Where the Middle Ages Begin
The Irish sometimes referred to them as Lochlannach, meaning ‘men from the land of lakes’. This probably refers back to their native Scandinavia and its famous landscape, but it could equally refer to Scotland and northern England where the Vikings had also settled.
My review of the recent Historical Novel Society conference that took place in London, England.
Archaeologists from The Danish Castle Centre and Aarhus University have made a sensational discovery south of Copenhagen, Denmark. On fields at Vallø Estate, near Køge, they have discovered traces of a massive Viking fortress built with heavy timbers and earthen embankments. The perfectly circular fortress is similar to the famous so-called ‘Trelleborg’ fortresses, which were built by King Harald Bluetooth around AD 980.
In order to further disentangle the reality and fiction of this view of culture versus barbarity and of reform versus wickedness, I shall analyse twelfth-century Irish vitae.
This article will illustrate that an important part of rulers’ wish to create a Christian society was the introduction of Christian legislation.
Three years ago, Shane McLeod’s article on ‘Warriors and women: the sex ratio of Norse migrants to eastern England up to 900 AD’ was published in the journal Early Medieval Europe. This week, the details of this article are now making headlines on media all across the world.
An important aspect of medieval Icelandic social organization, namely the manor, has been neglected in previous research, and very little research has been undertaken comparing Icelandic manorial organization with other regions. This article focuses on one aspect of manorial organization, namely the manorial demesne or central farm of the manor.
By answering questions like which board game you like to play and what’s your favourite colour, you can learn what you might have been called during the Viking Age
These skilled warriors and seamen had a unique art. Probably the best known artifices of them are the tombstones with engraved drawings; most of them preserve writings with rune scripts and therefore they are called runastones.
This paper addresses the question of how money was conceived and used in trade in the Viking Age and before, but starts with some brief reflections on the role of gifts.
This thesis is a comparison of ethnicity in Viking Age England and Normandy. It focuses on the period c.950-c.1015, which begins several generations after the initial Scandinavian settlements in both regions.
What did the Norse know about climate, and what was the role of driftwood in their lives?
The Viking predilection for travel and adventure made it easy for Christianized Scandinavians to adopt the idea of pilgrimage. It was, after all, not entirely unlike their own secular tradition of going a-viking.
Like Alcuin, later writers have been at pains to emphasise the destructive barbarism of these raiders, but how fair are these depictions? And do they tell the whole story?
In my opinion, the mono-cultural Viking Age is largely the product of one past social group, that had imposed on us their narration about the events, through production of tangible and durable monuments and sources. If analysis of the past should be of any value, it needs to be not only specifically spatially located, but also socially located.
If one signed on to a social media site, checked a news website or, in some cases, even watched one’s local evening news during mid- to late February 2014, one may have encountered some surprising news
Newfoundland is at the heart of what we may consider to be ‘Viking Canada.’
This essay reviews opening scenes in some recent film Beowulfs, which, although they have nothing at all to say about Scyld Scefing, suggest a sacrificial reading of the prologue and perhaps even the whole poem.
This article will focus mainly on the earliest period of Norse settlement, before the Norse earldom was established.
Perhaps the most splendid, and certainly one of the best-known, burials of the Viking Age is that of the two women who were put to rest in the Oseberg ship.
One may ask, then, not why there exists such a paucity of these women in the written record, but why any are mentioned at all, and for what purposes?
In his article, ‘Plastic Pagans: Viking Human Sacrifice in Film and Television’, Harry Brown notes a very key difference between how it is being portrayed and how it was in reality.
Three ways in which Viking raids and conquests in western Europe affected Scandinavian society are discussed
Dr David Petts (Durham University) tells us about his research in northern France: an area in which we know the Vikings to be elusive
In recent years the precise location and nature of Viking Dublin have been much debated. It is now generally accepted that there was a longphort phase from 841 to 902: a period of enforced exile from 902 to 917, and thereafter a dún phase.
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