Tag: vikings

The First Viking Woman to Sail to America Was a Legendary Traveler

SHE’S BEEN CALLED “THE GREATEST female explorer of all time,” and the “best-traveled woman of the Middle Ages.” Just after the year 1000 AD, she gave birth to the first European baby in North America. And she concluded her global odyssey with a pilgrimage on foot to Rome. Yet few today can name this extraordinary Viking lady, even if they have heard of Erik the Red and Leif Erikson, her father- and brother-in-law.

Dangerous and deadly sea voyages

Her full name, in modern Icelandic, is Guðríður víðförla Þorbjarnardóttir—Gudrid the Far-Traveled, daughter of Thorbjorn. She was born around 985 AD on the Snæfellsnes peninsula in western Iceland and died around 1050 AD at Glaumbær in northern Iceland. This map shows the extraordinary extent of her travels in between those dates and places. In all, she made eight Atlantic sea voyages, at a time when those were very dangerous and often deadly.

What little we know of her comes from the Saga of Erik the Red and the Saga of the Greenlanders. These are collectively known as the Vinland Sagas, as they describe the Viking exploration and attempted settlement of North America—part of which the explorers called “Vinland,” after the wild grapes that grew there.

Keep reading

Study Finds Out Those Barbaric Vikings Had…Stained Glass Windows?!

It is no secret that the portrayal of Vikings in popular culture has done more than its fair share to distort our ideas of what and who the Vikings were. This distortion extends across various domains, including clothing, language, culinary choices and even habitation, to name but a few. Now, another myth-busting study, dating fragments of windows from Scandinavia, shows us that  Viking Age  windows were created using  stained glass  as the 9th century, contrary to popular belief that stained-glass windows only emerged during the construction of medieval churches and castles in Denmark.

In a new study published in the  Danish Journal of Archaeology , a conservation expert from the National Museum of Denmark and their research team arrived at this conclusion after conducting a thorough re-examination of 61 glass fragments recovered from six different Viking-age sites. This means that  Norse dignitaries likely sat in rooms lit up by Viking Age windows with colored  glass, and adds another nail in the coffin of a “savage” or “ barbaric” Viking who swings his sword around.

Keep reading

Archaeologists Found Proof of a Viking City That Was Supposed to Be Mythical

The rousing debate surrounding the potential existence and possible location of a key 10th century Viking city has resurfaced, thanks to an observation tower on a Polish island in the Baltic Sea.

The history of Viking life has been largely buried, whether physically or figuratively. But a simple construction project to erect a new observation tower in a public park on the Polish island Wolin unearthed fresh artifacts. Those artifacts point toward the existence of a 10th century city—at least, according to the man doing the finding.

When Polish islands start offering up clues to a 10th century city, Viking scholars get excited, knowing that the potentially-real-possibly-mythical city of Jomsborg could be part of the equation.

“It is very exciting,” Wojciech Filipowiak, an archaeologist at Poland’s Academy of Sciences working on the project, tells the New York Times. “It could solve a mystery going back more than 500 years: Where is Jomsborg?”

Believed to be a key part of Viking history, Jomsborg first surfaced in 12th century texts. But the location was never discovered. That led some to believe that Jomsborg was nothing more than a compilation of lore—a mythical mash-up city described as a fortress combined with a bustling trading post.

Keep reading

The mysterious Viking runes found in a landlocked US state

Did Vikings find their way to a remote part of Oklahoma? Some in a small community believe so, thanks to controversial runic carvings found in the area.

“[Farley] spent the majority of her adult life researching the stone,” said Amanda Garcia, Heavener Runestone Park manager. “She travelled all around the US, went to Egypt and went to different places looking at different markings.”

Faith Rogers, an environmental-science intern and volunteer at the Heavener Runestone Park, led me down a cobblestone path toward one of the 55-acre woodland’s biggest attractions – which is also one of the US’ biggest historical mysteries. We were deep in the rolling, scrub-forest foothills of the Ouachita Mountains in far eastern Oklahoma, and we were on our way to view a slab of ancient sandstone that still has experts scratching their heads and debating about the eight symbols engraved on its face. 

Some believe that these cryptic inscriptions are runes (ancient alphabetical characters) carved into the towering stone circa 1000 CE by Norse explorers who travelled up the Arkansas River to this remote part of landlocked America.

“Do I think the Vikings carved this? I do,” said Rogers, as we stood in the protective wood-and-glass “house” built around the 3m-by-3.6m slab. “[Local historian] Gloria Farley spent her whole life researching this, and she has a lot of evidence to back it up.”

Farley – who grew up in the town of Heavener where the runestone was found and who passed away in 2006 – is a legend in these parts. She first saw the relic while hiking as a young girl in 1928 and was fascinated by it. Two decades later, she returned to study it, as an amateur runologist and self-taught epigraphist. 

The first modern knowledge of the runestone dates to the 1830s, when it was found by a Choctaw hunting party. For years, white Oklahomans called it Indian Rock, mistakenly thinking that the carvings were Native American.

“[Farley] spent the majority of her adult life researching the stone,” said Amanda Garcia, Heavener Runestone Park manager. “She travelled all around the US, went to Egypt and went to different places looking at different markings.”

Keep reading