Norse

The Norse tradition spans the Viking Age, the medieval Christian conversion, the sagas of Iceland, the Hanseatic North Sea, and the Nordic countries of the present. Its geographic core is Scandinavia, but its reach has always been larger than its homeland — Norse expansion put farms on Iceland, Greenland, and briefly North America by the year 1000, and Norse linguistic influence runs through the place-names of northern England, Normandy, and the Hebrides.

What the tradition produced is distinctive. A literature, in Old Norse and Icelandic, of saga prose that reads like nothing else in medieval Europe — laconic, focused on motive and consequence, written in a vernacular at a time when most European literature was in Latin. A material culture of long-ship construction, runic inscription, and metalwork of great technical refinement. A legal tradition of public assembly (the þing) that survived into the modern Nordic constitutional order. A mythology — Odin, Thor, Freyr, Ragnarök — that was written down by Christians who refused to let it be lost.

We cover Viking-Age archaeology and history, the Icelandic saga tradition, the Christian conversion and its absorption of older material, Nordic folk culture, and the contemporary cultural life of the Nordic countries.