Marriage an alliance between a man and a woman to build a family was essential to Viking life. (Yes, homosexual relationships are mentioned in the surviving sources, but they weren’t considered formal, legal relationships equivalent to marriage.) During the height of the Viking age, most free men were small landowners and needed a wife to…
While the Vikings did not have the kind of complex law and justice system that most countries have today, they had methods for managing communal justice. Even before the Vikings began to write down their laws in the 13th century, individuals could behave in a way that was considered unacceptable by the broader community. One…
The Vikings believed in the possibility of revenants, that is the dead returning to wreak havoc on the living. Among the Vikings, the undead of nightmares were often called draugr or aptrganga, which means “after walkers.” They are usually described as having blue skin, which was a common indicator of death. The giantess Hel is…
Like everyone, the Vikings used numbers as part of everyday life and needed a way to write them down. However, unlike modern English, which uses the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals, the Vikings had their runic alphabet, but no separate designated numerals. But that didn’t mean that the Vikings did not have a way to…
History often focuses on the activities of the Vikings in England as they moved from raiding for riches at the end of the 8th century, to the campaign of the Great Heathen Army in the 9th century, to settlement activities in the 10th century, and were eventually largely expelled in the 11th century by the…
We usually think of the Vikings as sailing out of the Scandinavian homes to Britain where they pillaged, stole, and massacred many of the local inhabitants. But in a historic massacre that took place on St Brice’s day in 1002 CE, the Anglo-Saxons turned the tables on the Vikings, massacring many of the Vikings who…
Hoards are among the most important archaeological finds for many cultures, including the Vikings. A hoard could also be called a “wealth deposit”, because they are basically a group of valuable objects collected by someone and then deposited somewhere, usually in the ground. It is assumed that most hoards were deposited to protect wealth, with…
The Vikings have a reputation for being violent and brutal due to their raids on their neighbors, and especially their raids of churches and monasteries, an act considered sacrilegious by their Christian neighbors. But, as we have previously pointed out, this was only one aspect of life among the Norsemen. They were also traders, builders,…
We dedicate quite a bit of column space to Viking treasures since these artifacts often inspire pieces in our collection. Most of the objects from the Viking Age that we have shared come from the Viking world Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Iceland, Greenland, and North Sea islands and the regions where the Vikings had a great…
There is good evidence that the Vikings were sailing into the Baltic and the region of Estonia from the start of the 9th century and that by the 10th century, they were having a big impact on the area with several Estonian-Viking settlements emerging in the mostly Finno-Hungarian region. However new archaeological evidence suggests that…