The Children of Ash and Elm

In what now seems like a completely other world, less than a year ago I wrote a blog post listing some recommended Viking reading. If I had been writing that blog post now, I would certainly have had to consider this very recent offering (it was published last month), all 599 pages of it, with the rather curious title The Children of Ash and Elm and the more prosaic subtitle A History of the Vikings. This book is by Neil Price, one of the best-known Viking specialists working today. He is professor of archaeology at the University of Uppsala in Sweden, and leader of a massive 10-year project called The Viking Phenomenon. By any account, this book, one of the outputs of that project, deserves serious attention.

I have to admit that not long ago I declined an opportunity to review the book, though this was only for practical reasons and not from any disinclination. Since then no one else has asked. So I thought I'd share some thoughts here. In fact, I rather like the freedom of writing as many (or as few) words as I like, and not having to follow the conventions of book reviews, or worry about who I was writing for, or explain the book to those who haven't read it and are wondering whether they should or not (the short answer is yes, though there's a longer and more complicated answer below). So this is not a review. Just some thoughts, mainly on those aspects of the book which particularly interest me, and which may or may not be of interest to others.

The first thing to note is that not only have I read it, but I have read it carefully and in its entirety and enjoyed doing so. You might think this goes without saying, but I can assure you that when it comes to popular or trade books about the Viking Age, this is very rarely the case for me... Too many books about the Vikings, aimed at a general audience, just say the same old things, in the same order, and in the dullest possible way. They might have their uses in providing the basics for those who know nothing, but I can rarely get past the first few pages... I assume this one is intended for a wide audience, as it is published by Allen Lane and will I guess eventually become a Penguin paperback, presumably to replace Else Roesdahl's The Vikings, which has now been around for quite a long time. So the very fact that I enjoyed reading it, and with attention, tells you a lot. However, its destiny as a popular book also makes it a bit difficult to review. How much should we expect of it? Who is it really for? We all know that it is really hard to encompass the whole of the Viking Age without making some mistakes, but how significant is that in this context? Does anyone care? I'm always being told that our first priority is to engage as well as inform the general public. But how far do we go in this process?

Well, this book is certainly very engaging. So what do I like about it? A variety of big and small things. Most important to me is how Neil's love of his subject shines through every word on these 599 pages. Here is someone who likes Vikings and the Viking Age a lot, as much as I do, almost certainly even more than I do, although probably for very different reasons. He resists the dreary tendency of some archaeologists to insist on the calling it the 'Viking period' and instead argues cogently (p. 9) for the validity of the notion of a 'discrete Viking Age'. He even admits that he is 'promoting the Vikings' worldview' (p. 26), something that sounds potentially dangerous these days. But it's not sinister, rather it is clear that his aim is deep understanding, an attempt to get inside the skin of the Vikings. Overall, I like this attitude. This is not a book for those who want battles and bling, rather I see it as an attempt to work out what motivated battles and bling (and of course much else).

Another good thing is that some of the book is about the centuries before the Viking Age, a period which is given a variety of names in different archaeological traditions (usefully tabulated on p. 66) and which is less well studied outside the circles of Scandinavian archaeology than the Viking Age itself. Very few books about the Viking Age consider this preceding period in any detail and it is illuminating to see both the continuities and the changes. In fact, you could argue that the author's idea of a 'discrete' and in many ways unified Viking Age is justified by that very contrast with the preceding period, with its multiple monikers and lack of a unifying narrative. Despite his over-fondness for Beowulf and the sixth-century 'dust veil', this focus on the pre-Viking period is still an important aspect of this book. I would also say the author is generally good on religion, even if I shudder at his adoption of the term 'religiolect' (p. 207), or when he overstates the evidence for worship of the Norse deities in England (p. 408).

I am of course very pleased that the author recognises the usefulness of the concept of 'diaspora' in understanding the Viking Age - this word is the title of the whole of chapter 13. Unlike many others, he is also alert to the fact that it is a difficult word to use and needs explanation and exploration rather than just appropriation (see especially pp. 363-5 and 555).

So, overall, this is a book which has many new and interesting things to say about Vikings and the Viking Age and already for that reason it is well worth reading. It's also a book which stimulates both thought and occasional disagreement, and I wouldn't be me if I didn't have some Thoughts about some of what Neil says.

