The Children of Ash and Elm

At Mammen in Denmark, one of the richest chamber graves of the whole Viking Age was made c. 970 for a man whose clothing has enabled us to reconstruct the dress of society’s highest echelons. The chamber itself resembled a hall and even had a pitched roof, all concealed under a great mound. The man was interred with a magnificent axe decorated in a

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

Ships also had to be maintained once launched. To take just one example, vessels of all kinds needed tar to insulate their hulls and waterproof the woollen sails. The servicing of watercraft would have been a constant feature of dockside activity. Around the jetties at Birka and Hedeby, in particular, archaeologists have found dozens of broken-off

Just as the einherjar would fight for the gods at the Ragnarök, the drowned also had their station, although a terrible one that they do not seem to have earned. As all the powers gather at the end, something will stir on the ocean floor, the greatest Viking ship ever made. Its name is Naglfar, ‘Nail-Ship’, so called because it is built from the fi

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,

There is a possible archaeological image of cross-dressing men on two Gotlandic picture-stones from Lärbro Tängelgårda. These show figures in the flowing dress that typically seems to signal women, some of them holding drinking horns, but a number of them appear to have beards and perhaps helmets. On one of the stones are four of these figures side

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 har

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 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.