When you look around the internet, it is not hard to find examples of Thor’s hammer, or Mjolnir, amulets. They were popular pieces worn in the Viking age, and they are also popular pieces of jewelry among modern-day Vikings and followers of the Norse religion. When looking at pictures, it can be difficult to determine…
How do you tell if you have Viking DNA? If you send your DNA off to an ancestry DNA testing lab, you might get results suggesting that you are 50% “broadly European”, 10% “North African”, and 40% “Norwegian”. That means you have Viking genes, right? You may also be told a fascinating Viking DNA family…
We are very excited about the release of the new The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series. The first episode dropped on Amazon Prime on September 1 (2022). It is set thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in the Second Age described in…
We often talk about “the Vikings”, but the people that we think of today as Vikings were not in fact a homogenous group. They were northern Europeans from present-day Denmark, Norway, and Sweden whose culture thrived between the 8th and 11th centuries. They also shared a seafaring culture of exploration, trade, and also pillaging. They…
I have heard quite a few people suggest that the image of Santa Claus, an important character in the Christian Christmas festival, is based on Odin, the All-Father and principal Viking god. They make a good point. If you look at traditions surrounding Santa Claus, especially before Coca-Cola reimagined him for their brand in the…
While it is great to see the Marvel movie franchise popularizing some of the important entities from Norse mythology, such as Thor, Loki, and Odin, it is important to remember that Marvel is representing a fictional universe based on a well-established comic book series with its own contextual universe, and not based directly on Norse…
With the launch of the new series on Disney Plus, our favorite Norse trickster Loki is more popular than ever. But how much does the Loki that we encounter in the Marvel universe line up with the giant described in Norse myth and legend? Let’s take a look at six factors and see where Marvel…
Reading time : 5 minutes There is no question that we are excited about the new Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla game from Ubisoft, which brings together two things that we love the most: kicking butt in fantasy worlds and all things Viking! But the inevitable question is: how historically accurate is the world of the Vikings…
The History Channel’s TV show Vikings has really set the bar in terms of good representations of the Vikings in film and television, but they are far from the first to have tried to bring our favorite warriors to life. Scores of films have been made about the Viking Age, some good, some bad, and…