The book is definitely the product of an archaeologist's mind, as indeed his predecessor Else Roesdahl's is. Allen Lane/Penguin still seems to belong to the class of publisher who believes only archaeologists are qualified to write about this topic. However, Neil is one of those archaeologists who is not only not embarrassed to use Old Norse texts to help understand his subject, but is also pretty knowledgeable about them. Indeed he has been supporting his archaeological interpretations with textual evidence for most of his career. This is laudable, but has some dangers. I have sometimes noticed that not only MA dissertations and PhD theses but also papers by more senior archaeologists have a tendency to use his work as a primary source to access these texts. While it is understandable that archaeologists cannot also be textual specialists, I think there is still some educating to be done here. But that is not this author's fault, rather that of those who use him in this way. This book is upfront about its use of sagas in particular, more than once urging its readers to 'read the sagas' - which can only be a good thing. I'm also totally with Neil when he notes (p. 23) that 'skeptical literary researchers' are probably too skeptical since they do not explain where all the Viking Age material in the sagas comes from, though his own justification (e.g. p. 222) is a bit thin. Let's by all means have more exchange and discussion of this topic which is sorely needed.

So I am disappointed to have to say that this book is not a particularly good advertisement for the use of sagas, or indeed any old texts, in archaeological narratives. At the most basic level, there are too many errors, often of a linguistic variety. So not only are we introduced to those weird Anglo-Norse hybrid dynasties the 'Ynglingas, Skjöldungas, and Völsungas' (p. 92) but, even more egregiously, the Saga of the Ljósvetningas (p. 160). I think our author has been reading too much Beowulf and not enough sagas. Constantine Porphyrogenitos' De Administrando Imperio is, despite the title, written in Greek not Latin (p. 366). Miðjarðarhaf  is a literal translation of 'Mediterranean Sea' and nothing to do with Miðgarðr (p. 374). A few such errors are forgivable but there are a little too many for my taste. Especially because they could easily have been eradicated by asking someone who knows about these things to read through the manuscript. But despite two pages of Acknowledgements to the Great and the Good of Norse and Viking Studies (pp. 574-6), this appears not to have been done, at least not successfully. The hubris of thinking you know everything affects us all in the end...and it's those who really do know a lot who have to be particularly careful. (I'm looking at myself here, too).

Similarly, some of Neil's reading of Old Norse texts is at least debatable and sometimes just wrong. On p. 55, he conflates without notice the texts of the poem Darraðarljóð and the prose narrative of Njáls saga in which it is cited. This is a pity for the argument because many people believe the poem is a genuine Viking Age product, while the saga definitively is not, and is therefore unlikely to be a reliable guide to what the poem really means. (I've more than once heard archaeologists at conferences claim they are citing the saga when in fact they are using the poem - when making a point about textiles, for example, this is an important distinction). Individual texts are in danger of being overinterpreted. Thus, Neil says (p. 110) that  Rígsþula 'describes an elaborate high-status wedding with fine linens and much ceremony',  but there is no such thing, only a very sketchy reference in st. 38 (40 in Larrington's translation) to Erna marrying Jarl and wearing linen. On the same page, he refers to the 'impotence' of Hrútr in Njáls saga, whereas most readers would I think say this character's marital problem was too much potence. We're told that 'sagas and poems are utterly saturated in magic' (p. 221). Well, yes, there is a fair bit of magic in these texts but 'utterly saturated'? Not in my experience. 'Professional mourner' is an odd concept to link to the Eddic heroine Guðrún (p. 253) in a context in which it is clear that she is mourning her own daughter - surely a genuine tragic figure rather than a hired weeper. It all smacks a bit too much of making the evidence fit the argument.

Runes are also not well-represented in this book, despite many of them being, unlike the sagas but like some poetry, contemporary texts from the Viking Age or earlier. It's disappointing when the author misses several opportunities to mention that important archaeological finds he discusses actually have runic inscriptions on them, such as some of the pre-Viking weapon deposits at Illerup (p. 70). Even more scandalously, the carved stones of the Isle of Man are mentioned for their Christian iconography beside images from Old Norse cosmology (p. 417) without any reference to their (more frequent, but perhaps less obviously exciting) runic inscriptions. Two Swedish rune-stones which Neil alleges (p. 112) provide evidence for men having two wives simultaneously are not only rather slim evidence for polygyny but could also be read in a variety of ways, even before we consider the problems of using these laconic inscriptions to write social history. And no, Ingibjörg did not have 'sex with me when I was in Stavanger' (p. 192). The medieval (not Viking Age) Bergen rune-stick N B390 M says that Ingibjörg unni mér þá er ek var í Stafangri or 'Ingibjörg loved me when I was in Stavanger'. You might argue that the verb unna is a euphemism here (though not always in runic inscriptions where it does seem to indicate romantic love). But I would argue that is interpretation which needs to be argued for, ideally with a consideration of how the word is used in other contexts. In this context, what is needed rather is just to get the translation right. Norse-speaking people are not known for euphemisms and did not shy away from the f-word when they needed it, as can be seen from several runic inscriptions including a famous one in Maeshowe (also post-Viking Age). 

