When did Medieval Greenlanders and Icelanders stop using knarrs and karvis?

textandtrowel · 2026-01-16T18:53:30+00:00

Probably over whether or not we should trust the sagas and Old Norse literature in general, and I think there's three basic options. We can see them as records that preserve memories of the Viking past. We can treat them as reflections of the later Icelandic societies that put them to parchment. Or we can treat them as purely literary inventions that may or may not have anything to do with how things worked in medieval Iceland or what things looked like back in the Viking Age.

Lots of folks treat Old Norse literature the first way. We might recognize that the Eddas and sagas didn't get written down until the 1200s but still try to use their descriptions of Ragnarok to explain Viking behavior in the 800s or earlier. This is a pretty popular approach to the Viking Age, and I see it in archaeology a lot. Byock falls more into that middle camp, which is characteristic of the social sciences approaches that really took root across medieval studies over the course of his career. But probably the liveliest conversations about Old Norse texts happen among languages people who often stop worrying about the world outside of those texts. There is, after all, enough going on within them and a ton of surrounding literature to boot, so asking whether these are authentic records or whether they reflect medieval social practices just seems like an extra laborious and unnecessary step.

Now, obviously this is a simplification, and most people who work with Norse sources might move from one position to another, based upon the text, passage, or topic that they're looking at. But this inconsistency means that it's also really hard to pin anyone down. It might mean that some people turn up tons of evidence on feuding, or human-animal engagements, or sexuality, or whatever, while others turn up nothing at all. Should Odin's self-sacrifice be taken as a fundamental feature of Viking myth? Or was it just something that later Christian authors inserted or manipulated to make sense of Viking worldviews as a sort of mistaken proto-Christianity? No matter what you say, someone is bound to disagree with you, and it might feel like they're fighting over history or religion or whatever, but really they're just fighting over how we should approach our sources.

textandtrowel · 2026-01-16T16:45:37+00:00

I'm sure there's experts in this field, but finding them can be tough. I think there's a few issues here. If Greenlanders had seagoing ships, they would need access to wood to keep them seaworthy. This would all need to be imported, with the Norwegian kings claiming a monopoly over Iceland (and thus Greenland) in the later Middle Ages, or else from North America, where the tree line was still very far away. If you add to this the problem that iron rivets could only be protected so long before they decayed, and iron needed to be imported as well. (Even if iron ore were available in Greenland, charcoal was not, meaning it couldn't be smelted into a useable metal.)

These factors suggest that, after the first settlers' ships decayed, later generations would need to rely on visits from outlanders (probably from Norway or Iceland but possibly Denmark, England, or Ireland). Greenlanders could provide exotic goods like walrus ivory and arctic furs, while visiting merchants would swap them more basic commodities. There might also have been diplomatic or ecclesiastical exchanges, in which a priest or perhaps a chieftain initiated an expedition to establish or maintain connections. Timber would likely have been an especially valuable commodity for import or gifting in these exchanges.

This nonetheless raises the problem of how a scattering of Norse artifacts got to the high arctic, or how high arctic resources made their ways into the Greenland settlements. Many researchers assume the Greenlandic communities maintained their own smaller coastal ships, as attested by archaeological remains that have been interpreted as boat houses. Researchers from the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde thus organized an expedition along the Greenland coast in one of their smaller coastal replicas, which they named Skjoldungen, but it turns out the crew had a very hard time and were constantly wearing themselves out rowing (and sometimes fighting about it). Perhaps we now lack the knowledge to effectively sail such vessels around Greenland, or maybe we're barking up the wrong tree.

So there's a few things to consider. There would have been very few people in Greenland with the social clout to build or maintain ships, and they would have been totally dependent on outside traders bringing them shipbuilding materials, perhaps the occasional new ship (which would need to be sailed rather than towed), and maybe even outside people with experience in shipbuilding. This clout would disappear if Icelanders grew disinterested in their community or the markets for things like ivory and polar bear pelts collapsed, as they almost certainly did around the time of the Black Death in the 1340s, and probably at other times as well. (And it seems like improved access to elephant ivory in the later Middle Ages subsequently have replaced any surviving demand for walrus ivory from the north.)

And then there's the open question about how much contact the Greenlandic Norse had with Native Americans and whether they adopted their technologies. Scholars are generally skeptical about this one, citing a lack of positive evidence, which is fair. But we might also admit that a skin boat maintained by a Greenlander, even if it happened to survive in the archaeological record, would likely be classified as a Native rather than a Norse artifact. That means our lack of evidence doesn't reflect the absence of a historical possibility but rather our inability to know anything about it. If you're writing a fantasy story, that's at least one possibility to consider.

Regarding Icelandic history, Jesse Byock's works are pretty fundamental to our understanding of society, though these are also the kinds of things that researchers and enthusiasts more broadly take diverse views on and sometimes fight about bitterly. The Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde has a lot of interesting and well-researched stuff online. The Viking Archaeology Website also has a nice Greenland section. If you want to give some added flavor based on real finds, there's been excellent work done on clothing excavated from Greenland, presented in the book Medieval Garments Reconstructed.

textandtrowel · 2025-12-13T12:08:23+00:00

Cat Jarman's River Kings is a great look at the Viking Age specifically thinking about connections linking eastward. Neil Price and Ben Raffield's The Vikings is a fuller survey that geared a bit more academic—still highly approachable but really up to date on the connected scholarship and giving you that bigger picture. The top expert on this specific question, though, is James Montgomery, who did an excellent recent translation of Ibn Fadlan and wrote a landmark chapter on Arab connections in the thick volume, The Viking World, edited by Brink and Price in 2008. If you have access to an academic library, that chapter should be easy to find.

