Medieval Mondays: Christian Viking Runestone Uncovered in Medievalist's Yard

It's every medievalist's dream come true--to find a rare artifact from the Middle Ages in their own back yard.

That recently happened to Dr. Sarah Jane Gibbon, a specialist in early church history, when her father found this fragment of a runestone on her farm.

It helps, of course, that she lives in the Orkney Islands, one of the richest areas for archaeological finds in the United Kingdom, and that's saying a lot. These rugged islands off the north coast of Scotland were home to an advanced Neolithic culture that made some amazing tombs and stone circles. Much later in the Middle Ages, it was home to a colony of Vikings.

What's interesting about this runestone is that it's using Viking runes to express Latin words, in this case, “who art in heaven hallowed”, part of the Lord's Prayer. Thus this runestone dates to after the Vikings had converted to Christianity. No similar inscription has ever been uncovered in the Orkneys or the Shetland Islands further north.

I bet Dr. Gibbon and her dad will be looking down a lot more as they walk around the property.

Image courtesy The Orcadian.

Norse Gods Blogfest: Naglfar, the Ship made from Dead Men's Nails

Today I'm participating in the Norse Gods blogfest. Wanting to be a bit different, I'm not going to talk about a deity per se, but a magical ship called Naglfar ("Nail Ship").

The Norse envisioned the end of the world as a titanic battle between Gods and the forces of Surtr, which included giants, rival gods, and various other fell beings such as the giant wolf Fenrir.

Sailing against the gods is the ship Naglfar, captained by the trickster god Loki and made entirely from the fingernails and toenails of dead men. It's a vast ship carrying hordes of warriors. In this apocalyptic battle many of the gods are killed, the world is consumed by fire and then flooded, and then rises from the waves fresh and new. Some gods remain to rule over this new land.

Only two humans are going to survive that particular era in human history, a sort of Norse Adam and Eve who will repopulate the land. The Prose Edda warns us to make sure to trim the nails of the dead to keep the enemies of the gods from completing Naglfar, but since it's all fated to happen anyway, I don't see how we can stop it!

Below is a shot of the Tullstorp Runestone from Sweden, showing the wolf Fenrir and the ship Naglfar.

Photo courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Medieval Mondays: Archaeologists trace Viking voyage in North America

One of the things that has always fascinated me about my field is how you can discover so much from seemingly innocuous remains.

Take this piece of jasper, for example. It was found at the site of L'Anse Aux Meadows, the Viking settlement in Newfoundland, Canada. This is the only Viking settlement so far discovered in the North America, but an analysis of this piece of jasper hints they went further afield.

It was used as a fire starter. If you struck it against a piece of steel it would make sparks. Bits of jasper are common finds in Viking sites. What's interesting about jasper and many other stones is that their chemical composition differs depending on where they come from. Thus you can analyze them and determine their origin.

Archaeologists analyzed this fire starter and found that it came from Notre Dame Bay, 143 miles (230 kilometers) south of the settlement. At that time (c. 1000 AD) the bay was inhabited by the ancestors of the Beothuk people and was rich in timber and wildlife. This would have been a good place to trade, being much more inhabited and rich in resources than the bleak area around L'Anse Aux Meadows.

Perhaps more investigations will reveal more detail about the lives of these rugged explorers from a thousand years ago.

Medieval Mondays: Sunstone found in English shipwreck

In a previous post I talked about the Viking sunstone, a legendary crystal that could detect the location of the Sun on cloudy days. This, of course, would be a boon to navigation in the age before GPS.

Sunstones are mentioned in some Viking sagas and historians have theorized they were double-refracting crystals such as cordierite, tourmaline, or calcite, which are common in Scandinavia. These crystals only allow light through them that's polarized in certain directions and thus appear darker or lighter depending on the polarization of the light behind it. While the Sun may be blocked by clouds, it's still sending out a concentration of polarized light that can be detected by the crystal as it's moved around.

But that's only a theory. No sunstone has ever been found. . .until now.

A team of French archaeologists studying artifacts from a British ship that sunk in 1592 found a rectangular block of Iceland spar calcite crystal, a type known for its double-refracting properties. The wreck was near Alderney island in the English Channel.

You can see the sunstone in this picture, next to a pair of dividers that may have been used for navigation. Both items were found close together in the wreck.

