Viking Soup, or What Did They Really Eat?

Posted on November 8, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

“The Soup Wars” are currently raging over who owns the beetroot soup, or borscht, Russia or Ukraine. In some papers it’s called The Battle of the Borscht, while one said that the knives where out, which seems like an unhandy way to eat soup.

But the question that concerns us here is: Did the Vikings in the east eat borscht? Probably not, as the first documented mention of borscht is in Domostroy, a 16th century Russian cookbook with some handy moral advice thrown in.

But people largely agree that borscht originated in what is now Ukraine, so it may have been eaten there much earlier. In fact, the soup reference in the Domostroy is an entirely different soup, here also called borscht, with wild hogweed grass and a light beer made from fermented bread.

So what did the Vikings actually eat? This will be discussed in some detail on a webinar next week hosted by culinary archaeologist Daniel Serra.

Click here if you wish to attend: https://www.facebook.com/events/988015935051696

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about the Soup Wars, you can follow this link to the New York Times article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/04/world/europe/russia-ukraine-borscht.html

Did the Vikings Have Standardized Godhouses?

Posted on October 19, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

IKEA is a popular, if not always beloved, Scandinavian indoor furnishing company know for the standardisation of its furniture. A recent archaeological discovery in Norway suggests that Vikings may also have had standardised temples of sorts.

In the village of Ose in southwestern Norway, the remains of a 8th century “godhouse” have recently been unearthed. While being the first such find in Norway, it closely resembles similar structures excavated in Tissö, Denmark and Uppåkra, Sweden. This is seen as the best example of such a place yet.

The godhouse is thought to have been used for midsummer and midwinter solstice ceremonies in honour of the gods. Remnants of meat cooked for Odin, Thor and Freyr, thought to have been represented by figurines while the feast was eaten by the human participants, have been unearthed. The figurines are still missing, but in 1928 a phallus stone was found in the same spot.

If the standard godhouse design reached to the lands of the Rus awaits further discoveries. Meanwhile, the first functioning hof, or pagan temple, to be constructed since the Viking Age awaits completion in Reykjavik. Land has been donated to the Asatru society by the city of Reykjavik on the Öskjuhlíð Hill and a design by architect Magnús Jensson was selected, looking a little like an upturned longship. The sun’s path and the number 9, representing the 9 worlds of the old religion, are will be reflected in the structure. However, the project has had various delays, including the banking collapse of 2008 and the refusal of a bank loan in 2019. Construction began in 2015 and was planned to take a year but little progress has been made. Perhaps it will take 9 years, all in all, for the new hof to the old gods to rise.

For more on the Ose find, see here:

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/norse-godhouse-site-found-norway-180976075/

For more on the Hof, here is an article from 2015:

https://icelandmonitor.mbl.is/news/news/2015/01/27/asatru_temple_rises_in_2016_2/

The Next Frontier in Viking Studies

Posted on October 7, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

In his very interesting online talk, Dr. Neil Price of the University of Uppsala suggested that the Eastern Vikings are the next frontier in Viking studies. Whereas 20 years ago it was unproven that they had gone east of the Urals, it now seems that they went as far as Central Asia and even to western China. Dr. Price even mentioned that the Chinese character in season 4 of the Irish/Canadian TV show Vikings was not at all unpalatable.

He further said that one of the reasons why the eastern Vikings have been under researched so far was due to the Cold War. It was very hard for western scholars to be granted access to the Soviet Union and even to communicate with people there, which has led to an overemphasis on the raids, trade and settlements in the west, rather than on a Viking worldview that stretched from North America to China.

Among his other points was that the first documented Viking raid took place not in Lindisfarne in England in 793 but on the Estonian island of Saaremaa in 750. What we now call the Viking Age probably had its roots in around 500 CE, with the major shifts that occurred with the end of the Western Roman Empire.

