Clothing, jewellery, tools and material – the real life behind the beautiful things.
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Most Vikings were not raiders but farmers, traders and craftspeople. A look inside the long house where their lives took place.
Read more →An entire heroic epic on a single teak panel: rider, ship and figures. Our Atli motif stands in an ancient Norse tradition.
Read more →A stone that is warm rather than cold, light as wood, honey-gold in the light – and sometimes carrying within it an insect from a world millions of …
Read more →When we think of Vikings, we often see grey-brown figures in undyed wool. That is a mistake. Whoever could afford it wore colour – glowing red, deep …
Read more →They ran the farm, could inherit and divorce – and yet the truth about the Viking woman is more nuanced than modern myths suggest.
Read more →A stone that burns like coal, charges electrically when rubbed like amber, and polishes to a deep black shine: jet is one of the strangest materials …
Read more →How do you pay when there is no money of your own? The Vikings had a simple answer: with silver, weighed on the scales. Whole arm-rings, foreign …
Read more →Long before chess came to the North, people sat on the long winter evening over a different board: Hnefatafl, the “king's game.” It was not a game of …
Read more →In the darkest time of the year the Norsemen celebrated Jól. Some customs of this winter feast live on in our Christmas to this day.
Read more →When archaeologists open a Viking-age grave, one find is almost always there: a comb. The comb was the most personal thing in the North – and a …
Read more →Among silver and glass, glowing red beads keep appearing in the rich women's graves of the Viking Age: carnelian. The warm, semi-translucent stone …
Read more →How did people heal in a world without a pharmacy? With herbs, with knowledge – and with a charm to go with it. An Old English poem, the Nine Herbs …
Read more →The shining swords, the fine brooches, the carved ships – behind all of it stood a craftsman with his tools. What those tools looked like is shown by …
Read more →From honey, water and time comes the oldest intoxicating drink of the North. But mead was more than a drink – it was community, and even poetry.
Read more →Again and again, peat-cutters in Ireland, Scotland and Scandinavia find the same riddle: a lump of waxy, ancient butter, buried deep in the bog. Some …
Read more →There are tools that become legend. Among the Vikings it was a sword – or rather: a whole group of swords, all bearing the same name in the blade …
Read more →The Viking ship was not merely a tool – it was a status symbol. And at its top there often gleamed a masterpiece of gilded bronze: the weathervane.
Read more →Matted hair, unwashed for years, reeking across the meadhall – that is the Viking of cliché. The finds tell another story: daily combing, one fixed …
Read more →Coarse brown sacking, a shaggy fur collar, and of course the obligatory horned helmet – that is the Viking of film and fair-tent. The textile finds …
Read more →Viking jewellery was rarely just decoration. A pair of brooches held the dress, an arm-ring was status symbol and savings account in one, and a …
Read more →Barely an image of the „real Viking“ reaches us today without dark runic and knotwork tattoos. But how do we actually know? The honest answer: from a …
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