Drinking was a big thing in the Viking world. Producing alcohol is one way of purifying water and making it safe to drink, so most Vikings, even young ones, would have drunk weak alcohol every day. Mead was a special drink. It was made from honey, which was relatively rare, so was mostly saved for…
According to descriptions of Norse cosmology, the Norse universe is set around a mighty ash tree called Yggdrasil. The nine worlds that make up the Norse cosmos are held within the roots and branches of the tree. This means that all living beings in existence live within Yggdrasil. But most are limited to the confines…
We’ve talked a lot about the children of Loki on this blog, but he wasn’t the only character from Norse mythology to “go forth and multiply”. But since Loki’s children are central villains in the story of Ragnarok, we know quite a bit about them. Despite Thor being one of the most important gods in…
Huginn and Muninn are the famous pair of ravens from Norse mythology. They are the familiars of Odin, and their names mean “thought” and “memory”. But what do we know about what the Vikings thought about this pair of birds? And what does this tell us about Odin and the Viking concept of the soul?…
Curses have a long and colorful history. Some of the oldest examples of writing from ancient Egypt and Greece are curses written on papyri or clay tablets for someone who wanted revenge on an enemy. I say “for someone” since literacy was not widespread in the ancient world. This is probably part of the reason…
The Grimnismal in the Poetic Edda is an important text for understanding Norse Mythology. In the text, Odin, in the guise of a man called Grimnir, describes the realms of the gods and the cosmology of the Norse universe. These descriptions are revealed in 54 stanzas that are written in ljodahattr meter, which was typically…
Several different types of magic are known from the Norse world. There is Seidr magic used by powerful seeresses and Volva (witches). Then there is rune magic practiced by warriors and the Galdrastafir runic magical staves from medieval Iceland. Galdr is another magical art known from the Viking world. This is a type of magical…
The Vikings believed that the runes were not a created alphabet but a fundamental part of the fabric of the universe discovered by Odin and shared with mankind. Used correctly, they could magically shape the world. We have written previously on the blog about the historical development of the runes and what we know about…
Questions of destiny and pre-determined fate loom large in Viking culture. They believed that the moment of every person’s death was preordained from the moment of their birth and that even the gods are subject to the laws of fate. The Ragnarok prophecy tells the story of the death of all the gods, which is…
If you scan the surviving Scandinavian texts, you will find the names of many Norse gods and goddesses. But many are only mentioned in passing, and little is known about them beyond their name and the fact that they were considered among the Aesir. Forseti is one such god. His name only appears twice in…