The Children of Ash and Elm

The point should not be overstated, but it is striking that the key tenets of the new societies that rose from the Migration Period crisis seem to have included a marked rise in militaristic ideology, infused with uncompromising codes of honour, oath-bound loyalty, and the obligations of violent redress. These values were expressed in the growth of

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

For the Viking-Age Scandinavians, fate did not represent the absence of choice but rather the manifestation of a pre-existing truth. Free will existed, but exercising it inevitably led to becoming the person you always, really, had been.

The impact was not unlike that of a nuclear winter. Trees began to wither, their growth stunted, as seen in the dendrochronological record. Unseasonal cold gripped the northern hemisphere, with snow in the summer months visible in the Norwegian high- altitude data. The weakened sunlight most directly affected plant life of all kinds, including crop

Saga simply means ‘story’, literally ‘what is said’, both in Old Norse and in the modern Scandinavian languages. As with any storytelling tradition, there are numerous narrative styles and genres, composed at different times and places and for a wide variety of purposes. The first Old Norse sagas were written down in Iceland during the late 1100s,

It is good to bear in mind that no other contemporary peoples ranged over the then-known Eurasian and North Atlantic world to the same degree as the Scandinavians. They travelled through the territories of some forty-odd present-day countries, in documented encounters with more than fifty cultures.

In revenge for Ymir’s death, the crime at the core of the Viking world, the giants’ hatred of the Aesir will extend to the Ragnarök itself when their armies of frost and fire will invade the gods’ home. There have been many attempts to understand what the giants ‘mean’. Unlike the gods, they do not seem to have impinged on the human world of Midgar

In the modern Nordic languages, vikingar or vikinger is still used only in the exact sense of seaborne raiders,

The hall was the primary milieu of poetry and of its masters, the skalds. In a sophisticated oral society such as that of Vendel, and later Viking, Scandinavia, one of the poets’ main tasks was to find memorable language in which to distill what was necessary to know, enabling people to retain what they needed of their collective past.

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