Doggerland.

New inforgraphic post!

Here it is, the long awaited Doggerland update post.

Here’s the text from the page, so that you don’t have to keep zooming and swiping:

“The inhabitants of Doggerland called themselves the Ingwine. This name was drawn from the earliest surviving references to their forebears, notably Tacitus’ Germania and Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, which describe three broad Germanic groups living in what was then Germania: the Ingvaeones, the Herminones (Irminones) and the Istvaeones. The Ingvaeones were the North Sea Germanic peoples, forebears of the Danes, northern Germans, the Dutch and the English, along with other communities around the North Sea. Ingwine is a de-Latinised rendering of Ingvaeones.

The name Ingwine is also attested in the earliest Old English sources, most notably Beowulf, where it serves as an ethnonym for the Danes, meaning the “friends of Ing”, lending the name further legitimacy. Unfortunately for the modern descendants of the Ingwine, they did not meet the UE’s definition of indigeneity and so had to fight tooth and nail for their independence.

In their struggle against the UE, the Ingwine took unexpected turns, most interestingly a sizeable return to heathenry, prompted by their reclaimed ancient name of Ingwine, ‘friends of Ing’, with Ing being short for the fertility deity Ingvi-Freyr.

Worldwide, growing resistance movements of peoples seeking self-determination and homelands of their own forced the already strained UE to make concessions. The Ingwine were granted a fraction of their former homeland. These new borders rather romantically mirrored Anglo-Saxon migration maps, this was enough to bring peace.

As the French independence movement faltered, leaders in Hauts-de-France sought survival through alliance with their neighbours. The region’s native Germano-Celtic populace had long ties to England and Flanders. Though the area was settled chiefly by Istvaeonic Franks, from whom France takes its name, Saxons also settled there as part of the wider Germanic expansion into the former Roman Empire. The Ingwine embraced them and counted them as kin. With Ingwine backing, the leaders of Hauts-de-France secured territory and joined “Ingland”. The move gave Ingland ports on both sides of the Channel and thus dominance over the North Sea.

By securing the Strait of Dover, Ingland controlled the narrowest reach of the English Channel. Hemmed in by the UE, it could not expand outward, so it turned inward. A vast land bridge was built across the Dover Strait and large-scale land reclamation began along the eastern side.

With Britain linked to continental Europe, a vision dawned in the national consciousness: their destiny was to raise the lost land of Doggerland from the North Sea and connect their coasts once again. More land bridges were built between the nearest points along the shores and with each new patch of reclaimed land, Doggerland slowly emerged. So many archaeological discoveries were made in this golden age.

With the North Sea wall completed, so too was the multi-generational project. As an act of friendship, what remained of Irish, Scottish, Welsh, Manx and Cornish dissidents were gifted Gaelic and Brythonic cultural zones in the north of Doggerland after their bids for self-determination failed. There, their culture, language and peoples could be preserved.

From above, Doggerland may appear artificial with its sea walls, canals and washes, but the view from the ground was quite different. Much of the land between farms was set aside as nature corridors. There was a law that every settlement had to be bordered by a forest equal in area to the settlement itself, which created vast wooded swathes across the nation. Set against the straight lines of the great canals, smaller streams were encouraged to meander through the countryside, creating meadows. The governing principle driving these decisions was that “life is an aesthetic experience”. As per this philosophy, official state buildings were constructed in a revived neo-Gothic style and the streets of new towns were lined with crow-stepped gable buildings. In rural areas, villages with thatched-roof cottages were most common.

This strain of romanticism is why, when Deicide discovered the remains of fallen warriors on the moon at the beginning of his rebellion, some of them resembled Vikings; these were Ingwine from Doggerland.”