As a Swede, it took me a while (perhaps in part due to insufficient quantities of coffee) to realize that this "Oland" they were going on about, which I had never heard of, was actually Öland.
In this age of near-universal Unicode support, is writing it properly really too much to ask? In fact, this mysterious letter Ö is even in latin1 and codepage 850, so the BBC would have had access to it even if they were still using MS-DOS.
As I recall, there was a time when Google Maps showed native names and glyphs, with english/latin "subtitles". I liked it. And I hoped it was the start the new way this would be handled. Regrettably not.
Not particularly minding this since the area was settled by Swedes in the late 13th Century, and a trading town established as "Helsingfors" in 1550 under the rule of King Gustav I of Sweden. The new name "Helsinki" -- a Finnish-sounding modification of "Helsinge" -- was chosen in 1819 under the rule of Tsar Alexander I as part of the Russian occupier's process of erasing Swedish presence and influence in Finland. The city had fallen to the Russian invaders in 1808; a new town name of "Alexandria" was considered in 1812; maybe you should demand we call it that, and write the name in Cyrillic.
It’s a fascinating story and so far they have only excavated about 10% of the site. The thing which stands out to me (not mentioned in the article) is that so far the archaeologists have only found male remains. So far they do not know what became of the women. Some speculate that they may have been taken, but if that was the case there ought to be remains of old women since an attacker would not kidnap those. The working theory right now is that the women where rounded up before they were killed and that that site remains to be found.
The head archaeologist speculates that this attack was part of a civil war on Öland (the island where Sandby is located) and that the purpose of this attack was to intimidate opponents. And since no one came to bury the dead it appears to have worked.
Women were likely taken for slave labor. The fertile ones as sex slaves, the older ones for physical labor.
"Old women" as we think of them today (65+) didn't really exist back then because life spans weren't as long as they are today for a number of reasons. Most "older" women taken would have been 50-60 years old and perfectly able to work as laborers.
Strangeness. I watched a presentation by a guy called Fredrik earlier today. He's worked with developing a VR experience that can be used as a tool in order to create strong emotions connected to the gruesome events that took place at Sandby borg. Read more here: http://www.sandbyborg.se/en/sandby-borg-in-virtual-reality/
Me too. Apparently similar etymology to English "-borough" or "-burgh". Contrast with Star Trek's borg, which comes from "cyborg", short for "cybernetic organism".
In this age of near-universal Unicode support, is writing it properly really too much to ask? In fact, this mysterious letter Ö is even in latin1 and codepage 850, so the BBC would have had access to it even if they were still using MS-DOS.