One of the Eddic poems, the Lay of Sigrdrifa, includes a detailed list of runes for special purposes—for protection in battle, to ease childbirth (“they shall be cut on the palms and clasped on the joints”), to heal, and to travel safely over the sea (“on the prow they must be cut and on the rudder, and burnt into the oar with fire”). There are

a marvellous episode from the thirteenth-century Saga of Egil Skalla-Grímsson. Here, the famed warrior-poet and his men are being entertained at the hall of his mortal enemy, their hatred of each other churning beneath the iron-bound rules of hospitality. Fine food is served; the ale horn goes round and round in the dim, smoky light, where it’s

There are saga descriptions of the interred dead ‘living’ in their graves, including a wonderful episode from the Saga of Burnt Njál where men walk past a burial mound at night only to find it somehow open, and inside sits its dead occupant happily singing and looking at the moon.

It relates a household rite of the early eleventh century, the period when paganism was being suppressed in Norway, and tells how a Christian king and his retinue attend a ceremony in disguise. As part of a communal feast, a long series of rituals are performed in which a preserved horse’s penis is passed from hand to hand and spontaneous verses

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

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

In the centre of the mound lay a man with some of the worst injuries and also the finest weapons, including a ring-hilt sword—the mark of a very high-status leader. Unlike the other bodies, his had not been covered with gaming pieces; instead, he had only one, the king, and it had been placed in his mouth.

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

After the beginning of the raids in the eighth century, foreign loot was sometimes repurposed as jewellery—book mounts from ecclesiastical volumes turned into brooches, English sword fittings similarly remade, coins pierced and hung on necklaces. In Norway there is an Irish or Scottish reliquary, almost certainly plundered from a monastery, that