He's the son of a chieftain and a princess--yet Halfdan was born a slave. Now he is becoming a man and it is time for him to meet his destiny. Though raised a slave who could only dream of freedom, young Halfdan's fate may be about to change. If freed, he may train as a Viking warrior, and come to know the glories of true brotherhood and the horrors of unspeakable evil. In the world of Vikings, a warrior's destiny is forged in the heat of battle. If the fates decree it, Hafdan may emerge as a new hero . . . a new myth . . . and perhaps a new legend.
Join Olaf the young Viking on a voyage of discovery around his world. Learn how to survive in those tough, adventurous times as he teaches you how to: ● train for battle ● choose your armor ● sail in a longship ● raid other lands Do you have the skills and guts to be a Viking warrior?
Hi, my name is Dustin. My name means "Thor's stone" in the Viking language. I live in Scandinavia around AD 800-900. I also have a sister, Ragna. Her name means "giving advice," and boy, does she love to give advice. Our way of life is very different from yours. We had to become tough, strong, and flexible. We were Norwegians, Swedes, and Danes. Our families were farmers, traders, blacksmiths, and craftsman. Most of us lived on farms, even those who lived in towns had gardens and animals in their yards. Everything we needed and used had to be harvested or made by hand. Children had to plant and tend the crops. Also, in the cold winter months when no one really wanted to go outside, except when absolutely necessary, we kept our animals at one end of the long house with us. It did get smelly. Another job for children was cleaning out the poop and pee from the animals each day they were in the house. I have to say our houses were a bit stinky in the winter. Our house is a long house or what you would call a rectangular prism with a fireplace area in the middle and rugs/animal skins hanging to divide the rooms. Ragna and I had to comb our hair every morning, and we had to take a bath every Saturday. You may be wondering if we just walked around in animal skins all day or whether we actually had clothing that looks like it was made of cloth, read to find out. We Vikings are known for our ships. Did you know there are actually two kinds of Viking ships? They were called the longships and knarrs. Come along with me and learn about our lives.
The Last Viking unravels the life of the man who stands head and shoulders above all those who raced to map the last corners of the world. In 1900, the four great geographical mysteries--the Northwest Passage, the Northeast Passage, the South Pole, and the North Pole--remained blank spots on the globe. Within twenty years Roald Amundsen would claim all four prizes. Renowned for his determination and technical skills, both feared and beloved by his men, Amundsen is a legend of the heroic age of exploration, which shortly thereafter would be tamed by technology, commerce, and publicity. Féd in his lifetime as an international celebrity, pursued by women and creditors, he died in the Arctic on a rescue mission for an inept rival explorer. Stephen R. Bown has unearthed archival material to give Amundsen's life the grim immediacy of Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, the exciting detail of The Endurance, and the suspense of a Jon Krakauer tale. The Last Viking is both a thrilling literary biography and a cracking good story.
Laughing Shall I Die explores the Viking fascination with scenes of heroic death. The literature of the Vikings is dominated by famous last stands, famous last words, death songs, and defiant gestures, all presented with grim humor. Much of this mindset is markedly alien to modern sentiment, and academics have accordingly shunned it. And yet, it is this same worldview that has always powered the popular public image of the Vikings—with their berserkers, valkyries, and cults of Valhalla and Ragnarok—and has also been surprisingly corroborated by archaeological discoveries such as the Ridgeway massacre site in Dorset. Was it this mindset that powered the sudden eruption of the Vikings onto the European scene? Was it a belief in heroic death that made them so lastingly successful against so many bellicose opponents? Weighing the evidence of sagas and poems against the accounts of the Vikings’ victims, Tom Shippey considers these questions as he plumbs the complexities of Viking psychology. Along the way, he recounts many of the great bravura scenes of Old Norse literature, including the Fall of the House of the Skjoldungs, the clash between the two great longships Ironbeard and Long Serpent, and the death of Thormod the skald. One of the most exciting books on Vikings for a generation, Laughing Shall I Die presents Vikings for what they were: not peaceful explorers and traders, but warriors, marauders, and storytellers.
The study of early medieval towns has frequently concentrated on urban beginnings, the search for broadly applicable definitions of urban characteristics and the chronological development of towns. Far less attention has been paid to the experience of living in towns. The thirteen chapters in this book bring together the current state of knowledge about Viking-Age towns (c. 800–1100) from both sides of the Irish Sea, focusing on everyday life in and around these emerging settlements. What was it really like to grow up, live, and die in these towns? What did people eat, what did they wear, and how did they make a living for themselves? Although historical sources are addressed, the emphasis of the volume is overwhelmingly archaeological, paying homage to the wealth of new material that has become available since the advent of urban archaeology in the 1960s.