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…
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…
Coins are among the most useful archaeological finds for historians. They are often marked with a date, or at least the name of a ruler that gives a dating period, providing “terminus post quem” dating information for the archaeological context in which they were found. The imagery used to decorate a coin can indicate much…
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…
Many of the pieces of jewelry in the VKNG collection are inspired by genuine Viking antiquities that were used by real Vikings almost a millennia ago. These same archaeological finds provide important information that help us to understand how the Vikings lived and what they believed in. Today we decided to pay homage to some…
When you read more sensational stories about Viking history, you will often hear tell of barbaric human sacrifices! While there is evidence of occasional human sacrifices among the Vikings in exceptional circumstances, the practice was rare. It seems primarily to have been associated with kingship. Ahmad ibn Fadlan observed Volga Vikings, a group of Swedish…
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…
We know that Viking culture had sacred spaces to worship their gods because they are mentioned in the surviving sagas and sources. But very little specific detail survives. We must piece together what these spaces might have been like from descriptions in texts written in Christian times, descriptions of the cult practices of earlier related…
One of the things that we get asked about most is Norse holidays. Which ones did the Vikings celebrate, how did the Vikings mark them, and how do they relate to the important holidays that we celebrate today? With those questions in mind, let’s take a look at the Norse calendar and how it frames…