Any one of these slips, individually, is not significant on its own, but there are rather a lot of them when it comes to the texts. What is more concerning is the overall pattern, of exaggeration and dramatisation, of literally sexing up things that were originally perhaps more mundane. Too much of this ends up with a slightly cartoonish view of the Vikings which both feeds into and panders to the ways they are portrayed in popular culture. Boring as I am, I would argue that the Vikings are fun enough without having to exaggerate what they were up to, they don't need all this showmanship. The end result is that the book sits very uneasily on the border between scholarship and yet another 'popular' version of the Viking Age. This is a worrying tendency in several aspects of Viking studies today, one example being the controversial Viking display at the National Museum of Denmark, though this book is not I think in that league, mercifully. And yet many people will regard this book as the 'defnitive' view of the Viking Age (as can be seen from both journalistic reviews, and consumer reviews on Amazon). Once again, the drive to 'engage' the public seems to be at the forefront of all public-facing scholarship and is in danger of overshadowing the actual scholarship.

This popularising tendency may be responsible for the author more or less ignoring certain forms of evidence which are not so easily tied into a colourful narrative (though others do manage it). So, place-names, a really important source of evidence, get very short, and sometimes inaccurate, shrift. It is simply not true that there are 'no non-Norse place-names in the Hebrides' (p. 404). I wonder if the author meant the Northern Isles in this instance, but even there this is not true. According to him, place-names provide the 'greatest evidence for the Scandinavian presence' in Normandy, 'as in several areas in the British Isles' (p. 419), but this point regarding the latter (and especially England) is not taken up elsewhere. The author could, I would suggest, also do with reading up on some of the recent (and older) discussion about the  name of Norway which I,  in agreement with others, no longer believe means the 'North Way' (p. 86). It's perfectly understandable that this is an area in which our multi-talented archaeologist author feels less confident, but I would really have liked to have seen more about this in a 599-page book which calls itself 'A History of the Vikings'.

Even in areas where he is more knowledgeable, the author is not always entirely reliable. I didn't know that ringed pins were a 'uniquely Norse invention' (p. 135) and I doubt it, but admittedly that's not my area of expertise. Snaptun (the find location of a carving beloved of my students which ostensibly shows Loki with his mouth sewn up) is not 'near the Norwegian border' (p. 136) - Denmark does not share a land border with Norway. It did in the Middle Ages, but that is still not where Snaptun is. I do wonder how we can be sure that Sámi traditions recorded in early modern times go back to the Viking Age and beyond (p. 89). This could well be true, but I'd welcome some comment on the question, especially in light of the author's semi-skepticism about the (earlier-recorded) sagas. His disappointingly brief comments on genetic research (p. 381) add nothing to what is an important and current discussion.

So, despite the stated commitment to interdisciplinarity, and a voluminous bibliography (in which I have happily discovered many items I knew nothing about), I'm not convinced that the author has fully digested everything he has read, especially in other disciplines. The saga-references in particular read a bit like someone who once read a saga some years ago and is retailing it from memory. Personally, I do not mind these errors, they are easily made and I can recognise them and filter them out. I can also tell when the narrative slips from fact to speculation and I for one enjoy speculation even when I do not fully agree with it, because it stimulates thought. A case in point is the author's new-found conviction that the Vikings were non-binary or queer, which seems a bit tacked on here and there to a narrative which otherwise still assumes a highly gendered society (my considered views on shield-maidens will, I hope, be published elsewhere soon, in the meantime you can get an idea from this recent podcast). The speculation is not always signposted though careful reading will reveal it. But I do wonder how many students and less experienced readers will look at the range of evidence cited and assume the author is equally expert in all of it. And then continue to cite him, rather than the original sources, for literary and linguistic detail... I'm almost tempted to say that you should study the Vikings for a few years before reading this book - you'll get more out of it and not be led astray. But is this the right kind of book for The Penguin Book of the Vikings? I'm already dreading some of Neil's more colourful exaggerations turning up in student essays for years to come.

