The Children of Ash and Elm

In contrast to the view of many people today, water was not perceived as a barrier to communication and transport but rather as a means of facilitating it. Island and coastal communities would not have been considered remote and inaccessible, but instead as being closely connected to each other through an extensive network of maritime routes. A key

The sagas vividly follow these people’s lives and adventures, sometimes over decades, and in the process sketch a compellingly convincing picture of Iceland at the time: a unique political experiment, a republic of farmers in an age of kings. Feud and revenge are common themes, with neighbourly quarrels escalating to theft and murder, as competing

One other dimension of the gods’ lives is intriguing. Strangely, Asgard also contained temples, cult buildings where the gods themselves made offerings—but to what or whom? The mythology of the Vikings is one of only a tiny handful in all world cultures in which the divinities also practised religion. It suggests something behind and beyond them, o

Some of the Norwegian assembly sites have slightly different layouts of buildings, while others include enormous linear installations of cooking pits for hosting open-air feasts. In Sweden and Denmark, with milder climates and more hospitable terrain, there seems to have been less need for established sites with semi-permanent standing buildings, a

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

In the middle of an open and rather marshy plain, nine parallel lines of substantial stone packings had been laid out and then buried beneath a layer of clay. The resulting rectangular construction appears to have had a slightly bowl-shaped depression at the centre and been bounded by a fence. Chemical analyses show that a great deal of blood had b

Around the middle of the eighth century, c. 750, a Swedish maritime expedition came to violent grief on or near the island of Saaremaa off the coast of Estonia. We know this because of the chance discoveries from 2008 to 2012 of two boats full of dead warriors, buried by the seashore in what is now the village of Salme. They had been set up paralle

what divides them from us is mainly their discretion. In Iceland today, belief in the Hidden People just about survives (though to a much lesser degree than tourist brochures would have you think) as part of a deeper and more widespread respect for the spiritual currency of the past in relation to a landscape that is far from inert.

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