Stave Churches

 We think of medieval churches as made of stone, as indeed most of them were.  But stone churches always needed wood as well.  The scaffolding that was required when the church was being built, as the rows of stone blocks rose higher and higher, was of course made of wood.  And the rafters of the church, which held up the roof, were wooden.  As the fire at Notre Dame six years ago showed, if those centuries-old timbers caught fire the church itself would suffer serious damage.

Some churches were however made primarily of wood, most notably the Scandinavian stave churches.  There are over two dozen in Norway dating from the Middle Ages and one in Sweden.  The term "stave" refers to the vertical posts, one at each corner of the main, central part of the church, which supported the weight of the rest of the building materials.

These staves were made from entire trunks of an evergreen tree (a special northern species of pine).  An appropriately tall, straight tree would be chosen, its branches cut off, and its bark girdled.  It would now be dead, but it was left standing for several years.  This was believed to make the sap inside set up, making the wood very hard and resistant to rot and insect damage.

The staves were set on horizontal "sills," made from the same hardened wood, and clapboard siding was attached.  The churches were several stories tall, with very steep roofs that would shed Norwegian winter snow.  They were decorated with carvings on the rafter ends, the same way that stone churches might have gargoyles.

The result was something that to the modern eye looks fantastical, like something out of a fairy-tale, but they are treated by the local congregation as just their church (note the cemetery adjoining the church).

Because these churches do not look like the churches built in much of Christian Europe in the Middle Ages, they are now often labeled "pagan."  This seems very unfair, as the earliest examples date from the end of the twelfth century, roughly 200 years after the region adopted Christianity.  (Remember, centuries were just as long in the Middle Ages as they are now.  We're talking about a time span comparable to the distance from us back to Thomas Jefferson as president.)

Movies and TV shows about the Vikings often give them "pagan temples" that look like stave churches, even though there is a grand total of zero evidence that Vikings ever worshiped Odin in anything that looked even vaguely like a stave church.  The carpentry skills that produced excellent long ships for the Vikings, however, carried over into the skills needed to build a stave church, and some of the techniques for the churches' clapboard siding are very similar to those used in ship construction.

© C. Dale Brittain 2025

For more on medieval religion and other aspects of medieval history, see my book Positively Medieval, available on Amazon and other on-line platforms.  Available as an ebook or paperback.

Iceland

 Iceland is the second biggest island in Europe, smaller than Great Britain (home to England, Wales, and Scotland) but bigger than Ireland.  It still speaks something very close to Old Norse, the medieval language of Scandinavia, though of course they have had to come up with new words for things like TVs and trucks, and it is very proud of its Viking heritage.

 One continuity with the Icelanders' Norse past is they do not have last names in our sense.  Eirik Olafsson is son of Olaf.  His son will be surnamed Eiriksson.  The phone book (I expect there wasn't an Old Norse word for phone book) lists people alphabetically by first name.

Europeans have been in Iceland on and off since the ninth and probably the eighth century, some of the first being Celtic hermits, whose desire to get away from it all certainly took them far from human settlements.  Its traditional foundation date however is 874, when settlers from Norway established a permanent colony in what is now the capital of Reykjavik.  The early settlers were mostly Norwegian, bringing with them Celtic slaves they had captured in the islands north of Scotland.

By the tenth century there were enough settlers that they needed a form of governance, and they established the Althing, what might be called a parliament, a system of democratic government.  (As you probably guessed, the word means "all thing," or the thing/process/get-together for everybody.)  Iceland proudly calls its parliament the world's oldest, though the country's current status as an independent republic (now with a President) dates only to the last days of World War II, and for many of the years in between it was under one of the Scandinavian kings (Norway, Sweden, or Denmark).  The Althing is now the legislature for the country.

