Redwall redated

My work PC is on an interminable update / reboot cycle so I'm not even pretending to be productive this morn. So: in the meantime, I've found some Dark-Age news posted last night that I'd missed then . . .

Last year I dredged up a 2014 study about the Norse Mouse Expedition to Terceira and maybe St. Mary. (The Danish mice colonised Madeira; the other Azores' squeakers hail from western Hispania.) I went out on a limb that Terceira's intrepid Scandi varmints probably had help.

Pedro Raposeiro et al., "Climate change [drink!] facilitated the early colonization of the Azores Archipelago during medieval times", doi 10.1073/pnas.2108236118. If I were Portuguese I'd have submitted this text in Icelandic rather than in English but hey. I also must protest this tendency to appeal to the peanut-gallery by noting muh climate in the paper's focus but, again - hey. We got a paper (well, an abstract) and we got it in a language I can read.

The lake Peixinho at the Pico island holds a record of charcoal and 5-beta-stigmasterol. That last is bullsh!t and Bockmist... literally, it's a compound from herbivore dung. The era of settlement was AD 700-850; there's more evidence from the 800s over at Corvo ("Crow Island") in the lake Caldeirão (which is what it says it is, a volcanic crater). Although these herders likely didn't use St. Bede's calendar.

So that AD 844 raid on Seville would have been about the last gasp of the former colony, most closely a stage-post. Running low on timber, mayhap. This may account for why there aren't physical remains: they dismantled their Germanic log lodges to build the last ships. Recommend a search for forges and hearths.

Island sheep survived to be spotted by the last Islamic Lishbûnatis. As of now, these islands Pico and Corvo have become our first candidates.

Looking earlier, I'm calling out as interesting that whatever rodents they now have in Pico and Corvo were not Scandinavian. How did Lisbon's little fuzzballs win? One notion is that those critters were there before the Norse got there. Might the Romans have been out there, from Lusitanian Olissipón? Tartessos? - More likely, that was Redwall: these first mice floated over in prehistory.

Next stop: the Danes from Madeira. I'm calling it that this outpost lasted longer, whacking Morocco AD 860ish.