Video from 2017. A horse buried in this grave is described at 2:18.
"Vikings who settled in Iceland more than 1,000 years ago valued their horses so much that the men were buried with their trusty steeds. And DNA analysis of these treasured animals recently proved that the horses consigned to the grave with their manly owners were males, too." Source: Live Science.
"Iceland is home to 355 known Viking graves dating from the late ninth century to the early 11th century A.D., and the occupants are mostly middle-age men, researchers reported in a new study. Horses are common in these graves — more than 175 horses appear in 148 graves. The majority of the animals were clearly associated with the human skeletons, and they appeared to have been slaughtered 'specifically for burial,' the scientists reported."
"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. 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.
"Carvings uncovered in the Canadian Arctic may be the earliest portraits of the Vikings created in the Americas. But archaeologists have been puzzling over whether the artwork really shows the infamous seafarers." Source: Live Science.
"...One of the carvings was excavated in the 1970s at the Okivilialuk site [?] on southern Baffin Island.Two textiles found near the Okivilialuk carving date back to the 16th century, suggesting that the carving may also date back to that time, the scientists said. This carving may not show a Viking, but it could show someone from one of Sir Martin Frobisher's expeditions to the Canadian Arctic in the 1570s, the researchers said."
Note: While it's still unclear whether these particular carvings were made by Vikings, archaeologists have already found more definite evidence that Viking explorers did establish camps on Baffin Island. Life in these camps or settlements or whatever they were must have been pretty harsh. I'm not sure what the climate on the island was like back during the medieval period, but it probably wasn't all that different from what it is today -- extremely cold and cloudy with polar nights in the winter and midnight suns during the summer. This is one of the harshest and most remote wilderness areas on the planet and the toughness required to survive there can only be imagined.
"An eight-year-old Swedish-American girl came across an exciting find swimming at her local lake, when she pulled an ancient sword from its depths." Source: The Local.
The sword is now being restored and studied by the Jönköpings Läns Museum.
"...It was initially reported that the sword was at least 1,000 years old, but the museum later contacted The Local to clarify that they believe it may be even older, estimated to date back to the 5th or 6th century AD, pre-Viking Age. The find has prompted huge interest from archaeologists and historians."
Comment: It's impossible to read about discoveries like this without thinking about what Sweden is like today. Despite the growing support for the Sweden Democrats -- an encouraging sign -- the country is collapsing very rapidly and may have passed the point of no return years ago. The Vikings and their ancestors would never have let something like this happen and if they were around now I don't think they would bother with elections in order to solve the problem. The contrast between the Vikings and modern Swedes couldn't be more dramatic.
"The Vikings who pillaged Britain 1,000 years ago may have had a surprising motive – they were trying to raise cash to attract a wife back home." Source: Daily Mail (2016).
"According to a study, there was a shortage of available girls in Scandinavia, so young Viking men joined raiding parties to become rich enough to entice one on their return."
Notes: "Writing in the journal Evolution And Human Behaviour, researchers from Sweden’s University of Uppsala and Canada’s Simon Fraser University said: ‘Many low-status men would have found it difficult to marry unless they were willing to engage in risky activities to improve their wealth and status.'" (Ibid)
So who were these low-status men?
There were three basic classes in Norse society: the thralls, karls and jarls (nobility). According to Hurstwic, "[t]he vast majority of Norsemen belonged to the middle class, the karls. These people were freemen and land owners. They were the farmers, the smiths, and the just plain folks. Families of karls usually lived in clusters of two or more buildings, typically longhouses supplemented by barns and workshops." I guess you could call the karls the working class and they probably wouldn't have had that much trouble finding wives unless the ratio of men to women was really lopsided.