Despite these disappointments, I do still really like this book. I hope it is recognised that engagement at this level of detail is a form of praise for this book - there are very few books I would take so much trouble to write about, especially in this informal way. I fantasise that I could even use this slightly uneven character of the book to train students in distinguishing between old news, new news and fake news, but it wouldn't be easy. The narrative is, I imagine, pretty seductive to those (almost everyone) who have less knowledge than Neil Price.

To end on a more positive note, the book has some insights or generalisations that are sufficiently interesting and provocative that I want to take them away and really chew over them, which is one reason I like this book. While it should not always be taken literally, the following random selection of observations shows some of the ways in which this book successfully stimulated my thought processes at least:

• 'trickster ... nomenclature may not help in understanding [Loki] from the point of view of the Vikings themselves' (p. 46)
• 'The mythology of the Vikings is one of only a tiny handful in all world cultures in which the divinities also practised religion' (p. 50)
• [with reference to the Migration Period, but also relevant to the Viking Age, and here's looking at you 2020] 'Some were fleeing, and others were those they fled from. Most were looking for economic security, safety, and a quieter life while a powerful minority were trying proactively to shape a world more to their liking' (p. 68)
• 'it is the man's gender that was limited and intensive, while the gender of women was to a degree unlimited and extensive' (p. 172)
• 'the Rök stone ... was deeply socially embedded (and visible) in a way that the book cultures of the Continent never wished to be' (p. 195)
• the importance of planning and preparing for Viking expeditions (p. 308)
• the 'armies' in England were 'continuously evolving migratory communities' (p. 339) or 'armed family migrations' (p. 357)
• 'There is little evidence of racism in Viking society' (p. 398)
• 'the Vikings live on today primarily as tourist magnets, as the draw of heritage trails and "experiences". The Scandinavians of the Viking Age were acutely concerned with memory; they might have been happy at this.' (pp. 498-9)

Viking Warrior Women - More of the Same? I

MM131 Andreas II
Viking Age runic cross from the Isle of Man,
commemorating a certain Arinbjǫrg

I never for a moment thought the fascination with the possibility of female Viking warriors would go away. After all, I have already argued that this fascination goes back at least as far as the Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus writing in Latin around 1200, and since then it has come back at regular intervals. Way back in 1991, I suggested (and I was not the only one) that Saxo's warrior women owed more to Amazons than to Vikings (Women in the Viking Age, p. 178). This is an aspect I have touched on in some talks over the past year, and which I am developing for a proper academic article in the near future, for those who think (with some reason) that blogs are not an appropriate venue for such discussions. In the meantime, of course, the proponents of the Birka warrior (Bj 581) continue to pop up all over the place. I have already discussed a brief reference in the Channel 4 programme Britain's Viking Graveyard, last April, so won't repeat myself about that. Howard Williams will fill you in on the Megan Fox approach to the topic. What I thought I would survey in this blog post and the next are three recent television programmes which take the discussion in new directions, not all of them entirely negative. I'm not going to rehearse arguments which have already been aired ('what is a "warrior" exactly?', 'do board games really indicate military leadership', etc. etc.) but try to see what directions these programmes are taking the debate in, since judging by the number of TV programmes just within the last year, the debate is being conducted on the airwaves more than in academic fora.

Den kvinnliga vikingakrigaren

This programme , the title of which translates as 'The female Viking warrior', was first aired on Swedish television in August of this year and is still available (in Swedish, though some interviews are in English). Although the main heading on the website describes it as a 'documentary', this is nuanced a bit in the paragraph below, which claims it is a 'drama documentary' based on 'research results'. It is basically a dramatisation of what the life of the person buried in Bj 581 'could have been like'. I will leave others to decide how well they think it works as a drama - in these contexts fiction is not my business. However, it seems clear enough to me that the dramatisation (which is only about half of the programme, interspersed with more academic content) seems designed to give further credence to those 'research results' to a wider audience. The programme makes brief reference to the 'international debate' those results caused back in 2017, without giving any sense of what the debate might have been about. Some of the interviews are with the archaeologists involved in the original research, and Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson in particular is worth listening to in her explanation of the importance of roles, and of belonging to a group, which I agree is an important aspect of the Viking Age. Other interviews are clearly designed to give the drama bit a sheen of academic credibility but they don't really explain anything. Thus Elisabeth Ward gives some useful information about Iceland, Greenland and North America, based on the sagas of Icelanders, but there is no explanation of why or how these sagas might be relevant to understanding the Bj 581 burial, it is just assumed that they are. This assumption that what happened in one part of 'Viking society' can explain what happened in another part of 'Viking society' is shared by Janina Ramirez who also generalises about 'Viking society' without reference to any actual evidence - her comments are all based on, and obviously meant to support, the narrative of the drama. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically, the programme refers to 'Byzantine sources' as evidence for female warriors. This idea is crucial to the development of the narrative, which envisages the Birka person as having travelled to and to some extent developed her martial skills in the East - here we are presented with a rather distinct part of 'Viking society' when it suits the story. The programme several times makes the suggestion that Freyja was a goddess of war (the evidence for this is actually quite limited and mainly from Snorri), and the implication that she was therefore a goddess for female warriors. Also, my favourite bugbear, the word 'Viking' itself, makes some annoying appearances. The archaeologist Leszek Gardeła, asserts that 'Saxo talks about Viking women', but Saxo never used the word 'viking', and of course Saxo is problematic as I keep saying. And Ramirez asserts that 'the Vikings did not call themselves Vikings', but they did! She also says that what they did say is that they would 'go a-viking', implying that it is a verb, which it patently is not. Yes, yes, I know I'm nitpicking, but even so, let's get it right folks.

