Vikingology Podcast

• Viking Ghost Stories

  The Norse during the Viking Age inhabited a world that was both utterly foreign to us and yet humanly familiar. Like us, they believed in ghosts. But maybe unlike us they believed in revenants and other supernatural creatures of all kinds. It seems their world was pretty porous when it came to the line between the living and the dead.In this episode we chatted with Irina Manea, a scholar of Norse myth and the saga literature, to get a sense of the viking mind regarding death and the afterlife. How did they deal with dead bodies? Where did they believe people went after death? Were ghosts and revenants welcomed or shunned? Were the dead scary or benevolent? Did they take steps to protect against them? And how much did the Christianization of Viking Age Scandinavia change those beliefs?It’s a fascinating topic that we hadn’t delved into much on the show. We learned a lot, including the fact that maybe an important way to keep bad spirits away is to cover your anus. To be safe, you’d better watch or listen and find out why :)Thanks Irina! We must do it again soon.You can find Irina on her Shield of Skuld newsletter right here on Substack. Do check it out. Lots of great viking content there.Skál Get full access to Vikingology Podcast at vikingology.substack.com/subscribe

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• Viking Ghost Stories

  The Norse during the Viking Age inhabited a world that was both utterly foreign to us and yet humanly familiar. Like us, they believed in ghosts. But maybe unlike us they believed in revenants and other supernatural creatures of all kinds. It seems their world was pretty porous when it came to the line between the living and the dead.In this episode we chatted with Irina Manea, a scholar of Norse myth and the saga literature, to get a sense of the viking mind regarding death and the afterlife. How did they deal with dead bodies? Where did they believe people went after death? Were ghosts and revenants welcomed or shunned? Were the dead scary or benevolent? Did they take steps to protect against them? And how much did the Christianization of Viking Age Scandinavia change those beliefs?It’s a fascinating topic that we hadn’t delved into much on the show. We learned a lot, including the fact that maybe an important way to keep bad spirits away is to cover your anus. To be safe, you’d better watch or listen and find out why :)Thanks Irina! We must do it again soon.You can find Irina on her Shield of Skuld newsletter right here on Substack. Do check it out. Lots of great viking content there.Skál Vikingology is reader-supported. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Get full access to Vikingology Podcast at vikingology.substack.com/subscribe

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• Viking Law and Order: English Edition

  Historians and archaeologists who study the vikings are constantly grappling with the question of the amount and level of influence they had on the various parts of the world they ventured into. In this episode we add legal customs to the mix with Dr. Jake Stattel, a legal historian and postdoc research fellow at Cambridge University's Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, who is looking into this very thing — pun intended :)We talked about how legal institutions in England were changing dramatically from AD 900 to 1200 due in part to internal political developments but also to the incursion of the vikings who not only raided and traded but eventually settled there, creating a new hybrid culture based on traditional Scandinavian legal systems, in an area that came to be known as the Danelaw.Want to know the difference between customary and common law, how a person would know which laws they needed to obey when living in a hybrid world, and what happened to 13-year old thieves? Jake’s got you covered.His article Legal culture in the Danelaw: a study of III Æthelred has won several awards for its novel approach to this subject, so if you’re interested in a deeper dive, do check it out.Thanks Jake for a really interesting chat that got our wheels turning!Vikingology is reader-supported. Thanks for watching and listening! To support our work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Get full access to Vikingology Podcast at vikingology.substack.com/subscribe

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• It's a Saga Thing!

  Four podcast hosts geeking out on the Viking Age. What could be better, right?We finally got our chance to sit down with John Sexton and Andy Pfrenger, Medieval Studies scholars who found they shared a love of the Icelandic sagas and started a podcast about it. They’ve been at it for over a decade now, bringing in-depth readings and discussion of the sagas — those tales about people living on a harsh little island in the North Atlantic during the Viking Age — which are chock full of utterly human situations and emotions that are still relatable all these centuries later. And sometimes they even put them on trial.But oddly enough, we started the conversation by talking about Beowulf and what it means to be killed in the Vikingverse. Go figure. John and Andy are leading a saga tour of Iceland in April 2026. If you are interested in tagging along, check out their website Saga Thing Tours. Space is limited so sign up early!And don’t forget to listen to their podcast. You’ll get a deep dive into the saga literature and occasionally hear an interview with top scholars and general viking enthusiasts as well. All great stuff.Thanks John and Andy! We hope we get to do it again. Skál!Vikingology is reader-supported. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber so we can continue bringing you great guests like John and Andy. Get full access to Vikingology Podcast at vikingology.substack.com/subscribe

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• The Treasures of Gotland

  We welcome back friend of the show archaeologist Martin Rundkvist who talked to us earlier this year about skulls in our episode The Headless Norsemen. This time we catch up with his latest archaeological work and finds from the Swedish island of Gotland. As you may know from our previous episode with author Octavia Randolph, Gotland is an island that was critical for Viking Age travel back and forth across the Baltic Sea. But as Martin tells us, based on his team’s finds which span an impressive amount of time from the Bronze Age in 2,000 BCE all the way up to the medieval period of the 1100s CE, Gotland has a very deep history indeed.If you regularly just listen to our podcast, you’ll want to watch this one instead to see some of the cool artifacts which have been recovered. It brought to mind for us the interesting topic of cultural objects and relics, why they are important, and whether they will matter in our future. Fascinating stuff. You can read the full archaeology field report here.Thanks Martin. Please come back again any time!Vikingology is thanks to supportive watchers and listeners everywhere. So we can keep this ball rolling, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Get full access to Vikingology Podcast at vikingology.substack.com/subscribe

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