A gentle wander through the Viking world
Door from Rauland church with runic inscription on the upper iron fitting. Photo J. Jesch 2023. Today is the feast day of the holy King Ólafr Haraldsson, who died on this day in 1030 at the battle of Stiklestad and subsequently became both Saint Ólafr and rex perpetuus Norvegiae 'eternal king of Norway'. As a widely-known figure, he not unnaturally appears in quite a few runic inscriptions, in…
Photo of Bryne by Rune Sattler CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org One of the most famous footballers today is the still very young Erling Braut Haaland, born in Leeds, but firmly rooted in his home town of Bryne, south of Stavanger, in the Jæren region of southwest Norway. Today's lecture is about his surname. Like many Norwegians, Erling's surname derives from what was originally a…
Illustration by Wilhelm Wetlesen for Harald Hardrådes saga, Heimskringla 1899-edition : «Kvinner frå Nidaros står og ser på at skipet vert drive fram med sytti årer.» Well, tonight is when it happens - Norway meets England in the World Cup. I have already pointed out in a previous blogpost that Erling Braut Haaland's namesake, the eleventh-century Erlingr Skjalgsson, said, before a battle, that…
Erling Skjalgsson by Theodor Kittelsen (public domain) It seems to be Erling Haaland weekend. The most famous contemporary Norwegian and footballing superstar's club, Manchester City, won the FA Cup yesterday. Perhaps a premonition of this was an item in the Guardian on Friday (actually in the print version yesterday) announcing that he was to make his acting debut, playing a Viking in a…
The following is an extract from something I am working on at the moment - an analysis of the killing of Earl Rǫgnvaldr of Orkney, as reported in chapter 103 of Orkneyinga saga , on the 20th of August, in 1158 (all translations my own): Replica of a statue possibly of Earl Rǫgnvaldr, Kirkwall, Photo © Judith Jesch It was one day at áliðnu sumri 'towards the end of summer' that the two joint earls…
It's good to be in Norway again on Norse and Viking business and today I had a free day in Oslo. I'm almost ashamed to say that despite coming here regularly for many decades and even living here a long time ago, I had never been up to Ekeberg. Until, that is, when, on a previous trip in a brief Covid lull last December ( on different Norse and Viking business ), our group was taken up there for…
On academic business in London the other day, I chanced upon Tooley Street, just near London Bridge Underground station. Now, I've known about Tooley Street for a long time, but never actually visited it, which was clearly remiss of me, as you will understand below. Tooley Street takes its name from St Óláfr of Norway, or rather from a church dedicated to that saint, as explained by Bruce Dickins…
Doorway in Kirkwall photo by Judith Jesch Today is the feast day of Óláfr Haraldsson, king of Norway and saint, who died in battle, killed by his political enemies at Stiklestad, on this day in 1030. He soon became a popular saint in many parts of northern Europe and further afield, as can be seen in some interesting contributions on Twitter today (they tend to turn up every year on this day, and…
Christine Fell in 1965 from a photo kindly provided by Gillian Fellows-Jensen One of my most treasured possessions is my copy of Sigurður Nordal's scholarly edition (1913-16) of Orkneyinga saga , which has been my constant companion for over two decades now, ever since I inherited it from my former colleague and friend Professor Christine E. Fell OBE (1938-1998; you can read about her on pp.…
For International Women's Day it is always useful to remind ourselves that, even in the Viking Age, women were approximately half of the population. There seems to persist an idea that both Vikings and everything that went on in the Viking Age were somehow entirely a masculine domain. Naturally, I have been trying to nuance this picture for at least thirty years (this year being the anniversary of…
Shameless self-promotion has not generally been the main purpose of this blog. I've tended to aim for the slightly quirky, or even personal, just recording things that I have found interesting. But I have also enjoyed bringing to light various Norse and Viking things that I have observed in my studies or my travels. And every once in a while I am minded to comment on books or other phenomena from…
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…
