Tag: Sagas
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Women’s Day Special: Aud or Unn? The Sagas of a Norse Matriarch
You probably haven’t heard about a Norse woman who single-handedly saved her family from a political turmoil in Scotland, settled part of Iceland, distributed land, arranged marriages for her kin, and maintained a respected reputation that was remember for generations? Of course not. This International Women’s Day special tells the story of a woman named…
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Women’s Day Special: Aud or Unn? The Sagas of a Norse Matriarch
You probably haven’t heard about a Norse woman who single-handedly saved her family from a political turmoil in Scotland, settled part of Iceland, distributed land, arranged marriages for her kin, and maintained a respected reputation that was remember for generations? Of course not. This International Women’s Day special tells the story of a woman named…
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Raid 12: Norse Mythology in Saga Literature
This is our third and final raid covering the scanty sources we have for Norse Mythology. To most people, sagas are an odd and obscure group of medieval literature mostly from the equally odd and obscure Iceland. Their content typically covers things like feuding farmers or campaigning kings (occasionally featuring whack-a-mole spectral seals and red-shirt…
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Norse Mythology in Saga Literature
This is our third and final raid covering the scanty sources we have for Norse Mythology. To most people, sagas are an odd and obscure group of medieval literature mostly from the equally odd and obscure Iceland. Their content typically covers things like feuding farmers or campaigning kings (occasionally featuring whack-a-mole spectral seals and red-shirt…
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Valentine’s Day Special: ‘Viking’ Love Stories
When it comes to love in the medieval North, these are some of the most essential stories to know. We start things off with a fairly detailed discussion about Freyja, the free-spirited goddess of love and war, including her ferocious cats and her experience with magic, aka seiðr. After that, we cringe (and laugh) through…
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Norse Mythology: Snorri and Saxo’s Salty Prose
When it comes to ‘primary’ source material about Norse mythology, few are better than the Prose Edda—but everyone hates on its 13th-century Icelandic author, the infamous Snorri Sturluson. There’s plenty of good reasons for that, but I think people take for granted that he was much less salty than his Danish contemporary, Saxo Grammaticus. This…
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Notes on Rings in Norse Legends
Anonymous asked: In one of your recent reblogs you said that “Rings worn on the finger, for example, have often played important roles in Norse legends.” Could you please explain more on that? I’ll have to scold my past self for that one. Not only did I leave the footnote for that statement lacking, but I…
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Harald Fairhair: Unification and Cultural Migration
This post was originally delivered as a virtual lecture to the New York Ancient Cultures MeetUp on September 20th, 2020. It was a group effort between myself (fjörn) and Joshua Gillingham (author of The Gatewatch). Below is the transcript I used while giving my portion of the talk. As such, I don’t have any footnotes,…
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Álfablót: Sacrificing to the Elves (Audio Version)
Occasionally, Viking fans and modern-day Norse pagans throw around the term álfablót (elf-sacrifice), but what does that actually involve? What is an elf-sacrifice, anyway? And what is it for? In this episode of the Fjorn’s Hall Podcast, I share a few stories from medieval sources dealing with this topic: sacrifices made to the elves. Although…
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ヴィンランド・サガ: Vikings in Manga & Anime
Although the Vikings never quite made it to Japan (as far as we know), their culture still managed to find its way there hundreds of years after the Viking Age. But the impact has been…minimal, to say the least. After all, whenever a curious wanderer searches for バイキング (that’s ‘Viking’ in Japanese) on Google, they…
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‘Viking’ Love Stories
When it comes to love in the medieval North, these are some of the most essential stories to know. We start things off with a fairly detailed discussion of Freyja, the free-spirited goddess of love and war, which includes some coverage of her ferocious cats and her experience with magic (seiðr). But after that, we…
