What comes to your mind when you think of Vikings? If it’s a bunch of hairy thugs in boats with swords and axes coming to steal your things, you are only partially correct. In this chat with Dr. Christian Cooijmans we found out that Viking activity in Francia — which encompassed a large swath of Continental Europe 1,200 years ago — was a much more sophisticated and calculated affair than anyone has previously thought.

Through investigating various sources which document Viking activity across the realm, Chris paints a picture of Vikings as economic actors with a level of business acumen rarely ascribed to them. Rather than random farmers out for an occasional good time, think planning, logistics, risk/reward calculations, and a very adaptable infrastructure, and you’ll be on the right track. These are not your grandmother’s Vikings.

After watching or listening to the episode, read more about it in his book Monarchs and Hydrarchs: The Conceptual Development of Viking Activity Across the Frankish Realm (c. 750 - 940) which is available directly from the publisher here. Use code VIKINGOLOGY for 25% off until January 31, 2025. It will make a perfect holiday gift for that Viking nerd in your life.

We also talked to Chris about his involvement in The Great Viking Survey, which is part of a research project looking into modern perceptions of Vikings on a global scale. Responses will help inform researchers about how the world sees Vikings at this moment in the 21st century. Anyone can participate in the survey which you’ll find here on our site by clicking the story below.

Thanks Chris for a fun and illuminating conversation about the changing nature of how we see Vikings. We look forward to chatting again very soon!

Skál!

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Have you ever thought, like really thought, about what it would be like if you took a time machine to the Viking Age? Where would you get food? How do you make clothes? What do you brush your teeth with, or do you brush them at all? And what on earth do you do without cellphones and the internet?

Our guests today know firsthand the answer to all these questions and more.

This time we had the privilege of sitting down with Kevin Alexandrowicz and Devon Rawlings, both members of Járnborg Vikings, a chapter in the Northwest Viking Alliance. These are NOT your garden-variety cosplay enthusiasts, but people who are deeply interested in experiencing the past, and learning from it, in an authentic way through living history experimental archaeology — a big fancy phrase meaning they understand the small mundane things that constituted daily life in northern Europe 1,000 years ago.

Things like how to make a wooden spoon, how to forge a needle to sew your clothes with, what it’s like to butcher an animal, and even how women dealt with that time of the month.

But besides learning some cool specialized knowledge or skills, why on earth would anyone really want to experience the Viking Age in this way?? We asked them about that and found ourselves wandering into the more philosophical issue of embracing the past versus escaping the present. It was an interesting and enlightening chat!

Þanciaþ!

If you live in the Pacific Northwest and you’re interested in finding out more or even maybe joining a group, check out the Northwest Viking Alliance. If you live outside the PNW, they can probably help you find similar groups in your area.

Kevin and Devon are also artists. Please check out their craft on their sites below. There’s some really beautiful stuff, and they’ll appreciate the support.

Kevin’s work at Archaic Growth and on Instagram @archaicgrowth.

Devon’s work at Baseborn and on Instagram at @baseborn.co

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This time we are thrilled to welcome Dr. Eleanor Barraclough to the show. We nerded out in a previous episode about her book Beyond the Northlands: Viking Voyages and the Old Norse Sagas, which is a great read we highly recommend, so we were very excited to speak with Eleanor about her new book Embers of the Hands: The Hidden Histories of the Viking Age.

In the new book, she delves into all kinds of evidence, both written and archaeological, to try and find the little bits of “gold” from the Viking Age past — you know, those bits that represent the utter humanity that often gets lost in the shuffle.

That search for humanity took us on a wide-ranging chat. We talked about Eleanor’s interest in the Sámi, an often overlooked Nordic culture that both shared and didn’t share space with the Vikings. And then true to our style at Vikingology, we wandered into all sorts of oddities like squirrels, whether Vikings would have been vegan, monsters, and turds — all things that defined what it meant to be human in the Arctic North 1,000 years ago, and that we can still relate to today.

We also ponder what we can learn from the Viking Age and whether at least some of it is worth repeating, based on Terri’s recent post.

To read more about all the interesting things she’s up to, check out Eleanor’s site. And for an intimate and seriously entertaining yet educational way to learn about the Viking Age, for goodness sake buy her books! You won’t regret it.

