Frisland – not mythical but submarine?

[KevinCthulhu]

On ‎11‎/‎09‎/‎2009 at 6:52 AM, TheSearcher said:

ARTHUR : The story of Arthur and the grail having been discussed at length in other threads, which Arthur would you be talking about? The details of Arthur's story are mainly composed of folklore and literary invention and his historical existence is debated by modern historians.

The sparse historical background of Arthur is gleaned from various sources, like the Annales Cambriae, the Historia Brittonum, and the writings of Gildas. But Arthur's name also occurs in early poetic sources such as Y Gododdin.

The legendary Arthur developed largely through the popularity of Geoffrey of Monmouth's imaginative 12th-century Historia Regum Britanniae. However, some Welsh and Breton tales and poems relating the story of Arthur date from earlier than this work. Arthur appears either as a great warrior defending Britain from human and supernatural enemies or as a magical figure of folklore, sometimes associated with the Welsh Otherworld, Annwn. How much of Geoffrey's Historia was adapted from such earlier sources, rather than invented by himself, is unsure.

 

It's amazing how this stuff does the rounds at times.  Gildas does not say one word about an Arthur, he covers a range of close contemporary figures but no Arthur.

'Evidence' for Arthur is almost non-existent, at least for a genuine historical Arthur.  The belief that Arthur was real is an interesting one.  I'm honestly not sure what it rests on, I think it is just a current 'common knowledge'.  The evidence such as it is is more than sparse.  There are mentions of Arthur for sure but they are extremely sketchy, one sentence in Y Goddodin, a line in the utterly unreliable Historia Brittonum (the word for Britain in Latin is of course Britannia, and 'Nennius' could not even manage to spell the name of his own nation properly, giving a good idea of how plausible the author is), a few comments in the Mabinogion.  Annales Cambriae is probably 5 centuries after anything approaching a 'realistic' timeframe.  So stuff that is there is thin in the extreme and it makes only a few hard to interpret statements.  Historia Britonum talks of an Arthur as dux bellorum (leader of battles or thereabouts).  The Mabinogion references seem to suggest both a real and mythical figure and not always a positive one.  Y Gododdin simply says "he was no Arthur".

The real problem comes not from what there is, which is exceptionally weak, but from what there isn't.  Take Gildas, he was writing a long and detailed complaint about the immoral leaders of his own time and the recent past, yet he says nothing about Arthur.  Bede writing the history of the English makes no mention of him.  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle which discusses Vortigern and others makes no mention of Arthur.  These are probably the strongest source material we have, in what is a very thinly sourced era.

The long and short of it is that a few mostly either semi-mythical (Y Goddodin, Mabinogion), extremely unreliable ('Nennius' the alleged author of Historia Brittonum is probably fictional, the work is regarded as a very poor source) or much later (Annales Cambriae, etc).  Those heavyweight sources we do have simply don't mention Arthur.  In the case of Gildas this is especially damning.

Sadly there can never be a resolution to this question.  The post-Roman period in Britain is appallingly documented and open to a very wide interpretation.  However, some of the characters supposedly alive in that period seem reasonably well attested, Vortigern for example.  Arthur is simply not supported by anything but the absolute thinnest of evidence.  It is hard to build a case of the 'no smoke without fire' variety when the evidence is so weak and thin.  My own reading of the material led me to the following conclusions:

- There almost certainly was no Arthur and if there was we can never learn anything about him

- He was probably a semi-mythical construct of the Robin Hood type who later morphed into a 'real' figure in popular culture.

- The authors who accepted the truth of Arthur and who built up the modern idea that a real Arthur is 'proven' were simply applying wishful thinking to the idea.  They 'wanted' a real Arthur so they took 2 plus 2 and made 10 in terms of evidence.

- If he was real then the name Arthur may have been a semi-mythical one, a nom de guerre, a nickname, etc which was applied to someone with another name.  I've read many theories about how it was based on the word for bear in Welsh, Arth, which is as good a theory as any other

- We will never know, this is the worst documented period in British history after the Roman conquest and barring some amazing discovery that nobody foresees it will remain an eternal mystery

[KibyNykraft4]

It seems like everyone here is extremely unfocused or unrealistic, whether it is the devoted to Frisland myth or fact, or whether it is a kind of skeptics.

To be either devoted to prove something, or to be a skeptic ,one must  a) be smart enough, b. actually consider sources and other relevant knowledge into the proper context.  Formal education in history or cartography specifically helps, but it is not necessary.  

So far I see a bunch of amateurs, sorry for the necessary directness. 

Imagine that we are going to map other solar systems. An ongoing process. But that we have no or little contact with each other over obstacles of generations and geography. Will scientist 1 and scientist 2 name all other planets the same way (no of course not), or will we invent new planets ? (no) , if one scientist get a note about one planet of a certain name, will he know which one it is? No.  Will that mean that the planet does not exist? No.  Can planets over a long time destruct or have a large change of climate? Yes...

