Northmen, The Viking Saga 793-1241 AD

Plate Section

1. The three major Viking pagan gods: (from left) the one-eyed high god Odin; hammer-wielding Thor; and the fertility god Freyr as depicted in a twelfth-century tapestry from Skog, Sweden.

2. Reconstructed chieftain’s longhouse at Borg in the Lofoten Islands, Norway. Housing both people and livestock under one roof, the longhouse was the typical Viking Age dwelling.

3. Ancestors of the Viking longship: Bronze Age ships with raiding parties on petroglyphs from Tanumshede, Sweden.

4. Evidence of state formation: the Vendel Period burial mounds at Gamla Uppsala, Sweden, traditionally associated with the proto-historic Yngling dynasty.

5. The 23-metre long Gokstad ship, built c. 895–900, could carry a crew of around sixty-five men on long open sea voyages.

6. The tenth-century Viking helmet from Gjermundbu in Norway is the most complete ever found. There is no evidence that Viking helmets ever had horns.

7. King Edmund of East Anglia is martyred by the pagan Danes in 869, in a fifteenth-century wall painting from Pickering church, North Yorkshire.

8. Irish monastic round tower at Glendalough: used as bell towers, treasuries and emergency refuges, dozens of such towers were built during Ireland’s Viking Age.

9. Golden Gate of Kiev, built by Yaroslav the Wise, in 1017–24, as a monumental entry to the Rus capital. The gate was substantially reconstructed in 1982.

10. The ruins of Luni, on the coast of Liguria: The city was sacked in 860 by Hastein, who supposedly mistook it for Rome.

11. Constantinople’s mighty fifth-century fortifications made it impervious to attacks by the Rus in 860, 907, 941 and 1043.

12. Modern replica of a knarr, a long-distance trade ship, under sail: it was in ships like these that Norse seafarers crossed the Atlantic Ocean.

13. Traditional haymaking in the Faeroe Islands. Viking settlers in the North Atlantic were pastoralists, dependent on the hay harvest to see their livestock through the winter.

14. Thingvellir, Iceland. The sheltered rift was the meeting place of the Icelandic assembly, the Althing, from c. 930 until 1798.

15. Reconstruction of the Norse settlement at L’ Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland, the earliest known European settlement in the Americas.

16. Aerial view of Hedeby: in the Viking Age it was Scandinavia’s largest town and most important international trade centre.

17. Aerial view of Trelleborg, Sjælland: it was one of several circular forts built by Harald Bluetooth to help impose royal authority across Denmark.

18. Viking warlord to patron of the church: King Cnut and his English consort, Aelfgifu, present a gold cross to Hyde Abbey in 1031.

19. Survival of pagan knowledge: the mythological wolf Fenrir and the world tree Yggdrasil from a seventeenth century copy of Snorri Sturluson’s Edda.

20. Ruins of Hvalsey church. A marriage here in 1408 is one of the last recorded events in the history of the Norse Greenland colony.