The Children of Ash and Elm

A so-called picture-stone memorial from the island of Gotland, dating to the fifth or sixth century and showing the characteristic burning disc thought to denote the sun, with the moon and stars. During the sixth-century climate crisis, such imagery disappeared as the sun lost its power, never to return in the Iron Age art of the North. This stone

There is also the richly textured world of similes, or ‘kennings’, in which two or more nouns and descriptors are combined to evoke an object visually or metaphorically. Thus, the ocean was ‘the whale road’, a ship was a ‘wave-horse’, and a person’s thoughts were ‘waves on the shore of the mind-sea’. Trees were frequent metaphors for humans, almost

But in the middle decades of the eighth century, a number of factors came together to both propel and draw the Vikings overseas in new ways, and in ever greater numbers.

When properly recited in appropriate surroundings, Viking-Age poetry can taste like cold iron on the tongue, its complex rhyme schemes building upon one another like layers of frost—treacherous but beautiful.

To add to the region’s misery, it is also possible that the Justinian plague pandemic that swept across Europe from 541 onwards also reached Scandinavia; it has so far been detected as far north as Germany. Estimates of the population loss across Scandinavia rise as high as 50 percent—a number considered reasonable by both volcanologists and archae

It is clear that in Valhöll are all the trappings of hall life in Midgard, but writ large. Servants gather kindling for the fires; there are pigs to be fed; horses graze outside; and hunting dogs are at the ready. The einherjar—the immortal warrior dead—drink, play board games, and fight. If they are killed, they rise again each evening in time for

The rape of a low-born woman was still a more serious offence than consensual adultery committed with a woman of status. Equally, the legal codes do seem to genuinely recognise a woman’s claim to the integrity of her body and person—for herself rather than merely as an extension of her kin. There were laws against unwanted touching without violence

It is good to bear in mind that no other contemporary peoples ranged over the then-known Eurasian and North Atlantic world to the same degree as the Scandinavians. They travelled through the territories of some forty-odd present-day countries, in documented encounters with more than fifty cultures.

The Saga of Grettir, for example, actually describes the looting of a chamber grave that is a perfect match for the archaeology. When the thief digs down through the mound, he first cuts through the roof timbers and then falls into a foul-smelling space below, landing among horse bones at one end of a chamber. Stumbling forward and groping about in