🇫🇮 The North Engendered: Mythologized Histories, Gender and the Finnish Perspective on the Imagined Viking-Nordic Ideal
“We suggest that the image of “the Viking woman” as a symbol of a tradition of gender equality is of high importance to how national identities are formed in the Nordic countries. She represents an idea of the romantic North, and an idealized, explicitly or implicitly, white identity. How the “Viking woman” is envisioned by Nordic societies relates to femonationalist political narratives, and race and racialization in the present day.”
Rosenström S. & Žiačková B. 2022. The North Engendered: Mythologized Histories, Gender and the Finnish Perspective on the Imagined Viking-Nordic Ideal. In: Hoegaerts, J et al (eds.), Finnishness, Whiteness and Coloniality. Helsinki: Helsinki University Press. DOI: https://doi.org/10.33134/HUP-17-4
🇳🇴 Norwegian farmer finds 1,000-year-old Viking sword on family farm
“X-ray scans of the sword revealed outlines of rare inscriptions with a cross pattern and the likely presence of letters on the blade.
Based on these inscriptions, scientists said it could be a so-called Vlfberht sword, produced during the Viking Age or the early Middle Ages between 900 and 1050AD.”
How a brawl in 18th-century Constantinople changed what we know about the Vikings
"Ibn Fadlan’s first-hand account of the Rus and their funerary rituals has secured his reputation as an important source for the study of ritual and belief across the Viking world. Nowhere else do we encounter eyewitness insight into this kind of Viking funerary ritual."
"The findings gave a unique understanding of life and death in this early Christian Viking community and indicated that it was common to suffer from dental caries, tooth loss, infections of dental origin and tooth pain. These Vikings also manipulated their teeth through filing, tooth picking and other occupational behaviors."
A new narrative history of the Viking Age, interwoven with exploration of the physical remains and landscapes that the Vikings fashioned and walked: their rune-stones and ship burials, settlements and battlefields.
There is more to the Viking story than brute force. They were makers of law - the term itself comes from an Old Norse word - and they introduced a novel form of trial by jury to England. They were also sophisticated merchants and explorers who settled Iceland, founded Dublin, and established a trading network that stretched from Baghdad to the coast of North America.
A major reassessment of the vikings and their legacy
The Vikings maintain their grip on our imagination, but their image is too often distorted by myth. It is true that they pillaged, looted, and enslaved. But they also settled peacefully and traveled far from their homelands in swift and sturdy ships to explore. The Age of the Vikings tells the full story of this exciting period in history.
In Scandinavia in the Age of Vikings , Jón Viðar Sigurðsson returns to the Viking homeland, Scandinavia, highlighting such key aspects of Viking life as power and politics, social and kinship networks, gifts and feasting, religious beliefs, women's roles, social classes, and the Viking economy, which included farming, iron mining and metalworking, and trade.
Oldest ship's grave in Scandinavia has been excavated in central Norway (the region of Trøndelag, to be precise). The grave reveals that Scandinavians were building ships large enough for long-distance travels already around the year 700. This find also pushes the burial custom of burying people in ships significantly back in time. (Article in Norwegian.)
The Waking of Angantyr by Marie Brennan is out today in the UK. It's historical fantasy set in the Viking era, brutal and a bit heartbreaking, but really good. Here's my review:
Watched the movie THE VIKINGS (1958) starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, Ernest Borgnine, and Janet Leigh.
Let's put it this way. THE VIKINGS did better with the knowledge about Vikings available in 1958 than THE NORTHMAN did with the knowledge available in 2022. In other words, I enjoyed this movie a lot more than I expected.