There are many maps of Fishland, Fixland, Frislant, and the problem is that one has to understand nuances in order to solve this matter. Most humans, especially westerners, are not good with nuances (East asians tend to be more intelligent and more effective, sometimes also germans and finnish).

Average-people generally including educated ones tend to simplify biased and build 2-3 camps of orientation from that or like 3 packs of sheep. 

I will try to bring up a few points to clarify : 

1 Islands can sink or rise as a natural process.  For example lowland archipelagos like Maldives can be gone in 30 years from now. Other times islands can rise from the sea in a matter of a few hundred years.  The causes can be several, for examples earthquakes or natural land changes relative to sea levels. This is mainstream geology science. Very often historians do not even learn the basics of nature sciences. 

So, Frislant can easily have existed as a most probably (if so) un-inhabited archipelago.  If the only evidence is from very important mapmakers who also made a great efforts to map today well known areas, we have to think of them as honest scientists, like most very active scientists tend to be...

However we can not exclude politics in it from those times, but those political motives count ALL ways, not only one way. There are loads of political motives from the Colombus branch in the hysterical fear that anyone could have sailed from Europe to Americas before him. Well there were several who did ,for example the vikings, and the evidence for that is very strong (no not the hoaxes from the 1800s, but modern archeological work compared to old history sources).

I am sorry Colombus was not first from the white world. Get over it. (Not to mention ,american natives were way way earlier coming from mostly across the Bering strait from east Russia into Alaska).     

2 Still there was no technology. Even if there could have been ancient worlds with ok tech in the distant past many thousands of years ago, well this is another debate. The 1500s cirka were times of the dark ages of religious dictatorships. All tools of importance had been suppressed for ages and most historians were attempted restrained, historical evidences suppressed and hidden, unless they benefitted elites, nationalism and clergies.  

So this is what we have to do : Find out the shape of the islands. http://ancientamerica.com/the-isle-of-frisland-on-zeno-map/

Case closed. 

It is obviously Newfoundland.. 

But then it is not that obvious alone, here the nuances come in. Because : At earlier times NORTH europeans from the viking age knew rather well of the waters and some of this knowledge went on to later scholars and scripts in all of Europe, while SOUTH europeans (not about northern waters) and later north europeans (after the black death and introduction of christianity) didnt . 

So, there became a natural mess of which of the unknown islands were which. 

Therefore one could identify Frislant as Iceland ,another Newfoundland as Frislant, or another could maybe even have identified real islands later sunken. Some here said that "if a group of islands west of Ireland sank in the sea recently, then Britain must have as well ," mentioning Doggerland etc. 

Well that is plain stupid. There are variations to levels. There are not only 3 or 4 levels of altitude above the sea or under it. 

So let us summarize for the children : 

1 Yes Frislant existed, as A) Newfoundland, the modern name. b.Iceland, Ireland,Greenland, Førøyar/Færøerne (Faeroe islands) or whatever, and POSSIBLY c.Islands previously up but now sunken (in this case we simply do not know, there are high enough underwater levels) . 

2 No there is no proof that the mapmakers made fantasy islands to favor their local king. But it is not impossible that they COULD have done it. But in this case they didnt. Remember their job at that time was very hard. So they had to build out from actual islands. But they didnt have dynamic opportunity of comparison in direct ways with other scientists.  

 

Edited December 24, 2017 by KibyNykraft4

[KibyNykraft4]

24 minutes ago, KibyNykraft4 said:

It seems like everyone here is extremely unfocused or unrealistic, whether it is the devoted to Frisland myth or fact, or whether it is a kind of skeptics.

To be either devoted to prove something, or to be a skeptic ,one must  a) be smart enough, b. actually consider sources and other relevant knowledge into the proper context.  Formal education in history or cartography specifically helps, but it is not necessary.  

So far I see a bunch of amateurs, sorry for the necessary directness. 

Imagine that we are going to map other solar systems. An ongoing process. But that we have no or little contact with each other over obstacles of generations and geography. Will scientist 1 and scientist 2 name all other planets the same way (no of course not), or will we invent new planets ? (no) , if one scientist get a note about one planet of a certain name, will he know which one it is? No.  Will that mean that the planet does not exist? No.  Can planets over a long time destruct or have a large change of climate? Yes...

There are many maps of Fishland, Fixland, Frislant, and the problem is that one has to understand nuances in order to solve this matter. Most humans, especially westerners, are not good with nuances (East asians tend to be more intelligent and more effective, sometimes also germans and finnish).

Average-people generally including educated ones tend to simplify biased and build 2-3 camps of orientation from that or like 3 packs of sheep. 