The programme is yet another example of what I have called 'a view of research ... which fills out our meagre evidence with speculation and imaginative reconstruction' which 'can lead to the blurring of the line between primary research and public presentation'. It's a difficult balance to manage in these days when academics are practically required to engage with the general public and I know how difficult that can be. I'm not sure how successful this programme is as drama - the story is interesting enough but could have been more so. It is clearly devised to reinforce the research results and the interspersed interviews tend to disrupt any flow it might have had. I cannot see this programme as anything more than yet another attempt to lodge the interpretations of the 2017 and 2019 articles even more firmly in the minds of the general public and cut off further discussions. I am still uneasy with the 'docudrama' format, since the 'docu' bit is just there to support the drama, and doesn't allow for any ambiguities in the interpretation of the evidence, let alone any counter-evidence. A proper documentary, however, can be expected to present different interpretations, no?

Viking Warrior Women

So is this programme such a documentary? It was first aired (in Britain at least) on the National Geographic Channel earlier this month, I assume it is regularly repeated. This programme is more closely focused on archaeology, which is I think a good move, since previous attempts have come a bit unstuck on the literary and linguistic aspects. Nevertheless, the credits show that Neil Price was a consultant on the show, so it is once again a show with a mission (as the presenter, an 'archaeologist and National Geographic explorer', admits). As the presenter, Ella El-Shamahi, is not to my knowledge a Viking archaeologist, she plays the traditional role of the non-specialist presenter being informed by a variety of experts, most of whom have already appeared in previous TV shows about this topic. One could almost get a bit bored... (Disclaimer: a few years ago, when National Geographic was first thinking about this programme, they got in touch with me with a view to interviewing me for it. For whatever reason known only to them, that never happened).

The non-specialist presenter is of course allowed to say things like 'It's always been assumed that Viking warriors were all men' or 'what is being revealed right now is transforming everything we thought we knew about the Vikings and how their women might have gone to war' to big up the programme, even though they are patently untrue. Again, there is the formulaic reference to the fact that Bj 581 is 'causing controversy in Viking archaeology' but without really explaining what that controversy might consist of. But heyho, a good controversy will make the programme seem even more cutting-edge and relevant and all that. And I'm afraid the word 'badass' is used of the occupant of Bj 581...sorry but it grates in something intended to be serious.

The content of this programme is really rather interesting, as it draws on the research of the aforementioned Leszek Gardeła, and Marianne Moen from Oslo, regarding certain Viking Age graves in Denmark and Norway which could also be interpreted as being those of 'warrior women'. What interests me is the questions that the programme raises without answering, or sometimes even without recognising that they are interesting and important questions (I suppose the downside of having a non-expert presenter). An example is how an examination of the Bj 581 skeleton moves very quickly from the width of the greater sciatic notch being 'in keeping with a female pelvis' to it is 'of course female'. But OK, I'm willing to take the osteoarchaeologist's word on this matter. In other cases, there is a real lack of information.

The programme is about two graves, in addition to Bj 581, one Danish and one Norwegian. On the Danish island of Langeland, there is apparently one (out of 49) graves that has been identified as female, but never before as a warrior. (Leszek admits at this point that 'I don't think this [i.e. women warriors] was very common but they certainly existed'). What makes her a warrior? Well, she has an axe, a battle-axe in fact, and indeed one that was 'crafted hundreds of miles to the east'. Does one axe (especially an exotic one) make a woman a warrior? I'd like to have heard more about that. But it is a high-status chamber grave, so with some parallels (including the eastern connection) with Bj 581. Lots to discuss here, but it is not discussed much.

