Re: HOGWASH!
'..Valhalla, however, is where you go to enjoy afterlife, if a "believer".'
Sorry, that was a obscurish Pratchett reference..
'..The big migration followed automatically. The Turks were again pushing west and north. Leiv's father, Eirik, was a shrewd salesman. His Greenland had turned out nowhere like as green as it had been in his imagination, but from Vinland Leiv had thoughtfully brought rich berries and wild grains.
The Northmen went west again. They leap-frogged colony after colony down the eastern seaboard, up into the base rugged lands around Tyker's Sea and down the Long Fjord into the Middle Seas.
It was the landscape of their dreams. They called it Valhalla.
There were natives. But the newcomers were only half-hearted farmers -- underneath the agricultural veneer they thought bloody. Those tribes they couldn't out fight they outthought. When they met the Objibwa Confederacy they made treaties. And they spread, and merged.
By all the theories it should have ended there. Neither the natives nor the invaders had the textbook kind of social dynamic that builds Remes. The Northmen should have become just another tribe, with blue eyes and fair hair. The theories were wrong. Something latent in both races was sparked into fire.
It was a big continent, and it was rich. In short, 300 years after Leiv, a fleet arrived at the mouth of the Mediterranean. Most of the vessels were under sail although there were one or two, small, fast and inclined to blow up, that could move into the wind. The sails of the big ships bore the Great Eagle of Valhalla on a striped background alternating the colours of the sky, the snow and blood.
The Battle of Gibraltar was short. Europe had been through 200 years of stagnation. There was no answer to cannon.' - Strata - Terry Pratchett