Back in the day when this blog was nobbut a baby blog, one of my first posts gave a quick mention to the Odinic obsessions of a certain Julian Cope , ageing musician and antiquarian who grew up in Tamworth. Twelve years later, the Other Half is still keeping not-very-musical me up to date with Cope's antics, especially when they have a Viking flavour, as they often do, such as his 2017 album…
The 29th of this month would have been Terje Spurkland's 72nd birthday. I first encountered him in the academic year of 1980-81, when I was on a scholarship in Norway and attended his lectures on Old Norse grammar, to improve both my Norwegian and my Old Norse. He was certainly a memorable lecturer, even then, but I didn't really get to know him until about ten years later. That was when I…
Here in dismal, grey, snowless Oslo it was a delight to visit the Historical Museum and especially its exhibition called Víkingr . The museum is currently being renovated, so this exhibition is a pared-down version of its old Viking Age exhibition, but also a long-term stop-gap while we wait for the new Viking museum on Bygdøy in 2025. It's quite minimalist, in terms of both the way it is…
The church at Orphir. Photo © Judith Jesch As I noted in a festive blog post a few years ago , the Old Norse word jól can refer either to the pre-Christian midwinter festival, or the Christian one. What seems to unite them is that it is very much a time of feasting, as can be seen from both skaldic and saga-references. But the stories are generally interested in conflict, so we rarely get a…
Reproduction dice and a gaming piece made by Adam Parsons (c) University of Nottingham CC-BY-4.0 In my previous blog post , I looked at two recent television programmes on this perennially popular topic. I found a few things to like but on the whole concluded that the programmes were still very much driven by a strong desire to prove at all costs that there really were Viking women warriors…
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…
Rune-stick N B644 (late 12thc.) from Bryggens Museum, Bergen. Photo Judith Jesch It's quite common for various media and/or internet sites to put up a list of suggested book titles for people wanting to learn more about the Vikings. A recent one is this on Medievalists.net entitled ' Which Books About the Vikings Should I Read '? A couple of years ago the Guardian did ' Top Ten Books About…
Lighthouse at the Point of Ardnamurchan As I have previously pointed out , many of the poetic-sounding names of the shipping forecast have Viking associations, as does the Point of Ardnamurchan, in the inshore waters section. Plus it sounds wonderful, too. So who could resist a little trip up there, especially when someone else was paying and there was a work reason to go? (More information on why…
Viking ship model in Repton. Photo Judith Jesch This blog started off as a light-hearted romp through some of my interests, mainly to do with Vikings and Scandinavia. I hope it is still mostly light-hearted, but I have come to realise that it is also, and now perhaps primarily, an outlet for some of the knowledge I have amassed over the years. Over the eleven (!) years I have been writing this…
In a blog post last year , I questioned whether the meat of the polar bear was especially edible. Well, travel is educational and I got some kind of an answer on my recent visit to the Westfjords of Iceland . The very splendid Westfjords Heritage Museum in Ísafjörður had a small display about the shooting of a polar bear up at Hornvík in the far northwest of the region in June 1963 by some…
My recent visit to the Westfjords, and to Hrafnseyri in particular, sent me back to re-read Hrafns saga Sveinbjarnarsonar . A relatively little-discussed saga, it is set in the Sturlung era, and recounts the life history of Hrafn up to his execution by his rival Þorvaldr in 1213. Much of the saga is taken up with feuds of various kinds, over sheep or whales, or the more serious political rivalries…
Although the Westfjords (Vestfirðir) of Iceland are sparsely populated nowadays, they do figure quite largely in a variety of Old Icelandic texts. Several sagas are set, wholly or in part, in the region, including some very well-known ones like Gísla saga , which has its own trail mainly around the Dýrafjörður area. Here however I will just look at a few anecdotes from my favourite text…
As regular readers of this blog know, I quite often go to academic conferences in the Viking diaspora and usually manage to stay on for a few days to have a bit of a busman's holiday. This summer's big conference was the 17th International Saga Conference in Iceland, held in Reykjavík and Reykholt . The conference was both enjoyable and useful but rather large (over 400 attended). And Iceland is a…