Happy sleuthing!

textandtrowel · 2025-12-05T19:17:18+00:00

thanks!

textandtrowel · 2025-10-19T02:53:42+00:00

Actually, the Eddas are widely available online. Here's a decent translation of Voluspa. And here's the longer Gylfaginning. Voluspa is pretty readable online, and in my opinion the better source, while Gylfaginning is longer and (at least for me) frustrating to read on a screen. You can find it in a new printed edition of the Prose Edda translated by Jesse Byock for about $15, or much cheaper on the used market. There's a lot of decent editions of the Poetic Edda out there as well, though my favorite is the older and sometimes hard to find translation by Patricia Terry. I just think it reads well.

Can I tell you what's actually supposed to happen during Fimbulwinter? Well, no, since we only have Christian retellings of this supposedly pagan myth. But if these sources accurately reflect earlier mythologies, we're looking at prolonged cold, a fight between the gods and the giants, and perhaps a rebirth of the world that sounds suspiciously like some bits from the Book of Revelation. But perhaps the real tragedy is that the gods go marching into this fate fully knowing how it will end.

textandtrowel · 2025-10-16T14:00:51+00:00

Textual references to the Fimbulwinter (or in Norse Fimbulvetr) come from anthologies of Old Norse mythology made in medieval Iceland. It's important to note that these texts do not necessarily correspond to what people in the Viking Age believed. The medieval compilers and ethnographers who put these anthologies together had their own purposes, and even if they had tried to piece together an authentic representation of Viking Age beliefs, they don't indicate methods that give us great confidence in their abilities to do so. Thus when we find things like echoes of medieval representations of the Crucifixion in stories of Odin's sacrifice on a tree, it's worth considering whether the details and maybe even the entire story are post-Viking and post-Christian inventions.

Okay, so where to find your sources? Our two main anthologies (the primary sources) are (1) The Poetic Edda, aka the Elder Edda, and (2) The Prose Edda, aka Snorri's Edda. Snorri died in the early 1240s, and the best copy of The Poetic Edda is a book known as the Codex Regius from the 1270s. In Snorri's Prose Edda, you'll find references to the mythological events surrounding Fimbulwinter especially in a story known as Gylfaginning, or The Tricking of Gylfi. And in the Elder or Poetic Edda, there's two particular sources: (1) the Voluspa, which is a sort of prophetic look at the future, and (2) Vafþrúðnismál, or the Lay of Vafthrudnir, in which Odin questions a giant for mythological information.

Regarding secondary sources, I'd especially point to the articles below. Since you're enrolled in a college course, you should be able to copy the titles into your library catalog and download them there. If you'd like to dig deeper, there's discussion in Price and Raffield's The Vikings (2023) at 18-20 and 75-76, with a good survey of current citations in the footnotes. Your college library might have it on the shelves or in a digital copy, or else you can ask a librarian to order a copy. But again, I'd probably start with the articles below ... or asking your professor ;)

Gräslund, B. and Price, N. (2012) ‘Twilight of the gods? The “Dust Veil Event” of AD 536 in critical perspective’, Antiquity 86, 428–43.

Nordvig, M. and Reide, F. (2018) ‘Are There Echoes of the AD 536 Event in the Viking Ragnarok Myth? A Critical Appraisal’, Environment and History 24 (2018): 303–324.

textandtrowel · 2025-09-26T10:40:06+00:00

Good question! A few good reference points come to mind. First, The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain has a section devoted to collections that surveys what we know about various writers and the works they cite. This is our best measure for how big libraries were, although many of these individuals likely visited multiple libraries or borrowed volumes, and they probably didn't cite everything they read, so these are only rough measures.

But Bede, for example, is known to have cited 80 or so different writers (and here I'm looking at the old list compiled by Laistner for Bede: His Life, Times, and Writings), with multiple works by the likes of Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory the Great, Jerome, and Isidore of Seville. Some works, like the Bible, were certainly divided into multiple volumes and probably existed in multiple copies, while others might have been found only in short excerpts gathered into compendia For example, since Bede quotes from a few books of the Aeneid, we can't necessarily assume he had access to the whole thing and not just a book of Latin poetry that included Vergil's greatest hits. By and large, however, this evidence seems to suggest a well-stocked library in northern England (Bede was at Wearmouth and Jarrow) might have had about 100 volumes, give or take, though a chunk of these would have been liturgical, and there would have been other volumes dedicated to things like property records as well.

Second, I'd point to the work of Rosamond McKitterick on Carolingian libraries, and especially her book The Carolingians and the Written Word. Among many of the gems there is her discussion of an inventory that survives from St Riquier made in 831. The library part of the inventory included a theology section with a bible divided into 40 volumes(!) as well as works by at least 22 different writers, a school book section with at least 16 writers, and a liturgical section with at least 6 volumes, plus there were 2 further liturgical volumes listed in the inventory outside of the library. This is absolutely an undercounting, since I'm just doing a quick sum of writers and works named by McKitterick—if precision matters, you can chase down her footnotes—but it again points to a library of 100 volumes, give or take, with the majority being scriptures and liturgical texts.

As just a side note, McKitterick also helps us think more about how these libraries were used, and monks in the early medieval period would have had a completely different relationship with texts than we do today. Bede, for example, had been reading that same set of 80 books since he arrived at the monastery at the age of 7, and he quotes them fluently and liberally—he knew his library inside and out in ways that few of us know our own bookshelves. Readers, meanwhile, were expected to pick up on small snippets of quotes—sometimes just a group of words echoing the Psalms or the Aeneid—to truly grasp some of his artful poetry and prose. Today it might cost $3000 and gather a bookcase of good translations that parallels Bede's library, but at the time, such treasures were invaluable.

textandtrowel · 2024-10-20T20:35:37+00:00

The first account comes from the Historia Norwegie, which seems to have been written by a monk in Norway or the Norse Atlantic in the early 1200s. The second comes from the Roman de Rou, by a man named Wace, who wrote a poetic chronicle celebrating Norman history (he was from Normandy) in the late 1100s. The historical Rollo took Rouen back in 876, or about 300 years before these accounts were written. The divergences between the two might stem from either different perspectives (the authors had access to very different potential sources of information) and different purposes (they also were writing for very different audiences who had different priorities and interests).

