Beer plays an important role in Valhalla Hills and it�s one of the more sophisticated technologies you can develop. Keep your militia well-supplied with booze and they receive a buff to their abilities in combat. This is in keeping with the stereotypical view of vikings as fighty piss-artists - but actually was against Odin�s advice. Among the god�s many sayings, quoted in the Poetic Edda, are a large number of warnings about beer, the pithiest of which is this: �No worse provision can [a man] carry with him than too deep a draught of ale.� Oh, okay, one more quote: �Be wariest of all with ale, with another's wife, and a third thing too, that knaves outwit thee never.� Quite so, Odin. But so many are his proclamations against excessive drunkenness (but not of drinking per se) that we can at least infer that it was a common enough problem. Latin accounts of Germanic tribes, which me might expect to be culturally similar to the vikings, certainly described them as hard drinkers. The Roman writer Cornelius Tacitus recounts with some alarm just how happy these shitfaced barbarians were to resolve disputes with bloodshed during the course of an evening�s revelry.


Even their kids were encouraged to slug back ale. However, the oft-cited reason for the popularity of beer - that it was safer to drink than water - doesn�t have any foundation in the literature of the time. There was an awareness of what constituted bad water, certainly, but no unwillingness to drink water per se. 7th century writer Paulus Aeginata even suggests boiling impure water to make it fit to drink. And Saxon sources tell us that man�s preference was for �Ale if I have it, water if I have no ale.� So, rather than being a matter of health, it was just that - a preference based on beer�s taste, and, quite possibly, the effect of alcohol addiction. Incidentally, I�ve been careless here using �beer� and �ale� interchangeably - but no more careless than many English translations of Nordic texts use of �beor� and �ealu�. There is, however, some suggestion that these were two distinct drinks: ealu being a malt-based drink we might recognise today, and beor actually being close to cider or perhaps another, even stronger, fruit-based drink with a sweet taste. The phonetic similarity between beor and barley - the crop from which ale was widely produced - appears to be an etymological red herring.


But as central as beer was to the vikings, and medieval society in general, its importance may be even greater than this: it may have been an invention as significant in the development of human history as the discovery of fire. No, really. One of the great controversies of anthropology concerns the transition between nomadic hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural settlements. As you sit there at your computer, or struggle to bring up this alt-text on your smartphone, it may seem like there is a pretty clear through-line of technological progression from early human settlement to the industrial revolution and onwards to the present. But this looks rather less clear when comparing the lifestyles of agricultural settlers and their nomadic forebears. In a famously provocative essay titled �The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race�, Jared Diamond explores the many immediate disadvantages that faced early human settlers. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, settlement precipitated a massive decrease in leisure time; it reduced the range of foods available and caused malnutrition; reliance on single crops left settlements vulnerable to famine; the concentration of population created problems of waste disposal and encouraged disease.


All this is evident from the analysis of bones. The average height of humanity plummeted with the onset of agriculture. Disease and malnutrition are evident in the density of the bones and quality of the teeth. Diamond makes a point about how agricultural labour encouraged the stratification of societies, engendering the disparity between rich and poor, between the sexes even, which has maligned humanity ever since. So why did they ever do it? There is no certain answer. Perhaps as populations of nomadic groups grew, it became impossible to move with the freedom that they once had - nomadic people rarely have children at a rate higher than one every four years as the mothers need to carry a child until it is old enough to keep up on its own. But this seems to me a problem that hunter gatherers might have encountered in the 1.9 million years of human and proto-human history prior to the adoption of agriculture 10,000 years ago.


A technological discovery seems a more likely incentive for a change in habitation - and, rather than the cultivation of grain being a consequence of settling, perhaps it might have been the motive. And not merely cultivation, but fermentation too. The earliest evidence of beer dates to around 7,000 BC, coinciding with the widespread arrival of barley and wheat as systematically cultivated crops - but the archeological evidence suggests that settlers were storing wild grain in granaries much earlier than this. No doubt this was for the purpose of making bread, but why not beer too? Consuming grains naturally fermented by wild yeast in rain water is probably a much easier accidental gastronomic discovery than the process of bread making. What I�m saying is that early man discovered booze, got so shitfaced he could barely move, and it�s all been downhill since. For all our technology, Diamond suggests, can we really say that the gender and wealth divisions, the malnutrition, the serfdom, the slavery, the bloodshed and horror that followed settlement 10,000 years ago was really all worth it? It might seem so, but then we weren�t the ones who had to suffer for our current privilege (as many others alive today continue to do). Perhaps Odin was right about booze then, even if his advice came a little too late. What�s left to do but have a commissatory pint? Skol!

How about some links? 

Odin's advice from the Poetic Edda: 

https://www.pitt.edu/~dash/havamal.html

Two articles on the role of booze among the vikings and Anglo Saxons:

https://www.vikinganswerlady.com/drink.shtml
https://www.tha-engliscan-gesit_has.org.uk/archives/the-alcoholic-drinks-of-the-anglo-saxons

On the "water was more dangerous than beer" myth:

https://leslefts.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/the-great-medieval-water-myth.html

Jared Diamond's essay: The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race

https://www.ditext.com/diamond/mistake.html