The Children of Ash and Elm

the legendary sagas sometimes include narratives that ostensibly concern events long before the Viking Age, stretching back to the time of the great migrations when the post-Roman map of Europe was violently transformed. Figures such as the Hun warlord Attila appear (rather approvingly), along with fifth- and sixth-century kings and military leader

The pope was forced to write twice to the Icelandic clergy protesting against the practice (by the clergy, amongst others), and priests were buried with multiple wives and children as late as the 1400s, for example at Skríðuklaustur. The institution was euphemistically known as bi-fruar, translating approximately as ‘side-wives’. Two Icelandic bish

The Norns often are depicted weaving fate on a loom, another motif common to several mythological traditions. On an upright loom, the warp of a textile always has a pattern, inherent from the beginning and determined by the threading of the heddles. It is made by the decisions of the weaver, but cannot be fully perceived until the cloth nears its f

As agents of fate, the Valkyries also have obvious links with the Norns, and Snorri even says that the “youngest” Norn, Skuld, rides with the Valkyries to choose the slain. In a strange battle poem called The Web of Spears, dating to either the tenth or eleventh centuries, a troupe of twelve horse-borne Valkyries are seen dismounting to enter a cot

There is also the richly textured world of similes, or ‘kennings’, in which two or more nouns and descriptors are combined to evoke an object visually or metaphorically. Thus, the ocean was ‘the whale road’, a ship was a ‘wave-horse’, and a person’s thoughts were ‘waves on the shore of the mind-sea’. Trees were frequent metaphors for humans, almost

My favourite Viking-Age archaeological find from Iceland is a small pair of children’s mittens in heavy wool, still attached to one another by a long string that would have run across the back and down inside the sleeves of a jacket. They would fit a two- or three-year-old, and one can picture some Viking-Age girl or boy playing in the cold and swi

A much-quoted Oxfordshire chronicler, writing around 1220 but working from older sources, recorded that Viking men arriving in England combed their hair every day, washed once a week, regularly changed their clothes, and “drew attention to themselves by many such frivolous whims”—behaviour so astonishing that the English women preferred them to the

One of the more widely known narratives of the Norse myths concerns the fall of the worlds—the cataclysmic final battle at the Ragnarök in which gods and humans will perish forever. The prelude to the Viking apocalypse is actually quite specific in its details, as recorded in a variety of poems. Here is Snorri, from his Edda: First of all that a wi

The worst of these effects went on for three years. In 2016 a team of climate scientists suggested that the long-term, cumulative ecological impact of the dust veil persisted in varying degrees for up to eighty years.

Little is understood, for example, of how the Vikings measured time. Their music and songs are a mystery; here there is a potential starting point in the few surviving instruments, with tonal qualities that can be reconstructed, but what the Vikings did with them is another matter entirely. It is unclear where women were believed to go when they di