Salt was also a medium of exchange, a kind of money too.
Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in it. When one is „worth their salt“, they deserve their payment. Salt is uniform in its quality and scarce, like precious metals are, and besides its usefulness and consumability, serves well as money.
Which scholars think early medieval chronicles are „fictional“? This seems facile to me. Outdated ones?
Fiction did not exist and fabula was never written on parchment. Sacrelige! The lens of the early medieval mind, which to us seems distorted, was not engaged in fiction, because it was not yet capable of playing with the willing suspension of disbelief aka Coleridge. Fiction is not a merely a euphemism for not factual. In the Early Middle Ages, there is neither fact (a post-Baconian scientific paradigm) nor fiction, which is invented in the High Middle Ages.
My recent post is about Hamburg going back to the 9th century. I read some about the viking raids there, later than yours. They were not relevant to my post’s topic and the post was already too long, so I left them out. Salt, though, I do mention in the context of trade and payment for the labor of sailors, but it worked differently than one might think. I mention Vikings in another context: the manner in which they transported goods on their ships.
Salt was also a medium of exchange, a kind of money too.
Roman soldiers were sometimes paid in it. When one is „worth their salt“, they deserve their payment. Salt is uniform in its quality and scarce, like precious metals are, and besides its usefulness and consumability, serves well as money.
Which scholars think early medieval chronicles are „fictional“? This seems facile to me. Outdated ones?
Fiction did not exist and fabula was never written on parchment. Sacrelige! The lens of the early medieval mind, which to us seems distorted, was not engaged in fiction, because it was not yet capable of playing with the willing suspension of disbelief aka Coleridge. Fiction is not a merely a euphemism for not factual. In the Early Middle Ages, there is neither fact (a post-Baconian scientific paradigm) nor fiction, which is invented in the High Middle Ages.
My recent post is about Hamburg going back to the 9th century. I read some about the viking raids there, later than yours. They were not relevant to my post’s topic and the post was already too long, so I left them out. Salt, though, I do mention in the context of trade and payment for the labor of sailors, but it worked differently than one might think. I mention Vikings in another context: the manner in which they transported goods on their ships.