Bipedalism is actually not that rare among animals like us, ie primates. Lemurs and gibbons walk on two legs on the ground (though lemurs tend to skip more than walk). 20 species of gibbons and they all do this. For some tree climbers it just seems to be the most comfortable way to move around on the ground.

It seems to have been the same with our ancestors because full bipedalism was already present right at the start of human evolution with Australopithecus, which still had a brain not much larger than a chimp. So maybe bipedalism is not something we evolved for any particular reason, maybe it was just how we started out as a byproduct to how we moved in the trees, and when we started living on the ground more we had to work with it.

And in “continental” Scandinavia the problem is compounded because we have so few very few sources of our own that we rely heavily on Icelandic sources, but we can’t assume that what people believed in Iceland is the same as what they believed in Denmark or Sweden; there may have been significant regional differences.

I don’t think it makes much difference for the vast majority of people because most people simply don’t give a shit about history. I’m from Scandinavia which supposedly has a lot of this stuff, but people here tend to know very little about the pre-Christian culture of 1000+ years ago and care even less. People have a vague idea of who Thor and Odin are but that’s pretty much it.

Use a bookmark you savage.

I believe all four ships were ordered simultaneously but they started building Vasa first. Already during construction they thought it would be unstable so they made the other three ships wider.