"Leif Erikson Day is an annual observance that occurs on October 9. It honors Leif Erikson ... the Norse explorer who led the first Europeans thought to have set foot in continental North America (other than Greenland)." (Wikipedia)
Note: I'm several days late with this, but technically it doesn't really matter. According to Wikipedia, "October 9 is not associated with any particular event in Leif Erikson's life. The date was chosen because the ship Restauration coming from Stavanger, Norway, arrived in New York Harbor on October 9, 1825, beginning a wave of immigration from Norway to America."
Note: Leif Erickson's brother apparently ran into some trouble with the local population:
"According to the Icelandic sagas, while in Vinland [North America], Leif and his crew came into contact with 'Red Indians' (as distinguished from the Inuit), whom they referred to as skrælingi, an archaic term for 'wretches.' According to these sagas, the encounters with the indigenous people were initially friendly with a strong trade relationship. Tensions rose when Leif's brother, Thorvald, was struck by an arrow in a fight with the skrælingi. He is famously known for pulling the arrow out, and poetically reciting the phrase, 'This is a rich country we have found; there is plenty of fat around my entrails', upon which he dies." (Wikipedia)
"If the project is successful, the 65-foot-long (20 meters) oak vessel — called the Gjellestad ship — will become the first Viking ship to be excavated in Norway in 115 years, said Sveinung Rotevatn, the Norwegian Minister of Climate and Environment."
Video from April 15, 2020. Closed-captions helpful.
"The Gjellestad ship, also spelt Jellestad, is the remains of a Viking agelongship found at the farm of Gjellestad in Halden municipality in Norway in 2018 by the archeologists Lars Gustavsen and Erich Nau. A 2019 examination by the University of Oslo has dated it to earliest AD 733. Originally interred beneath a burial mound, in the present day the ship lies 50 centimetres below the topsoil due to years of plowing.
"Due to extensive fungus damage to the hull caused by field drainage, drought and exposure to the air, archaeologists called for an immediate dig to save the ship. Excavation of the ship at Gjellestad began in June 2020, overseen by Professor Knut Paasche from the Norwegian Institute for Cultural Heritage Research. It is estimated to be over 20 metres long, although only parts of the keel have survived. This would mean that the boat is of a similar size to the Gokstad ship. The identity of the boat's occupant has not yet been confirmed, but experts have speculated that it may have belonged to a king or queen;" (Wikipedia)
I'm not sure if the excavation has been completed.
"A previously unknown graveyard with thousands of well-preserved skeletons, some of them dating as far back as to the Viking Age, found in a well-researched area, has baffled Swedish archaeologists, providing them with unique research material." Source: Archaeology News Network.
"The sensational discovery was made outside of Medieval Vreta Abbey, north of the Swedish city of Linkoping.
"Despite plenty of research and excavations performed in the surrounding area over the years, a new graveyard with Viking-era graves was found during pipe-laying, national broadcaster SVT reported."
"Scientists have discovered extinct strains of smallpox in the teeth of Viking skeletons -- proving for the first time that the killer disease plagued humanity for at least 1400 years [1]." Source: Science Daily (7/23/2020).
[1] - "...Historians believe smallpox may have existed since 10,000 BC but until now there was no scientific proof that the virus was present before the 17th century."
The researchers can't say if the Vikings they studied died from smallpox, but they "certainly died with smallpox in their bloodstream for us to be able to detect it up to 1400 years later. It is also highly probable there were epidemics earlier than our findings that scientists have yet to discover DNA evidence of."
The chances are good that the Vikings spread the disease during their raids and migrations, but as far as I know there isn't any direct evidence of this.
Note: Smallpox has been eradicated, or so we're told, but who knows how many vials of the live virus are stored in research labs around the world? And who knows how many of these vials have been misplaced or completely forgotten?
"A Viking Age excavation in East Iceland is revealing a more nuanced history of the settlement of Iceland, involving seasonal settlements, wealthy longhouses, and walrus hunting long before the island was settled permanently. The site, known as Stöð and located in Stöðvarfjörður fjord [next video], shows human presence in Iceland decades before AD 874, the accepted date for when Iceland was permanently settled." Source: Archaeology News Network.
The modern village Stöðvarfjörður with views of the fjord.