I will try to bring up a few points to clarify : 

1 Islands can sink or rise as a natural process.  For example lowland archipelagos like Maldives can be gone in 30 years from now. Other times islands can rise from the sea in a matter of a few hundred years.  The causes can be several, for examples earthquakes or natural land changes relative to sea levels. This is mainstream geology science. Very often historians do not even learn the basics of nature sciences. 

So, Frislant can easily have existed as a most probably (if so) un-inhabited archipelago.  If the only evidence is from very important mapmakers who also made a great efforts to map today well known areas, we have to think of them as honest scientists, like most very active scientists tend to be...

However we can not exclude politics in it from those times, but those political motives count ALL ways, not only one way. There are loads of political motives from the Colombus branch in the hysterical fear that anyone could have sailed from Europe to Americas before him. Well there were several who did ,for example the vikings, and the evidence for that is very strong (no not the hoaxes from the 1800s, but modern archeological work compared to old history sources).

I am sorry Colombus was not first from the white world. Get over it. (Not to mention ,american natives were way way earlier coming from mostly across the Bering strait from east Russia into Alaska).     

2 Still there was no technology. Even if there could have been ancient worlds with ok tech in the distant past many thousands of years ago, well this is another debate. The 1500s cirka were times of the dark ages of religious dictatorships. All tools of importance had been suppressed for ages and most historians were attempted restrained, historical evidences suppressed and hidden, unless they benefitted elites, nationalism and clergies.  

So this is what we have to do : Find out the shape of the islands. http://ancientamerica.com/the-isle-of-frisland-on-zeno-map/

Case closed. 

It is obviously Newfoundland.. 

But then it is not that obvious alone, here the nuances come in. Because : At earlier times NORTH europeans from the viking age knew rather well of the waters and some of this knowledge went on to later scholars and scripts in all of Europe, while SOUTH europeans (not about northern waters) and later north europeans (after the black death and introduction of christianity) didnt . 

So, there became a natural mess of which of the unknown islands were which. 

Therefore one could identify Frislant as Iceland ,another Newfoundland as Frislant, or another could maybe even have identified real islands later sunken. Some here said that "if a group of islands west of Ireland sank in the sea recently, then Britain must have as well ," mentioning Doggerland etc. 

Well that is plain stupid. There are variations to levels. There are not only 3 or 4 levels of altitude above the sea or under it. 

So let us summarize for the children : 

1 Yes Frislant existed, as A) Newfoundland, the modern name. b.Iceland, Ireland,Greenland, Førøyar/Færøerne (Faeroe islands) or whatever, and POSSIBLY c.Islands previously up but now sunken (in this case we simply do not know, there are high enough underwater levels) . 

2 No there is no proof that the mapmakers made fantasy islands to favor their local king. But it is not impossible that they COULD have done it. But in this case they didnt. Remember their job at that time was very hard. So they had to build out from actual islands. But they didnt have dynamic opportunity of comparison in direct ways with other scientists.  

 

Btw : Friesland is a region in Europe along the borders of Germany and Holland, so Friesland or in some maps Frislant, in some modern sources Vrislandt etc (germans and dutch pronounce d as t) was a name used by individuals from the dutch and central european adventurers and whalers, fishermen etc. Holland for example was a very active adventuring nation at the time. They even established villages and maps for whaling and military tactics in the today Barents sea north of Norway. Barents named after a dutchman... 

Freezeland may have been a confusion that lead to the idea that it was Greenland or Iceland. This in turn has probably contributed to the whole mess around whether the islands exist or not. 

[jmccr8]

13 minutes ago, KibyNykraft4 said:

Btw : Friesland is a region in Europe along the borders of Germany and Holland, so Friesland or in some maps Frislant, in some modern sources Vrislandt etc (germans and dutch pronounce d as t) was a name used by individuals from the dutch and central european adventurers and whalers, fishermen etc. Holland for example was a very active adventuring nation at the time. They even established villages and maps for whaling and military tactics in the today Barents sea north of Norway. Barents named after a dutchman... 

Freezeland may have been a confusion that lead to the idea that it was Greenland or Iceland. This in turn has probably contributed to the whole mess around whether the islands exist or not. 

Well after reading those 2 posts I'm guessing your short answer is I don't know.

jmccr8

[KibyNykraft4]

32 minutes ago, jmccr8 said:

Well after reading those 2 posts I'm guessing your short answer is I don't know.

jmccr8

Not if you actually read the posts. And I doubt you did  What I am saying is that the Frislant in some of the maps is obviously Newfoundland.  But as the name existed in a time of much less organized communication among humans and much less technology, there was a natural spreadout of the name into also including other islands. 