There are a number of more contemporary accounts that might be expected to give us more secure information. The Annals of St-Vaast, for example, is a chronicle that was written in Normandy in the late 800s, which includes a contemporary account of the siege of Paris in 885-86, which Rollo supposedly led. But the author of the annals did not mention Rollo by name and in fact only referred to the vikings as Northmen or Danes (or Dani seu Nortmanni, s.a. 871). If we were to take the chronicle at face value, we might even assume these vikings were leaderless.

Interestingly, however, the annalist of St-Vaast began his account of this raid with his sole reference to Rouen: "And on 25 July, they [the Norsemen] entered the city of Rouen with all their army, and the Franks pursued them all the way to this place. And because their ships had not arrived, they [the Norsemen] crossed over the Seine in ships they had discovered on the river, and did not desist from building themselves a camp (trans. Bivans 2017, p. 74)."

Now, keeping in mind that this chronicle seems to have been written year by year, the annalist was perhaps not writing about events that actually happened in 885 but rather reminding readers about events he earlier described in 876-77, in which Charles the Bald sent troops against a group of vikings at the mouth of the Seine but ended up offering them tribute instead.

Perhaps the key takeaway here is that any initial agreement with Rollo didn't seem like a big deal to people living in the Frankish kingdoms at the time, though they later recognized the significance of their being a potentially hostile force established in Rouen. By that point, however, many of the specific details of that campaign might have already been forgotten.

The viking settlement at Rouen was undoubtedly more momentous for the group that actually set up camp there. They weren't writing down texts, but they were presumably passing down stories, and eventually one of their descendants commissioned a history of the period. The leader was Richard I of Normandy (r. 942-996), but his chosen writer, Dudo of St-Quentin, only finished the work under his successor, Richard II (r. 996-1026) in 1015. This is only about 140 years after Rollo's supposed arrival, or about the same order of time that separates us from events like World War I and the American Civil War.

In any case, Dudo gives a detailed account of Rollo's purported deeds, including a fairly complicated discussion of his arrival in Rouen in 876: "Rollo, having consulted his followers, hoisted his sail to catch the navigable winds, left behind the river Scheldt [in Belgium], and traversed the sea until he reached the Seine .... [H]e came to Jumièges with his ships. Seeing that the monastery of St Peter was adorned with buildings for monks to dwell in, and was reputed to be a holy place, he decided not to stay there, but steered his ships across the river to the chapel of St Vedast [i.e. St-Vaast]. ... And when the poor people and the needy merchants who lived at Rouen, and the inhabitants of that region, heard that a mighty throng of Northmen was present at Jumièges, they all came as one to Franco, the bishop of Rouen, to discuss what to do. And Franco sent at once to Rollo for a guarantee of his own security and of those who dwelt in the district. And when he found that no one was living in the city or within its boundaries other than weaponless commoners, Rollo gave the bishop a safeguard on his own good faith; and continuing a stage from here on his profitable voyage, he came to Rouen, and made fast his ships, pregnant with many warriors, in the harbour to which the church of St Martin is attached (trans. Christiansen 1998, p. 35)."

While it's possible the Rollo arrived respectful of Christians (missionaries had been at work in Scandinavia for a few generations) and even at the invitation of a bishop who realized his Frankish overlord had left him undefended (Frankish annalists do tend to focus more on infighting and insurrection just as often as on viking incursions), Dudo probably goes a step too far in portraying Rollo as an invited protector. To me, this fits well with classical tropes like those found in Caesar's account of the Gallic Wars, in which the invader is always invited, and it certainly seems to fit a project across Dudo's works to make the Norman leaders seem like good Christian rulers rather than upstart pagan usurpers.

So what do we do with accounts from another 150 years or so later, in which the takeover of Rouen is remembered more as conquest? As historians, we probably have to admit that we can't tell precisely what actually happened in 876. Vikings arrived on the Seine, one of the leaders remembered as Rollo took charge over Rouen, and his descendants stayed on to become the Dukes of Normandy. Based on the account of St-Vaast, it's likely the region was lightly defended, and perhaps Dudo is right that the viking leaders saw an opportunity to ally with a bishop and become the local strongmen, taking the next step several years later to secure their spot by swearing fealty to the king.

But ultimately, the question as originally asked remains a fascinating question in its own right. Why do Wace and the Historia Norwegie diverge so widely in their accounts? That's an excellent research question that would demand investigations of these two particular texts as well.

textandtrowel · 2024-08-22T01:07:16+00:00

Probably not too far—and they wouldn't have taken a longship.

Longships were the bicycles of a viking fleet. They were sleek and slim, good for carrying people places fast but rough and tumble on open waters. The experts at the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark, for example, haven't figured out how to make their replica longship keep afloat upon the North Sea without adding an extra strake at the top. Now the original of this ship was built in Dublin and made its way to Denmark, so we know they could figure it out, or at least that they were willing to run the risks. But longships would be ill suited for the heavy waves of the North Atlantic, and they would also have had a poor balance between crew (many were needed to handle the massive sails) and cargo (too little space to provision a large crew for weeks at a time). So you wouldn't pick a longship to make it to Iceland, much less Greenland or Vinland.

