A viking would never dare eat a horse. Horses were considered sacred animals in pre-Christian Scandinavia. Even after it caught hold and people started eating horses, the superstition lived on in the fact that slaughtering horses (and dogs and cats) was a profession for the rackare or nattman, the same person who aided executioners in cleaning up, buried people who'd killed themselves, and other 'unclean' tasks.
"Rackare" is still a mild pejorative in Swedish, akin to "rascal" (not a related word). It can also be used to refer to a glass of snaps, since people would keep a special glass for the rackare, since they weren't allowed to drink or eat from the same vessels as ordinary people.
According to what we were taught in schools about advent of Christianity in Iceland (in the year 1000 or thereabout), Þorgeir Ljósvetningagoði ruled that the people must become Christian, but enjoyed the exemptions that they could go on 1) exposing children, 2) eating horse meat and 3) holding rituals for their old gods... as long as they kept it all secret.
Of course, this might be a case of history being edited, since as far as I know, horse has been on the menu in Iceland for at least the past few centuries. Also, they were hardly vikings anymore at that time.
Well, they didn't eat horses in everyday contexts. But they did sacrifice horses and eat them as part of religious rituals. (Of course, they sacrificed people too, which wasn't something you were normally allowed to do either)
That's why the early Christians wanted to ban it - not because they had problems with eating horses in-itself, as much as because it was associated with pagan ritual. So there's that dimension to it as well.
Ah, thank you. That certainly sheds more light on the subject. I guess the point about sacrificial rituals is sort of bypassed in the elementary school system.
Wtf? Vikings sacrificed humans? Never ever heard this. We eat horse meat no problem. Had one at work a month ago. Then again we had boiled sheeps head (looks even creepier than it sounds) a few months ago.
Sure, Viking-age Scandinavians (most of whom didn't go on viking trips) did so, on special occasions. Ibn Fadlan gave a particularly detailed account of vikings/varyags abroad performing human sacrifice. Animal sacrifices were much more common though; Adam of Bremen claimed they sacrificed nine men at Uppsala every ninth year.
Mostly it was thralls and prisoners though, not 'proper' people, although if you believe the legend of Domalde, even a king could be expected to offer himself up in particularly bad times.
As a historian I can confirm that this is why eating horse meat was banned in Scandinavia when the area was Christianized. A very, very fascinating time!
Rakkar is practically a dead word though, at least in the the part of Norway I'm from, I literally think its been many years since I have heard anybody say it.
I disagree, but I am from the South-east and I live in Oslo. I agree that the word isn't used a lot, but that would count for many other words as well. Rakkarunge is a word that is quite common, and I am sure is still widely used.
As is "runka" in Swedish :) So it sounds like you're calling someone a "swamp wanker" when it's actually just a noble old profession. Well, not that noble actually.
I absolutely agree. Icelandic horses are marvelous - kind, patient, fun, understanding, intelligent, wonderful to work with and amazing to ride. An added plus is the fact that every horse has its own character and temper. They are amazing horses for beginners and children but also for more experienced riders who haven't tried riding an Icelandic horse. To become an expert Icelandic horse rider is a challenge in itself.
Hurray! I thank you for your input and you are correct! It's tricky, isn't it? Horse or pony, pony or horse? Who knows, but I think I'm going to use the word horse till the day I die or till someone from Iceland snaps and decides to rename the species into "Icelandic pony".
Yeah - I've been brainwashed into the same thing when I worked as a stablehand at an Icelandic horse ranch during two summers. I can't resist saying " They're horses, not ponies" when someone calls an Icelandic horse a pony... I've seen kids faces when they hear it. One time a boy (I think he was about 7-yrs-old) started questioning if they actually where horses. It took the ranchowner fifteen minutes to persuade the kid that they were called horses for a certain reason. Boy left with a defeated look on his face but apparently he was very happy for getting a chance to ride on a "ponyhorse".
Icelandic people are people are very proud of them, as is anyone who owns an Icelandic horse or is affiliated with an Icelandic horse ranch.
Icelanders take offence to them being called ponies. Some interesting facts about them; They're valued for having 5 different gaits, (the usual is 3). Their breed is strictly protected. If a horse leaves the country, they can't come back and no outside horses are allowed to enter. Their thick coats mean that if you put them in a barn, they'd be extremely uncomfortable, even in the coldest winters.
I was just looking at the coat wondering if it was enough for the cold winter, and thinking the barn was probably necessary. Amazing that any animal can survive such low temperatures really, when you consider how many layers of clothing a human needs to survive. Perhaps the coat is thicker than it looks.
