Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog

…how does this model apply outside Europe and the Mediterranean? But for anyone interested in western history or history more generally it is the starting place. You have to get…

…We have decided to put up the most interesting passage in this respect that relates to some wind-blown fishermen from Europe who end up ‘over there’. Frislandia here is perhaps…

Popular superstitions survived surprisingly late in many parts of Europe. However, these superstitions had two enemies, Christianity and urbanization, enemies that gradually scoured them out of mind and memory. From…

…from throwing tea into Boston harbour to twitting the French over the EU rebate.) However, he has been charmed by a parallel development. In Europe particularly there are now such…

…just have residuals. Other thoughts on the Celtic Church? drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com *** 30 April 2013: JJ from a Corner of Tenth-Century Europe writes: Apropos of your defence…

…or their memory can be trusted. A trifling example though one that was to have enormous consequences for European and then world history. 27 October 1922 Mussolini’s Black Shirts began…

…the same club. Conversely, we might wonder that if Hitler had had some passionate romps in a Bavarian hay field at an impressionable age, whether Europe would not be a…

…in the Orkney islands. 2) The Finnmen were Inuit who had been taken on board European ships and then thrown in the water with their kayaks when they arrived in…

…were taken up by Greenlanders and from there leaked back into Europe to appear on European charts from the fourteenth century onwards. This is a thesis that has not garnered…

…because their thinking has started to close down.) As to the Fairy Folk… Well, where to begin? It is thrilling to think that on the margins of western Europe a…

A question. What modern European country asked a cricketer, the son of a Sultan, a German prince, a circus acrobat and a Gaelic-speaking Scot to be their monarch within ten…

…Continental Europe and they also went defenceless to their enemies and somehow survived to tell the tale, hence the lion’s mouth of the title. First, Lorenzo: after the Pazzi Conspiracy…

One of the weaker proofs of Pre-Columbian contacts with Europe is the legend of the ‘white Indian’. Typically, a pioneer in the sixteenth or seventeenth or eighteenth or even the…

…influenced by some all-embracing pagan cult with influence across Europe. Before we proceed any further, here’s something to think about: On one out-of-the-body trip to Mars, he found that a…

…it at this. But Dowding, sometime believer in fairies, went further. He also recalled how in the thirteenth-century he had been chief of a Mongol tribe sweeping into Europe. Because…