One of the most important decisions of the medieval Althing, around the year 1000, was to vote to adopt Christianity for the country.  They had been pagan until then, but they'd been visited by missionaries and decided this Christianity stuff made sense.  The Norse gods we now associate with early medieval Scandinavia are now known from stories written in Iceland, but only several centuries after they had all become Christian.

Besides the eddas, the stories of legendary gods, the Icelanders wrote sagas, more or less historical accounts of early settlers.  Many of the stories are about people deciding to kill their relatives.  One might wonder why a community of peaceful sheep farmers and fishermen would be interested in blood-thirsty tales of revenge, but a lot of the sagas seem intended as cautionary tales and examples of how to defuse violence before it gets out of hand, an activity in which women played a major role.

Sheep farming and fishing were indeed the principal activities of these Viking descendants.  Fishing included going after walruses and narwhals in the icy Arctic seas, coming home with ivory equivalents (tusks that could be substituted for elephant tusks), which made excellent trade goods.

One problem with sheep farming is that sheep eat baby trees before they can become established.  Iceland had had plenty of forests when Europeans arrived, but once they were cut down for ships or building, they did not replenish themselves, as new seeds would have had to travel over the ocean.  This had happened back at the end of the Ice Age, but there hadn't been sheep in Iceland then.

(Fun fact:  The word for mutton in Icelandic is the same as the word for meat.  Beef is cow-mutton.  Pork is pig-mutton.  Meat, just as a word, means meat from the sheep unless otherwise specified, because meat from the sheep was what you were going to get.)

A lot of Iceland is also volcanic, not suited for either sheep or forest.  Its volcanoes periodically erupt, releasing clouds that can foul air traffic.  The volcanoes do  fuel hot springs that help keep Reykjavik warmer than you'd expect for its latitude.  Indeed, modern Iceland's power comes almost entirely from hot springs and waterfalls.  Iceland's population is low, less than that of Vermont though it's substantially bigger, less than 10% that of Ireland, an island nearly as big.

It used to be that the cheapest way for Americans to fly to Europe was through Iceland, to Luxembourg.  One would get off the plane in Iceland while it refueled, and the gift shop was right there.  I have a most excellent sweater made of Icelandic wool that I bought there.

© C. Dale Brittain 2023

For more on medieval Scandinavia, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Medieval Russia

 Russia is not usually considered part of medieval Europe, but its history is closely tied to the countries to the west.  For that matter, it's difficult to draw lines between western Europe, eastern Europe, central Asia, and east Asia, given that they are all on a big contiguous land mass with no sharp dividing lines (south Asia, that is India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, at least has the Himalayas for demarcation).

Everything happened later in Russia, if one takes medieval France as the model to which all must conform (medieval French monks and knights would certainly have so argued, as do a number of modern scholars in France), from organized government to organized religion.  Its ethnic and cultural history is very complicated, because the wide grasslands and steppes provide no barriers to various people coming to settle or to conquer.

Russia first appears in written history in the ninth century, when its first organized government was established by the so-called Rus Vikings.  Bet you didn't know Vikings were so far inland.  But they had established trade routes stretching from the Baltic Sea all the way across central Asia to fetch up in Constantinople, where a number of Norsemen signed on as soldiers, the so-called Varangian guard.  Some of them however decided to settle down halfway there and carve out their own kingdom, with Kyiv established as the capital.

So although the Russian version of the story is that Ukraine is part of Russia, historically speaking Russia is part of Ukraine.

The Vikings mingled with the native Slavic peoples in a kingdom bigger than anything further west.  It included (very roughly) the same territory as modern Ukraine, Belarus, and the more western parts of Russia.  They adopted Christianity late in the tenth century, getting it from Constantinople, but Russian Orthodoxy (as it is now known) had a number of differences from Greek Orthodoxy, starting with using Old Church Slavonic as the main language of religion rather than Greek.