It's interesting that the sunstone was found on a ship dating centuries after the Viking era. It looks like these things were more popular than anyone ever suspected.

Photo courtesy Alderney Society.

Medieval Mondays: Were the Vikings Potheads?

A new discovery reveals that the Vikings in Norway grew hemp.

Examination of material excavated from a Viking farm in southern Norway uncovered hemp pollen dating from 650 to 800 AD. Hemp is Cannabis sativa, a subspecies of which, Cannabis sativa indica, is marijuana. Industrial hemp such as what the Vikings grew can't get you high because it contains almost no THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

Instead, hemp can be used for clothing and rope, as well as numerous other products. While the archaeologists stressed that they found no evidence that the Vikings grew marijuana, I have a hard time beliving they didn't have a little patch set aside for those long winter nights. The sagas would have sounded pretty cool while high on a mixture of pot and mead.

They couldn't have smoked too much, though, otherwise they wouldn't have made all those voyages of conquest and discovery. They'd have just stayed home eating Doritos and watching TV instead.

Photo of industrial hemp (not the Grateful Dead kind) courtesy Evelyn Simak.

New evidence for Vikings in North America

Recent excavations have found new evidence for Norsemen in Canada.

National Geographic reports that an archaeologist has reexamined the artifacts found at four sites in northern Canada and thinks they're Norse. Back in the 1960s, some strange cloth was found from sites belonging to the Dorset culture, the predecessors of the modern Inuit. The cloth didn't look Dorset and when it was looked at again this year, the researcher discovered it looked just like cloth woven in Viking Greenland in the 14th century.

Other evidence was found too. Whetstones that had lain in a museum for decades were analyzed with modern methods and found to have been used to sharpen bronze. The Dorset culture had virtually no metal tools. Only when they were lucky enough to come across meteoric iron would they have metal to work with.

Early researchers also found a sizable building that was much bigger than Dorset structures but the right size for a Viking hall. This was before the 1960s discovery of L'anse aux Meadows, the Viking settlement on Newfoundland. Since back then the idea that Norsemen came to the New World was only supposition, the evidence wasn't looked at as closely as it should have been.

As yet there's no smoking gun, but it does raise some interesting possibilities. The four sites from which the new evidence comes range over a thousand miles from northern Baffin to northern Labrador. The Norsemen, or their trade goods, seem to have gotten around.

Besides L'anse au Meadows and the Baffin Island finds, there is some fuzzy evidence for more widespread Norse explorations of North America. This 13th or 14th century carved figurine, called the "Bishop of Baffin", shows a person in clothing quite unlike that worn by the Dorset or Inuit cultures, yet strangely reminiscent of a European cloak. Also check out my post on the Maine Penny.

The Maine Penny: an archaeological mystery

While every history reader knows the Vikings came to North America around 1000 AD, that wasn't always the case. A half century ago, there was heated debate over whether the Vikings had reached so far west. The Vinland Saga seemed to indicate they had, but there was no real evidence. It wasn't until the excavation of L'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland in 1978 that there was definitive proof that the Vikings colonized North America.

There was some evidence before this. In 1957, archaeologist Guy Mellgren was excavating a midden (trash heap) at a Native American site in Maine discovered this silver coin five inches below the surface. Coin experts determined it was minted in Norway between 1065 and 1080 AD. This set off a huge controversy. Some archaeologists even accused Mellgren of "seeding" the site in order to win fame.

Now that we know the Vikings did come to the New World, Mellgren has been vindicated. He hadn't found a Viking settlement, though. The site was purely Native American and now researchers believe the coin made its way south as a trade item. It's now in the the Maine State Museum.

Christianity reached Vikings earlier than previously thought

A new excavation is pushing back the date for the introduction of Christianity among the Vikings.

Archaeologists working at Ribe Cathedral in Denmark have found Christian burials from the mid ninth century in the graveyard. They all faced east and had no grave goods in keeping with Christian tradition. Viking burials almost always included grave goods and generally did not face east.

Traditional history says that the Vikings in the area were converted after King Harold Blutooth was baptized in 963. On his famous Jellinge Runestone, shown here, the king boasted that he "made the Danes Christians”. Some historians have contended that he was only making official a slow process of conversion that had started long before. These graves seem to confirm that, and bring up the question of whether there's the foundations of an older church underneath the cathedral at Ribe.

