Sublime

Odin’s hall, and Freyja’s, hold “all men who have fallen in battle since the beginning”, but they will be too few “when the wolf comes”, as Fenrir inevitably will at the Ragnarök. Kings and their retinues are therefore especially welcome, with the Valkyries serving wine for such a royal entrance.

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 se

the largest longship ever found—thirty-two metres long, with a single-watch crew of eighty that could have been doubled for war. Dating to the early eleventh century, it is of the dimensions the sagas give for the highest rank of royal warships.

Queen Aud, widow of Olaf the White, the proclaimed king of Dublin, led a navy from the Western Isles of Scotland to colonize Iceland. Hers was an extremely well-organized expedition, each longship towing another ship laden with livestock such as cattle. An English princess, Æðelflæd, “Lady of the Mercias,” was prominent enough in battle to merit ad

Within a year of the battle at Chester, whether or not Æðelfrið’s campaign had been directed at Edwin or at those who would shelter him, the exiled prince left, or was encouraged to leave, the protection of his British sponsors and seek sanctuary with a king whom he must have believed lay beyond Æðelfrið’s reach. Rædwald, he of the Sutton Hoo ship

It is clear that in Valhöll are all the trappings of hall life in Midgard, but writ large. Servants gather kindling for the fires; there are pigs to be fed; horses graze outside; and hunting dogs are at the ready. The einherjar—the immortal warrior dead—drink, play board games, and fight. If they are killed, they rise again each evening in time for

The consorts of such lords, poetically exemplified by the figure of Wealþeow in Beowulf and by the Wife’s Lament of the Exeter Book, played critical roles in the management of the comitatus, as anthropologist Michael Enright has argued.24 A noble wife managed the elaborate drinking rituals through which the comites were bound into their lord’s serv

the legendary sagas sometimes include narratives that ostensibly concern events long before the Viking Age, stretching back to the time of the great migrations when the post-Roman map of Europe was violently transformed. Figures such as the Hun warlord Attila appear (rather approvingly), along with fifth- and sixth-century kings and military leader