If a matter could not be resolved at one court, it would move up to the next level of assembly, sometimes with a gap of some months. Delegates would represent their districts, often with spokesmen who were especially gifted at public speaking or legal argument. The speeches were heard by the presiding official—the lawspeaker—who, as his name

The exact derivation of the term is unknown, but the most widely accepted interpretation today builds on the Old Norse vík, a bay of the sea. Thus Vikings may originally have been ‘bay-people’, their ships waiting in concealment to strike at passing marine traffic.

In each region, the Iron Age archaeological features correlate remarkably closely to the administrative units of land and populace recorded for the same areas in the law codes and surveys of the early Middle Ages, and even into the early modern period. At the Dysjane site in Tinghaug (literally ‘thing-mound’), Rogaland, for example, the thirty-two

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.

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.

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

However, behind these warlords and their petty kingdoms, and the social ladder on which they tried to rise, were the continuities of political life that had been part of Scandinavian culture for centuries. This was the so-called thing (Old Norse þing), a regular gathering of elected representatives in whom was vested the practical exercise of power

In 792 a charter of King Offa of Mercia refers to Kent, and the need for military service against “seaborne pagans” (who can only be Scandinavians) in migratory fleets that had presumably been active for some time.

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