We had such a fun time! For an extra treat, stay tuned at the very end for a behind-the-scenes look at our pre-show banter.

Thanks Eleanor! We definitely look forward to meeting up again soon.

Skál!

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It’s been a minute, but Terri and C.J. are finally back together, so in this episode it’s time for life updates from Vikingology.

First up, Happy Birthday! We were both born on September 18, so shout out to us for recently completing another turn around the sun.

Terri is just back from Iceland, while C.J. is preparing to move to France. We talk about the Viking connection to both places including Terri tricking friend of the show Reynir into helping uncover a stone ship setting (which he didn’t mind too much) and finally getting to meet his Hurstwic sidekick William in person, and C.J. proposing a business idea for when he settles in France that also involves a Viking ship.

C.J. shares that he’s putting the finishing touches on the fourth book in his series The Saga of Hasting the Avenger. The newest installment is The Fell Deeds of Fate and will be available soon. Follow him on Amazon or his Substack for updates.

Lastly, we tease some cool upcoming guests that you won’t want to miss. And as always, we laugh a lot. So, there’s lots going on at Vikingology!

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"Let us burn him house and all," said Mord.

Then they took the vetch-stack and set fire to it, and they who were inside were not aware of it till the whole hall was ablaze over their heads.

Then Flosi and his men made a great pile before each of the doors, and then the women folk who were inside began to weep and to wail.

Njal’s saga, chapters 76 and 128

This time on the podcast we are thrilled to welcome back William Short and Reynir Óskarson of Hurstwic. They were our very first guests way back in December 2022 when they told us about their experience and expertise in Viking Age weaponry.

This time they are here to tell us all about a Viking battle tactic found in several sagas: burning an enemy’s house. If a certain Talking Heads song is in your head right now, it should be.

But this is not your usual historical discussion. William and Reynir are renowned for their years of mixing research of the written sources such as sagas and law codes with experimental archaeology to try and determine firsthand in real time what aspects of life in the Viking Age were like. So, in early July they didn’t just publish an academic paper or write a book about a burn, they actually performed one on a recreated Viking Age house (well, half of one anyway) near Eiríksstaðir in Iceland.

Take a listen to hear all about what went into planning this experiment, how it was carried out, and some of what they learned from it. You won’t want to miss this one. It’s about as raw and close to the past as you can get!

You can also check out more about Viking weapons and tactics in their book Men of Terror: A Comprehensive Analysis of Viking Combat

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We are so happy and excited to welcome Professor Clare Downham back to the show. If you didn’t catch our first episode with her, you should. We had a great chat about lots of Viking, historical, and philosophical stuff.

But this time we decided to do something a little different and engage in a bit of storytelling. Since Clare is one of the world’s leading experts on Vikings in Ireland, we asked her to tell us about one of the most important battles in Irish history, The Battle of Clontarf in 1014 — a battle much beloved and remembered by many in Ireland to this day.

With the Irish side being led by national hero King Brian Boru, this battle has everything: Vikings, politics, greed, magical raven banners, scorned ex-wives, religion, beheading, ambition, martyrdom, good vs. evil, and female spirits weaving the grisly fate of it all. It’s the stuff that legends are made of.

The battle appears in several sources that we discuss in the episode, but arguably the most famous is Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib ("The War of the Irish with the Foreigners").

We hope you enjoy this one. Though it’s difficult to tease fact from fiction at times, there’s one thing we know for sure — someone needs to make this movie, stat!

On another note…..

If you are in the Aberdeen, Scotland area or would like to travel there, be sure to check out the Scottish Society for Northern Studies’ big conference from 26-28 June. Clare will be presenting on Thursday, and there are other interesting talks, as well as a side trip to a museum and distillery. Of course. It’s Scotland! Please do check it out and support their work.

Also, remember to check out Clare’s books if you are interested in medieval Irish history. You won’t be disappointed.

* Viking Kings of Britain and Ireland: The Dynasty of Ívarr to A.D. 1014

* Medieval Ireland

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For much of the English-speaking world, the “Viking Age” ostensibly got its start with the infamous raid on Lindisfarne in A.D. 793. But did you know by that time there was already a half century of Viking activity in the East in what is now the Baltic States and all the way south to Ukraine?

And did you also know that they may even have laid the foundation for what is now Russia?

