It's Ragnarok this Saturday! Try not to worry too much

The Jorvik Viking Festival in York, England is billing this Saturday as Ragnarok, the Norse-version of the apocalypse. They calculate that February 22nd will be the date when the Norse gods - Odin, Thor, Loki et al.- fight an epic battle that will leave the world destroyed.

The festival organizers are apparently not too serious about the events. The York Press reports that during the day they will be hosting combat training sessions for the younger kids, and the "finale will see about 300 warriors gather in Dean’s Park for a march through the city from 1.30pm, before massing at the Eye of York at 6.45pm for the climactic battle."

NPR has sent this radio report back on what to expect:



If you are still worried, check out Judith Jesch's article on the University of Nottingham's website, where she talks about the meaning of Ragnarok, which may be more peaceful than is seen in popular imagination.  By looking at the meaning of the term ragnarok, the events foretold can be seen more as a  ‘renewal of the divine powers’.

Jesch adds:

If this meaning goes back to the pre-Christian period, as seems likely, then it sheds a whole new light on those gloomy old Vikings. Their mythology envisaged Ragnarok as a cleansing process, through which the gods could be reborn. This more positive view of Ragnarok would also have suited their Christian descendants (Iceland was converted around the year 1000 AD), who could interpret the renewal as being a rebirth into a whole new dispensation with a whole new kind of divine power. This attractive solution not only revises our understanding of the Viking world-view, but also explains how the story could successfully be reinterpreted by Christians, such as the newly-converted Vikings who in the tenth century erected a cross (depicted here) with scenes from both Ragnarok and Christian myth at Gosforth, in Cumbria.

Enjoy the day!

Evidence of Viking Outpost Found in Canada

For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America's east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors.

 It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada earlier this month, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas. 

While digging in the ruins of a centuries-old building on Baffin Island, far above the Arctic Circle, a team led by Sutherland, adjunct professor of archaeology at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a research fellow at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, found some very intriguing whetstones. Wear grooves in the blade-sharpening tools bear traces of copper alloys such as bronze—materials known to have been made by Viking metalsmiths but unknown among the Arctic's native inhabitants.

 Taken together with her earlier discoveries, Sutherland's new findings further strengthen the case for a Viking camp on Baffin Island. "While her evidence was compelling before, I find it convincing now," said James Tuck, professor emeritus of archaeology, also at Memorial University.

Click here to read this article from National Geographic

See also our feature on L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland

Scholars examine Viking Life in Greenland through soil samples, music

A scientist and a composer are working together to explore a thousand years of Greenland's history through soil samples.

The project is called Exposure: Understanding Living in Extreme Environments. It examines Greenland's history, including the Inuit, Viking Settlements, and the modern communities, by using materials and data from the forensic examination of soils to explore human responses to environmental change. Soils record are investigated and revealed in different perspectives.

Images of soil samples gathered by Dr Paul Adderley have been set to audio by Dr Michael Young. Dr Young said: "Hidden in the soil is this story about people and the environment. We explore that."

The audio-video presentation is generated live by a specially built computer program. The presentation takes about 30 minutes to explore more than 1,000 years of human history.

Stirling University's Dr Adderley said: "We combine visual information gained from a forensic examination of soils from old settlements, with an understanding of how Greenland's environment has changed.

"The everyday farm-life of the Viking settlers is used to create the synthesis of the sounds heard. Michael and I hope that the work will cause the audience to reflect on the nature of these past communities and the extremes of environment which were faced by Viking settlers."

Dr Young, from Goldsmiths, University of London, said he had used audio from a variety of sources to create the science-art collaboration. Data obtained from the soil imaging is used as a source for generative audio and visual exploration: photomicrographs (and related contextual images) are processed and animated, and environmental sound recordings, in conjunction synthesized materials, are subject to real-time granular processing and dynamic filtering.

Click here to go to their website.

Experts Gather to Celebrate York's Viking History

Academics from around the Viking world will gather in York on Saturday 13th February 2010 for an entertaining and illuminating look at the past, present and future of Viking studies.

The two-day conference - “A celebration of Iconic Collections and Excavations from the Viking World” - will open the 2010 JORVIK Viking Festival and forms part of JORVIK Viking Centre's 25th anniversary celebrations. It will celebrate some of the most important developments and iconic artefacts uncovered in the last quarter-century of research into the Viking era.

