Norse Archive
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Reincarnation among the Norse: Sifting through the Evidence
Posted on May 17, 2013 | No CommentsThis short article looks at the possibilty of reincarnation as a common alternative concept of life after death among Germanic heathens and then as a possible non-standard alternative belief. -
Viking poetry of love and war – new book by Judith Jesch
Posted on March 18, 2013 | No CommentsThey are most famous for being violent invaders of foreign shores but a new book by a University of Nottingham Viking expert shows they were also poetry lovers with a wicked sense of humour! -
The Position of the Individual Gods and Goddesses in Various Types of Sources – With Special Reference to the Female Divinities
Posted on March 13, 2013 | No CommentsOld Norse religion is in itself an interdisciplinary subject. If we are to survey the whole subject, it will presuppose special knowledge of a great many fields. -
Awkward Adolescents: Male Maturation in Norse Literature
Posted on January 25, 2013 | No CommentsAlthough medieval masculinities have become a subject of scholarly interest, there has been relatively little discussion of the transition in Old Norse until very recently. -
Anaphrodisiac Charms in the Nordic Middle Ages: Impotence, Infertility, and Magic
Posted on January 16, 2013 | No CommentsThis essay, however, looks to explore, not this seductive form of charm magic, but rather its opposite, ie charm magic that prevents the consumption of a relationship, or that makes a fruitful union impossible. -
The Children of Ash: Cosmology and the Viking Universe
Posted on December 24, 2012 | No CommentsWhat I am really going to be talking about throughout these lectures is stories, the power of stories, and the role that narrative played in the life of the Vikings, its influence on their perception of the world in which they understood themselves to move. -
Tolkien’s Cauldron: Northern Literature and The Lord of the Rings
Posted on December 14, 2012 | No CommentsTolkien was a scholar of Old Norse literature and much of his work in the Lord of the Rings is informed by his knowledge of old Norse mythology, Eddic poetry, and saga. Tolkien's use of these sources enriched this complex story of Middle-earth. -
INTERVIEW: Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths
Posted on December 13, 2012 | No CommentsAn interview with author Nancy Brown on her latest medieval offering: "Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths". -
Horses of Agency, Element, and Godliness in Tolkien and the Germanic Sagas
Posted on December 12, 2012 | No CommentsWhat is the contract between man and equine that allows a beast ten times our size and one hundred times our strength to willingly serve in our ambitions? What magnetism (and who placed it) is it that draws humanity and horses together? -
Where does Old Norse religion end?
Posted on December 1, 2012 | No CommentsHow did the believers of the Old Norse religion perceive other religions, and to what extent did people from the outside get in contact with myths and rituals? -
Madness in the Old Norse society: Narratives and ideas
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsIn the Viking Age (800-1030 a.d.) and the Middle Ages (1030-1500 a.d.) in Northern Europe, the main available information stems from fictional literature - more precisely the sagas, written predominantly in Iceland during the 13th century. -
Conquest or Colonisation: The Scandinavians in Ryedale from the Ninth to Eleventh Centuries
Posted on November 25, 2012 | No CommentsThe study of settlement history has developed within the fields of history, archaeology and geography. As a result much of the work carried out in settlement studies has borrowed the research and conclusions of scholars from other disciplines. -
An island archaeological approach to the Viking colonization of the North Atlantic
Posted on October 28, 2012 | No CommentsThe present paper is a brief exploration of the application of methods commonly used in the archaeological study of the Pacific and Mediterranean islands to the expansion of the Vikings across the North Atlantic during the ninth to eleventh centuries AD. -
Odin, Magic and a Swedish Trial from 1484
Posted on October 24, 2012 | No CommentsIf we are to believe any number of histories, spiritual life in medieval Scandinavia, and especially the conversion to Christianity, is readily summarized: paganism collapsed against Christian conversion efforts in dramatic fashion at a meeting of the Alþing, or when a missionary bore hot iron, or an exiled king had a deep religious experience, or when a pagan revolt was finally overcome, and so on. Or at least that is how learned lore, now as then, has elected to present “the facts” of the Icelandic, Danish, Norwe -
Early Religious Practice in Norse Greenland
Posted on October 17, 2012 | No CommentsHow many Icelanders were Christian at the time of Greenland’s settlement? Were there any pagans? Did Greenland ever officially convert to Christianity and, if so, when? -
The Good, the Bad and the Undead: New Thoughts on the Ambivalence of Old Norse Sorcery
Posted on October 14, 2012 | No CommentsWhen taken collectively those sources imply that seiðr was a kind of operative magic which – among other things – enabled its practitioners to foresee the future, heal the sick, change weather conditions, reveal the hidden, shift into animal form or travel to other worlds in a state of trance. -
Iron Smelting in Vinland
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsAny former iron smelting site presents a special problem for archaeologists. The process of converting iron rich ore into a working iron bar requires a complex series of steps. Each separate function is most likely to be undertaken by heavily modifying the previous equipment set up. Unfortunately for the archaeologist, the evidence of those important earlier stages is certain to be blurred, if not totally obliterated, by later steps. It will be the very last part of the whole process which alone remain as evidence. -
What Was Viking Poetry For?
Posted on September 12, 2012 | No CommentsThe most characteristic kind of verse that has been preserved from the Viking Age is praise poetry — praise either of the living or of the recently dead... -
Old Norse Nicknames
Posted on September 11, 2012 | No CommentsWhat role do nicknames play in expressing cultural sensitivities and ambiguities in medieval Icelandic and Scandinavian society? How did they develop and become so common especially during the medieval period? -
What is runology and where does it stand today?
Posted on August 29, 2012 | No CommentsRunes are an alphabetical system of writing, and for the most part they are used to record language. An independent runological discipline, if it is to be established, must therefore deal with the runic symbols themselves, individually and as systems, with their development, and their use to record language. -
Hƒdr’s Blindness and the Pledging of Ódinn’s Eye: A Study of the Symbolic Value of the Eyes of Hƒdr, Ódinn and fiórr
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe supreme god of the Old Norse pantheon, Óðinn, is one-eyed, and þórr is described as having particularly sharp eyes -
Herding horses: a model of prehistoric horsemanship in Scandinavia – and elsewhere?
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThis article discusses a possible system of horse keeping, used in prehistoric Scandinavia, with focus on the Late Iron Age. -
Modern nationalism and the medieval sagas
Posted on August 5, 2012 | No CommentsNineteenth-century romanticism had a special interest in both the medieval world and primitive, untainted rural culture. As the nineteenth century progressed and turned into the early twentieth, the Danes fell more and more under the nostalgic spell, tending to look upon the Icelanders through increasingly romantic and patronizing eyes -
What Vikings really looked like
Posted on August 1, 2012 | No CommentsWere Vikings really dirty savages who wore horned helmets, or did they look like we do today? Here’s what the experts say. -
“Semiotics of the Cloth”: Reading Medieval Norse Textile Traditions
Posted on July 29, 2012 | No CommentsReading textiles from medieval Norse society supplements written sources and also provides insight into the voice of the individual who created these textiles.
