HistoryExtra
type: channel
link: https://www.historyextra.com
description: Home of Britain’s bestselling history magazine and award-winning podcast
date: 2026-01-29T14:25:37.000Z
update period: hourly
update frequency: 1
update base: 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00
items: It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
items: Everything you think you know about Vikings is WRONG
items: In his mother’s womb, he was fated to avenge his father – how was pregnancy understood in the Viking age?
items: Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age
items: Ordinary Vikings: hidden histories of the Nordic world
items: Norse gods and goddesses: 14 of the most important deities venerated by the Vikings
items: Old Norse poetry: how the Vikings viewed the world
items: "A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people", plus four other facts about the Vikings you might not know...
items: Vikings podcast episodes
items: Daily life, with Professor Ryan Lavelle

It was an "extravaganza of brutality": how the Vikings menaced the Mediterranean
type: item
date: 2026-01-19T15:30:53.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Historical events
subject: Historical people
subject: viking
subject: Viking life and culture
subject: Viking warfare
description: Killing, burning, pillaging, enslaving. Even when heading to sunnier climes, Viking raiders deployed the same tactics that they had used along the shores of northern and western Europe, reveals Thomas Williams
encoded: The poor citizens of Al-Jazira al-Khadra never knew what hit them. In 859, an unfamiliar fleet sailed into the bay separating this Muslim settlement – which later evolved into the city of Algeciras, now in southern Spain – from Gibraltar. Making landfall nearby, the alien ships disgorged their fearsome crews: Vikings. In a sequence of events terrifyingly familiar to victims in more northerly parts of Europe, these formidable marauders wreaked havoc. They occupied the city, burned the mosque, ravaged the countryside – and then moved on to the next target, and the next. The campaign later known as the ‘Great Raid’ was well and truly underway – part of a chapter in Norse history that’s less known today, but no less bloody. Stone cold killers The Vikings of our imagination are emphatically creatures of the north – avatars of cold climes and bleak weather, manifestations of ice and snow made flesh and steel. Dragon-prowed ships slice through the frigid waters of steep-sided fjords swathed in midnight-green pine forests. Fur-clad adventurers hunt walrus amid the crashing icebergs of the northernmost seas. Giants haunt the ice-capped mountains in an unreal world of midnight sun and northern lights. We are used to reading tales of Viking rampages through lands both near and far from home: around the Baltic coastline, in Britain and Ireland, in what’s now northern France, Russia, even Canada. But none of these places seem so different from Scandinavia, in climate at least; indeed, some boast similar extremes of latitude. Even in the most temperate of these places, a sharp north-easterly or a rare winter snowstorm may come and go without raising an eyebrow. Likewise Vikings in times past. But, like the ice, it can feel jarring to find Vikings in places where we feel instinctively they don’t quite belong. Like Mallorca, southern France, even Egypt. <img src="https://images.immediate.co.uk/production/volatile/sites/7/2026/01/CreditCopyright--Museo-San-Isidoro-de-Leon-Derechos-r…

VikingDPSwebready-4a60a40-e1768831823299.jpg
width: 1500
height: 1000

Everything you think you know about Vikings is WRONG
type: item
date: 2025-12-11T15:50:14.000Z
creator: Kev Lochun
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Viking life and culture
description: You KNOW who the Vikings are – bearded, brutish, spoiling for a fight, and ever ready to raid an Anglo-Saxon monastery near you. Or do you?
encoded: The Vikings were bearded, brutish, spoiling for a fight, and ever ready to raid an Anglo-Saxon monastery near you. How true is that, really? It is a stereotype beloved across pop culture – most visibly in TV and film – but it’s also an oversimplified fiction. HistoryExtra’s Kev Lochun braves the ire of a sword-wielding colleague to break down what we get wrong about the Vikings – not least, that they didn’t even exist. Confused? It’s all downhill from the horned helmets. View Green Video on the source website

