Word: norsemen
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This is the rare DreamWorks movie that might have benefited from a few more gag writers. Its early reels rely too heavily on the conceit that medieval Norsemen spoke with a Scots accent, and the other teens in Hiccup's dragon-training class never surmount their stereotypes. But Sanders and DeBlois, two Disney vets who told a similar kid-and-feral-pet fable in 2002's Lilo & Stitch, have the knack of giving life to fantastical interspecies friendships. And the technicians at their disposal (including the Coen brothers' ace cinematographer, Roger Deakins) have splashed the screen with landscapes that would...
...about 16 hours into the trip, we were somewhere in northwestern Pennsylvania. I woke up, hungry, and decided to see if I could find some food. I ventured back into the food car where I ordered a bagel, took a seat next to a loud, boisterous group of Norsemen, and promptly told the one nearest me to shut up, if he didn’t mind.The group, composed of Swedish tourists enjoying one of their generous vacations, was far too consumed by its own good humor to be bothered by a cantankerous 19-year-old who hadn?...
...Kari Stefansson can trace his ancestry back 1,100 years. That's almost unheard of in the U.S., but in his native Iceland, where genealogy is a national obsession, it hardly raises an eyebrow. The island nation is a genetic anomaly: settled by a few Norsemen and Celts in the 9th century A.D. and relatively free of later immigration, it is among the most genetically homogeneous countries on earth. And in the late 1990s, when scientists were racing to map the human genome, Stefansson realized that Iceland's genetic isolation and unrivaled genealogical records made it a potential gold mine...
While all that was going on, a colony of about 5,000 tenacious Norsemen was suffering a similar fate thousands of miles to the north. They had audaciously established a settlement on Greenland's comparatively mild southern coast, but they too overextended their environment and paid the price. Among many other blunders, they shortsightedly depleted the local forests (deforestation is a major theme in Collapse), which left them without the wood they needed to smelt iron. Icelanders were stunned when Greenlanders sailed into port in ships held together with wooden pegs and baleen instead of nails...
Diamond is not an eloquent writer, but he doesn't have to be: Collapse is full of spectacles of unbearable, nightmarish poignance. He shows us the last desperate Norsemen rioting and eating newborn calves and even their own hunting dogs. He lays out the decline of the Mayan empire, the extinction of the Anasazi--whose five-story buildings were the tallest in North America until the 1880s--and the final days of Mangareva, a tiny tropical island where the last inhabitants not only ate one another but dug up buried corpses and ate them...