdus Bronn).

It is curious that in the twentieth century iolite found its way into aviation as a polarizing filter in a device used to determine the position of the Sun after sunset.

The fact is that even at dusk, the glow of the sky is polarized, and therefore the exact direction to the hidden star can be easily determined if you have “Polaroid” vision. The technique will work even if the Sun has already dropped seven degrees below the horizon, that is, tens of minutes after sunset. By the way, bees are well aware of this fact, but we will return to them later.

IN general outline The principle of operation of the Viking compass was clear for a long time, but the big question was the experimental verification of the idea. There are several experiments and calculations in this direction. recent years dedicated by researcher Gábor Horváth from the University of Otvos in Budapest.

In particular, together with colleagues from Spain, Sweden, Germany, Finland and Switzerland, he studied light polarization patterns under cloudy skies (as well as in fog) in Tunisia, Hungary, Finland and within the Arctic Circle.

Gabor Horvath in the Arctic in 2005 (photo from elte.hu).

“The measurements were carried out using precise polarimeters,” reports New Scientist. Now Horvath and his comrades have summarized the results of the experiments.

In short: the original (from the so-called first-order scattering) polarization pattern in the sky is still detectable even under the clouds, although it is very weak, and the clouds themselves (or a foggy veil) introduce “noise” into it.

In both situations, the coincidence of the polarization pattern with the ideal one (according to the Rayleigh model) was the better, the thinner the cover of clouds or fog and the more breaks in it that supplied at least a fraction of direct sunlight.

The Arctic sky (from left to right) is hazy, clear and cloudy. From top to bottom: color image of the "dome", differences in the degree of linear polarization across the entire sky (darker is more), measured polarization angle and theoretical angle relative to the meridian. The last two rows show good agreement (illustration by Gábor Horváth et al./Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B).

Gabor and his colleagues also simulated navigation under conditions of a completely cloudy sky. It turned out that in this case, the “imprint” of polarization is preserved and, theoretically, the position of the Sun can be calculated from it. But the degree of light polarization was very low.

In practice, this means that, armed not with polarimeters, but with sun stones, the Vikings could hardly notice subtle fluctuations in the brightness of the sky when looking through the crystal. Navigation under a continuous cloud cover, even if possible, turned out to be inaccurate, the scientists concluded.

However, the investigation undertaken by Horvath showed that the legends about the sun stone and Torkild's explanation of its work are quite plausible and scientifically based.

Scientists have found that both with a clear sky (columns on the left) and with a cloudy sky (on the right), the proportion of the total sky area in which the polarization coincides with the Rayleigh polarization (shaded in gray) falls as the Sun rises (black dot) above the horizon (elevation angle indicated in parentheses). This shooting took place in Tunisia.

This, by the way, means that the “polarization” method of navigation is more advantageous in high latitudes, where the Vikings honed their skills (illustrations by Gábor Horváth et al. / Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B).

By the way, about legends. Horvath cites a reference to “polarization navigation” in the Scandinavian saga: “The weather was cloudy and snowing. Saint Olaf, the king, sent someone to look around, but there was no clear spot in the sky. Then he asked Sigurd to tell him where the Sun was.

Sigurd took the sun stone, looked at the sky and saw where the light came from. So he found out the position of the invisible Sun. It turned out that Sigurd was right."

Nowadays, scientists describe the principle of navigation by polarized light much more accurately than ancient storytellers. First, the birefringent crystal (the same sun stone) had to be “calibrated.” Viewing the sky through it in clear weather, and away from the star, the Viking had to turn the stone to achieve the greatest brightness. Then the direction to the Sun should have been scratched on the stone.

The next time, as soon as there was even a small gap in the clouds, the navigator could aim a stone at it and turn it to the maximum brightness of the sky. The line on the stone would point to the Sun. We have already talked about determining the coordinates of a day star without any skylight.

Archaeologists from time to time find sunken Viking ships, modern enthusiasts build copies of them (the video below shows one of these replicas - the ship Gaia), but still not all the secrets of skilled sailors of the past have been revealed (illustrations from the sites marineinsight.com, waterwaysnews.com, reefsafari.com.fj)

Well, it was easier to find out the direction to the geographic north by the position of the Sun. For this purpose, the Vikings had a specially marked sundial, on which the extreme trajectories of the shadow from the gnomon were shown in carvings (from dawn to sunset at the equinox and summer solstice).

If the Sun was present in the sky, the clock could be positioned in a certain way (so that the shadow fell on the desired strip), and the cardinal directions could be determined by the marks on the disk.

The accuracy of the compass watch data was great, but with an amendment: it showed the north absolutely correctly only from May to August (just during the Viking sailing season) and only at a latitude of 61 degrees - exactly where the Vikings’ most frequent route through Atlantic - between Scandinavia and Greenland (illustrations by Gábor Horváth et al. / Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B).

Opponents of the theory of “polarimetric navigation” often say that even in cloudy and foggy weather, as a rule, the position of the Sun can be estimated by eye - by big picture lighting, rays breaking through irregularities in the veil, reflections on the clouds. And therefore, supposedly, the Vikings did not need to invent a complex method with a sun stone.

Gabor decided to test this assumption as well. He shot many full panoramas of the daytime sky with varying degrees of cloudiness, as well as the evening sky at twilight (near the sea horizon) in several places around the world. These pictures were then shown to a group of volunteers on a monitor in a dark room. Using a mouse, they were asked to indicate the location of the Sun.

One of the frames used in the eye navigation test. The subjects' attempts are shown with small white dots, a large black dot with a white edge marks the “average” position of the luminary according to observers (illustration by Gábor Horváth et al. / Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B).

Having compared the choice of subjects with the actual location of the star, scientists found that as cloud density increased, the average discrepancy between the apparent and true position of the Sun grew noticeably, so the Vikings may well have needed additional technology for orientation to the cardinal directions.

And to this argument it is worth adding one more. A number of insects are sensitive to linearly polarized light and take advantage of this for navigation (and some crustaceans even recognize circularly polarized light). It is unlikely that evolution would have invented such a mechanism if the position of the Sun in the sky could always be seen with ordinary vision.

Biologists know that bees, with the assistance of polarized light, orient themselves in space - they look at gaps in the clouds. By the way, Horvath also recalls this example when he talks about the prerequisites for the unusual navigation of the Vikings.

There is even a species of bees ( Magalopta genalis from the family of halictids), whose representatives even fly to work an hour before sunrise (and manage to return home before it) and then after sunset. These bees navigate in twilight light by the polarization pattern in the sky. It is created by the Sun, which is just about to rise or has recently set.

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