Forgotten Adventuring Gear: VIKING SUNSTONE

The Viking Sunstone is a mystical stone from viking sagas. The viking sunstone supposedly helped vikings find the sun in storms and blizzards to help them navigate.

Sunstone Theories:

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Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

[justinritchey]

This is exactly what is needed in the Curse of Strahd campaign where the lore of the world says the sun is always heavily obscured so you can never tell the exact time of day.

[NevisYsbryd]

The North Sea is clouded over a _lot_ of the time regardless of active precipitation. Cloud cover can fairly easily obscure the sun enough for it to be difficult to tell where it is.

[Wishbone]

In Scandinavia it is not uncommon to have completely overcast days with a heavy uniform cloud layer, and on those days you really cannot tell by eye where the sun is in the sky.

[williammcalexanderjr]

Krammer (I hope that's how you spell it), I have some info on compasses for you. In my younger days, as an archaeologist, two of us found a prehistoric site. Part of the data recording included compass readings. We stood 30 meters apart and our compasses were pointing at each other. We were using Sunto compasses (good quality ones). The Ouachita Mountains are composed of folded and twisted strata. This can and does interfere with magnetic fields. So always remember accurate map reading and terrain recognition skills are important.

[ellorybockting]

As a world builder I have love to build a fantasy setting that uses no hand waving or 'a wizard did it' as an explanation.
In it there is a place called the Erie. A very large expanse of bog and swamp that is usually to misty and foggy to see the sun, the bogiron and iron deposits make a compass unreliable enough to easily get lost in the windy and foggy bog. So a sunstone is only way to determine the time and direction.

[lukeevan]

Instructions unclear, threw out all navigation tools and sunstoned my way into Narnia

[YepImThatGuy]

For those who may not know, there is True North and Magnetic North for the compass. Great vid, now I want one.

[Crisilac]

I mean, you COULD use a compass, but "Sun stone" is *such* a cooler name.

[markfergerson]

A sunstone makes a passable clock during winter in high latitudes, too.

Above the Arctic circle the sun is not visible at all for months at a time because it’s below the horizon in northern hemisphere winter. A sunstone will tell you which way the sun is. That won’t give you direction but it will tell you what time of day it is within a couple of hours if you already know which way is north through local experience. Even toward the end of autumn and the beginning of spring the sun will still be below the *local* horizon in mountainous terrain. That can amount to half of the year in some places.

Knowing the time of day s helpful when managing land trips, meeting someone else at a particular time, or just knowing when to call the kids in for supper.

[Beepy-the-Vellfire]

Don't need to imagine being somewhere a natural power sets it's will against you; I live in the UK and our weather does that pretty much on a daily basis. 😂
We often have completely overcast skies so you don't see the sun all day, sometimes for days. I can definitely imagine there could once have been a great use for the sunstone in a climate like this. 😎

[Rocketsong]

Cool. I have a song about the sunstone on one of my albums. The secret is polarization Calcite ore is birefringent, which means it splits light into polarized paths. In this case, calcite can split either plane polarized or circularly polarized light.

Very cool to see someone explaining how it works in practice, thanks Kramer.

[LaineyBug]

This would be a nice addition to Skill Tree's Staff of the Wanderer. I'm imagining having a little vintage brass sundial compass and spy glass in my other pockets! Maybe in a hiking situation you can have a modern map of the area tea stained!

[jamesanderson]

I always amazed at innovations our ancestors used to solve problems.

[scottthomas]

I used to work for a small college, and one professor had a sunstone. As I recall, it fluoresced under ultraviolet. I think he said it was for getting very a very general idea of which direction you're headed on cloudy or stormy days.

[CreepyMF]

Those sunstones are really incredible, i kinda want one now.

[StarlasAiko]

Last month I was out with a friend during extremely cloudy afternoon. Despite the complete cloud cover, it was not possible to look at the sky in any direction other than North with bare eyes and there was no indication of where the sun was. Everything was just blindingly bright grey. But with sunglasses, I could look straight at the sun and it looked like a Full Moon behind a veil thin cloud cover.

[kingdavidapple]

While reading, "Collapse, ' by Jared Diamond, he mentions how foggy the western shore of Greenland and all of the region of Iceland can be due to sea ice, fractured or sheet in winter. Such a device would be a real help, in concert with the many other indicators of approaching land these sailors knew better than I can: size & type of swell, types of fish or birds observed, smell or taste of the seawater; perhaps more details I know nothing of. Thanks, Kramer!

[MrDowntemp]

Moves to the desert. Loses the sun :) Only kiddin' love the content. Since its such a backup tool, Would be neat as a piece of jewelry so you don't have to worry about carrying it around as much. The black dot could be another gem too.

[gagatube]

A most interesting subject. I did a little digging on this topic a few years back and could not determine if the Sunstone was a genuine navigational aid or not. From (low level) scientific research that statistically found no benefit in using a Sunstone, to an article saying an airline which used to make trans-arctic flights (during which a magnetic compass is less than useless) had Sunstones mounted in the cockpit as a navigational aid. To add to the confusion I found an article which said the Sunstone is literally an aid i.e. if you are sufficiently skilled (and know what you are looking for) _you don't need the stone._ Evidence to support this theory is found in an Icelandic Saga where the 'hero', in a gathering, is asked to point to the direction of the sun and does so unaided, whereupon the Chief fetches his Sunstone, examines the sky through it and announces the hero is correct.

[golwenlothlindel]

So the other thing about magnetic compasses is this: magnetic north and true north aren't the same. At the equator, the difference hardly matters but at the poles the difference is miles. The vikings were primarily sailing between 50 and 80 degrees north, where using the wrong value for north could mean a few days or a whole week extra sailing time. That's more than enough time to die of hunger and thirst, if you run out of provisions. Being blown off course is the norm if you're sailing in the north Atlantic, but the sooner you know you're off course the sooner you can start rationing your provisions and looking for ways to get more. That can dramatically boost your possibility of survival even in the worst case scenarios. The magnetic compass is not superior to a sunstone for ship navigation, especially not in the extreme north or south. What IS superior to a sunstone for ship navigation is a sextant. Though in the perpetually cloudy and misty north Atlantic, you might want both instruments.