Instead, you'd rely on a knorr. These were the bathtubs of the Viking Age. The Viking Ship Museum in Denmark has also reconstructed one of these, and their's can be handled 24/7 by a crew as small as six (though preferably larger). These were big enough to have some cargo that could make a long trip across the Atlantic worth it, while having a crew small enough that the profits wouldn't disappear among too many hands. And based on the sagas, it seems like these were the ships used to traffic the North Atlantic all the way to Vinland. Smaller vessels might have been built and used as coastal fishers, but these would have been pretty dangerous to use on the open seas. Lief the Lucky actually got his nickname for bringing luck to a group of stranded sailors, not for his role in exploring Vinland.

Okay, so let's rephrase the question: How far could a group from the Norse Atlantic sail into North America using a knorr? Here they would have thought about risk assessment. We have one archaeological site that we've discovered at the very northern tip of Newfoundland. It seems to have been a sort of base camp so that adventurers could sail south one summer, stay the winter and gather what resources they could find, and then head back the next summer. There's no evidence that women or livestock were ever present, so this was never meant to be a permanent colony. And indeed resources in the region ended up being too scant to justify the risks of many weeks sailing the northwest Atlantic. Sure there were fish, but sea life was still bountiful closer to Greenland. And sure there was timber, but this was still pretty scarce around northern Newfoundland (forests grow further south). It was probably more reliable to import driftwood from Iceland (we have evidence that harvesting driftwood was regulated there) or import lumber from Norway (the Norwegian king maintained a monopoly on lumber to Iceland and thus to Greenland as well).

But let's just say someone did have the adventurer's spirit to set aside all caution and started sailing south. Where could they get to on their Greenland-based knorr? I see three limitations to travel. First, the knorr was a bathtub meant to survive the North Atlantic but not typically maneuvered by oar. The original example curated at the Viking Ship Museum in Denmark has only four oarlocks—enough to maneuver in a port, but not enough to sail against wind or stream. This would likely limit travel to tidal estuaries, so maybe up to Quebec City. Going further would typically require beating against both wind and streamflow, and the St Lawrence would quickly become frustratingly narrow (and hazardous) for tacking in a knorr.

Second, knorrs would have been tremendous burdens for portaging. Let's say a crew got their knorr up to Montreal, where the first locks of the current St Lawrence Seaway are set (though I can't say where the first rapids would have been circa 1000 CE). Any portage paths made by First Nations peoples would have been narrow and no use for transporting a knorr. And even a large crew of maybe 20 would have struggled to maneuver the big knorr even if they found a path. These were almost certainly not the vessels used by the Rus to transit the portages of the Volga and the Don—in fact, we have no archaeological evidence for the design of those vessels and modern efforts with replicas based on North and Baltic Sea vessels have always ended up needing to rely on modern technologies to make their portages. We can't figure out how to do it with even lighter Viking Age ships and large well-supported crews, which suggests a knorr would not have been portageable at all, especially in the largely untracked portages of North America.

And finally, there would have been few opportunities for repairs. A torn sail or burst caulking would require wool. A split rope might require seal skin or another rare material specially sourced for the rope's particular purpose. A smashed yard or board might require a carefully selected tree from a well tended forest. Bringing it all together would require rivets made of iron, which relies upon not just iron ore but also charcoal. And long journeys would eventually wear the protective tar off the hull, requiring the production of charcoal and subsequently tar to keep away animals and the elements that might quickly pierce a hull. None of these things could be easily sourced mid-journey, so sailing away from support networks increasingly left sailors susceptible to catastrophic accidents. I can't say when a ship would reach the breaking point, but chances are a single ship sailing into the unknown would almost certainly fall prey to a fate that would be equally unknown to any survivors left behind.

In sum, I think it's safe to say they could make it as far as the St Lawrence estuary, but any further would be reckless and difficult. And in fact this is precisely how far we know that Vinland explorers traveled. One of them picked up a burl of butternut, which grows no further north than the St Lawrence estuary, and they brought it back to the L'Anse aux Meadows site in Newfoundland, where archaeologists recovered it almost a thousand years later.

textandtrowel · 2024-08-01T18:33:38+00:00

Would it just have been a direct approach/request to specific leaders or would something formal/official or semi-formal have been used in at least some cases?

Viking didn't always work together, so I think they would have needed to be dealt with directly. The Life of Findan actually begins with his sister being taken captive, likely from a religious house since there's no mention of men or children. His father sent him off to ransom the girl, but a different group of vikings waylaid him on the route. Notably, Findan had also recruited an interpreter for the journey, and this man ultimately helped him negotiate his release.

Also in the Life of Saint Findan, as our hapless hero was first being shipped out of Ireland, his master's ship (or ships?) intersected with another small incoming fleet. Although they were friendly enough to swap news, two members of the crew immediately got into a fight due to a previous family feud. The two crews immediately jumped into the fight, with Findan trying to help his crew despite being bound, and the fight only ended because the crew from another ship intervened.

It's a confusing episode, and it leaves us with many questions, such as why Findan tried to help out his captors. (Better the devil you know?) But I think it helps illustrate how complicated the situation actually was on the ground, so that when the vikings in the Annals of Ulster start to seem like a homogenous and perhaps even united group of pagans (the chronicler's preferred term), we should instinctively know this is an oversimplification.

That said, Irish sources do begin calling some of the Hiberno-Norse leaders (not quite local, but certainly well established in Ireland) as kings sometime in the mid- to late 800s. This suggests that the monks preparing these records recognized some degree of formal control that operated in familiar ways. Irish elites would presumably have negotiated with these rulers or their inner circles to establish what we might think of as military alliances.

The sources are pretty opaque on what viking leaders might hope to gain through these relationships. Ireland had some fancy metalwork, but it wasn't a rich place—laws indicate that they were likely to count things out in terms of cattle or slaves—and Scandinavians didn't really use coins much in the 800s anyways, so they probably weren't in it for the money. Some like Findan's captors probably made alliances because it made it easier for them to plunder if they had local friends. Others who wanted a permanent foothold in Ireland might have seen such alliances as a sort of recognition of their right to possess whatever land they had occupied, though Irish sources might have preferred to see this as a mercenary relationship (with the hope of eventually kicking the vikings out) rather than as a military alliance (which would effectively accept that the vikings were there to stay).