The lowest social class consisted of the þræll or thralls. "These included the slaves (usually booty from a raid) and bondsmen. If a Norseman of any class could not pay his debts, he was obliged to become a bondsman and to work for another man until the debt was paid. Icelandic law ... allowed for someone convicted of theft to be handed over as a slave to the victim of the theft. [They] must have led very hard lives." (Hurstwic) According to Wikipedia, you could be born into bondage if your parents were thralls, so some thralls must've been married.
The males who were most effected by a shortage of available females were probably Karls. If you were a dirt-poor and/or ambitious Karl trying to attract a mate and climb the social ladder, you only had a couple of choices: (1) you could work for years to accumulate some wealth through farming or trade, or (2) you could take a gamble on getting killed or wounded and go a-Viking in an attempt to get rich quick and make a name for yourself.
Men in Viking society had fewer options than they do now, but it doesn't sound like the basic situation has changed all that much since medieval times. The males with cash and status have the best chances of finding a mate. That's as true now as it was back then.
"Fashion in Viking times was different from how we perceive it today, where the wardrobe changes from year to year ... but we can see a form of 'fashion' from the archaeological finds from that time." Source: Archaeology News Network (2015).
Closed captions in English available.
"Our knowledge of Viking fashion comes entirely from the tombs of rich Vikings and tells us little about how poorer people in society would have dressed ... "What we call fashion are their symbols of high status. Overall, it appears that the ordinary Vikings would have been dressed in something similar, though less luxurious and without the gold, silver, fur, and silk. But the elements would have been roughly the same. Styles of high-status outfits probably greatly influenced styles of garments made further down the social hierarchy..."
Comment: the use of idiotic background music and robotic text-to-speech voices in these video news reports is a blight on humanity and everyone responsible should be taken out and shot.
"New DNA analysis reveals that, before their mysterious disappearance, the Norse colonies of Greenland had a 'near monopoly' on Europe's walrus ivory supply. An overreliance on this trade may have contributed to Norse Greenland's collapse when the medieval market declined. " Source: Science Daily.
Note: "The Norse settlements [in Greenland] thrived for centuries but disappeared sometime in the 15th century, perhaps at the onset of the Little Ice Age. Apart from some runic inscriptions, no contemporary records or historiography survives from the Norse settlements. Medieval Norwegian sagas and historical works mention Greenland's economy as well as the bishops of Gardar and the collection of tithes. A chapter in the Konungs skuggsjá (The King's Mirror) describes Norse Greenland's exports and imports as well as grain cultivation." Source: Wikipedia.
Viking longhouses and great halls were related structurally, i.e. they shared the same basic design and the construction techniques and materials (1) used to build them were generally the same. The main differences between them were their size and function.
(1) "...the longhouses were built around wooden frames on simple stone footings. Walls were constructed of planks, of logs, or of wattle and daub." Source: Hurstwic If the roofs and walls were covered with sod, the grass and other plants in the sod would frequently keep growing, giving the longhouses a characteristic green and bushy appearance.
The Vikings built longhouses wherever they went. For instance, the next video shows a reconstruction of a Viking longhouse that once existed in a Canadian settlement.
The great halls, aka mead halls, were usually bigger and more elaborate since they were the political centers of Viking life. They served as meeting and feasting places, so they were designed to accommodate larger numbers of people.
Mead halls evolved from the basic longhouse design. They were usually royal residences, but this wasn't always the case and some of the early mead halls were pretty primitive:
"In ancient Scandinavia and Germanic Europe a mead hall or feasting hall was initially simply a large building with a single room." (Wikipedia). "From the fifth century to early medieval times such a building was the residence of a lord and his retainers. The mead hall was generally the great hall of the king."
Some of these mead halls were huge. Back in 2014, for instance, the remains of gigantic feasting hall "the size of a football field" was discovered in Sweden, according to the International Business Times. "The longhouse, an early iteration of the magnificent banquet halls of medieval Europe, dates back to between the 5th and 12th centuries A.D..." The IBT described it as "straight out of Beowulf."
Next video is about a Viking longhouse excavated in Iceland.