The presenter and Moen then make a pilgrimage to Åsnes, in Hedmark, Norway. Here, there is a grave discovered in 1900 which contained a 'kvinneskjelett med mannsutstyr' (a woman's skeleton with a man's equipment), according to a contemporary monument on the spot (a fascinating object in its own right, as Moen points out). This skeleton is the piece de resistance of the programme, since her grave goods, along with a wound on her forehead interpreted as a battle-scar, are the evidence for her having been a warrior. What I'm interested in is how, in 1900, the archaeologists decided it was a female skeleton? They certainly didn't have the advanced techniques used on the Birka 'warrior'. Given what we're told about Victorian (and later) preconceptions about Viking warriors being all male, what led the 1900 archaeologists to decide the skeleton was female? And do specialists still agree with this assessment? We are not told. We are only told by the presenter that 'not everyone agrees', but we are not told who disagrees, nor are any such people interviewed. Academic discussion is reduced to a one-way monologue by experts on a mission. I was particularly annoyed by the presenter's comment about these '[n]ew discoveries that I really hope will challenge what some people still refuse to believe, that there's evidence out there that not only did elite female viking warriors exist but that they had the skills and the weapons to fight on the battlefield alongside men'. It's not a matter of 'belief', dear TV presenters all, just let us into the secrets of the evidence!

Despite these caveats, there were one or two good bits in the programme. I did quite like the suggestion that the occupant of Bj 581 was a high status mounted archer. But does this imply that s/he was a warrior or a leader? Could she have been an aristocratic lady who liked hunting? I can't help but remember the riding and hunting imagery on some of the Manx Viking Age crosses, several of which commemorate women. This needs some more digging, including the implication that burials with horses suggest that the occupants were riders.  Well, yes, people with sufficient wealth probably did ride horses (in the summer), but does this make them a warrior, or a hunter, or could the horses have other meanings? I don't know, just asking for a friend.

The excellent Cat Jarman was also a refreshing interviewee on the programme regarding the female skeletons at Repton. Ignoring the presenter's astonishment ('it's previously been thought that Viking women were left at home' - no, Dr El-Shamahi, see Jesch 1991 and others), Cat made the important point that, yes, 'women were in some way part of moving out of Scandinavia, they weren't just sitting at home, looking after the farm'. But what part they played in this process is certainly multifarious, complex, and still to be discussed.

While these two programmes had some good bits, on the whole they were both mainly designed to reinforce the PR machine that has grown around the Bj 581 project. There is one other recent programme which does, however, in my view, begin to really have the more nuanced and important discussions that this topic needs. I'll let that programme have its own blog post, so stay tuned for 'Viking Warrior Women - More of the Same? II'.

Languages, Myths and Finds

Just wanted to give a little plug to a project I have had some involvement with. This has very much been the Year of Vikings, and in particular the splendid exhibition at the British Museum, now sadly finished, about which I have blogged before.

In connection with the exhibition, the Languages, Myths and Finds project had the aim of encouraging conversations between specialist university academics and advanced research students in Old Norse and Viking Studies, and local communities around Britain and Ireland who were interested in knowing more about their Viking heritage. The communities chosen for the project were Cleveland, Dublin, Isle of Lewis, Isle of Man and Munster. Five small teams of six academics and students were chosen to work with each community, in each case developing and researching topics most suited to that locality, as identified in dialogue with the community.

The result is now five gorgeous booklets, each very different, which can be downloaded in pdf form and for free from the project website.

Enjoy!

Vikings: Life and Legend

Tjørnehøj brooch
©Nationalmuseet, Copenhagen

The Mega Viking Show has finally come to town, and your faithful blogstress was honoured and privileged to be present when Margrethe, Queen of Denmark, and various other dignitaries opened it last Thursday, as well as to get an early viewing of the whole thing. I don't propose to review the exhibition - there are plenty of reactions of all types to be read in the media. The exhibition is designed for the general public, rather than the expert, and I firmly believe that the outsider's view is the one to seek out. Interestingly, the reactions vary enormously - do read more than one review to get a sense of it all. Another reason I would find it hard to review is that so many of the objects are almost too familiar. This is not only because I saw a version of the same exhibition in Copenhagen last September, but also because some of them I saw last time the British Museum did a Viking exhibition, in 1980, and in other exhibitions in various places since. Yet others are familiar from the many illustrated coffee-table books about the Vikings that flood the market on a regular basis.

