Events, places, people and excavations – what really shaped the Viking Age, evidenced not asserted.
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High above the world of humans, beyond the burning rainbow bridge, lies Asgard – the fortified home of the Æsir. It is fortress, city and heaven all …
Read more →Almost 1,500 years before the first Germanic peoples entered Roman history books, a highly developed Early Bronze Age culture flourished in the heart …
Read more →Between the world of humans and the world of the gods a bridge of light is stretched: Bifröst, the rainbow. It is the most beautiful structure of the …
Read more →Long before the Edda was written down, the people of Gotland told their stories in stone – in images that still puzzle us today.
Read more →Since 1878, Birka’s grave Bj 581 had been the textbook example of a high-status Viking warrior – the „ultimate Viking". In 2017 a DNA analysis …
Read more →Sometimes history is found not with the spade but with the computer. For a long time four of Harald Bluetooth's famous ring fortresses were known …
Read more →„So did they wear horned helmets or not?" The honest answer is a double no and yes: the Vikings did not. But the North really did have them – a good …
Read more →Sometimes a war is won not with the sword but with the purse. In 991 the English ealdorman Byrhtnoth faced a Viking army at Maldon – and lost …
Read more →In 723 an Anglo-Saxon missionary stood axe in hand before the holiest tree of the Hessians – the oak sacred to the thunder-god Donar near Geismar. He …
Read more →Vikings were not only raiders. In the Rhine-Meuse delta they sat in the very middle of the greatest trading centre of the Frankish realm – and one of …
Read more →Some 1,700 years ago a man from the Near East settled in a Germanic village in present-day Thuringia – and rose into its elite. His grave and the …
Read more →Two horns of heavy gold, covered all over with puzzling figures, and on one of them a line of runes in which, for the first time in the North, a …
Read more →The Roman Tacitus praised Germanic women as chaste, honoured and even brave at the edge of battle. But above all he was holding up a mirror to his …
Read more →Somewhere a story must begin. For the kingdom of Denmark this beginning is a man named Gorm – Gorm the Old, the first king whose line can be traced …
Read more →In 865 an army landed in England that did not want to raid and sail home, but to stay: the „Great Heathen Army". Two excavations make its winter …
Read more →The name says it all: Gudme means „home of the gods". On the Danish island of Funen lay one of the richest cult and power centres of the Iron Age – a …
Read more →They are so small and so thin that you can barely hold one without creasing it: the guldgubber, “gold men,” tiny figures pressed from stamped gold …
Read more →In 1891 peat-cutters in a bog near Gundestrup in Jutland struck something metallic: a dismantled cauldron of pure silver, covered all over with gods …
Read more →Here silver from Baghdad, furs from the North and glass from the Rhineland came together. Hedeby was the pulsing trading heart of the North.
Read more →Long before the Vikings, a Roman writer describes a Germanic tribe that defeats its enemies not by number or strength, but by sheer terror: the …
Read more →The most famous eyewitness account of the Vikings comes not from the North, but from Baghdad. In 921 the Caliph sent the scholar Ahmad ibn Fadlan to …
Read more →Carved in stone over 1,000 years ago, a king proclaims the unification and baptism of Denmark – the same king whose name is in every smartphone today.
Read more →Long before the Vikings they settled between the Eifel and the Danube, leaving behind gold hoards and princely graves – and yet we hardly know their …
Read more →Without their ships the Vikings would never have become Vikings. The longship was the high technology of its time – fast, seaworthy and yet light …
Read more →It is not two centimetres tall and weighs nine grams – and yet it set off one of the most exciting debates in Norse archaeology. A tiny silver figure …
Read more →To a farmer from Uppland, „the great city" was as unimaginable as another planet. Constantinople had walls that fire could not take, domes of gold …
Read more →Whoever won did not always keep the spoils. In the Roman Iron Age, Germanic victors sank the entire equipment of defeated armies in lakes and bogs …
Read more →While Uppsala is famous above all from a text, Thuringia holds the best-excavated Germanic sanctuary in the ground: the sacrificial bog of Oberdorla …
Read more →Long before there were Germanic peoples – some 4,300 years ago – people in today’s Saxony-Anhalt raised a vast ring of earth and wood: the ring …
Read more →King Hákon the Good, a son of Harald Fairhair, fought all his life against the sons of his brother Eric Bloodaxe. Two battles became legendary – one …
Read more →Long before there were Vikings in the sense of the sagas, there was already a town in south-west Jutland: Ribe, founded around 700, the oldest town …
Read more →The Viking battle was no wild scramble but a hard struggle shield to shield. A look at tactics and weapons beyond the clichés.
Read more →Long before the Viking Age and before the Icelandic Edda there was Germanic cult – and one of the most striking stood almost on our doorstep, in the …
Read more →Silver was the lifeblood of Viking trade – weighed, chopped up, buried. Three of the greatest hoards show how far the networks reached: from Gotland …
Read more →A horse, a golden disc, six little spoked wheels: the Trundholm Sun Chariot is one of the most beautiful images the Bronze Age has left us. It shows …
Read more →One late-summer day in 1066, a Norwegian army marched through northern England certain of victory – and a few hours later it had all but ceased to …
Read more →Some lose a battle and thereby win everything. On 29 July 1030 the Norwegian king Olav Haraldsson fell at Stiklestad, fighting against a peasant …
Read more →A whole royal ship, buried beneath a mound, full of gold and weapons – and a helmet that became the face of an entire age.
Read more →Some Vikings raided, others had Danegeld paid to them – Sweyn Forkbeard did both and then reached for the crown itself. In 1013 the Danish king …
Read more →The Vikings had no central state power. Law and politics arose at the assembly of free people – the Thing.
Read more →A handle that turned out too short, a fly at the bellows and over a thousand silver amulets in the earth: Thor's hammer is the best-known symbol of …
Read more →A king raises a stone for his wife and calls her on it “Denmark's adornment.” A son sets both parents an even greater monument. And a thousand years …
Read more →A lake named after a god. A lord’s hall the size of a church. Weapons sunk in the water, and a gold ring heavier than any other: Tissø on Zealand was …
Read more →Its name means “the god's lake.” On the shore of Tissø on the Danish island of Zealand lay, for centuries, one of the largest and richest seats of …
Read more →Sometimes a whole world of gods sits on a thumb-sized piece of bronze. The four Torslunda dies from the island of Öland are such a case – stamping …
Read more →From above they look as if drawn with a compass: perfectly circular ramparts, divided into exact quarters, with four gates towards the points of the …
Read more →On a field south of Lund, where today only a small church stands, lay for almost a thousand years one of the largest and richest centres of the …
Read more →No place stands more for the pagan cult of the North than Gamla Uppsala: the golden temple, the great sacrifice every nine years, the mighty royal …
Read more →In December 2020 a metal detector beeped in a field near Vindelev, only a few kilometres from Jelling. What came to light was a gold treasure of …
Read more →A rare genetic trace in Iceland tells a story that sounds almost unbelievable: some Icelanders carry a maternal DNA line closely related to the …
Read more →About five centuries before Columbus, Norsemen set foot on American soil. For a long time this was thought a legend – until the spade proved it.
Read more →Vikings and Aachen? Sounds like two worlds with nothing to do with one another. Yet in the winter of 881/882 the Northmen really did stand before …
Read more →The Vikings came, raided – and stayed. Over the winter, at least. Instead of sailing home after every raid, they settled into fortified camps on the …
Read more →Many call the Varus battle the „big bang of Germany". Yet another battle shaped our lands far more deeply – one in which Germanic fought Germanic: at …
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