For more information, his book Children of Ash and Elm is widely available and the Facebook page for the talk can be found here

Viking Lecture with Neil Price Online

Posted on October 6, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

The inimitable Neil Price will be giving an online lecture on Wednesday, October 7th, at 13.30 Co-ordinated Universal Time, which is happily also Iceland time (although for some reason the atom clock is set by Greenwich and not Reykjavik). The lecture is hosted by the Institute of Northern Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands in Scotland.

Dr. Price will base his lecture on Children of Ash and Elm: A New Look at the Vikings, which is his latest work. Price is also associated with the Legends of the Eastern Vikings program, for further information see his profile on “The Project and Its Participants” page. For residents in Iceland, the book is available in the University book store (Bóksala stúdenta), which remains open although the University library and most of the premises are closed due to Covid.

The lecture will take an hour and a half and is free of charge. If you want to join, please sign up here.

Viking Societies Were Cultural and Genetic Melting Pots

Posted on September 17, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Peer-reviewed journal Nature has published an article by a team of researchers who have been mapping Viking DNA by examining the remains of 442 people from burial sites all over Europe. It probably comes as little surprise that Norwegian ancestry is found in Iceland, Greenland and Ireland, Danish in England and Swedish in Eastern Europe, Swedish DNA having been traced to the present day Baltic States, Russia and Poland. However, the study also shows that there was a considerable influx of people from southern Europe and even Asia into Scandinavia. This is in line with recent discoveries of objects from far afield found in Nordic excavations. It seems that rather than Vikings emanating from Scandinavia and setting off to conquer, all blond and blue eyed, they may have been a very mixed group, with Picts from Scotland found to have been accorded full Viking burials. The popular conception of what Vikings supposedly looked like is up for re-evaluation, but some researchers point out that as the study only looks at the Viking Age (ca. 750-1050), we don’t as yet know how far back this cultural melting pot goes. The solution would seem to be to dig deeper.

A short podcast discussing the findings with scholars from Norway and Denmark can be found here: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02659-w

The full article is available here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2688-8

International Byzantine Studies Congress Moves From Istanbul to Venice

Posted on September 9, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Much like the Triumphal Quadriga above the porch of St. Marks Basilica in the 13th Century, the 24th International Byzantine Studies Congress has been moved from Constantinople to Venice. The International Association of Byzantine Studies website has announced that the 2021 Congress has been postponed until 2022 and will now take place in Venice and Padua, Italy. The congress was originally to take place in Istanbul in 2021.

The Turkish Duvar Gazette states that while the reason for the postponement was Covid related, the reason for relocating the congress was not. Rather, it was a response to the Turkish government converting the famous Hagia Sophia Byzantine church from museum to mosque. The congress committee quotes Covid as well as “other concerns associated with issues of heritage management” as cause for the move.

The congress has been held every five years since 1948 and over 1000 scholars were expected to attend the 2021 congress. They will now be meeting a year later with the Bronze Horses of Venice instead of the Hagia Sophia as backdrop, with the precise date yet to be announced.

For the International Association of Byzantine Studies website, see: https://aiebnet.gr/

For the Duvar website, see: https://www.duvarenglish.com/culture/2020/07/27/byzantine-studies-congress-moved-from-istanbul-after-conversion-of-hagia-sophia-into-mosque/

Varangians Could Only Visit Constantinople in Small Groups

Posted on September 3, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

At the end of August, Turkish news sources announced that the remains of a Varangian settlement had been discovered outside Istanbul. This is not the first hard evidence of Northmen in what was once the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the most famous being the runes found inscribed on the walls of the Hagia Sophia itself. But it may tell us a lot more about their activities there.

The team doing the dig consisted of 75 archaeologists led by the Turkish Şengül Aydıngün and including the Polish Viking expert Blazei Stanislawski. The site is in the the ancient city of Bathonea near Lake Küçükçekmece, and findings date from the 9th to the 11th centuries. Bathonea was an international port at the time and among the objects found are a north European ambergris cross and a necklace bearing the symbol of Jörmundgandur, the Midgard Serpent.

Among the theories prompted by the discovery are that the Varangians were not allowed to live within the walls of Constantinople at the time, but could only enter in groups of 35 men at the most and had to be gone by sundown. It seems that fear of the Northmen encouraged social distancing long before our era.