YT-Vikings-D-9eabc53-e1765467996161.jpg
width: 1603
height: 1078

In his mother’s womb, he was fated to avenge his father – how was pregnancy understood in the Viking age?
type: item
date: 2025-06-13T13:48:47.000Z
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Viking life and culture
description: A powerful prophecy was made in the Laxdaela Saga, a tragic 13th-century Icelandic tale filled with gory twists and turns. It concerned the unborn child of the beautiful Guðrún, a woman caught in a violent sequence of love, betrayal and revenge…
encoded: Guðrún was pregnant by her husband Bolli, though their marriage was not happy. After a series of taunts and insults played out between Guðrún, Bolli and Kjartan, Bolli had participated in the murder of Kjartan, who Guðrún had once loved the most. Seeking revenge for that death, a man named Helgi murdered Bolli, in front of Guðrún. Helgi then wiped the blood from his deadly spear on the shawl covering Guðrún’s belly, saying, “I think that under of the corner of that shawl dwells my own death”. Helgi’s words became reality. The child she was carrying would one day grow up and kill him. This striking story is one of only a few references found in Old Norse texts to pregnant women and their unborn children. But how typical is it? And what does it tell us about how Vikings understood pregnancy, unborn life and the women who carried it? New research into Viking understandings of pregnancy Those are the questions that new research, published in May 2025, has sought to answer, aiming to unpick the ambiguity and uncover what pregnancy was really like for Viking women, and examine its place within Old Norse culture and society. In ‘Womb Politics: The Pregnant Body and the Archaeologies of Absence’ (Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 2025), Marianne Hem Eriksen, Katherine Marie Olley, Brad Marshall and Emma Tollefsen examined 300 years of Viking texts, images, and burial evidence – and what they found was a culture that had surprisingly mixed views on pregnancy. In some places, the unborn were seen as people with destinies of their own. In others, pregnancy was treated more like a health condition, with no suggestion that the fetus had a separate identity at all. What’s most striking, though, is how often pregnancy is simply left out of the record – not missing by accident, the authors say, but likely made deliberately invisible. Women in the Viking Age Hem Eriksen notes that there was no one way of experiencing life as a woman in the Viking Age. Most people lived on rural…

VikingPregnancy-c03bc90.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Reading the runes: what we can learn about everyday life in the Viking Age
type: item
date: 2024-10-15T16:26:41.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Historical people
subject: Letters
subject: Poetry
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Runes – those instantly recognisable characters inscribed on stone, wood and bone – are filled with mystery, but can reveal little-known aspects of everyday Viking life. Eleanor Barraclough deciphers runes that recount tales of love, lust, travel and tragedy from a millennium ago
encoded: The Vikings are best known for their bloody raids, bawdy gods and buried ships. But they are also famous for the runes – the Nordic branch of the spiky north Germanic alphabet still so familiar today. Though Viking Age culture was largely non-literate, runes were the chief exception, lying at the intersection between text and object. In the same way that the word ‘alphabet’ is derived by combining the Greek letters ⍺ (alpha) and β (beta), the Nordic equivalent, ‘futhark’, is derived from the first six letters of the writing system: ᚠ (f), ᚢ (u), ᚦ (th), ᚬ (a), ᚱ (r), ᚴ (k). Surprisingly, because they represent such a recognisable and well-known form of ancient writing, no one knows for certain where runes came from. It’s probably no coincidence that many of the oldest interpretable runic inscriptions discovered – dating from the second century AD – were found in a context that shows evidence of contact with the Roman empire. The shape of runic characters are similar to many letters of the Latin alphabet, but with an angular shape more suited for carving into hard materials such as wood, bone and stone. It’s likely that knowledge of the Roman writing system travelled north with people who had spent time on both sides of the imperial frontier along the Rhine, whether as mercenaries, traders or craftspeople. Want to know more about the Vikings? Professor Ryan Lavelle leads our four-week HistoryExtra Academy Vikings course, available to HistoryExtra subscribers This might also explain one possible meaning of the word ‘rune’ itself: something secret or hidden, originally reserved for a particular segment of society – an elite group. As the centuries passed, though, knowledge and use of runes spanned an ever-broader proportion of society. The Viking Age is typically considered to encompass roughly the years 750–1100 AD – the period during which people of Scandinavian origins and heritage took part in overseas raiding, trading and settlement. At its height, the Norse diasp…

