In that Epic "The Vikings" Tony Curtis lead the maurauders with a moonstone which was in essence a piece of a meteorite which was magnitized. It pointed north and with a knowledge of the wind and waves it was almost as good as a Garmon!
Now this is your department.
GGG Ping
It obviously hasn't helped them to win any Super Bowls.
If they were used as time-keeping pieces in the navigational computations, then that might imply the Vikings assumed the earth was round.
That's cool, where can you get one? And how do they know the Vikings used one? When the sun reaches its highest point in the sky, local noon, it is due south exactly, I believe. Pretty helpful.
Please FREEPMAIL me if you want on or off the
"Gods, Graves, Glyphs" PING list or GGG weekly digest
-- Archaeology/Anthropology/Ancient Cultures/Artifacts/Antiquities, etc.
Gods, Graves, Glyphs (alpha order)
There is a persistent theory that Vikings found their way to the South Seas, and settled (amongst other places) in New Zealand.
Speakeing personally, I'd have no at all difficulty believing this theory: their longboats were more than sufficiently seaworthy, and they had an idea-or-two about how to do long trips by boat.
And this would explain several persistent Maori tales about blond, white, faerie people who inhabited New Zealand before the Maori settled here.
It has also been postulated that the Phoenecians got here, at some point, prior to the big Taupo volcanic explosion. Again, I have no difficulty believing this.
Worst case scenario: if you were on a log, cast adrift somewhere in the South Pacific, the prevailing currents would in all likelihood sweep you toward NZ and wash you ashore. Or, at least, that is my reading of the maps...
I'd like to see this in action. I'm having a hard time believing that when light is completely diffused there's some refractive principle that can un-diffuse it. An estimate of where the sun sits is possible through an overcast, but its really approximate and subject to easy mis-direction.
The modern usage of the word sunstone refers to an entirely different mineral, varieties of feldspar.
Here are two links that give more detail about how early seafarers might have used iolite crystals as a navigation aid.
Navigation and Iolite
Vikings may have used a special crystal called a sunstone to help navigate the seas even when the sun was obscured by fog or cloud, a study has suggested.
What it can't do is help them find the End Zone.