Vikingology Podcast

This time we sat down with Ross Downing to talk about the new book he co-wrote and edited with Kaarina Aitamurto, Germanic and Slavic Paganisms: Security Threats and Resiliency , which through a collection of essays looks at the various ways the Viking past is interpreted and misinterpreted in modern Paganism. Ross has an extensive academic and professional background in the study of religions and...

We are delighted to welcome back to the show Dr habil. Leszek Gardeła. It’s been two years since our last conversation with him, and so we were excited to get a chance to speak with him again and hear about his new book The Vikings in Poland (hardback now available, paperback to be released soon). Leszek is a Polish archaeologist, so this history is personal for him, and this book has been a long...

The search for the Great Viking Army is both literal and figurative. For years, scholars have tried to answer the questions surrounding this supposed “army” — What, exactly, was it? How big was it? Who fought in it? Who commanded it, and what were their goals? In this episode we welcome back friend of the show archaeologist Tom Horne to help us answer these questions and understand the exciting wa...

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 ha...

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 privi...

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 kind...

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...

"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 t...

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 h...

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...

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, Ne...

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 o...

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 i...

If you’re a fan of the show, you’ll remember our fascinating chat last year with Mathias Nordvig. He’s an expert in Norse mythology, folklore, and the Nordic Story World. Some people may think that those myths are just cool, fanciful stories about the exploits of gods like Odin and Thor or creatures like dwarfs and giants meant simply to entertain and pass the time on those long Scandinavian winte...

Brothers must battle one another, become each other’s slayer, and sisters’ sons will sever the bonds of kinship. There will be hardship in the world and much whoredom, axe-age, sword-age, shields smashed to pieces, wind-age, wolf-age, until the world falls, no man will spare another. Völuspá , stanza 45. Translation by Mathias Nordvig. This time on the podcast, archaeologist, historian, and friend...

So far, 2024 has been exciting for us at Vikingology, and our good fortunes continue with this chat we had with Professor Clare Downham of the University of Liverpool. She is the leading scholar in the world regarding Vikings in Ireland, but as you’ll see we talked about much, much more. From what drove Clare to study medieval Ireland in particular to issues of gender and ethnicity both then and n...

This time we had the very great privilege and pleasure of welcoming Dr. Anders Winroth to the show for our first episode on one of the most important game changers in the Viking Age Nordic world — the introduction and acceptance of the Christian faith in Scandinavia. The Vikings would never be the same. Anders is one of the world’s foremost scholars on medieval Christianity. He is currently facult...

This time we had the lovely opportunity to sit down with Ellen Marie Næss, an archaeologist and lecturer at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo, Norway. She is someone very passionate about Viking ships and has worked for many years at Oslo’s famous Vikingskipshuset which houses three important ships from the Viking Age: the Tune , Gokstad , and the Oseberg . Each of these ships has important s...

If you know anything about the study of the Viking Age or have listened to our podcast this year, the name Søren Sindbæk will not be foreign to you. A Danish archaeologist and professor at Aarhus University, Søren has been researching and writing about Vikings for many years, particularly about the maritime trade networks and towns that proliferated during the Viking Age. Sure, the Vikings were of...

This time we dive into the economics of the Viking world by chatting with Dr. Tom Horne, an archaeologist and historian in Glasgow, Scotland, who specializes in Viking trade networks. The nuts and bolts of commerce may not sound like the sexiest topic, but we certainly had a laugh and learned a thing or two. Contrary to what most people think about Vikings, it turns out where business tactics were...

If you saw our recent post about Terri heading to Denmark in search of Vikings, you may be wondering what she found. Wonder no more! In this Vikingology Podcast episode, C.J. and Terri talk about the places that resonated the most for her, all of which she has been teaching about for years but never got to experience firsthand until now. First up, Terri discusses the Ladby Ship on the island of Fy...

This time on the podcast we had the very great pleasure of exploring the Viking mind with Dr. Mathias Nordvig, a Nordic myth and folklore scholar from the University of Colorado Boulder. Arguably, for most of us when we think of “Norse mythology,” what comes to mind may be the sagas or visions of Odin and Thor, or maybe Freyja, thanks to the popularization of these things by people like game creat...

This time on the podcast we head east to Gotland, a small island off the coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. Our tour guide is author Octavia Randolph, a wonderfully charming person who has made Gotland her adopted home. Did you know that Gotland is the site of the largest Viking silver hoard ever found? Or that so many Arabic silver dirham coins were buried there by Vikings that rabbits literally...

At Vikingology we like to ponder the various ways that people access and interact with the Viking Age past. C.J. writes historical fiction about it, Terri teaches about it at college and university, and our guests all have their own unique ways of experiencing it. And so it is no different in this episode where we interview Gabe Martin, leader of the historical reenactment group Timberhaven Viking...

We know the Vikings traveled far and wide and that they had a significant impact on many of the lands where they roved, but in the English-speaking world we tend to focus on western Europe. What about their activities in Central Europe? It was a well-trodden path for Scandinavians seeking to get to the East and the riches of places like Constantinople and Baghdad, particularly through what is now...