In this episode we wanted to learn a bit more about those eastern Vikings — known there as the Rus, and an elite subset of them known as Varangians who served as “special forces” soldiers in Constantinople — so, we turned to Icelandic scholar and professor of medieval history Sverrir Jakobsson.

Sverrir has researched and written extensively on the medieval and Viking Age history of Iceland, but he has particular interest in the Rus and Varangians who are the subject of his book The Varangians: In God’s Holy Fire.

We learned from him who they were, how we know that from surviving sources such as the Annals of St. Bertin, and how they compared to Vikings in the West. Turns out they started out as the ultimate “others” seen as terrifying forces of nature and, for some at least, ended up becoming honored members of elite society.

A case in point: Sverrir writes about King Harald III of Norway — nicknamed hardrada, or “hard ruler” — who embodies this progression from Viking to mercenary to royalty. His article “Araltes: The Evolution of a Varangian Stereotype” is well worth the read, as is his book, for anyone interested in the fascinating history of the Scandinavians who helped to shape the East and who are so often overlooked.

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Move over Christopher Columbus. Leif Eriksson got there first.

To celebrate our 30th episode we’ve pulled out all the stops! We are finally getting to talk about the Norse in North America during the Viking Age. If you’re into Vikings, you probably know they made contact almost 500 years before any other Europeans, touching down and creating a small settlement in what is now L’Anse aux Meadows, Newfoundland, Canada. So far, it’s the only Norse settlement that’s ever been found on the continent. And thanks to new science we know it was built in the year 1021 C.E., smack in the Viking Age.

To tell the story, our special guest is Loretta Decker. She works for Parks Canada which has responsibility for maintaining and interpreting the UNESCO World Heritage Site. It was a smallish way station for the Norse at the edge of their world, which Loretta says for them may as well have been “a base camp on the moon.”

But her connection runs deeper than that. It was Loretta’s grandfather George who owned the land on which the Vikings settled, so her childhood was steeped in Nordic archaeology. We couldn’t ask for a better person to give us a front seat at the table (or under the table as she recalls!) of this story.

But before archaeology, hard science, and Loretta could tell the story of this place, the Icelandic sagas were our guides. In particular, The Saga of Erik the Red and The Saga of the Greenlanders (collectively known as the Vinland sagas) have for centuries told of Norse exploits in a land that was new to them, replete with strange landscapes, a one-legged being, and Native Americans whom the Norse called skrælings. It’s the fantastical stuff that saga legends are made of.

But at L’Anse aux Meadows at least some of those legends were true.

Thanks Loretta! We know you’re getting ready for your busy summer season, so we appreciate you taking the time. It was a true delight!

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This time on the podcast C. J. and Terri muse about what a TED talk on Vikings might look like. We get philosophical — as we often do — about how people engage with the Viking Age past and history in general, and we try to thread the needle between our tendency to overly romanticize Vikings with our need to acknowledge that some pre-modern ways of life could actually be antidotes to the stresses of our modern existence. Heady stuff.

But just when you think we might be overthinking things, we also laugh a lot and somehow end up talking about the concept of “Viking washing,” a new Disney Viking-themed park, and Otto von Bismarck. Go figure.

Take a listen and enjoy the ride! And as always, if you like what we do let us know and…..

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I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

For an exciting change of pace we sat down with Ian Stuart Sharpe, the creative mind behind the multifaceted Vikingverse, an alternate world where Viking history plays out, shall we say, a bit differently than in your uni textbook.

From comics and novels to tutorials for learning “modern” Old Norse and RPGs, Ian’s Nordic story world brings the Viking Age to life in ways even the Norns could never have fated.

The entire enterprise is based on the “what if?” proposition, or what we historians call Counterfactual History. At any given moment each of us is faced with decisions in life and multiple paths we can take. How do we choose which one? What if we can go back in time and take an alternate path? Can we rewrite history and learn from it? These are the questions that Ian applies to the Vikings.

The Viking Age was a time of big change, including leaving behind the Old Ways in favor of becoming Christian. But what if that had never happened? What if Odin and Thor still ruled the day, and the world was still populated with spirits like the alfar and dvergar? This is the world Ian invites us to explore. And if you venture in, you just might find it’s a path worth taking.

Click here to buy any of Ian’s products or access his free content.

Vikingology Podcast is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.