Note: "According to both Landnámabók and Íslendingabók, monks known as the Papar lived in Iceland before Scandinavian settlers arrived, possibly members of a Hiberno-Scottish mission. Recent archaeological excavations have revealed the ruins of a cabin in Hafnir on the Reykjanes peninsula. Carbon dating indicates that it was abandoned sometime between 770 and 880. In 2016, archeologists uncovered a longhouse in Stöðvarfjörður that has been dated to as early as 800." (Wikipedia)
"Swedish Viking explorer Garðar Svavarsson was the first to circumnavigate Iceland in 870 and establish that it was an island. He stayed over winter and built a house in Húsavík. Garðar departed the following summer but one of his men, Náttfari, decided to stay behind with two slaves. Náttfari settled in what is now known as Náttfaravík and he and his slaves became the first permanent residents of Iceland."
Vikings is a great show (until recently, anyway), but like all historical dramas it has to play fast and loose with its own timeline, not to mention the actual history of the events it depicts. It's also inaccurate in various details such as its depiction of the armor that the Vikings wore in battle, but all of this is to be expected due to time and budget constraints as well as the fact that the series mixes mythology and real history for dramatic effect.
One of the show's most popular characters, Lagertha, a female warrior or shieldmaiden, is also a source of controversy since it's unclear whether shieldmaidens ever existed. Strictly speaking, of course, the question is irrelevant because Vikings is a fictional drama, not a documentary, but it would be interesting to know if characters like Lagertha actually fought alongside the men in real life.
Like her husband, Ragnar Lodbrok, the character of Lagertha is taken from Viking mythology. "Her tale, as recorded by the chronicler Saxo in the 12th century, may be a reflection of tales about Thorgerd .., a Norse deity," according to Wikipedia. Shieldmaidens in general appear in the Sagas and the female Valkyries may have been based on them.
"Few, if any, scholars nowadays believe that women warriors led war bands in Viking-age Scandinavia; they have either been relegated to the world of amazon myths or explained away in other ways," according to Medievalists.net (2015). On the other hand, there is some archaeological and documentary evidence that Viking women fought in battle, at least in certain situations:
"There are few historic attestations that Viking Age women took part in warfare, but the Byzantine historian John Skylitzes records that women fought in battle when Sviatoslav I of Kiev attacked the Byzantines in Bulgaria in 971. When the Varangians (not to be confused with the Byzantine Varangian Guard) had suffered a devastating defeat in the Siege of Dorostolon, the victors were stunned at discovering armed women among the fallen warriors." (Wikipedia)
Taken by itself, this Byzantine account doesn't prove that female warriors were a standard feature of Viking society. After all, the women killed in this battle could have been wives or daughters forced to fight by a desperate situation. If the story's accurate, however, it does show that Viking women -- some of them, at any rate -- were capable of taking part in battles. How often this happened is another matter.
Ultimately, the question boils down to the interpretation of burials. Recent findings suggest that women accompanied the Viking men (in England, at any rate) in greater numbers than previously assumed, but whether these women--or the men, for that matter--were raiders is another question. Some of the sources I've seen claim that "almost half" of the Viking burials discovered in England belonged to women, but calling them warriors may be a misinterpretation of the original study (see Related links below). As it turns out, these Vikings were probably colonists rather than raiders as such, so it would have been natural for them to take their families along with them. Some of the women were buried with weapons, though, and the question is why?
Here are two examples from the stories about the burial study:
"Viking women accompanied their male partners to Britain in far greater numbers than had been previously thought," according to the Daily Mail (2011). "Almost half of all bodies in burial grounds researchers examined were those of women - with some carrying swords and shields." (Emphasis added)
The women buried in these graves may have been under-counted in earlier studies. "A study has revealed that previous research examining the gender ratio of Vikings in Medieval England may have underestimated the number of Viking women because they assumed that graves showing individuals buried with a sword and shield were men. According to USA Today (2011), the newer study, which determined sex by analyzing the skeletal remains, showed that nearly half the examined remains were female, including one of the ‘warrior’ skeletons buried with a sword and shield." Source: Ancient Origins. (Emphasis added)
Even if half of the bodies discovered were women, it sounds like only a few of them were buried with swords and shields. Whatever the case, these grave findings suggest that female warriors did exist. After all, if a male skeleton is found buried with weapons, it would be natural to assume that he was a warrior of some kind, so the same thing could be assumed about a female skeleton. I'm not sure why a woman would be buried with weapons otherwise (unless they had some kind of symbolic value). Even if there were female Viking warriors, however, this still wouldn't prove that shieldmaidens as such actually existed as a distinct warrior caste in Viking society.
Shieldmaidens are a classic example of what I would call hidden history. Maybe they were real. Maybe not. The question, as far as I can tell, is still up in the air and will probably never be resolved conclusively until more archaeological or documentary evidence is uncovered. If shieldmaidens did exist, I have my doubts that they were as gorgeous as Katheryn Winnick, the actress and martial artist who plays Lagertha in Vikings. Most likely, they were hard-bitten characters with nasty tempers when they were crossed. One way or another, it doesn't help that the whole issue has become so mixed up in contemporary identity politics.