For the news story in Hurriyet Daily news, see:

https://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/archaeologists-unearth-viking-neighborhood-in-istanbul-157658

Björk Goes Viking in New Historical Epic

Posted on August 21, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Filming of the Viking epic The Northman has finally commenced in Northern Ireland, after having been suspended due to Covid-19. The film is directed by Robert Eggers, known for his portrayal of New England historical epochs, such as The Lighthouse (late 19th Century) and The Witch (1630s), often adding supernatural elements. The film stars Alexander Skarsgård and Nicole Kidman and is written by Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón. Perhaps most interestingly, Björk will appear in the film, her role being that of a “Slavic Witch.” The film is set in Iceland in the early 10th Century and perhaps Björk’s character description indicates that connections between the western and easternmost parts of the Viking World will be utilized in the story.

Sjón and Björk have collaborated before. He has been her lyricist on various tracks, including the soundtrack to Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark for which they were nominated for an Oscar. This was where Björk debuted her famous Swan Dress, so we can only hope she will be nominated again.

Belarus: Waving the Flag of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania

Posted on August 19, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

Avid news watchers may have spotted that Belarusian protesters are waving a red and white flag, often with a picture of a knight on it. This flag, in fact, goes back to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania when it was used by Belarusians under Lithuanian rule. It was briefly adopted as the flag of the independence movement at the end of World War I. The white reflected the country’s name. One theory behind the naming of Belarus (sometimes called White Russia) is that it was the part of the Rus kingdoms that was not conquered by the Mongols in the 13th Century and hence was ruled by Christian princes. The westernisers in Belarus, as in Ukraine, see continuity from the ancient Rus through the Lithuanian Duchy and later the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to today.

Hence, a red stripe was added and sometimes the picture of the knight. This was the official flag of Belarus from independence in 1991 until 1995, when Lukashenko changed it back to the flag of the Belarusians SSR of the Soviet Union. Perhaps it will be changed back if he relinquishes power. For more on the Belarus flag, see:

https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Belarus

Belarus: He Who Controls the Present Controls the Past

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

History is being made these days in Belarus and inevitably whoever comes out on top will have his own of history canonized. The current conflict between Westernizers and Pro-Russian groups goes back over 100 years, each faction viewing historical events in very different terms. The difference between the two is recounted in an article late last year by Moscow-born University of Radford Professor Grigory Ioffe called “Split Identity and a Tug-of-War for Belarus’s Memory.”

https://jamestown.org/program/84916/

For the pro-Russians, the history of Belarus goes back to the Polotsk principality, which was subservient to the Kyivan Rus, the precursor to both modern day Ukraine and Russia. For centuries after the collapse of Kyiv, most of Belarus was occupied by Lithuanians and Poles before being liberated by the Russians in the 18th Century (and again during World War II). The official view, quite neatly, sees Kyiv, Novgorod and Polotsk as separate ancestors of the three eastern Slavic states of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus.

For the Westernizers, the county’s history also begins with Polotsk but here the connection with Kyiv is downplayed. St. Volodymyr is seen to have incorporated the principality against the wishes of the populace (as related in the Primary Chronicle) and so a heritage of resistance to foreign authority is established. Conversely, the union with the Lithuanians and the Poles in the later Middle Ages is seen as having been on equal terms, making Belarus a full member of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In this narrative, Russia comes the main enemy and the many uprisings of the Poles against the Russians in the 19th Century are seen as joint Polish-Belarusian affairs.

According to Belarusian philosopher (and Westernizer) Valantsyn Akudovich, the former view appeals more to Belarusians as it allows them to be a part of the glory of Russian and Soviet Empires rather than its victims.

Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s move to Lithuania and Lukashenko’s calls for assistance to Russia can be the seen as the latest chapter in the long running debate about whether Belarus’ history runs through the Grand Duchy of Lithuania or Muscovy, and whether its future belongs to the Westernisers or pro-Russians.

St. Vladimir and Comrade Stalin