Sorry for my recent silence, but I've been busyworking on the latest book in the Timeless Empire series. I've even put a word counter on the sidebar to keep me motivated! Book One, Hard Winter, is already available, and Book Two, At the Gates, is being prepared for publication. It should be availabe in the next two weeks.

Photo courtesy Sven Rosborn.

Medieval Mondays: Did Saint Brendan sail to America?

Fellow author and blogger buddy Sean McLachlan recently wrote a couple of interesting posts about the Vikings in North America for the travel blog Gadling. One was on L'Anse aux Meadows, the only confirmed Viking settlement in the New World. The other is on the controversial Kensington Runestone and other purported Vikings traces in the U.S. These runestones are problematic to say the least and may be modern forgeries.

There is a whole subculture in the United States of trying to prove that various ancient cultures arrived in the New World before Columbus. One of the more popular theories is that Saint Brendan voyaged to the New World.

Saint Brendan lived from about 484-577. Not much is known about his life for certain. One later account written in the ninth century, Voyage of St Brendan the Navigator, tells a fantastic tale of his seven-year journey to the Isle of the Blessed and back. This isle was supposedly far to the west out in the Atlantic. During their voyage, the saint and his companions meets devils, Judas, and sea monsters, and have many adventures. Time and against the saint protects his followers by calling on God.

While it seems like a Christian fable or morality tale, some people, especially Irish-Americans, think it proves that the early Irish visited the New World. There's no archaeological evidence for this, however and there is no mention of it in any of the Irish records besides the fantastical tale of Saint Brendan. One would think that Irish monks risking life and limb to preach to the native Americans would write an account of their exploits.

Back in 1976, adventurer Tim Severin decided to prove that Saint Brendan could have made the voyage. He constructed a currach, the traditional Irish boat of the times. These boats come in all sizes and are made of leather lashed onto a wooden frame. Severin's boat was 36 feet long and had two masts. A model is below. he and his crew sailed this unlikely craft all the way from Ireland to Newfoundland.

This was certainly an impressive feat. Showing that Brendan could have made it, however, doesn't prove that he did. Severin had the advantage of knowing where he was going!

While Severin was a serious investigator, the same can't be said for some of those searching for the early Irish in the New World. Barry Fell and other authors caused a craze in the 1970s when they claimed to have found numerous inscriptions of Ogam, an ancient Irish script, all over the United States. There's a good page on this controversy at the Council for West Virginia Archaeology website. Well worth a look.

Photos courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Medieval Mondays: Viking graffiti

The Vikings traveled far. From their homeland in Scandinavia they reached across the Atlantic to North America, penetrated deep into what is now called Russia, circled the west coast of Europe and sailed all around the Mediterranean. Their longship was feared and their knörr was welcomed. If you saw the first, you were about to get raided. If you saw the second, that meant traders were bringing you goods from distant lands.

The Vikings left traces of their passage. The photo above shows Runic graffiti in the Hagia Sofia, the main church of Constantinople (modern Istanbul). It was probably made by a Varangian, one of the Byzantine emperor's personal bodyguard. Byzantine politics was a deadly game and the emperor liked using foreign mercenaries who were loyal only to him, or at least his ready supply of gold. I can just picture poor Halvdan standing bored through a long Greek Orthodox service and inscribing his name on the railing.

Several other Runic inscriptions have been found in the Hagia Sofia. Like Halvdan's inscription, they're faint and hard to read. If you ever visit, take a good look at the walls and you might discover more!

Next we have this crude carving of what many believe is a Viking ship, found on the wall of a palace in Palermo, Sicily. It may not have been made by a Viking since Viking ships were a common sight in the Mediterranean. It's still a tantalizing image.

Of course, Viking graffiti is more common in places where the Vikings actually settled. In the Orkney Islands, a neolithic chamber tomb is covered in runic graffiti. We actually know who did some of these carvings and when, because the event is preserved in the Orkneyinga Saga as well as the runes themselves. A group of Scandinavian Crusaders, either leaving for or coming back from the Crusades, broke into the tomb to hide from a storm at Christmas time 1153.