As for the idea of sunken islands, again this can be the case of Maldives in 30 years from now, and it was the case for Doggerland. A group of sunken islands could have gotten the name while being present, and the name transferred later to Newfoundland. 

So, there is nothing here I do not know. What i do not know is the detail of it which is of course impossible in the past, not that islands generally are a real physical phenomena  

Edited December 24, 2017 by KibyNykraft4

[KibyNykraft4]

The whole problem basically starts with the fact that people tend to simplify ,because simplification is easy right? Very tempting. Either it should be some magical mystical isles connected to mystical forces, hidden ancients blah blah.  Or, the other group, "since the first group babbles nonsense the whole subject must be dismissed". 

Well that is just lazy. 

If we bother to go propely into the subject then there is not much doubt. Most of the coastlines in several of the old maps, I have studied 12 of them, are almost identical to Newfoundland, including the islands to the near north side of the coast. 

What one cannot know is if Frislant was the name used on it by the first european discoverers, or if the name was used on some other islands before that. 

In other words, we have at least one Frislant to be confirmed easily. 

Edited December 24, 2017 by KibyNykraft4

[Piney]

1 hour ago, KibyNykraft4 said:

So this is what we have to do : Find out the shape of the islands. http://ancientamerica.com/the-isle-of-frisland-on-zeno-map/

 

Yeah this website is a real winner. I could spend hours debunking most if not all of it without looking at any of my books of files......

[jmccr8]

7 minutes ago, Piney said:

Yeah this website is a real winner. I could spend hours debunking most if not all of it without looking at any of my books of files......

I am out of likes again

jmccr8

[jmccr8]

31 minutes ago, KibyNykraft4 said:

Not if you actually read the posts. And I doubt you did  What I am saying is that the Frislant in some of the maps is obviously Newfoundland.  But as the name existed in a time of much less organized communication among humans and much less technology, there was a natural spreadout of the name into also including other islands. 

As for the idea of sunken islands, again this can be the case of Maldives in 30 years from now, and it was the case for Doggerland. A group of sunken islands could have gotten the name while being present, and the name transferred later to Newfoundland. 

So, there is nothing here I do not know. What i do not know is the detail of it which is of course impossible in the past, not that islands generally are a real physical phenomena  

Actually I did read your posts and you said it could be here, there, there or no longer there. Sounds pretty conclusive to me good job carry on, by the way have you found Atlantis,Lemuria and Mu as well?

jmccr8

Edited December 24, 2017 by jmccr8
Little buttons fat fingers

[jaylemurph]

1 hour ago, jmccr8 said:

Well after reading those 2 posts I'm guessing your short answer is I don't know.

jmccr8

It's not every new poster that sits us down and explains how stupid and amateur we are. How lucky we are he came to share; I do so hope he wants to talk about the Middle Ages and how stupid people were then, too.

(Did you know different languages spell things differently? My god, his professionalism shines through, doesn't it?)

--Jaylemurph

[jmccr8]

21 minutes ago, jaylemurph said:

It's not every new poster that sits us down and explains how stupid and amateur we are. How lucky we are he came to share; I do so hope he wants to talk about the Middle Ages and how stupid people were then, too.

(Did you know different languages spell things differently? My god, his professionalism shines through, doesn't it?)

--Jaylemurph

 Yes I suppose I should be embarrassed at my lack of understanding but those stubborn Irish genes just won't let me.

jmccr8

[Sir Wearer of Hats]

On 24/12/2017 at 1:12 PM, KibyNykraft4 said:

Not if you actually read the posts. And I doubt you did  What I am saying is that the Frislant in some of the maps is obviously Newfoundland.  But as the name existed in a time of much less organized communication among humans and much less technology, there was a natural spreadout of the name into also including other islands. 

As for the idea of sunken islands, again this can be the case of Maldives in 30 years from now, and it was the case for Doggerland. A group of sunken islands could have gotten the name while being present, and the name transferred later to Newfoundland. 

So, there is nothing here I do not know. What i do not know is the detail of it which is of course impossible in the past, not that islands generally are a real physical phenomena  

FWIW I’m a visual learner, can you show me some maps please?

[Sir Wearer of Hats]

Furthermore, for an island to be submerged beneath s rising sea level, you’d need a reason for the sea level to rise, so what was going on geologically when Friesland disappeared? Was it the Little Ice Age? Is there any ancillary evidence of sea levels rising at the same period? 

I recall something about villages in the UK being submerged (and rediscovered recently) were they from the same period?

[Youngnoah]

It appears that it is Newfoundland Island.  Frisland is also called Fixland (aka Fishland) on various maps.  Gunnar Thompson wrote a good article on this, here:  http://marcopoloinseattle.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Portolan-Article-Newfoundland-Nov-2016-1.pdf  He died last May, 2017.

Edited January 1, 2018 by Youngnoah
added death of Thompson