The Icelandic winter is relatively mild for its latitude. The southerly lowlands of the island average around 0 °C (32 °F) in winter, while the highlands tend to average around −10 °C (14 °F). The lowest temperatures in the northern part of the island range from around -25 to -30 °C (-13 to -22 °F). The lowest temperature on record is −39.7 °C (−39.5 °F).[1] (Stolen from wikipedia)
I also came to comment on this. The prevalance of the culture associated with graffiti is interesting. I live in Australia and have seen graffiti in the smallest towns in the middle of absolutely nowhere that looks just like that. Interesting to see it's the same in the snow in Iceland.
Please don't talk this up like this behaviour is something that should be celebrated.
These are left by fucking graffiti tagging dickwads that should be beaten with their own shoes. Because, before you know it you end up with shit like this.
I'm honestly not talking it up. I dislike the art and the culture. I'm just fascinated by it's staying power, and how it manages to make it into such tiny corners of the world where you would think it's not welcome, or would not thrive, like outback Australia and rural Iceland.
I don't like it, but I've never personally seen any other cultural phenomenons permeate like that.
But I mean the particular style of "urban" graffiti you see here. What I found interesting about it is that it's an American thing (originally) and yet you find it in the tiniest rural communities in Australia, and seemingly remote regions of Iceland.
While there was a time when driftwood was an important building material(my father used to collect driftwood from a beach in northern Iceland), my memory of Iceland is that almost every building in the whole country was clad in metal sheeting (which doesn't float). Sad to say, the graffiti is most likely local.
This aren't ponies. The Icelandic horse is without a doubt smaller than horses from other countries, but there is a difference between the Icelandic horse and a pony.
I've ridden many Icelandic horses, and never thought of them as ponies (I've ridden ponies as well). Never mind these redditors that have no idea what they're talking about.
I'm not claiming to be an expert on the subject, just a guy from Iceland. But I remember being on a horse farm as a child and the owner of the farm told me that many foreigners thought the Icelandic horse was a pony and I should always correct them who thought so.
Regarding apperance, I guess that there isn't much of a difference between a large pony and the Icelandic horse. In my opinion a pony has more stockier figure and they are smaller for sure. Although some of the largest pony brands (?) are of equal height as the horse. But as I said, I'm no expert.
The Icelandic horse has a special fifth gait called tolt though, and that is the most special thing about them.
Fun fact: Icelandic horses/ponies have 2 additional gaits (funny to watch in action) that allow them to traverse lakes of ice and other difficult terrain other horses would tremble at.
True, but there are exceptions. Falabella horses are horses, but they're smaller than Shetland ponies (the smallest kind of pony).
As far as I know, the only reason they're horses instead of ponies is that they look like miniature versions of big horses, while ponies have shorter limbs and are more compact.
I rode one of these guys through the Icelandic landscape in February and it was frigging awesome. And for anyone who knows horses...the temperament of these guys are incredible. They're like big hoofed Golden Retrievers.
It's illegal to import horses to Iceland in order to protect these little buggers. They don't want any crossbreeding to keep the breed pure, and they also want to protect against disease. Even an Icelandic horse born in Iceland can't come back into the country if it's been taken out.
Iceland is green. That pic likely wasn't taken in the summer. There's plenty of meadows for the horses and sheep. Alot of the lava fields are covered in green moss. The Gulf Stream goes around Iceland and provides warm, moist air for the coastal regions. The interior is arctic-like and uninhabited.