But some of the exhibits are relatively new and I thought I'd pick out a few of my favourites at random, for my and your delectation. My top favourite is probably the valkyrie figure discovered in 2012, but I have blogged about that before. Several other 'valkyrie' images can be seen in the exhibition, and they are a fascinating group, mostly relatively recent metal detectorist discoveries. Another recent (2007) metal detectorist find from Denmark of which I am inordinately fond is the ship-brooch pictured above and extensively used by the British Museum in its publicity for the exhibition. It is sometimes said to represent a dragon-ship, but it is quite clear to me that the two figureheads are those of horses, as indicated by their ears and manes. Although similar brooches are known, this is the only one I have come across on which the animals seem very definitely to be horses' heads, and is thus a unique representation of that figure so commonly found in skaldic poetry, by which ships are called 'horses of the sea'. I also like the little face between the horses' heads, though quite what he represents I do not know.

Oval brooches have always fascinated me because they are typical of Scandinavian women's dress, and when we find them around the world, they raise interesting questions about the role of women in Viking migrations. Many thousands of them are known, from a broad geographical and chronological range, and in a variety of styles. For me, the one that tops them all is definitely that found in 2004 in an archaeological investigation at Finglas, in Dublin. There's an interesting photo of how it looked when it first came out of the ground on the website of Icon Archaeology, but it can only truly be appreciated in its cleaned-up form, which shows very clearly its 'protruding animal ornament', as the archaeologists say. These include both whole animal figures, and animal heads, all of which strongly resemble bears. Although similar brooches with small animal figures are known, I think these are the only ones which are clearly bears. They look quite cute to us today, though the bear was of course a feared and fearsome animal, and widely significant in Viking language and culture. I haven't found a good photo of the brooch to show you, but it adorns the cover of The Viking Age: Ireland and the West (2010), edited by John Sheehan and Donnchadh Ó Corráin, shown above, and is discussed at length by Maeve Sikora in that volume.

Finally, although the exhibition is not strong on runic inscriptions, it was a real pleasure to see the Kirk Andreas III stone from the Isle of Man, with its simple (and incomplete) inscription 'Þorvaldr raised this cross'. While not the most exciting inscription, it is of interest because, along with most of its fellow Manx inscriptions, it records the earliest uses of the word kross in Old Norse, a word with a fascinating history which appears to be borrowed from Latin crux into Gaelic, from there into Old Norse (as suggested by the Manx inscriptions) and from there into English, as suggested by some place-names in the north-west of England. Oh, and the stone, which is clearly a Christian cross-slab, also has those well-known images of what appear to be Odin at Ragnarok on one side, and a Christian figure on the other (above, left). It was particularly nice to see it in London last Thursday, because on Friday I went off on another runological field trip to the Isle of Man, where we had to make do with a replica in St Andrew's church, Andreas, instead. But the display in the church did have a nice picture of the last time the stone went to the British Museum, for the 1980 exhibition (above, right).

Jorvik Revisited

Some specialists are a wee bit sniffy, I'm told, about the Jorvik Viking Centre, but I've always thought it's rather a good thing. It has certainly been around for nearly three decades now, so it has had to have a few revamps along the way, and it's been a while since I last saw it. Taking a relative for a mini-break in York the other day gave me a welcome chance to view its latest incarnation, and I've come away with the conviction that it's still excellent edutainment. It simplifies, as it has to, but not in a bad way.

What's interesting is that the balance seems to be swinging more and more to the edu-, but still with sufficiently good -tainment for the punters to keep flocking there. The ride is more or less as ever, though regularly tweaked, and not so long ago spiced up with new dialogues (written and voiced by a colleague and students at the University of York). But the before and after the ride are both impressive, with some real nuggets of knowledge presented in an accessible way. The before gives you a useful summary of the excavations which form the basis of the ride, and lets you stand on the site, as it were. The after plays a bit to the gallery with skeletons, the famous Great Viking Turd, and so on, but also smuggles in a lot of useful stuff about palaeopathology, isotope analysis, metalworking techniques, and much more. All kinds of multimedia are used, prerecorded speakers, live intepreters with horns for you to blow if you dare, computer graphics, touch screens. The main criticism of the after bit is only that it's too small. It's a tribute to how interesting the stuff is that the rather narrow corridor with all this excitement was jammed with people looking, reading and learning, rather than heading straight for the shop.