Delegates will also get a sneak preview of the newly renovated JORVIK Viking Centre at an evening reception on Saturday 13th February; and the opportunity to take part in a Conference coach tour visiting some of Yorkshire's finest Viking-Age artefacts.

Speakers include former York Archaeological Trust director, Peter Addyman, and deputy director, Richard Hall; National Museum of Ireland director, Patrick Wallace; Anne-Christine Larsen of Vikingeborgen Trelleborg, Sydvestsjællands Museum, Denmark; Ellen Marie Næss of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo; and Anne Brundle from The Orkney Museum.

York Archaeological Trust chief executive, John Walker, says the conference offers delegates a unique opportunity to benefit from the most up-to-date interpretation of the best-known Viking-Age collections of material and archaeological sites from around the world:


“It is fitting to celebrate the anniversary of one of the world’s most astounding Viking-Age discoveries with this conference here in York,” he says. “We are honoured to welcome these leading experts to speak at our celebratory event, which will be fascinating for anyone with an interest in Viking history.”

For bookings or enquiries please call 01904 615505.

Papers include:

‘Viking Dublin and the Public’, by Dr. Pat Wallace, National Museum of Ireland

‘In Search of Viking Orkney’, by Anne Brundle, The Orkney Museum

‘Oseberg`s elusive ladies’, by Ellen Marie Ness, The Viking Ship Museum, Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, Norway

‘Jorvik - Uncovering a Viking-Age City’, by Dr Richard Hall, York Archaeological Trust

Vikings and Death

In the Viking Age people were buried in many different sort of places. Did the ancient Scandinavians chose a particular place for burial or were the burial sites randomly selected? Had the choice anything to do with ideas of the afterlife?

Archaeologist Eva Thäte will deliver a lecture about vikings and death at the University of Stavanger in Norway next week. She will explain that Viking Age burial rites are very diverse as were people’s choices of places for burial grounds. In the Late Iron Age (AD 500-1000), people in Scandinavia buried their deceased on high ground, in ancient burial mounds, in houses, close to water sites and near roads or boundaries.

The archaeologist is a Visiting Research Associate from the University of Chester in England, and a well-known face at the Museum of Archaeology, where she’s doing further research on the theme Vikings and Death, more specific on the costume of boat graves.

"The diversity of the evidence poses the question of why the ancient Scandinavians chose a particular place for burial or if the burial sites were just randomly selected. Whilst the custom of re-using ancient monuments for the dead may have had to do with hereditary rights to property in the first place, the historical sources show that the placing of cemeteries elsewhere in the landscape matches ideas of the afterlife," says Thäte.

A comparison with modern studies on near-death-experiences demonstrates that the aforementioned landscape features match archetypes with a liminal meaning. The theory is put forward that people chose sites that covered as many of these topographical features as possible in order to be prepared for the transition to the otherworld.

Dr. Thäte's current research project is The Boat on the Hill. Topography, symbolism and new interpretations of boat burials in Viking Age Scandinavia.

She says, "One of the most significant objects linked to the Vikings is the boat - and not least in the Viking-Age burial rite. The boat was an important symbol in pre-Christian Scandinavia that designated the transition from life to death.

"No detailed research on boat burials has been done for the last 30 to 40 years and new evidence from recent excavations in Rogaland (Norway) - a region where boat burial was common practice - demands a re-assessment of outdated results and statements."

Her lastest article is "Barrows, Roads and Ridges: Or Where to Bury the Dead? The Choice of Burial Grounds in Late Iron-Age Scandinavia," in Mortuary Practices & Social Identities in the Middle Ages. Essays in Honour of Heinrich Härke, from Exeter University Press.

The Assembly Project awarded £850,000 to study Vikings and Early Medieval Europe

Over £850,000 has been made by medieval scholars from the Universities of Durham, Oslo and Vienna and the University of the Highlands and Islands, Centre for Nordic Studies, Orkney, by the Humanities in Europe Research Awards Scheme. This will fund a three-year, international effort, known as The Assembly Project, is designed to explore the role of assemblies or things in the creation, consolidation and maintenance of collective identities, emergent polities and kingdoms in early medieval Northern Europe.

Orkney and Shetland are to be research sites for a major project looking at the way the Viking communities governed themselves and strengthened their groups.

Around £118,000 has been awarded to the Centre for Nordic Studies for research on administrative organisation and Norse “thing”, meaning governing assembly, sites in areas of Viking settlement and colonisation.