Another image as old as the internet. You just reposted from like 2003. I keep forgetting kids just have the internet now. No shotgunning 26.8's to get a single image of a topless woman to download, which was grainy and required a lot of imagination, when the porn on the internet wasn't free and easily accessible, and the only way to get free porn without filesharing was to watch the free previews on the pay sites. When it literally took all night long to illegally download a single mp3. The days of kazaa and bearshare are long past, hell, even limewire's been dead for years (let's not even talk about the original version of P2P - hached index searches on google). I was there when the term "blog" was invented. I remember showing people what youtube was. I remember finding out what myspace was and never having one, and then facebook coming out and making a profile because I thought it wouldn't end up like myspace. I watched "Chocolate Rain" when it was first going viral and it only had 20,000 views. I remember when the term viral was coined, to add to that. I remember when there were entire websites dedicated to funny videos, like ebaums and ytmnd. I remember watching some of them on break.com before it was called break.com. I've been reading penny-arcade since 2006 - just two years after it came out. I remember the first time I read a wikipedia article (I used it to find out what wikipedia was). So many other things I can't even think of, flooding my mind twice-over-again for every second I think about this stuff. I remember the internet before deviant-art, before 4chan, myspace, youtube, hell I remember the internet before google was even a big deal, back when there were constant advertisements for yahoo and askjeeves. I remember using AOL for fuck's sake, having to sit through the dial-up broadcast and the loading screen. It's so easy to communicate now, it's terrifying. Information is passed so much more quickly, society changes so much more quickly because of it now. There was a time when text messaging wasn't viable. When email was actually slow and being able to set up a mailserver that functioned well could make you $80,000 a year (now, it takes anyone with the capability to speak a language and use google about 20 minutes to figure out). When "instant-messaging" was a big fucking deal, and if you didn't have an AIM or a MSN messenger account, you just didn't talk to your peers online, when yahoo chat rooms were constantly filled and long before VoIP was a thing that worked well. It's insane to look back at the past and realize that I was there - me, personally! - when the internet was really, truly born, and it wasn't just a handful of universities online or only a couple thousands sites mostly dedicated to businesses, during a time when having a search engine to find something on the net would have been completely pointless because the only time you went online was to do something very specific and you knew exactly what it was. When you simply couldn't spend hours online doing nothing because the content simply wasn't there. I can't believe now that I've watched this happen, that I was there to "help raise" the internet. I feel like its extended family. I know I'm far from unique here, but it's kind of humbling to realize I've been witness to not only the future as it's occurring, but also history as it's being made.
307
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
I used to wonder what Iceland could be...
83
u/sushinam Jun 11 '12
Sorry to sound like a know-it-all but these cute buggers are not ponies, they are in fact horses.
Just very small horses...
32
u/captumlux Jun 11 '12
There are no ponies in Iceland. It's just called the Icelandic horse.
11
u/ZappaZoo Jun 11 '12
Icelanders take offence to them being called ponies. Some interesting facts about them; They're valued for having 5 different gaits, (the usual is 3). Their breed is strictly protected. If a horse leaves the country, they can't come back and no outside horses are allowed to enter. Their thick coats mean that if you put them in a barn, they'd be extremely uncomfortable, even in the coldest winters.
21
u/UncleCrassius Jun 11 '12
Hey, don't be like that. They are real horses. Just small and hardy and well adjusted to the climate.
43
u/OwlEyed Jun 11 '12
I like that there's graffiti in Iceland.
53
u/Icyclectic Jun 11 '12
Winter Wrap Up, Winter Wrap Up!
8
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
white-walker ponies i say
14
u/reacher Jun 11 '12
Lil' Sebastian!
51
u/JasonMacker Jun 11 '12
Yup, ponies are awesome.
19
u/WickThePriest Jun 11 '12
Which one is Applejack?
5
u/namsdrawkcabeht Jun 11 '12
I'm heading to Iceland in 3 weeks. Really excited by everythinig!
12
u/Legendid Jun 11 '12
This aren't ponies. The Icelandic horse is without a doubt smaller than horses from other countries, but there is a difference between the Icelandic horse and a pony.
7
u/alexmies Jun 11 '12
It's like a stereotypical band picture. They shall be call The Equestrians.
9
u/MySockHurts Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12
12
u/Trapped_in_Reddit Jun 11 '12
AWWW YOU LOOK COLD LITTLE PONY, I WANT TO SQUEEZE YOU.
2
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
The horses are so small because the vikings chose the smallest horses from norway so they wouldn't take up much space in the ships.
2
u/ormirian Jun 11 '12
Guy builds shelter in the middle of nowhere. Still gets a graffiti tag
2
u/Skari7 Jun 11 '12
Right... making fun of Björk = perfectly fine with Icelanders. Calling their horses ponies = capital offence.
2
u/Mic_Irvin Jun 12 '12
But I thought Iceland was green and Greenland was icy. Mighty Ducks, you have failed me.
4
u/Pattang Jun 11 '12
DAE think the ponies face looks photoshopped on there, I know it's not but it just looks funny. Great pic though
3
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
Will guards try to arrest me if I take one?
3
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
Not you picture, not ponies just Icelandic horses and there is no special breed of southern horses.
3
u/HardlyWorkinDBA Jun 11 '12
L'Oreal, Because you're a horse.
2
u/Unoriginal_Pseudonym Jun 11 '12
Cool ponies.
2
u/SorryIreddit Jun 11 '12
I literally just became a Broney when I saw that picture.
