When the Vikings landed on English shores they didn’t just take away slaves and previous goods to line their own pockets, they left quite a lot behind. Laying down roots as settlers from the mid-9th century, they had a pretty big influence on local culture and society. Let’s look at some of the ways that…
Many modern pagans, and other people who want to create greater alignment with natural cycles, celebrate the Wheel of the Year. These are festivals that align with important moments in the solar calendar, and therefore the seasons, such as the solstices and equinoxes. While there are many neo-pagan festivals based on the idea of the…
While we think of the Vikings as legendary warriors, the Vikings themselves had their own legendary heroes and fighters. There were the Berserker warriors believed to embody the spirit of the bear to become invincible in battle. Read our post on the Berserkers here. And there were also the Jomsvikings. The Jomsvikings were a semi-legendary…
Many Wiccan and Neo-Pagan traditions venerate the triple goddess, who manifests as the maiden, mother, and crone. They represent past, present, and future, and also the cycle of life and death as new growth, fertility, and death. She aligns with the cycles of the moon, with the maiden the waxing moon, the mother the full…
Vikings have a reputation that’s larger than life. But beneath the surface of their fierce and fearsome persona lies a trove of lesser-known facts that might just change the way you think about them. For example, Vikings were legendary navigators, can you imagine that? They were capable of crossing vast and treacherous seas. But did…
When reading Norse sagas and other types of Norse literature, one important literary motif to understand is kennings. Kennings are not just common in Old Norse literature, but also Old Germanic texts and Old English poetry. A kenning is a figurative phrase that replaces a common noun. For example, a Skaldic poet might refer to…
One thing that we have in common with our Viking ancestors is an appreciation for a good joke and a robust sense of humor. The surviving Norse sagas suggest that the Vikings had a dark sense of humor that involved sarcasm, irony, and strangeness. They would tell jokes at the dinner table and on the…
Druids were the priests and religious leaders among Celtic tribes and are known to have existed across the Celtic world from Ireland to Germany. What little we know about them comes from observations from writers from other cultures, especially the Romans, and from more modern folklore. While it is believed that the Druids were literate,…
Before the Vikings raided the monasteries of England and established Danelaw, before the Anglo-Saxons established their kingdoms, and before the Romans made Britannia one of its colonies, the island was occupied by the Celts. One of the most famous heroes of Celtic Britain is Boudica, also written Boudica or Boadicea, a queen of the Iceni…
On our blog, we share a lot of individual stories from Viking history, whether it was the time that Ragnar Lothbrok sacked Paris, when Erik the Red was exiled from Iceland and established the first Viking colony in Greenland, or when Harald Hardrada lost his life while disputing his claim to the English throne. While…