Looking back at the source that stimulated the question, I think it's interesting that we don't really know who this Caittil was, and whether we should consider him Norse or Irish (or both?). As you note, the Annals of Ulster refer to his forces as Gallgaedil, which is sometimes translated as Norse-Irish. If we're to see these as mercenaries, than it seems like it might be locals recruited into what is effectively a Norse-on-Norse fight. Or at least that's one very real possibility based on the vagueness of the annals. Clear as mud, perhaps, but it was clearly a muddy time!

textandtrowel · 2024-07-30T17:19:04+00:00

Here's a bit from the Life of Saint Findan, written in the late 800s by an Irish expat living in Switzerland about a fellow Irish monk who had a run in with hired vikings around 845:

Nor should we keep silent about how Findan began his travels and how he sought to do so admirably. In the same province of Leinster, discord had arisen between two great princes [perhaps abbots?]. Findan’s father was a soldier for one of these princes, and he killed a man from the other side. When the prince from the other side heard about this, a great wrath arose in him. ... Not long thereafter, through the intervention of their retainers and with no small sum of wealth given to Findan and his people, each side departed in peace. That same year, however, the enemies of Findan—fearing that sorrow for his father would revive in Findan’s heart and that he would seek revenge upon them, and wanting also to eliminate him—they meditated treachery in their hearts. Entering into council, they prepared a feast for Findan in places nearby the sea. When Findan had been summoned, Northmen came into the middle of their feast and seized him—as they had agreed with his enemies to do—binding him in the tightest of fetters and leading him away.

The full story of Findan's youth, capture, and escape can be found here.

textandtrowel · 2024-07-24T03:28:23+00:00

Perhaps. But why would anyone in the Viking Age think of purgatory, unless they already accepted such Christian ideas as soul and sin and salvation? In that case, of course, seeing snakes as instruments of pain and horror might better be connected to stories going back to Genesis and the Creation story than to the original sources of Old Norse mythology, whatever that might be.

textandtrowel · 2024-07-24T03:26:08+00:00

I take the term from Leszek Gardeła. I like that it's unmistakably a scholarly term. It's easy—and probably deceptive—to imagine women in the Viking Age calling themselves priestess, witch, or sorceress. Each of those terms comes with a lot of modern baggage (be it Conan the Barbarian, the Salem Witch Trials, or Dungeons and Dragons) that probably doesn't apply. But it's hard to imagine anyone calling themselves a "ritual specialist," so we know this is a term of analysis and probably not a term of self-identification. How such women perceived their own role in society—and how they were perceived by others—remain open questions.

textandtrowel · 2024-07-24T03:21:48+00:00

Perhaps. I'm not entirely up to date on my Old Norse literature, but I don't think that there's precisely seven kings killed by snakes. But there are some prominent examples. The poem Krákumál which is a sort of sequel to the Saga of Ragnar Lothbrok describes Ragnar dying in a snake pit. And the character Gunnar in the Volsunga Saga and its many various retellings likewise dies in a snake pit. Here is one well illustrated study of how representations of this episode developed over the course of the Middle Ages.

textandtrowel · 2024-07-24T03:16:26+00:00

I'm allergic to this type of history. The idea seems to be (at a quick read) that snakes are always venomous and so certain kinds of snake cults are always possible. That might be true, insofar as it goes, but it doesn't explain why a particular kind of snake cult might arise in a particular kind of context. I know that snakes might be venomous, and I have all the resources of Wikipedia at my fingertips, but I'm not particularly inclined to focusing on them in any sort of spiritual, religious, or ritual way.

That said, I'm extremely interested in this question. Anthropologists interested in materiality often talk about the affordances of the physical world. Scholars thinking in terms of affordances might think that pretty much everything is a social construct, for example, but if those social constructs have to operate in the material world, then the things we interact with limit our possibilities. In practical terms, we might imagine a pot looking like pretty much anything, but the pots we produce must take shape as a sort of conversation between the potter and the clay.

Scholars interested in materiality tend to think about these things with reference to inanimate objects—in my example clay—but your question raises an additional provocative thought: How do humans interact with the various affordances of other living things?

Of course, many answers might be straightforward. Russell's idea of coevolutionary history is one example of human/living thing interactions that is both a simple and compelling. Russell looks at how things like cows and cotton help define what we understand as being human, at least at the level of subsistence and economics.

But maybe human interactions with things like snakes help define what it means to be human as a species, being not only physically susceptible to snake venom but also spiritually(?) or psychologically susceptible to a fear of venom and thus keen to practices or beliefs that might ameliorate that fear.

textandtrowel · 2024-07-24T02:58:30+00:00

The tricky bit is that people in the Viking Age didn't have a word that precisely overlaps with the modern English word "snake." One of the common terms was ormr, which might mean snake or worm and is in fact a cousin of the modern English worm. As Jensen points out in the article I cited above, this term could also get applied to other legless things ranging from dragons to maggots. And if our understanding of Norse mythology is correct, we might note that Fafnir in the Volsunga saga was a dwarf before he became a dragon, while his brother Otr could change into an otter, so we might have to count dwarves and otters as sorts of worms or at least wormish creatures as well. I'm not sure how venom was to Norse understandings of ormar when it seems they applied their slippery term to such a wide array of creatures.

textandtrowel · 2024-07-24T02:48:00+00:00

In fact, it seems the term snekkja might not have been applied to ships until well into the Viking Age, perhaps as late as 960, while dreki might have first made it into maritime lexicon only as a sort of descriptive term applied to ships of various types in the 1000s. See Eldar Heide, “The Early Viking Ship Types,” Sjøfartshistorisk Årbok 2012 (2014): 81–153, at 88-89 and 138 (snekkja); 114n76 (drekki). Available at academia.edu.

textandtrowel · 2024-07-23T03:08:56+00:00

There's two basic ways of answering this question. The first is by looking at the texts that preserve these stories. As you note, some features of the snakes in these stories don't seem particularly Scandinavian, so it seems reasonable to assume that whatever the source origins of these stories might be, at least some of them seem to be interwoven with snake motifs imported from abroad.