Calling a mead house a "great hall" is probably a misnomer since the term normally refers to "the main room of a royal palace, nobleman's castle or a large manor house or hall house in the Middle Ages," according to Wikipedia. The Viking great halls had the same function, however, even if they were smaller and more primitive, so this is probably just hair-splitting on my part.
The most famous mead house in literature has to be Heorot, the "palace" of King Hrothgar, aka Hroðgar, in Beowulf. According to Wikipedia, "The hall was large enough to allow Hroðgar to present Beowulf with a gift of eight horses, each with gold-plate headgear. It functions both as a seat of government and as a residence for the king's thanes (warriors). Heorot symbolizes human civilization and culture, as well as the might of the Danish kings—essentially, all the good things in the world of Beowulf. Its brightness, warmth, and joy contrasts with the darkness of the swamp waters inhabited by Grendel."
I just started watching the first season of The Last Kingdom (BBC/Netflix) and it's been great so far. Based on the Saxons Stories novels by Bernard Cornwell, the TV adaptation is one of the most realistic historical dramas set in the medieval world I've ever seen. There are no indestructible super-warriors or Mary Sue shieldmaidens here and the setting has a distinctly rural feel, the kind of thing you would expect from societies based on agriculture. The battles are on a much smaller scale as well, at least so far, and probably come pretty close to what they would have been like in real life.
The Danish Vikings in The Last Kingdom are thuggish and sadistic, but the Saxons aren't much better. Pagans and Christians were all barbarous back then. The show is violent, sometimes very violent, but there is no nudity or really graphic sex, which offends my sense of prurient interest. Despite the fact that the series is produced by the ultra-liberal BBC, this is still a British production so the acting is first-rate and the writing is well-paced and intelligent. Based on what I've seen so far, I'd say that it's just as good, if not better in some ways, than the early seasons of Vikings from the History Channel.
"... The earliest source to make note specific note of Ubba is Passio sancti Eadmundi, which includes him in its account of the downfall of Edmund, King of East Anglia (died 869). Almost nothing is known of this king's career, and all that remains of his reign are a few coins. The first contemporary documentary source to cast any light upon his reign is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. According to this account, the Great Army invaded East Anglia in the autumn of 869, before setting up winter quarters at Thetford. The chronicle relates that the kingdom was conquered and Edmund was amongst the slain."
Did Ubba actually exist? Apparently so, though it's always hard to tell for sure with the history of this period. Like many Viking leaders, he's an obscure character whose personality is almost completely submerged in the larger story of the Viking invasion of Anglo-Saxon England. Most of what we know about him comes from a handful of Anglo-Saxon writings, themselves a mixture of history and mythology. Usually presented as one of the sons of the legendary Ragnar Lodbrok and the brother of Ivar the Boneless, Ubba may not have been related to them at all:
"Although Ubba and Ívarr are associated with each other by Passio sancti Eadmundi, the men are not stated to be related in any way. The earliest source claiming kinship between the two is the Annals of St Neots, an eleventh- or twelfth-century account stating that they were brothers of three daughters of Loðbrók (Lodebrochus). [1] This source further states that these three sisters wove a magical banner named Reafan that was captured at the Arx Cynuit conflict. Although certain versions of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle also note the capture of a raven banner, named Hræfn ('Raven'), they do not mention any magical attributes, or refer to Loðbrók and his progeny." (Wikipedia)
[1] It's not even clear if the "Loðbrók" in the Annals of St. Neots refers to the probably-mythical Ragnar Lodbrok. According to Wikipedia, "Loðbrók appears to be an early reference to Ragnarr loðbrók, a saga character of dubious historicity, who could be an amalgam of several historical ninth-century figures."
Comment: Ubba appears in two current TV series, Vikings and The Last Kingdom, but they are completely different characters. The Ubba in Vikings seems like a metrosexual compared to the barbarous Ubba in The Last Kingdom.