The first ruler of Kyiv to convert was named Volodymyr, and this name (or its Russian version, Vladimir) continues to be a popular name in the region today.  Volodymyr's son Yaroslav's children were the first generation to be brought up Christian from birth, and they quickly began marrying the royal families of western Europe.  Western kings had almost exhausted the supply of royal princesses to whom they were not already closely related, and the conversion of the rulers of Kyiv provided many brides.  Anna, the queen of King Henry I of France (d. 1060), for example, was one of Yaroslav's daughters.

But in the thirteenth century this flourishing principality was conquered by the Mongols, the Golden Horde (think Genghis Khan).  They continued under Mongol rule for the next two hundred years.  During this time the dukes of Moscow were able to establish themselves, in part by being little friends of the Mongols, but in the fifteenth century they led the war that ended Mongol rule.  Since then, Russian territory has had Moscow as its capital.

The history of the whole region becomes even more complicated in the early modern period.  Just for example, Lithuania, now a tiny Baltic republic, was part of the great Polish-Lithuanian empire in the seventeenth century.  Then, in the eighteenth century, Poland (and Lithuania) were divided up three-ways between Russia, Germany, and the Austro-Hungarian empire.  (Later they came back.)

But both Ukraine and Russia began in this period to consider themselves true nations, with their own language and culture (Ukrainian is similar to Russian though not the same).  Russia had the advantage of having its own emperors, the tsars, throughout this period, starting in the sixteenth century.  (The word tsar, of course, comes from Caesar, indicating their conception of themselves as continuing the traditions of ancient Rome and ancient Byzantium.)

Ukraine was not so successful, as they were usually controlled either by Russia or by Poland.  The name Ukraine means "border land," the land between the Baltic and the Russians of Moscow.  (The country wants to be known as Ukraine, rather than the Ukraine, because they fear the latter would suggest they were just an outlying border region of Russia.)  When Russia went Communist in 1917, Ukraine tried to assert independence but were dragged back into the fold.  They have only been a recognized separate country since 1991, when they became their own republic during the breakup of the old Soviet Union.

And I haven't even talked about how Russia didn't really get serfs until the early modern period, when serfdom was long gone in western Europe.  "Medieval" Russia, unlike western Europe, is assumed to persist until the eighteenth century or so, rather than stopping in 1500.  The history of the region continues today to be the basis of sweeping arguments about what the region ought to be like today.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval nations, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Iceland

 Iceland is a parliamentary democracy, established on an island with a lot of volcanoes (a source of geothermal heat and electricity), one of the world's largest islands (in Europe second only to Great Britain, being bigger than Ireland), and a member of NATO.  Sounds sort of normal and boring, right?  But it's a country shaped by its medieval past even more than most of the rest of Europe.

The first human settlers of Iceland came from Scandinavia during the ninth century.  They found good land for their sheep and governed themselves through what was called the Althing (meaning the thing that has everyone represented), now considered the world's oldest parliament, even though it didn't meet for a century or so from the late eighteenth to nineteenth centuries.  It's back in business now, and Icelandic people are intensely proud of its ninth-century roots, making it 400 years older than Britain's Parliament.  In the year 1000, the Althing voted to adopt Christianity, the only example we know of where people voted to become Christian, rather than a ruler deciding to convert and converting his people.

From Iceland, explorers went to Greenland and to what is now maritime Canada, although the New World settlements were short-lived and the Greenland colony eventually died out after several centuries.  The other Scandinavian countries claimed Iceland as their own at various times, most recently Denmark, but in 1944 the Icelanders became their own independent democracy.

The main economy of Iceland, both then and now, was based on sheep raising and fishing.  Wool is used to make lovely warm sweaters, which you can buy in the convenient gift shop at the airport if you're changing planes or have a layover.  The Icelandic word usually translated as "meat" means lamb or mutton by itself, and then there's "cow-mutton" (beef), "pig-mutton" (pork), and so on.  