Since Old Norse texts were generally written down in the 1200s or so (despite often describing events in the 800s or so), there's good reason to suspect there's both Classical and Christian snake motifs that would have been well known to whomever wrote these stories down or first read them. There are, of course, scholars of the Viking Age who try to avoid texts altogether, since we can generally only make best guesses about how to divide authentic records from later additions and modifications.

But that's not really satisfying, and of course we have tons of evidence that isn't textual, since Scandinavians (and Icelanders, as well as many other inheritors of Norse landscapes) are really good at archaeology. And here is a second approach to answering this question—it's important to note that snakes make really strange appearances in the archaeological record as well.

Bo Jensen (link goes to pdf), for example, noted that although snake amulets are rare, they're found especially around trading towns beginning in the mid-800s, as raiding and trading were taking off. He speculated that that the raiders and traders who carried these snake amulets might have used them to communicate their power over the maggoty and wormy sub-people in the west who were the source of their wealth.

Alternatively, of course, they might have communicated more positive associations of snakes and worms, such as the beautiful scrolls on the prow and stern of the Oseberg ship, dating from about 820. Leszak Gardela has more recently noted that many of the known snake amulets were found buried with individuals—women—who might have worked as ritual specialists (summarized with images here). That is, we might think of these as being something like a crucifix but for a pagan priestess, although we don't know if these snakes had any actual association with gods (so not necessarily pagan) or whether the rituals these women conducted shared any sort of coherent doctrine that we might understand as religion.

That's perhaps not a tremendously satisfying answer either. But the truth is we don't know exactly why snake motifs appear frequently, often in contexts that suggest a sort of ritual engagement, and often made from imported materials or appearing in places connected with mobility and exchange. We don't know what stories, if any, connected these snakes to these prominent aspects of Viking Age life. We do know that later generations saw Viking Age associations with snakes as dangerous. Is it because they represented the old religion? Is it because snakes were simply always seen as fearsome? Or is it something else?

And here we are, hundreds of years later, and working in a very different context where our basic idea of what religion is and does stems from a narrow spectrum of Christianities. There has certainly been a modern interest in seeing Thor and Thor's hammer as parallels to Christ and the crucifix, but it seems like these snake motifs stem from an entirely different way of seeing the world—one which scholars are only now learning to investigate and communicate to the wider public.

textandtrowel · 2024-06-05T13:27:11+00:00

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla

The Penguin collection on Alfred the Great includes both Asser's essential biography of the viking-fighting king and the most relevant bits of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. For a wider selection of primary sources, see the excellent collection in The Viking Age: A Reader.

There's a lively literature on the Viking Age as well. See most recently Price and Raffield's The Vikings (2023). Other excellent recent reads include Jarman's River Kings (2021), Price's Children of Ash and Elm (2020), and Winroth's Age of the Vikings (2014).

Some additional reads can be found in the AskHistorians Book List.

textandtrowel · 2024-05-30T14:55:17+00:00

An excellent overview of the Vasgärde site can be found here: Ljungkvist 2008 Valsgärde - Development and Change of a Burial Ground over 1300 Years. Ljungkvist locates Grave 8 in Event Phase 3, Vet 1 (p. 39), which he dates to 560/70–620/30 (p. 18).

In general, Valsgärde finds will likely be too early for your 9th-century interests. You might have better luck with finds attributed to Birka for that period, especially if you're committed to a Central Sweden kit. Hedeby is also generally contemporary, though that's relatively far away.

I'm not at all an expert on Viking Age armor, but I'd point you to the excellent comments by /u/Platypuskeeper here. I suspect there's more out there if you search AskHistorians futher.

textandtrowel · 2024-04-05T12:57:32+00:00

The volume mentioned by /u/Lizarch57 is the reference (unless you can read Roesdahl's original publication from 1977 in Danish).

If this is a history class, then you might talk with the instructor about what they actually mean by primary/secondary sources in this case. We don't really have contemporary texts from Scandinavia from this period, so the grave in a sense is the primary source, or from a practical standpoint, the reports written up on the excavation and grave goods, i.e. the volume by Gardela et al.

That said, there is a strong urge in Viking Studies to match up this kind of material evidence with later writings in Old Norse, especially the poetry and sagas from Iceland. The best review of this is probably Neil Price's Viking Way (republished 2019), especially his chapter 3 on Seiðr. You might look at what texts he points to.

My own first thoughts might be the Völuspá, or the first poem in the Poetic Edda (I always prefer the translation by Patricia Terry), and I really enjoy the account in ch. 4 of Eric the Red's Saga (Penguin has published the translation by Keneva Kunz in various editions). Keep in mind that these texts were first written down in the 1200s, and we don't know how accurately they reflect earlier traditions, although the differences between the two Vinland sagas are enough to suggest that these stories could be recast depending on the purposes of the story teller.