"The ruined church and monastic buildings that still stand on the island today are not Anglo-Saxon; they are the remains of the new priory built on the island in the late 11th century by the monks of Durham. So where is the original monastery? And what happened to it after the attack?" Source: DigVentures.
"All that is known to survive are some carved stone monuments of Anglo-Saxon date, which were found by archaeologists clearing away some of the collapsed rubble from the priory ruins in the late 19th and early 20th century."
Note: "... a major ... geophysical survey funded by National Geographic was carried out by Durham University in September 2012. This has shown that there is limited archaeological evidence for the monastic boundary that had previously been postulated, but an alternative boundary has been identified, which is associated with an area of possible industrial activity. It also identified a probably infirmary cloister associated with the later priory and a possible structure aligned on the two standing churches." Source: Durham University.
"'Striving to escape death, [the Danes] entered [a] sanctuary of Christ, having broken by force the doors and bolts, and resolved to make a refuge and defense for themselves therein against the people of the town and the suburbs; but when all the people in pursuit strove, forced by necessity, to drive them out, and could not, they set fire to the [building’s] timbers and burnt [it] down.'" Source: Smithsonian (2010).
Note: This is a great article about an archaeological discovery which confirmed that Danes were the victims of the St. Brice’s Day massacre in the Kingdom of England in 1002 AD. The massacre has been described as "one of the most heinous acts of mass murder in English history." The quote in the first paragraph is from an account written by King Aethelred the Unready (966? - 1016 AD), Lord of the Mercians, who ordered the killing.
"The sword was one of the most important weapons in the Viking Age together with ax and spear. Viking swords are found throughout Scandinavia, but the majority counting about 3500 have been found in Norway." Source: "Norwegian Viking-Age Swords - Typology," Thor News.
"The reason is that the pagan burial customs of putting swords into graves were more common in Norway than in Sweden and Denmark. Several Viking swords are also found in the British Isles, Mainland Europe, Russia and the Baltics."
Next video shows an Ulfberht sword on display in the National Museum, Dublin.
According to Wikipedia, "The Ulfberht swords are [sic] about 170 medieval swords found in Europe, dated to the 9th to 11th centuries, with blades inlaid with the inscription +VLFBERHT+ (and variants). That word is a Frankish personal name that became the basis of a trademark of sorts, used by multiple bladesmiths for several centuries."
"Saint Olga [aka Helga] ... was a regent of Kievan Rus' for her son Svyatoslav from 945 until 960. She is known for her obliteration of the Drevlians, a tribe that had killed her husband Igor of Kiev. Even though it would be her grandson Vladimir that would convert the entire nation to Christianity, for her efforts to spread Christianity through the Rus' Olga is venerated as a saint. While her birthdate is unknown, it could be as early as AD 890 and as late as 5 June 925." Source: Wikipedia. She is thought to have died in 969 AD.
Olga, a sinister beauty if I ever saw one -- assuming that her portraits are accurate -- was a probably a Varangian, i.e. a Russified Viking. She turned to Christianity after her husband was killed and is "sometimes credited as founding, with her grandson Vladimir, what has come to be known as Russian Christianity (the Moscow Patriarchate within Eastern Orthodoxy). She was the ruler of Kiev as regent for her son, and she was the grandmother of St. Vladimir, great-grandmother of Saint Boris and Saint Gleb." Source: Thought Company.
Orthodox Easter Liturgy Mass, Moscow, 2016.
I'm not sure who Saint Boris and Saint Gleb were, but it looks like Olga whelped a whole family of saints. She was a kind, compassionate and gentle Viking matriarch who displayed her Christian qualities of mercy and forgiveness when she dealt with the Drevlians, the Eastern Slavs who killed her husband:
"Igor's widow Olga avenged her husband's death in an extremely harsh manner, killing Drevlian ambassadors and nobility, burning their capital of Iskorosten to the ground and leveling other towns." (Wikipedia)
Her treatment of the Drevlian ambassadors is particularly memorable. According to Russia Insider, "Olga pretended to accept the ambassadors with honors. She invited them to the court on the next day. They were to be carried in boats by her own warriors as a special honor. But instead, she had a ditch dug near her own palace, and when the ambassadors, filled with their own significance, were carried in on longboats, she ordered them thrown into the ditch and buried alive."
I'm no Christian, but I've always liked the Russian Orthodox church. Persecuted by the Communists, criticized by modern liberals, the church is a force for tradition during a time of widespread social collapse in the West and any religion that has saints like Olga can't be all bad.