The big problem with raising sheep is that they keep all the plant life cropped short.  In fact, gracious English manors in the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries used to keep sheep to take care of the lawns.  But after the early Icelanders cut down the local trees, to build ships or open up grazing lands, trees were gone for good, any seed that somehow arrived from the mainland being nipped off before it could grow.  (These days Iceland plants and protects trees.)

These peaceful medieval sheep-farmers wrote sagas, accounts of historical events like the adoption of Christianity or the discovery of the New World, that also included a whole lot of feuds, insults, and people killing their relatives.  Although these are sometimes seen as glorifying violence, in fact they are about not getting into those situations in the first place, and women are often portrayed as the peace-keepers.

The sagas were written in Old Norse, the ancestor of the languages now spoken in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.  In Iceland, the everyday spoken language is still very close to Old Norse.  Proud of their medieval linguistic heritage, the Icelanders have avoided adopting modern words from other languages, instead creating new words from Old Norse roots for things like television or internet.  Children learn Danish in school, which they consider a simple language, good for talking to Scandinavians who have given up on complex declensions and conjugations.

They have also continued the tradition of having surnames based on a parent's name.  So "Peterson" as a last name originally meant "son of Peter," but in Denmark-Sweden-Norway these have just become hereditary, so Torvald Peterson's kids will all have the last name Peterson, not Torvaldson or Torvaldsdottir.  Not so in Iceland!  There each person's surname is quite literally so-and-so's daughter or son.  Torvald Peterson's daughter might be Kristin Torvaldsdottir.  The phone book is arranged by first name, not last name.

© C. Dale Brittain 2022
For more on medieval Scandinavia, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.  Also available in paperback.

Beads

Nobody these days thinks much about beads.  Beading (or making simple jewelry from them) can be fun, but it is not something we think of in terms of trade routes and great expense.  In the early Middle Ages, things were different.

Beads were considered a fine form of decoration for women and, to a somewhat lesser extent, to men.  In the late Roman Empire those in the West who could afford it wore necklaces of beads made from semi-precious stones.  Beads could also be made from amber, from non-precious stones, even from horn.  (Plastic was centuries in the future.)  But the most important kind of material was glass.

This changed in the seventh century.  With the rise of Islam and the resultant breakdown of Mediterranean trade routes, it became hard for the West to get glass.  Beads found in graves from that period tended to be made instead from bone, horn, even fired clay.

This changed with the Vikings.  As I have noted before, they established long-distance overland trade routes that reached all the way from Scandinavia to Byzantium.  One of the most important things that they brought to the west was glass.

A lot of the glass was already in the shape of beads.  Other glass could be melted down and shaped into beads (most commonly short tiny cylinders in shape, rather than the round form we take for granted).  The glass came in all sorts of different colors.

The Vikings, who set up trade colonies in the West by the ninth century, once the fun of constant raiding wore off (and they realized that one could make consistent money year after year through trade, whereas a raid usually couldn't be repeated), traded beads.  Beads made excellent trade goods, because everyone wanted some, they were (relatively) inexpensive per unit, so everyone could afford at least some, and they were fairly lightweight, making them easier to transport than say metal or stone.

Big heaps of early medieval glass beads have been found in Scandinavian harbors, presumably from a box being loaded that broke loose and dumped.  It would not have been worth it at the time to send divers down into the murky, icy waters to try to pick up beads one by one.

Do you find it hard to picture a Viking warrior wearing a necklace of glass beads?  Readjust your thinking.

Some of the ideas in this post were inspired by the work of Matthew Delvaux of Boston College.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on Vikings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.

Medieval boats

Boats were a major part of medieval transportation.  Without combustion engines or good roads, dragging loads along the land was very slow and inefficient.  Much more efficient was to float heavy goods on barges.  Every smooth-running river was full of boats and barges, carrying both people and goods.  Bridges had to be built high enough that boats could easily pass underneath.  The more expensive a trade good and the further distance it had come, the greater the chance that it had been on a boat.