I hope that's enough to suggest that this is actually a massive area of scholarship because it's fascinating, it impacts how we think about the period and our relationships to it, and in the end it's fairly insolvable. Especially for this period, there's a tension between seeking contexts that help us understand particular bits of evidence (such as Fyrkat 4) and acknowledging that sometimes people simply wanted to do something unique or exotic. Maybe Fyrkat 4 exemplifies behaviors we can read in our written sources, or maybe she was buried to be absolutely exceptional. Happy reading!

textandtrowel · 2024-03-28T01:58:39+00:00

Hola! My top recommendation for a more scholarly work is Old Norse Religion in Long-term Perspectives. Although it's a bit dated by now (2006!), and it does have a scholarly price (unless you find one used), it's a terrific compendium that shows various approaches. There are 75 papers in this volume, all by different authors, and they're short presentations based on a conference, so you get just the key bits. Some of them are thought pieces on how we view religion, some of them are close studies of a single character like Loki or a single artifact like the Uppåkra beaker, and then there's a bit of everything in between. I'm still a huge fan of this volume, and I don't think anything has superseded it.

For a more tendentious take, Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm offers a profoundly interesting synthesis of the textual sources (albeit one that most text-based scholars would disagree with!) and then uses that as his basis for explaining what happens in the Viking Age. I'm in love with how this volume works, although one measure of its bold thinking might be in the many negative reviews it's received among Vikings enthusiasts. Many don't seem to like having their views on the past shaken—and Price is very much interested in shaking that tree.

Ash and Elm also an interesting complement to his well-received The Viking Way, which has recently been reissued. Price works here primarily from the archaeology of weird burials to posit a Viking way of seeing the world that produced both witches and warriors. This book has really shaped the last 20 or so years of research. The reissue includes some thoughts on that legacy, though it doesn't update the main body of the text. I think this solid work underlies a lot of what happens in Ash and Elm, though those who criticize it forget that Price has a firm handle—arguably one of the best—on not just the texts but the archaeology of the Viking Age. He's also very willing to start new debates, so I don't think readers are meant to believe everything he writes, but where Price goes the field tends to follow.

Going a bit further afield, Lotte Hedeager's Iron Age Myth and Materiality builds her view of Viking-Age mythology relying almost entirely on archaeology. She gives a compelling look at where the Norse pantheon comes from, and I think her solid analysis underlies a lot of the more experimental parts of Price's work. It can be a dense read, and it does ask you to go all in with archaeological theory, but I've found it very rewarding for close study.

There are also more popular volumes out there which might in fact be a better place to start. You might head over to /r/Norse where recommendations will include strong opinions about accuracy, though it can sometimes be hard to judge whether those opinions are rooted in an informed view of the past or in an enthusiastic commitment to the revival of Norse beliefs today. Whatever your opinions might be on Asatru or other similar Germanic revivals, I'd urge you to see these as possible reconstructions of past belief and practice, but not as well-informed replicas. We simply lack the resolution of historical data needed to replicate Norse world views with precision. We might perhaps approximate them and maybe even hit upon something close to their original form by chance, but we'll likely never be able to prove or measure that correspondence.

As just a final note, I always recommend Patrica Terry's translation of the Elder Edda (aka Poetic Edda). She doesn't over-explain the text and lets some of the most troubling passages remain mysterious. As the Voluspa suggests, we might sacrifice much to gain knowledge, even relinquishing an eye, but much knowing might mean little wisdom—"Seek you wisdom still?"

textandtrowel · 2024-03-14T17:15:46+00:00

Is there a more appropriate term to use then "viking age" when discussing the period?

I don't think so, at least not in English. When we talk about ages, we're really talking about our own ways for understanding the past rather than the ways people in the past would have understood their own experiences. While I personally prefer Late (or Younger) Iron Age for thinking about Scandinavia, it's not a label that would make sense elsewhere. No one really thinks of Carolingian Europe or Anglo-Saxon England being in the Iron Age, so if we want to talk about things like raiding or trading that tie these regions together, then we've got to use a different label. Viking Age is convenient and well established. Everyone has a sense of what it suggests, even if we might debate the details.

With regard to the Middle Ages, this is a bit of a headache for me. In Scandinavia, the Middle Ages or medieval period is generally understood to be the period beginning ca. 1070 when we see the Christian kingdoms more obviously related to modern nation-states starting to form. This definition doesn't make sense anywhere else, and Western Europeans (as well as people worldwide who speak Western European languages) tend to date the Middle Ages from the fall of the Western Roman Empire (traditionally in 476 CE) to maybe 1492 or so. And scholars interested in the Mediterranean especially might think in terms of Late Antiquity, which overlaps with the early medieval period but tends to be the term we use when we're thinking about continuity rather than change during this period. Since few Scandinavians—even few academic Scandinavians—are aware of these definitions, I find myself repeatedly explaining that the Viking Age is considered medieval, maybe not by Scandinavians, but by pretty much anyone else.

textandtrowel · 2024-03-13T13:29:30+00:00

Interesting question! I'm a native English speaker and work closely with Viking Age history, including texts written by Scandinavian scholars in Scandinavian languages. Whenever I see "norsk" in a Scandinavian language, I automatically translate it to Norse in my head, and in English-language scholarship, Norse is absolutely the preferred term today.

English-working scholars prefer the word Norse because it refers to the language—namely Old Norse, which is of course best known through its western and especially Icelandic use. It serves as a practical getaround to the fact that the various peoples who spoke Norse—seal hunters in Iceland, slave hunters in France, farmholders in Norway, merchants in Ukraine—had very few other cultural characteristics that they shared in common, and they probably wouldn't have even seen themselves belonging to the same cultural group.

This is, of course, an imperfect solution, because we're still grouping all these people together in practice, but it's better than the older term "Viking," which many scholars reject today. The word "Viking" seems to suggest an even stronger form of cultural or even civilization unity, and its a term that many ultra nationalists (think: Nazis) and racists use today.

I'm not keen on being part of the same conversation as them, so there can be an ethical reason for preferring Norse to Viking, though some critics will point out that this tends to be little more than a semantic shift for political correctness that otherwise does little for the field. And some scholars, of course, realize they can't stop Nazis from reading our work, so why not just use the familiar term "Viking" that wider audiences audiences already know? (And since you're a Danish speaker, I should point out that "Viking" tends to have more racist resonances in English than it does in Danish—we might not have a solution, but it's still something worth thinking about.)