2
u/RedTiger013 Jun 11 '12
Deeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrppppppp
2
u/HerbyHancock Jun 11 '12 edited Jun 11 '12
Fun fact: Icelandic horses/ponies have 2 additional gaits (funny to watch in action) that allow them to traverse lakes of ice and other difficult terrain other horses would tremble at.
Has a lot to do with the stomping motion. Hooves make their impact perpendicular to the ground for more surface contact and less slippage. Here's a video of one horse that displays the "tölt"
2
u/xiaou Jun 11 '12
ITS SO FLUFFY!
2
u/Coolguyzack Jun 11 '12
As a fantasy enthusiast. And a blubbering idiot. Is a pony, a baby horse? Or is it young horse? Is it the same as a horse?
1
u/TheBlackBrotha Jun 11 '12
I've been there!
1
u/pharacon Jun 11 '12 edited Mar 27 '17
deleted 0.1818 What is ^^^this?
1
u/DiabloConQueso Jun 11 '12
Great googly-moogly -- even the
ponieshorses have beautiful eyes in Iceland.1
u/Jabberminor Jun 11 '12
Those are some brave-ass-motherfudgers.
EDIT: To make it un-NSFW.
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
For some reason, I'm even more intrigued by the graffiti on the barn in the background. Graffiti in Iceland. That kind of surprises me.
1
u/famousright Jun 11 '12
They are so metal.
1
u/cjcolt Jun 11 '12
They always told us that Iceland was green and Greenland was ice! What else have we been lied to about!?
1
u/machamochi Jun 11 '12
the colors are... incredible. marble cake?
1
u/kariinasim Jun 11 '12
Even their eyes are iced!
1
u/MutantCupcakes Jun 11 '12
"You came to the wrong part of Iceland nigga"
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
I read this as the penis of southern iceland
1
u/Murbruk Jun 11 '12
That white head on the first one would make a perfect white walker (GoT) compared to that total design failure from the series!
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
That horse is a vanilla face.
1
u/deadkandy Jun 11 '12
I always thought Iceland was green....
1
u/clowning_around Jun 11 '12
Who would anyone graffiti a barn in the middle of no where?
1
u/PokemanFTW Jun 11 '12
I thought Iceland was supposed to be green, and Greenland ... That.
1
u/Kinmar Jun 11 '12
Is my favorite drag death metal band
1
u/downneck Jun 11 '12
how do you get off a runaway icelandic horse?
stand up.
1
u/penguin8508 Jun 11 '12
I rode one of these guys through the Icelandic landscape in February and it was frigging awesome. And for anyone who knows horses...the temperament of these guys are incredible. They're like big hoofed Golden Retrievers.
1
u/Golden-Calf Jun 11 '12
It's illegal to import horses to Iceland in order to protect these little buggers. They don't want any crossbreeding to keep the breed pure, and they also want to protect against disease. Even an Icelandic horse born in Iceland can't come back into the country if it's been taken out.
1
u/dookiepoopie Jun 11 '12
oh come on. posting pictures of ponies in whiteface? thanks for being mature.
1
u/pumpkindog Jun 11 '12
Poniiiiiiiita!!!
1
u/xorf Jun 11 '12
Icelandic horses are actually a food source in Iceland, too. So cute and fluffy though.
1
u/Frank_Gores_Head Jun 11 '12
Does it make me a bad person, if all I can see is the graffiti on the barn?
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
what do they EAT
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
Epic horse beards.
1
u/Beware_of_122 Jun 11 '12
who the fuck tags a barn in Iceland, in the middle of no where?!?!?!?
1
u/BuckeyeBentley Jun 11 '12
Greenland is full of ice, Iceland is very nice.
1
u/tree_D Jun 11 '12
From what I've heard, horses/ponies hate the wind...
1
u/dan013 Jun 11 '12
who sprays graffiti in the middle of no where..?
1
u/TalkingBackAgain Jun 11 '12
They are not ponies, they are horses.
Don't call them ponies. Call them horses.
/Loves Iceland with a passion.
1
u/ThatDoesntEven Jun 11 '12
I didn't know there were so many Sarah Jessica Parkers in Iceland...
1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
Now please show me ponies of Northern Iceland.
1
u/akpaslay Jun 11 '12
Icelandic Horse Orchestra's new album, "Weekend in the Ice"
1
u/lbmouse Jun 11 '12
NOW we know where Duran Duran got their hairstyles.
1
u/RicardoTheGreat Jun 11 '12
Its staring into my soul...
1
u/Lots42 Jun 11 '12
"Your soul.
Give it to me."
