HeyJaredShield of Skuld
Research and education on Vikings, sagas and the Early Middle Ages.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 14
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- Oct 1, 2026
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- Aug 3, 2026
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Prophecy of the Seeress (opens the original)
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I am delighted to invite you to a live talk, Prophecy of the seeress: ritual specialists in the Viking world, to be held here on Substack on Oct 8 at 7:00 PM CET. What role did magic and ritual play in the Viking world? How do we know about magical practices? And above all else, who were the mysterious people conducting them?In this talk, I’ll attempt to uncover part of the identity of these powerful characters by combining various approaches ranging from critical textual analysis to recent arch
Did the Norse worship a horse phallus? (opens the original)
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Enlarged art thou, Völsi,and raised aloft,enriched with linen,supported by leeks.May giantessesaccept this holy object,but now, my husband,you must accept Völsi.Wait, are we talking about a penis? Mhm. These bizarre and very explicit verses come from a short Norse story called Vǫlsa þáttr (The Tale of Völsi), a story preserved in the late 14th-century Icelandic manuscript Flateyjarbók, where it is interpolated into the text of Óláfs saga hins helga (Saga of Olaf the Saint ch 265
A tale of two prehistoric graves (opens the original)
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Sometimes, quite often actually, the dead can tell us astonishing stories about the deep past, inviting us into worlds that may seem familiar yet so strange and incomprehensible at times.In 1973, on a small fossil island rise near Dragsholm Castle in northwest Zealand, Denmark, two burials were brought to light, and they stand out as one of the most telling mortuary assemblages in Northern European prehistory. Resting near a reclaimed inlet of the former Lammefjord, the dead from the two graves
Things & Vikings - live with Dr Irina Manea (opens the original)
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Get more from Irina-Maria Manea in the Substack appAvailable for iOS and Android<a class="install-substack-app-embed-link" href="https://substack.com/app/app-store-redirect?utm_c
Women of the Viking age: of warp and weft (opens the original)
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Moving away from the semi-legendary realm of the previous two posts in the series, this time we’ll have a look at one of the most economically relevant activities in the Viking Age and all ages, really: textile production. Alas, we will end up in a supernatural web (sic!) again, in fact, very fitting since magic inevitably dripped into all domains, mundane or not.textile work …Old Norse society largely operated under a structural gender division codified by the spatial distinction between innan
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