Boats were powered either by manpower (rowing or poling), horse power (barges pulled along by a horse or mule on the towpath), or sail.  Sailing on the rivers was mostly to increase one's current-fueled speed and to improve steering.  Part of the reason the Burgundy region became a major center of wine-growing, even aside from its good soil and climate, was that it was easy to put wine barrels on barges and float them downstream to the large Paris market.

Sail really came into its own on the ocean.  Sailing ships had been found in antiquity, but there were many improvements to rigging and sails during the Middle Ages.  The boldest sailors, of course, were the Vikings.  They developed their longships in the late eighth century, ships that could be either rowed or sailed, were big enough to cross the open ocean, and shallow enough to row up Europe's rivers to find tempting targets to raid.  By the end of the tenth century, they had reached (progressively) Iceland, Greenland, and even what are now the Canadian maritimes.  (See more here.)

Other than the Vikings, most medieval sailors were hesitant about heading off out of sight of land.  Ships tended to hug the shoreline.  Those heading to the Holy Land from Western Europe on Crusade usually went by ship, as both quicker and (slightly) less dangerous, though shipwreck on the windy and treacherous Mediterranean was always a possibility.  At the beginning of the thirteenth century, when leaders of the Fourth Crusade were trying to book ship passage for their soldiers to get to the East, the Venetian ship-masters charged them such high prices that they had to accede to Venetian demands to sack one of Venice's trade rivals as part of the price.  (The Fourth Crusade was a disaster all the way around, but that's a different story.)

The biggest advance in ships in medieval Europe since the Viking longships came in the fifteenth century.  Prince Henry of Portugal, nicknamed "the Navigator," sponsored improvements in ocean-going ships that allowed Portuguese sailors to leave the well-known confines of Europe and the Mediterranean and start south along the coast of Africa.  Henry's purpose was to find a way to get to the Indian Ocean, where spices from the fabled Orient came on Arabic dhows (ships), to join trade networks that led to Europe.  He found Africa a lot bigger than he had anticipated, but quickly realized that trade and colonies in west Africa had a lot to recommend them in the meantime (ever wonder why Angola is Portuguese-speaking?).

It was of course due to rivalry with Portugal that led the Spanish kings Ferdinand and Isabella to sponsor Columbus and his crack-pot scheme to reach the East by sailing west.  So the integration of the New World into European culture owes a lot of fifteenth-century ship building.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on medieval transportation, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval: Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Vikings in the New World

When humanity's ancestors left Africa, maybe 120,000 years ago, some turned left and ended up in Europe, while others turned right and ended up in Asia and some, eventually, in the Americas, crossing during the end of the Ice Age when the seas were lower and people could get across between what is now Siberia and Alaska.  (In fact people left Africa in several waves, and many of course stayed, but let's keep it simple.)  When the Vikings met the people they called Skraelings in the Canadian Maritimes around the year 1000, the circle was complete, and people whose ancestors hadn't seen each other for 120,000 years met again.

I've discussed the Vikings before on this blog, but here I want to focus on their visits to the New World.  You can't really say they discovered America, because the natives knew it was there the whole time, and Columbus, not Leif Eriksson, was responsible for permanent contact between Europe and the Americas.  But they definitely got there in their long ships.

The Vikings/Norsemen were a lively lot, with exploration, raids, trade, colonies, and permanent homes from Scandinavia to the British Isles to France (Normandy) to Sicily (where they established a kingdom) to Ukraine, Russia, and Byzantium.  Everybody they met they called Skraelings, "the other," people who weren't them and therefore inferior.

Starting in the late ninth century they headed west from the Shetland and Hebrides islands, where they'd been well established, to see if there were any more good islands out there, and ended up in Iceland.  This became a very successful settlement, where a language very close to Old Norse is still spoken today, and the glaciers are balanced by the hot springs heated by volcanos.  The only big problem was that once they cut down the trees they didn't grow back, not having nearby trees to reseed them (as on the mainland).  But the Icelanders were mostly sheep farmers anyway.

