Re: 2 Fantasy Rants for the Price of One

In article <Ipoy3v.HoH@xxxxxxxxxxx>,
Dorothy J Heydt <djheydt@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>
>It's all vaguely reminiscent of the traditional Lapp way of life,
>following the reindeer around and living off them. On the other
>hand, I suppose there was some plant life they could eat too,
>berries or what not. On the OTHER hand, I don't suppose there
>was much of it.

The pre-modern Saami way of life varied by geography but was mainly
based on seasonal hunting, fishing and foraging, with some animal
husbandry and farming evident in the earliest historical records
(the Sami range within historical times having extended as far
south as central Norway, into areas where farming is not such a
bad idea). Most of these people would not have been proper nomads,
but moved between two or three semi-settled locations over the course
of the year.

The specialized nomadic reindeer-based way of life *was* traditional,
but only a few centuries old; it was based on domesticated herds (after
the wild reindeer population had been reduced by hunting) and only
ever applied to a section of the population within a larger economy.
(Many coastal groups became permanently settled fishermen, and the
reindeer-herders were always doing a lot of trade with non-herders --
in fact their high degree of specialization was not so much a subsistence
necessity as it was an effective utilization of the resources at hand).

The arctic and sub-arctic biomes of northern Scandinavia may be
unsuitable for most types of farming, but they're nothing like
Greenland or the islands of the Canadian arctic.



--
Leif Kjønnøy, cunctator maximus. http://www.pvv.org/~leifmk
.

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