Greetings from Oslo!

Nothing says you’re in viking country like a display case of actual viking swords greeting you at the airport.

Welcome to Oslo.

Today, I’m off to day one of the Viking Congress at the University of Oslo. It’s a prestigious conference for the top scholars in the world who study this stuff which happens only every four years, so think of it as the Viking Olympics. It’s my first time going and I’m really looking forward to meeting so many people that I’ve known for a while and that we’ve had on our Vikingology Podcast, getting to see them for the first time in the flesh.

I’ll be reporting all the goings on, but wanted to send just a couple shots from my world just now. Here is a view from my apartment in an old, beautiful neighborhood.

And here is one from the plane ride over the North Sea. So many wind turbines like stars in the sky or icebergs off the coast of Greenland. I don’t know why some people in the U.S. don’t like these off-shore wind projects and think they’re ugly. I think they’re amazing. Gigantic, and yet so small in the vastness of the sea. Spinning slowly, peacefully. There’s a sort of beauty about them.

But the more amazing thing for me, as someone who studies the vikings — primarily those from Denmark and Norway who made ample use of the North Sea — is how deceptive it is on a map. Only by flying over it and literally getting that ‘30,000-foot view’ can I begin to imagine the feat of setting out in viking ships to traverse back and forth. Ships that were strong, mighty, and large (at least some of them) for their time, but which pale in comparison to the giant container ships that I see outside my airplane window that look like tiny little boats. It makes what the vikings did seem unreal and all the more impressive. If you squint at the horizon line on the left, you’ll just barely make out part of the coastline of the Netherlands, what was called Frisia in the Viking Age. It was a common target for them due to the trade emporia that existed there. Despite what had to be an arduous sea crossing, Vikings always went were the money was.