The longest inscription chronicles the event: "Crusaders broke into Maeshowe. Lif the earl's cook carved these runes. To the north-west is a great treasure hidden. It was long ago that a great treasure was hidden here. Happy is he that might find that great treasure. Hakon alone bore treasure from this mound (signed) Simon Sirith"

What was this treasure? Nobody knows. Some Neolithic tombs contained gold ornaments, which would surely have warmed the Vikings' hearts on that cold Christmas.

Other inscriptions were a bit earthier: "Thorni fucked. Helgi carved." Interestingly, Helgi is a male name, and I believe Thorni is as well. Is this evidence of gay Vikings?

Here's another boast: "These runes were carved by the man most skilled in runes in the western ocean."

Most of the rest of the 30 inscriptions are more prosaic, simple names or the common formula of "so-and-so carved these runes." You can find the whole list of them here.

Photos courtesy Wikipedia.

Medieval Mondays: Viking trading ships

The Vikings were some of the greatest shipbuilders of the premodern world. A lot of people don't realize, however, that the famous longship was only used for raiding and warfare. It was too narrow to safely take across the open ocean and would quickly swamp in heavy seas. Norsemen hugged the coasts with their longships when they went a-Viking.

So what boat did they use for their famous voyages to Iceland, Greenland, and Vinland (North America)? This one. It's called a knörr. Like all Viking ships it was clinker-built, meaning of overlapping oaken planks lashed together to naturally curved timber and fastened with iron rivets. Fitted with a square sail and a side rudder called a steer-board (hence the name starboard), they could carry up to 40 tons of cargo. they could be up to 60 feet long and carried a crew of 15-20 people.

Since knorrir didn't have much of a keel and the steer-board could be taken up, they could sail in as little as five feet of water and be run onto a beach. They had very little draft and thus bobbed along the surface of the ocean. It was also somewhat flexible, giving in heavy seas. This kept the hull from cracking.

Several reproductions have been made and modern sailors are universal in their praise of the knörr's seaworthiness. in 1932, a knörr called the Roald Amundsen after the Arctic explorer sailed one of the routes used by Columbus to the New World and made it there in only 2/3 the time it took Columbus! It was then sailed from Newfoundland to Norway.

The Vikings were smart with more than just shipbuilding; they were expert navigators too. They used a special crystal called a sun stone to determine the position of the sun on overcast days.


Photo courtesy Wikipedia.

Medieval Mondays: Viking Sunstones, magical myth or primative high-tech?

Welcome to Medieval Mondays! As a medievalist I get a lot of questions about the Middle Ages, so every Monday I'll be giving you some interesting facts about my favorite historic period.

Despite a century of research showing the Vikings were an advanced civilization, they still have a reputation as booze-swilling brutes who could barely grunt out a coherent sentence, let alone make any significant inventions. Hopefully a recent study will help dispel this myth.

We all know the Vikings were expert seafarers, generally the only ability granted to them besides being able to kick some serious ass. They were helped in their navigation by a "sundisc", a type of sundial. But when the skies were cloudy as they often are in the North Sea and northern Atlantic, how did they know which way to go?

A tantalizing clue comes in one of the Norse Sagas. In Rauðúlfs þáttr, King Olaf asks the hero Sigurður to point out the Sun while it's snowing. He points it out, even though it's invisible. Then the king had his men "fetch the solar stone and held it up and saw where light radiated from the stone and thus directly verified Sigurður’s prediction.”

What's going on here? Is it only a tall tale, or something more? Some scientists believe the "solar stone" was actually a type of crystal called a double-refracting crystal. Such crystals like cordierite, tourmaline, or calcite are common in Scandinavia. These crystals only allow light through them that's polarized in certain directions and thus appear darker or lighter depending on the polarization of the light behind it. While the Sun may be blocked by clouds, it's still sending out a concentration of polarized light that can be detected by the crystal as it's moved around. For a more technical description of how it works, check out this article.

So we can imagine a Viking standing on the deck of a ship in bad weather, trying to find the way to the nearest Irish monastery for an afternoon of relaxing looting. He pulls out his handy sun stone and moves it around the sky until a flash of light shows him where the Sun is. From that he can determine direction, and his seaman's skills do the rest.

Viking ships are fascinating. The one I'm showing here is called the Gokstad ship and it's at the Kulturhistorisk museum, Oslo. It was found in 1880, and dates to around 890 AD, when it was used as a grave ship for a Viking chieftain. Thanks to James Cridland for this cool photo!