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

Heroic or Just Cruel. What Do the Sources Say?

Posted on August 7, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

A review of The Children of Ash and Elm: A New History of the Vikings by Neil Price has appeared in the “Socially Distant Summer Issue” of the London Review of Books, Vol. 42 No. 16, 13 August 2020. Price is an archaeologist and professor at the University of Uppsala and is also associated with this program. His previous book is The Viking Way: Magic and Mind in Late Iron Age Scandinavia.

The review is written by Tom Shippey and titled “Did they even hang bears?”, a reference to the ritual sacrifices at Uppsala which may have included larger animals than previously thought. Shippey recounts some of Price’s conclusions, such as the fact that 125 million silver dirhams are thought to have gone north from the Caliphate to Scandinavia in the 10th Century. Meanwhile, only seven million pennies did so from the Frankish Empire, which still amounted to around 14 percent of the Franks output. No one knows why so many of the coins were put into burial mounds but it can hardly have been an accident. Price suggests ritual as a possible explanation.

Even more interesting is the mystery of why the Viking Age started. Price points to a couple of factors, such as lack of central power following the collapse of the Roman Empire as well as the many volcanic eruptions of the 6th Century, which may have destroyed crops all over but hit the Nordic Countries with their limited agriculture particularly hard. More immediately, the feuds between the successors in the Frankish Empire in the 9th Century may have led to new opportunities to acquire loot.

Perhaps most interestingly, there may have been a considerable male surplus in Scandinavia in the period, as male children seem to have been better looked after and less likely to suffer from malnutrition. This may have led to raids to find funds to impress the girls back home or a chance to find and abduct entirely new girls.

Finally, Shippey finds many examples of the Vikings being alternately heroic and cruel in Price’s text, saying that the idea that they were simply one or the other belongs in the realm of comic books.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v42/n16/tom-shippey/did-they-even-hang-bears

News from Norway

Posted on July 27, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

An archaeology student at the University of Trömsö found a previously unknown Viking era trading post in Sandtorg in northern Norway between the towns of Harstad and Narvik. Dating from the 9th century, it is the oldest trading centre in the north of Norway and shows that international trade was conducted from here earlier than thought. Among the artefacts discovered are Arabic coins and an Asian belt strap decoration. Those who know the Sagas will recall that this is the general area Egill Skallagrímsson’s immediate ancestors emigrated from to Iceland.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/archaeology-student-finds-viking-trading-post-norway-180975391/?fbclid=IwAR3bpTj2dx5CeWAcXGi5rnpxL7CO1znAHbT5874OWaqhm98vTx0-lhh8s3I

The NRK national radio series Museum, about Nordic history and archaeology, is finally available as a podcast. In an episode from 2005, hosts Øyvind Arntsen and Jan Henrik Ihlebæk travel to Starya Ladoga, the old Aldeiguborg, to find out about the beginnings of the Rus. Among the conclusions are that once Rúrík went east, he left Swedish history and entered that of Russia, in much the same way that prince Carl left Danish history and entered Norwegian when he became King Haakon VII of Norway. If Kyiv is he mother of Russian cities, then Aldeiguborg is the grandmother. In Norwegian with some Russian:

https://radio.nrk.no/podkast/museum/l_4665aac8-cd9c-4aee-a5aa-c8cd9cbaeee1

Norwegian lion meets Russian bear

Swedish Proto-Vikings on Icelandic TV

Posted on July 20, 2020 by Valur Gunnarsson

De första svenskarna, or The First Swedes, is a two-part series by archaeologist Jonathan Lindström. The series debuted on Swedish television in February and the first episode was showed on Icelandic television last week. Using modern DNA technology from the University of Uppsala, Lindström aims to show that Sweden was first settled by dark-skinned, blue-eyed people from coming the south at the end of the last Ice Age 11.000 years ago. Almost simultaneously, a pale skinned group entered from the north via Russia, emanating from modern day Turkey. These hunted elk and had superior stone age weapons and tools and soon interbred with the former group. The second episode, to be aired tomorrow (July 21st) deals with proto-Viking raids from long before the beginning of the Viking Age.

The link to Icelandic National Broadcasting is here: https://www.ruv.is/sjonvarp/spila/fyrstu-sviarnir/29633/8qj8oh

The link to Swedish National Broadcasting: https://www.svt.se/special/mot-de-forsta-svenskarna/