The centre – supported by UHI, the prospective University of the Highlands and Islands – is involved in a three-year project with Oslo, Vienna and Durham universities.

Dr Alexandra Sanmark at the Centre for Nordic Studies, one of four principal investigators, won a bid for a total £850,000 from the Humanities in Europe Research Awards. The Assembly Project was ranked third out of 168 applications from across Europe.

The Centre for Nordic Studies research will involve archaeological fieldwork on outdoor parliament and court sites in Orkney and Shetland, as well as an Orkney workshop and an exhibition planned for 2011. Findings will be compared and contrasted to the situation in the Viking homelands.

Centre director Dr Donna Heddle said: “The development and strengthening of early historic European collectives lie at the centre of our current understanding of Europe. This project will fit in well with the centre's research agenda. I am absolutely delighted that our strategic significance has been recognised.”

Research will involve archaeological fieldwork on outdoor parliament and court sites in Orkney and Shetland, as well as an Orkney workshop and an exhibition planned for 2011, Dr Heddle explained. Findings will then be compared and contrasted to the situation in the Viking homelands, she added.

Bill Ross, principal of Orkney College UHI welcomed what now amounts to two successful project proposals relating to things. He added: “Orkney College, through our archaeology department, is a partner in another major project funded by the Northern Peripheries Programme (NPP) of the EU and focusing on linking and developing thing sites with partners in Shetland, Norway, Iceland, the Highlands of Scotland and the Isle of Man.

“We are currently looking closely at how the projects will complement each other with a view to making the total impact greater than the sum of the two parts”

The NPP things project is being led by Dr Sarah Jane Gibbon, who presented an acclaimed paper on thing sites at the Orkney-based Viking conference, Maritime Societies, in 2008, and is now co-editing the conference proceedings with Dr James Barrett of Cambridge University.

Dr Gibbon is hoping to undertake fieldwork this summer on the Orkney assembly sites.

For the NPP project, a two-islands event, hosted jointly with Shetland Amenity Trust, is planned for mid April, with details to be advertised later.

“It is exactly this kind of high quality, international knowledge exchange that raises our profile, brings visitors and makes archaeology work for the community in Orkney” stated Julie Gibson, Orkney’s county archaeologist, whose background is also in medieval archaeology.

Dr Jane Downes, head of archaeology in Orkney College, UHI stated. “We are now partners in two out of the three significant projects studying the subject across Britain and Europe — this is good news.”

Another £115,000 from the grant will come to Durham University to fund research on assemblies and assembly places and the creation of national identities in Britain and Europe.

See also the article: Places of Assembly: New Discoveries in Sweden and England

Did Elephants doom the Norse in Greenland?

A new article is examining the theory that Greenland's medieval Norse settlements were ruined by the collapse of the trade in walrus tusks, after ivory from elephants became more easily accessible for artisans in Europe.

In her article, "Desirable teeth: the medieval trade in Arctic and African ivory," Kirsten Seaver criticizes that idea, and puts forward her own theory about why the Norse settlers mysteriously vanished from Greenland sometime during the 15th century.

In 1998, Danish archaeologist Else wrote an article which suggested that in the beginning of the fourteenth century, a surplus of reasonably priced elephant ivory from Africa caused ivory from walrus tusks to lose its market share, which were so catastrophic that it eventually led to the collapse of the entire Norse Greenland colony.

Ivory has been a prized commodity in Europe and Asia since antiquity, with ports along the north African coast controlling much of the trade. When Norse settlers arrived in Greenland during in the 10th century, they soon found that walrus ivory could be a profitable trade.

Roesdahl believes that this trade went through Norway and would have been a cheaper alternative to elephant ivory. Several carved tusks have been found among the treasures of European rulers, particularly Scandinavian kings.

But this trade floundered by the fourteenth century, according to Roesdahl, as trade between Africa and Europe grew, allowing for more elephant ivory to be exported to the continent. Seaver disputes the notion that this would have undermined the Greenland walrus trade.

She writes, "Prior to 1500, it is highly unlikely that there was a drop in the price of elephant ivory capable of displacing walrus tusks in the market, even in periods when more African ivory appears to have been reaching European workshops. It is far more likely that, during periods of increased supply in response to European demand, the price of African ivory would have risen in step with the available quantities, because the transportation costs arising from Africa’s immense distances."