We also dropped into the new temporary exhibition, Valhalla: In Search of the Viking Dead, around the corner. It had far fewer bells and whistles and for me it didn't fully explain the links between the various skeletons, sculpture and reconstructed artefacts on show, while the children's section had some nice things about Norse mythology, without for obvious reasons going too much into death and dying in Norse life and myth... Still, at least it was free with a Jorvik ticket, and the York Minster sculptures were well worth seeing.

Viking Cats and Kittens III

A little booklet I picked up on the Isle of Man provides five different popular 'myths' about the origins of the tailless, or nearly so, Manx cat, known as a Manxie. One of these is that 'mother cats bit off the tails of their kittens when the Isle of Man was invaded by Scandinavians to stop the invaders taking their tails to decorate their helmets'... Hmm. You'll have spotted this as a tall tale or urban myth (the helmets are the clue) even before learning that the breed is the result of a genetic mutation only 200-300 years ago. But I can't help wondering how old this popular misconception is, it certainly is an odd one.

Runic Ramblings

When the budget allows, as this year it did, the best place to take runology students for a field trip is the Isle of Man. It's been a few years since I've been myself, so I was keen to go too! As we were taking the ferry from Heysham, it seemed appropriate to get in the Viking mood by visiting the antiquities there, in particular the hogback at St Peter's. It really is one of the most extraordinary examples of its type and I was very pleased that we could arrange to see it (thanks to the kind gentleman who made this possible). In pictures and drawings it often looks tacky and naive, but I found it rather beautiful, quite carefully carved and very well-preserved. The images are as enigmatic as they come, and give rise to much speculative interpretation, but I am convinced that serious work would elucidate at least some of its mysteries. Sigurd? Sigmund? Ragnarök? The four dwarves holding up the world? That's just for starters... Heysham has many other attractions of the early medieval variety, so do visit if you can, and lunch at Squirrel's Bistro (especially the chips!) is highly recommended.

After a very smooth crossing (unusual for the Irish Sea!) we arrived at our Viking-themed B&B in Foxdale (Old Norse foss-dalr 'waterfall valley'), and very nice it was too, well supplied with Manxies. A delicious and convivial dinner with some old friends in Castletown set us up very nicely for the following runic day.

It is possible to see all of the accessible rune stones in the Isle of Man in one day if you have a car and are determined, but we took it a bit more slowly, as the aim was to train the students in the skills of field runology - so quality rather than quantity was the name of the game. Still, we saw everything there was to see, runic or non-runic, 'Celtic' or 'Viking' (or even 'Anglo-Saxon') at Braddan, St John's, Kirk Michael, Ballaugh, Jurby, Andreas and Maughold. By the end of the day everyone was quite proficient in distinguishing their Manx bs from their fourth runes, and had learned how to record and interpret these often fragmentary or confused inscriptions. The late Ray Page was constantly in our minds, as we referred constantly to his notes and interpretations; he has done more work than anyone on these inscriptions, and the lucky person who in the end does the definitive scholarly edition (still awaited) will relay heavily on his spadework.

And of course we couldn't ignore the wonderful pictures on so many of the stones, and wondered at the rich mixtures of geometrical and figural ornament, Norse and Celtic names, runes and ogham, and much else. Sigurd, Odin and Christ were obviously the top chaps in tenth-century Man, along with their attendant figures of various kinds, but also so many animals - goats, rams, boars, stags, horses, wolves, dogs ... What does it all mean? By the end of the day, our heads were spinning with ideas and questions.

Man has the advantage of being able to play up both its Viking and its 'Celtic' heritage, depending on which is more fashionable at any given moment. We of course noticed the Viking stuff more, such as this splendid modern stained-glass at Jurby, taking its theme from one of the Andreas crosses. The day ended with a meal at the appropriately-named The Viking hostelry on the outskirts of Castletown, with its most inappropriate collection of smiling Viking heads adorned with horned helmets.

The runic thumbscrew was loosened slightly on our final day and we did a bit of site visiting (Balladoole) and museum study in the fine Viking room of the Manx Museum. We admired the snow on the appropriately-named Snaefell, which had come on the cold (and I mean cold) wind of the night before. This usefully blew the clouds away but also threatened a rough crossing back, as it proved, exacerbated by the fact that we were on the catamaran to Liverpool rather than the ferry. Some indeed suffered. It may not be much consolation, but I always advise those who are seasick that some of the best Vikings were too - in fact the Faroes are said to have been populated entirely by those Vikings who were too seasick to carry on to Iceland!