It may be that all the workers of magic and sorcery were differently gendered, at least when seen in the light of their much better documented cousins in the circumpolar cultures of the last three hundred years. In much of Siberia, for example, it has been argued many times that ‘shaman’ (or its equivalent) constitutes a gender in itself.

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

In Óttarr’s words, filtered through the Old English text: He said that the land of the Northmen was very long and very narrow. All that they can either graze or plough lies by the sea; and even that is very rocky in some places; to the east, and alongside the cultivated land, lie wild mountains.

In the Viking mind, somewhere inside each of us is also a hamingja, a remarkable being that is the personification of a person’s luck. This was a very important attribute for the people of the North in the late Iron Age, as everyone’s path in life was determined by fate but rode on a wave of luck.

This is preserved in a remarkable English document that records the conversations between Alfred, the king of Wessex, and a visitor to his court in the 880s, as mentioned above in the prologue. Named there as ‘Ohthere’, he was almost certainly called Óttarr in his own language and seems to have come from the region around the Lofoten islands in

The main tool of the sorcerer was a metal staff that was probably held between the legs and rotated (they apparently served as symbolic distaffs, and were used to ‘wind back’ the performer’s travelling soul, attached to the body by a kind of spiritual thread). Several of the terms for these staffs are synonyms for the male organ; descriptions of

As agents of fate, the Valkyries also have obvious links with the Norns, and Snorri even says that the “youngest” Norn, Skuld, rides with the Valkyries to choose the slain. In a strange battle poem called The Web of Spears, dating to either the tenth or eleventh centuries, a troupe of twelve horse-borne Valkyries are seen dismounting to enter a

Wine was certainly known among the elites, as it had been from Roman times, although as an imported commodity it was both expensive and rare. In the richest graves there are delicate glasses brought in (or looted) from Frankia and elsewhere on the Continent. Sometimes they have been painstakingly repaired with metal clips, indicating how valued

There is no doubt that this was a time of extreme homophobia, and we can trace a clear, though chronologically interrupted, path to the Germanic peoples of Tacitus’s time. He relates how men found guilty of homosexual acts were pressed into bogs and held down to drown under wicker hurdles. Archaeologists have found many male corpses from the Iron