The Children of Ash and Elm

The graves provide small clues, although they are hard to interpret. For example, the buried dead, and even the accompanying horses, sometimes wore crampons on their feet— does this imply the funeral took place in winter, or are the dead travelling to somewhere cold? The written sources mention special ‘Hel-shoes’ to speed the dead on their way—is

Leif Eiríksson, allegedly the first European to land in North America, was also known as hinn heppni, ‘the Lucky’.

Little is understood, for example, of how the Vikings measured time. Their music and songs are a mystery; here there is a potential starting point in the few surviving instruments, with tonal qualities that can be reconstructed, but what the Vikings did with them is another matter entirely. It is unclear where women were believed to go when they di

Odin’s hall, and Freyja’s, hold “all men who have fallen in battle since the beginning”, but they will be too few “when the wolf comes”, as Fenrir inevitably will at the Ragnarök. Kings and their retinues are therefore especially welcome, with the Valkyries serving wine for such a royal entrance.

The Vikings were back the following year, and they knew what they liked: isolated, undefended, but very rich monastic houses. They were probably well familiar with them from trading ventures, as markets were sometimes held near such institutions. Any Scandinavian entering a church of this kind—rather drab on the outside and served by ineffectual-lo

Before entering the ship, the enslaved girl is lifted up by men in order to look over an odd thing—a specially built free-standing door frame that has been set up in the open air. She describes three successive visions of the next world and its inhabitants: a ‘Paradise’ beautiful and green like a garden, where the girl’s dead family is already wait

Some of the inscriptions even detail the process, and occasionally we find not only the rune-carver named but also the whole team: one who shaped the stone itself, another who laid out the interlace patterns within which the runes would sit (we know from one such text that they were called something like ‘snake-ribbons’ or ‘snake-eels’, although th

In all, many thousands of runic inscriptions have come down to us, mostly in the form of messages carefully engraved onto free-standing rocks—the famous ‘runestones’ mentioned here many times—in texts set within beautiful borders and other designs of writhing beasts and symbols. Originally painted in bright colours, sometimes the designs and inscri

Just as the einherjar would fight for the gods at the Ragnarök, the drowned also had their station, although a terrible one that they do not seem to have earned. As all the powers gather at the end, something will stir on the ocean floor, the greatest Viking ship ever made. Its name is Naglfar, ‘Nail-Ship’, so called because it is built from the fi