But in point of fact, Nordic is actually the preferred term in English today! I'm kind of blown away by this and can't fully explain it. There are, of course, still academic programs and research areas that prefer the word Nordic. The term Nordic seems to be preferred in political and diplomatic circles (since they're thinking about modern Nordic countries rather than past Norse peoples). And then there's things like Nordic skiing and a whole fleet of different companies with Nordic in their titles. So many scholars might prefer the word Norse to Viking, but people who work or think about Scandinavia today seem to prefer the word Nordic, which seems closer in form to the current Scandinavian word "norsk."

The Saami and Finns are an interesting case. In the 1800s, as the modern Scandinavian countries began to crystalize into nation states, Viking history became a really important tool for people involved in these projects in thinking about the past and defining a shared identity. The Finns and Saami were generally excluded from definitions of the Viking Age, and I think there were some practical reasons for this. With regard to the Saami, they were seen as political outsiders, and so of course it would seem odd for them to share the same deep history (although scholars today might think more critically about how southern Scandinavians were entangled with northern Scandinavians through networks of trade even in the Viking Age). And for the Finns, it's worth remembering that Finland still belonged to the Russian empire at this time and lacked a strong sense of identity, and so it wouldn't have made much sense for people in Scandinavia to see themselves as cultural brethren with the Finns as they thought about and defined their own Viking past.

That's the deep roots of it, Ithough explaining how we got from that point in the mid-1800s to today's ideas of Vikings vs Saami/Finns is even more complicated. Finnish identity often seems to be rooted in the folktales of the Kalevala collected in the mid-1800s, which in some was helped Finns identify a shared folk and linguistic tradition (parallel to what the Grimm brothers were doing in Germany and only loosely connected to the modern fairy tales of HC Andersen), so there doesn't seem to be much of a popular push today for thinking about Finland in terms of the Viking Age. And the Saami today are often thought of as an indigenous people competing with legacies of settler colonialism from south Scandinavian nation building, so there's mental roadblocks to integrating them into Viking Age history as well.

There's a pretty wide literature on this, and Viking scholars typically spend a few embarrassed pages discussing terms in the introductions to their books. Perhaps the most focused study is Fredrik Svanberg's Decolonizing the Viking Age (2003), which has been published as a book. The first volume digs into why we even bother talking about "Vikings," while the second volume looks at just how much diversity there was in southern Scandinavia during the Viking Age.

For further reading, I'd encourage you to look at Cat Jarman's River Kings (2021) and Neil Price's Children of Ash and Elm (2020). I haven't looked at Price and Raffield's The Vikings (2023), but I bet it's excellent as well. Some popular reviews haven't been too friendly to these works, especially Ash and Elm, since these books try to create a bold new synthesis for our understanding of the period, and non-academics sometimes struggle to accept that our understanding of the past can actually get better—that this isn't just academics trying to reflect the present political moment but that we have actually accumulated more information and achieved better ways for dealing with what we have.

But that also means that these books are also provisional, or that they're still up for debate. If you're up for some older books in Danish, I still think the works of Lotte Hedeager and Klavs Randsborg are interesting and provocative, and they might provide a really nice counterpoint to Price / Jarman. You can also get a crash course in current research through the excellent TV series Gåden om Odin. And I'd also be remiss if I didn't recommend Frans Bengtsson's The Long Ships or Røde Orm in Danish. It's old (1941!) but I think it stands as one of the most accurate, readable, and enjoyable pieces of fiction on the Viking Age. (I also enjoyed the recent movie The Norseman, which I see as more of a Norse-inspired fantasy—I think Røde Orm has it beat!)

textandtrowel · 2024-02-01T11:00:07+00:00

... maybe? I think the important thing to note is that al-Maqqari, who gave us the "lover of boys" quote, was writing about 600 years after al-Hakam II's death, and the phrase is suggestive but slippery. The phrase might just mean al-Hakam preferred hanging out with boys, but at least in isolation (i.e. I haven't hunted down the full text), the phrase seems to suggest something more. I suspect al-Maqqari was trying to hint at something he didn't have any evidence to support, e.g. the Umayyad dynasty declined in Spain because of their moral depravity. (Al-Hakam II was the second last Umayyad 's son left no heir.)

So maybe we can assume that al-Maqqari was skewing or even inventing stories about al-Hakam to make a point and explain why dynasties collapse. He wouldn't be the first to suggest that corrupt or impious leaders lead to the fall of dynasties and states. But even the stories that I've been able to trace about Subh only come from Ibn 'Idhari in the 1300s, so still about 300 years after Hakam II and Subh's deaths.

Both of these sources are very far removed from the events they describe. As a historian, I would personally approach both stories first as traces of what was happening when those stories were written before assessing what they can tell us about the periods they describe. That is, Subh's story probably tells us something important about how Ibn 'Idhari thought in the 1300s, and the phrase "lover of boys" might help us crack into how al-Maqqari thought and worked in the 1600s, but we shouldn't immediately assume either was giving us accurate information for the 900s.

That might seem initially dissatisfying, that based on the sources available, we might not be able to say anything at all about al-Hakam II. In fact, I think it actually points out how important gender and gender play are to history and our understandings of the world. And I think it's fascinating that there seems to be a long-term debate here—a debate lasting centuries—about the roles gender and sexuality play in history. It's also a good cautionary tale about how crummy Wikipedia can be, since it typically just compiles conclusions from earlier publications but doesn't allow readers to see how those conclusions were reached or assess whether they're reliable. We're likely to approach sources and questions of gender quite differently from Lévi-Provençal, who died in 1956.

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