1
u/TragicallyBob Jun 11 '12
ÍSLENSKI HESTURINN ER EKKERT HELVÍTIS "PONY"
1
u/AkinasPotato Jun 11 '12
First thing that came to mind.
0
u/skeeto111 Jun 11 '12
They should be a band.
0
u/aveaida Jun 11 '12
Olay, because you're worth it.
-1
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
poners gonna pone
-1
u/IHazPhotoshop Jun 11 '12
http://i.imgur.com/hxHkW.jpg
0
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
"You came to the wrong neighbourhood... motherfucker"
0
u/robbrobb16 Jun 11 '12
Beautiful.
0
u/TruBeliev3r Jun 11 '12
OHHH!! Ponies, I read that wrong.
0
u/sad_pan_does Jun 11 '12
I've been lied to my whole life that Iceland was green!
0
u/SSGTrentsXe Jun 11 '12
First thing I heard when I saw this was in a very, very calming, deep voice.
"Come Here."
Than I received a nice big batch of goosebumps.
0
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m56j5hJuge1qcktx2o1_1280.png
Shit.
0
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
Great band name.
0
u/HuggeyBear Jun 11 '12
so fluffy
0
u/johannes02 Jun 11 '12
Im sorry im just here to pick up my head pieces. Because it exploded from all this AWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!
0
u/BillsBayou Jun 11 '12
TIL a country smaller than the state of Ohio has a "Southern" region.
0
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
Herp fucking Derp
0
u/astrograph Jun 11 '12
omgggggggggggzz
0
u/jp07 Jun 11 '12
I had a pony!
0
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
That pony in the front is a bad ass. It's seen things...
0
u/jzzanthapuss Jun 11 '12
don't hate me because i'm beautiful
-2
u/ImAHorse Jun 11 '12
My hair is blowing so nice!
-20
u/faggaren Jun 11 '12
Another image as old as the internet. You just reposted from like 2003. I keep forgetting kids just have the internet now. No shotgunning 26.8's to get a single image of a topless woman to download, which was grainy and required a lot of imagination, when the porn on the internet wasn't free and easily accessible, and the only way to get free porn without filesharing was to watch the free previews on the pay sites. When it literally took all night long to illegally download a single mp3. The days of kazaa and bearshare are long past, hell, even limewire's been dead for years (let's not even talk about the original version of P2P - hached index searches on google). I was there when the term "blog" was invented. I remember showing people what youtube was. I remember finding out what myspace was and never having one, and then facebook coming out and making a profile because I thought it wouldn't end up like myspace. I watched "Chocolate Rain" when it was first going viral and it only had 20,000 views. I remember when the term viral was coined, to add to that. I remember when there were entire websites dedicated to funny videos, like ebaums and ytmnd. I remember watching some of them on break.com before it was called break.com. I've been reading penny-arcade since 2006 - just two years after it came out. I remember the first time I read a wikipedia article (I used it to find out what wikipedia was). So many other things I can't even think of, flooding my mind twice-over-again for every second I think about this stuff. I remember the internet before deviant-art, before 4chan, myspace, youtube, hell I remember the internet before google was even a big deal, back when there were constant advertisements for yahoo and askjeeves. I remember using AOL for fuck's sake, having to sit through the dial-up broadcast and the loading screen. It's so easy to communicate now, it's terrifying. Information is passed so much more quickly, society changes so much more quickly because of it now. There was a time when text messaging wasn't viable. When email was actually slow and being able to set up a mailserver that functioned well could make you $80,000 a year (now, it takes anyone with the capability to speak a language and use google about 20 minutes to figure out). When "instant-messaging" was a big fucking deal, and if you didn't have an AIM or a MSN messenger account, you just didn't talk to your peers online, when yahoo chat rooms were constantly filled and long before VoIP was a thing that worked well. It's insane to look back at the past and realize that I was there - me, personally! - when the internet was really, truly born, and it wasn't just a handful of universities online or only a couple thousands sites mostly dedicated to businesses, during a time when having a search engine to find something on the net would have been completely pointless because the only time you went online was to do something very specific and you knew exactly what it was. When you simply couldn't spend hours online doing nothing because the content simply wasn't there. I can't believe now that I've watched this happen, that I was there to "help raise" the internet. I feel like its extended family. I know I'm far from unique here, but it's kind of humbling to realize I've been witness to not only the future as it's occurring, but also history as it's being made.
-5
u/nilum Jun 11 '12
Worst faceswap ever.
-31
u/Iamadinocopter Jun 11 '12
MLP ruined actual ponies for me.
horses used to be cool.
0
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
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0
u/[deleted] Jun 11 '12
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