Viking Sunstones..real or myth?
If you had to come up with a way to get across an ocean without technology could you? The sun would help but what if it was cloudy? Well if you were a Viking you would use a Sunstone. For the longest time historians thought that this wasn’t a real thing but just used in Viking legends. However, the first one was discovered in a shipwreck in 2002! Admittedly the stone was found in a British shipwreck but it did allow the idea that the myth had some truth to it.
So what is a Viking Sunstone? It’s a chunk of crystal that is used by looking through it and rotating it just right to be able to get the position of the sun using polarized rays. Basically the light comes through the crystal which splits it into two paths and makes a double image on the far side looking through it. You then rotate the crystal until both images are equally bright which tell you that the crystal is pointing east-west. Its a bunch of physics I do not understand tbh. However, it has been proven to work! A French researcher made a prototype sunstone compass using a common calcite crystal (called Icelandic spar and very prevalent in Iceland) and they were able to navigate within 1% of the true location of the sun!
Excavations have found these crystals in Viking settlements so it is entirely possible that they navigated using the mythical sunstone! You too can try it if you want to! They sell them online on Amazon and Etsy. I think I’ll stick to gps though.
If you want more info on Viking Sunstones check out the below video and links!
https://www.livescience.com/27696-viking-sunstone-shipwreck.html
https://www.livescience.com/16831-viking-sunstone-crystal-compass.html