From Iceland they kept exploring west and got to Greenland in the late tenth century.  The sagas tell that the explorers came back talking about how "green" everything was there in order to lure settlers, omitting to mention that most of Greenland is under a sheet of ice a mile thick (unfortunately now melting).  Several Viking colonies were established, which lasted until the late Middle Ages, when the climate cooled and their sheep-farming (their principal occupation beyond fishing) just wasn't working.

In the meantime, explorers kept heading out, going north with the current up the coast of Greenland, where they hunted walruses, then west to Baffin Island, and south along the coast of what is now Labrador.  Here they doubtless encountered Eskimo ancestors (who were heading east themselves and eventually reached Greenland, after the Vikings did, though their descendants survived when the Norse ones did not).

South of the Arctic Circle the Vikings got to L'Anse-aux-Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland.  This seemed like a much better place than what they'd been seeing recently.  They called the region Vinland because wild grapes grew there.  There were already people (ancestors of what are usually called Indians, or in Canada First Nations people) with whom they had an uneasy relationship.  This is all described in the saga of Leif Eriksson, but for a long time it was considered fanciful.  Then archaeologists started digging and found all sorts of Viking objects, as well as the remains of the sod long-houses they had built.  L'Anse-aux-Meadows is now a "living history" site, with reenact ors and everything, as well as ongoing archaeology.  You can visit it, and Newfoundland would love you to do so.

Vinland really was too far out, so although there was at least some Viking habitation there for twenty years or so, including women and families, they pulled back to Greenland.  This has not kept Scandinavian-Americans in Minnesota from imagining that they somehow made it a couple thousand miles further overland to reach their homeland.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on the Vikings, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Strangers at the Gate

With refugees now trying to get out of the war-torn Middle East or out of Africa into Europe, there is often a strong reaction, Europe for the Europeans.  But in fact Europe has witnessed waves of migration, immigration, and downright hostile invasions throughout recorded history.  The ancestors of many modern day Europeans (and their American descendants) were migrants or invaders in their day.

Take England.  There were the megalith builders thousands of years ago, heaving Stonehenge and many other huge stone structures into position (while Neolithic Woman doubtless rolled her eyes and wondered when Neolithic Man was going to go hunting and get the family some food for a change).  Then the Celts came over the land bridge that then connected the British Isles with the Continent.  Then the Romans came and conquered (first century BC).  Then the Angles and Saxons came and conquered (fifth-sixth centuries AD).  Then the Normans came and conquered (1066).  Modern England is a mix of all of these, and it would probably have a lot more in the mix if the chalk land bridge hadn't been broken through (well BC), creating the Channel.

In the early Middle Ages, there were plenty of migrants, refugees, and invaders.  The Germanic peoples for the most part came peacefully into the Roman Empire and its margins.  The Franks settled in Roman Gaul and quickly adopted Roman culture and language.  The ancestors of the Scandinavians settled in the northern parts of Europe where the Romans had never gone, as the ancestors of the Swiss settled, with their cows, on mountains the Romans had avoided.

Other Germanic peoples conquered, like the Goths who sacked Rome in 410.  (This was of course a major shock to the Romans, but they rebuilt--this did not cause any "fall.")  But the Goths too ended up settling in Italy and Spain and adopting Roman ways, being indeed recognized as part of the Empire.

Then there were the Huns, who rampaged through Europe in the middle of the fifth century, being stopped from sacking Rome by the pope (Leo I), and whose empire collapsed after the death of Attila in 453.  The Magyars, a related people, ravaged the German kingdom five centuries later, before being stopped by the German king; modern-day Hungary considers itself the heir of both Huns and Magyars.

The Vikings were another terrifying group of invaders, from whom many people in both France and England had to flee--although some Vikings settled in Normandy and some in Yorkshire around the beginning of the tenth century, where they quickly became respectively French and English (but with some of their lively nature still in place).

