User:J.Goodsir/sandbox

Fimbulwinter
The Norse mythological tale of the unending winter - the Fimbulwinter - has been posited to be an example of geomythology. Here the Fimbulwinter is seen as a Viking folk memory of a much earlier time when an eruption in South America at Lake Ilopango caused a long winter throughout the world. The eruption spewed eighty-seven cubic kilometres of ejecta into the atmosphere, blocking out the sunlight. Trees withered for lack of sun and crops failed. In Scandinavia, a region already low on agricultural land, many people starved to death: as many as half the population of Scandinavia died during the long winter, according to one estimate, and the effects went on for at least three years. Archaeologist Neil Price has argued that the Fimbulwinter myth is likely a folk memory of this time, although he is careful to point out that "Geomythology is by its very nature an inexact concept: inherently unproveable, prone to confirmation bias, and hampered by a lack of precise dating in both textual and archaeological sources." Price gives several examples as to why the Fimbulwinter myth is an example of geomythology. One example is from Snorri's poem the Poetic Edda: First of all that a winter will come called Fimbulwinter.

Then snow will drift from all directions.

There will then be great frosts and keen winds.

The sun will do no good.

There will be three of these winters together

and no summer in between.

"The description of this terrible distortion of the seasons," writes Price, "is remarkably similar to the cycle scientists postulate for the immediate effects of the eruptions."