Seaver adds in her own theory about the fall of the Norse colony, linking it to the increased activities of English fishermen in the North Atlantic. During the 15th century, the English were particularly interested in catching fish for food, in particularly cod, and were sailing out further outwards to find stocks. Seaver believes that the Norse in Greenland may have been attracted to this trade, and shifted their settlements to be closer to better fishing grounds.

Seaver believes that large numbers of Greenlanders may have even tried to develop settlements in Labrador, with English support, which proved to be disastrous, as the climate in that portion of northern Canada was much more hostile than even in Greenland.

"If the Norse Greenlanders migrated west to a stretch of Labrador chosen by others," Seaver writes, "as it appears likely that they did, they may have ended up on the bottom of the Davis Strait before even reaching the other shore, or they may have perished during their first winter in the new land from new diseases, from starvation, or simply from the bitter cold."

Seaver's article, "Desirable teeth: the medieval trade in Arctic and African ivory, appears in the Journal of Global History, Volume 4 (2009).  See also:

Interview with Nancy Marie Brown about her book The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman


What did the Viking Discoverers of America Know of the North Atlantic Environment?

Archaeological discovery of Norse presence on Baffin Island

One of Canada's top Arctic archeologists says the remnants of a stone-and-sod wall unearthed on southern Baffin Island may be traces of a shelter built more than 700 years ago by Norse seafarers - a stunning find that would be just the second location in the New World with evidence of a Viking-built structure.

Canwest News Service reported that the signs of a possible medieval Norse presence in the Canadian territory of Nunavut were found at the previously examined Nanook archeological site, about 200 km southwest of Iqaluit, where people of the now-extinct Dorset culture once occupied a stretch of Hudson Strait shoreline.

Newfoundland's L'Anse aux Meadows is the only known location of a Viking settlement in North America. But over the past 10 years, research teams led by the Canadian Museum of Civilization's chief of Arctic archeology, Pat Sutherland, have compiled evidence from field studies and archived collections that suggests Norse explorers were visiting other parts of Canada.

At three sites on Baffin Island, which the Norse called 'Helluland' or 'land of stone slabs', and at another in northern Labrador, the researchers have documented dozens of suspected Norse artifacts such as Scandinavian-style spun yarn, distinctively notched and decorated wood objects and whetstones for sharpening knives and axes. A single human tooth from one of the sites was tested a few years ago for possible European DNA, but the results were inconclusive.

Among the new artifacts found near the sod-and-stone features at Nanook is a whalebone spade - consistent with tools found at Norse sites in Greenland, and which might have been used to cut sections of turf for the shelter.

There is also evidence at Nanook of what appears to be a rock-lined drainage system comparable to ones found at proven Viking sites.

The apparent "architectural elements" found at the site "still have to be confirmed," Sutherland told Canwest News Service. "They're definitely anomalous for Dorset culture. And when you see these things in connection with Norse artifacts, it suggests that there may have been some kind of a shore station."

Sutherland's theory is that Norse sailors continued to travel between Greenland and Arctic Canada for generations after the failed colonization bid in Newfoundland. She believes they encountered and possibly traded with the Dorset, ancient aboriginals who were later overrun - probably before 1400 A.D. - by the eastward-migrating Thule
ancestors of modern Inuit.

The theory is a controversial one. University of Waterloo archeologist Robert Park recently challenged the dating of artifacts and Sutherland's interpretations of evidence in a paper published by the journal Antiquity.

Park argues that the "most plausible explanation" for Norse-like traces at Nanook and other sites is that "none of these traits come from Dorset-European contact."

He suggests such items may have been developed without any Norse influence by the ancient indigenous inhabitants of northern Canada. "Despite the difficulty of proving a negative - i.e. establishing that Dorset did not come into contact with the Norse - on the basis of these data there appears to be no convincing archeological evidence that contact occurred," Park concludes.

Sutherland insists that while proof of Norse-Dorset interaction isn't overwhelming, there are now "several lines of evidence" pointing to sustained contact. And she notes that the kind of ``boulders and turf'' structural feature observed at Nanook is "atypical for Dorset" and consistent with Norse culture.

"I think in any scientific field, when something new comes along that hasn't been given much consideration in the past, it generates debate," she said.

Sutherland, whose research is also featured in the current issue of Canadian Geographic, said a scientific paper summarizing a decade's worth of work on the national museum's Helluland project is due to be published in August. Further field work at a Dorset site in northern Labrador is scheduled for 2010, she added.