Any of these invasions of course created refugees.  So did natural disasters like the famines of the fourteenth century, which sent waves of desperate people across Europe, seeking for food.  Even without massive famine, local loss of crops would lead to refugees, who took off hoping to find some place that still had something to eat.

And then there were just migrants.  Europe's cities grew quickly in the eleventh and especially twelfth centuries, as people (the majority young men) gave up farming to move to town for what they considered a better life.  Just as in nineteenth-century America, the migration of people into the cities represented a major population movement.

For much of the High Middle Ages (after the great waves of invasions were over), refugees were treated with pity and concern.  Bishops reminded parishioners of Jesus's saying, "I was a stranger, and you took me in."  This only lasted as long as the economy was strong.  With the weakening economy of the fourteenth century and the accompanying famines (and then Black Death), people lost all pity for refugees, who were considered dangerous and frightening.

© C. Dale Brittain 2016

For more on medieval social history, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.

Vikings

Everybody loves the Vikings.  Or at least everybody does now.  Back in the Middle Ages, it was an entirely different story.

There had been Germanic peoples settled in Scandinavia since the time of the Roman Empire.  The Romans never tried to conquer them, but traded them with them for things like walrus tusks and amber. They scraped out a living farming the narrow fields along the fjords and fishing.  In the eighth century, they developed the long ship, that could be either sailed or rowed, and decided it would make excellent sense to go raiding.  ("Viking" is actually a verb.)

Raiders, usually led by an out-of-favor chief or deposed king, attacked villages and monasteries in western Europe, carrying away loot.  The Vikings were terrifying fighters.  Some monks had to flee repeatedly, because Europe's rivers made excellent transportation networks for the shallow long ships.  A common prayer was, "Preserve us from the Vikings and their terrible dogs."  Imagine Great Dane dogs that were fierce rather than friendly and a bit stupid.

The Vikings (who never wore horned helmets, contrary to Hagar the Horrible) also established some trading colonies in western Europe, realizing one could only raid an area once but could make a profit in trade every year.  They also explored to the east, establishing what later became Russia and continuing all the way overland to Constantinople, where the Byzantine emperors hired these tall, powerful fighters as their so-called Varangian guard.

All during the ninth century Vikings attacked England, France, and what are now the Benelux countries.  In England, King Alfred the Great fought back and eventually forced and bribed them to settle only in what was called the Danelaw region of northeastern England, where they gradually intermarried with the locals and adopted Christianity.

In France, King Charles "the Simple" granted them the region now known as Normandy in the early tenth century (it was named for the Norsemen).  Again, they settled down, started speaking Old French, and became Christians--even if always very lively Christians.

Many Norsemen stayed in Scandinavia.  They explored westward, settling in Iceland and Greenland, even briefly reaching the Canadian maritimes.  Iceland was run by an elected assembly.  Around the year 1000 they voted to convert to Christianity.

We still have a number of sagas and legends they wrote down once they became Christian, some of which, like the Saga of the Volsungs or the Poems of the Elder Edda, referred back to their pagan gods and myths.  Most of the sagas, however, were tales of relatively ordinary Icelanders who ended up killing their relatives.  All the sagas were written in Old Norse, which is extremely close to the language still spoken in Iceland (though they have added words for things like TVs and cars of course).

I have written my own epic saga, Voima, available as an ebook from Amazon, http://amzn.com/B004ZGI3Q8, as well as from other e-tailers.  It combines elements of the sagas with elements of the Finnish Kalevala, which, both the Icelanders and the Finns will tell you, are very different.  The Finns are an entirely different ethnic and linguistic group than the other Scandinavians, being close only to Hungarians.  But from an Anglophone perspective, they both look like good traditions from which to borrow.

I've got dragons, long ships, pagan gods, and wars.  It's my version of what Norse legends might be like if they were still being written.

© C. Dale Brittain 2014