GettyImages-471065417-CMYK-73682f5.jpg
width: 5906
height: 3937

Ordinary Vikings: hidden histories of the Nordic world
type: item
date: 2024-10-07T06:00:21.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Eleanor Barraclough explores the daily lives of the Vikings who weren’t warlords or kings, but farmers, merchants, wives and lovers
encoded: We know the Vikings best as brutal, seafaring, pagan raiders – and that’s an important part of their lives and histories. But it’s only one aspect: what about their love lives, experiences of travels, and attitudes to religion? Speaking with James Osborne, Eleanor Barraclough unpicks the day-to-day lives and culture of the Vikings across their vast – and complicated – geographic domain and timeline. Eleanor Barraclough is the author of Embers of the Hands: Hidden Histories of the Viking Age (Profile Books, 2024) Buy now on Bookshop.org Buy now on Amazon Buy now on Waterstones

Eleanor-Barraclough-Embers-WL-fafefdd.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Norse gods and goddesses: 14 of the most important deities venerated by the Vikings
type: item
date: 2024-07-03T15:11:57.000Z
creator: Jonny Wilkes
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Evergreen
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Names like Odin and Thor are commonly known. But if can’t tell your Aesir from your Vanir, or don’t know what animals pulled Freyja’s chariot, or which of the gods and goddesses survived Ragnarök, here is a guide to some of the key figures and events in Norse mythology
encoded: Before the existence of humans, before the cosmos, before the gods, there was the Ginnungagap: a gaping, primordial void. On one side of this yawning nothingness was an icy realm called Niflheim, and on the other was the land of fire, Muspelheim. When the realms expanded and the ice and fire clashed together, a burning frost formed and sent heated water droplets into the Ginnungagap. There, they merged into the form of a being; the first life, a giant named Ymir, according to Norse mythology. It was from Ymir that other lives emerged, among them the god Odin and his brothers Vili and Ve, who killed the giant and created the world from his corpse. His flesh became the earth and his blood the seas, oceans and rivers; his skull was turned into the sky and his brain used for clouds, while his bones made the mountains and his teeth the stones. The brothers then made humans from ash and elm trees. From there, the legendary pantheon of Norse gods and goddesses burst forth, complete with a rich and complex set of beliefs that, today, we still know little about. Yet the names and images have lodged themselves in our consciousness, from Thor’s hammer to the afterlife at Valhalla. Who are the most famous Norse gods and goddesses? Odin – The All-Father, god of war, wisdom, poetry, prophecy, runes and the dead Frigg – Goddess of motherhood, love and marriage Thor – God of thunder, the sky and agriculture Freyr – God of peace, prosperity and fertility Freyja – Goddess of beauty, gold and fertility Loki – The trickster god Heimdall – The watchman of the gods Balder – God of light, purity and summer sunshine Tyr – God of war, law and justice Njord – God of the sea, wind and bounty Hel – Keeper of the land of the dead Bragi – God of poetry and music Idunn – Goddess of youth, rejuvenation and spring Skadi – Goddess of winter, mountains, skiing and bow hunting Odin: Norse god of war, wisdom and the dead Known as: the All-Father, Father of Men, Woden Known for: Ruler of Asgard, he was …

GettyImages-1155652887-47054aa-e1720015013545.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Old Norse poetry: how the Vikings viewed the world
type: item
date: 2024-05-30T11:42:15.000Z
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Old Norse poetry isn’t just a rip-roaring account of the exploits of bloodthirsty warriors, or the intrigues of gods and giants. It is those things, but it’s also an indispensable portal into how the Vikings understood the universe. Alicia Maddalena and Matthew Townend give us a whistle-stop tour of a glittering art form
encoded: “King, you made a great attack on the family of princes. Gracious leader, you reddened broad Kantaraborg in the morning.” With these words, an early 11th-century poet, Óttarr the Black, praises one of the martial feats of his patron, King Óláfr Haraldsson of Norway. Kantaraborg is the Old Norse form of the name of Canterbury; the event that is being commemorated here is the capture of the city by a Viking army in 1011. Its sequel the following year was the shocking martyrdom of Archbishop Ælfheah. For the English writers of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, the capture of Canterbury was a grievous event: the 1011 entry laments that “there misery could be seen in the place where joy was often seen previously”. But that is not at all how the taking of Canterbury is viewed in Óttarr’s verse. Here, the assault offers grounds for celebration, an instance of the king’s military prowess. Old Norse poetry such as Óttarr’s, in other words, gives us access to a perspective on the Viking Age from the Vikings themselves. Such poetry is full of journeys and battles, dominated by charismatic war-leaders who wield weapons, conquer lands, and share out treasure to their followers. What did the Vikings use poetry for? The stereotype of the Vikings as great warriors derives largely from this self-image that was cultivated by their poets. But that is by no means the only subject matter that we find in this body of verse. In the Viking Age, poetry was used to tell mythological stories about the gods and their cosmos, celebrate special occasions, woo prospective lovers, insult rivals, and commemorate everything from a generous gift to a well-decorated interior. Composed in the Old Norse language, Viking poetry is the great under-used resource for exploring and understanding the early medieval Scandinavian world. Only in such poetry, and in the less eloquent corpus of runic inscriptions, can we hear the Vikings speak for themselves. Given that their actions and ideas have predominately been me…

GettyImages-152204965webready-cb64aa2.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

"A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people", plus four other facts about the Vikings you might not know...
type: item
date: 2024-03-05T17:18:24.000Z
creator: Professor Ryan Lavelle
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: Evergreen
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Ryan Lavelle, who is teaching our new HistoryExtra Academy course, shares five surprising facts about the raiders, pirates and traders from medieval Scandinavia
encoded: A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people The people of medieval Iceland are best known for their sagas – vivid stories written about their Viking ancestors. Yet they also possessed a lawcode, and these laws reveal a curious marriage custom that shines a light on gender relations in Icelandic society. For a marriage to be legitimate, a groom had to be seen by six witnesses entering the same bed as his new wife, “without concealment”. The idea that marriage was witnessed ensured that children from the union were seen as legitimate – an important matter for the descent of property and for family honour. After all, the keeping of mistresses was far from uncommon and the sexual mistreatment of female slaves so widespread it appears that it was barely worth recording in sagas. Read more | Viking gods, goddesses & tricksters: 12 figures from Norse mythology All this is worth bearing in mind when considering the Viking cemetery in Birka, Sweden – in which a skeleton buried with an array of weapons turned out to be biologically female. Many Viking women enjoyed greater freedoms than their counterparts across Europe. But there were still limits to their power. Did the person buried at Birka express their identity like that of a male warrior because of such limits? The Vikings with Ryan Lavelle In this four-week short course, you'll discover everything you need to know about the Viking period, guided by Ryan Lavelle, Professor in Early Medieval History at the University of Winchester. Find out more Vikings converted to Christianity earlier than we thought In c965 AD, King Harald Bluetooth made a bold – and striking – claim. On a runestone erected at Jelling on the Jutland peninsula, the Danish monarch declared that he had “made all the Danes Christian”. It was the earliest ‘official’ statement on Christianity made in Viking Scandinavia. So does that mean that Christianity didn’t gain much traction in the Viking lands until the late 10th century? Perhaps not. For, in 20…

GettyImages-599956397-8b904a9.jpg
width: 700
height: 1024

Vikings podcast episodes
type: item
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: viking
subject: Viking life and culture
description: Browse our archive of HistoryExtra podcasts on Vikings, from the Norse gods to global connections...

Vikings-topic-48c7e86-e1709301654616.jpg
width: 620
height: 413

Daily life, with Professor Ryan Lavelle
type: item
date: 2024-02-19T14:11:11.000Z
creator: Professor Ryan Lavelle
subject: Membership
subject: Period
subject: Viking
subject: HistoryExtra Academy
subject: HistoryExtra Academy Vikings Course
subject: Viking life and culture
description: In week three of the HistoryExtra Academy Vikings course, Professor Ryan Lavelle explores how people lived, loved, worked and worshipped throughout the Viking world
encoded: View Green Video on the source website Discover more learning from week three of the HistoryExtra Academy Vikings course What was life like for Viking women? – reading time 7 mins Inside the Viking mind – reading time 10 mins Viking gods, goddesses & tricksters: 12 figures from Norse mythology – reading time 8 mins Podcast: What Norse poetry reveals about the Viking Age – listening time 48 mins Viking women: raiders, traders and settlers – reading time 7 mins How England rode the Viking storm – reading time 12 mins Viking ‘warrior women’ – reading time 3 mins

HEXA-Viking-Vod-thumbnail-WK3-a4f28c8.jpg
width: 620
height: 413