24 maj 2009
Birka the viking town that archeologists recently excavated near modern-day Stockholm.
The video clips come from footage that Swedish filmmakers Mikael Agaton and Lars Rengfelt shot of a 1:30 scale model of Birka now housed in the Museum of National Antiquities in Stockholm.
Music: Wardruna and a part of the song Bjarkan.
Viking mother and daughter by ~VendelRus
The photographers wife Kerstin and daughter Hervor. They are looking out over lake mälaren.
Viking helmet.
I would imagine most Vikings used slightly less ornate helmets
This link is to the Facebook page.
They have a homepage too but it is in Swedish (most Swedes speak English though, in case you decide to contact them).
http://www.nidingbane.se/om-nidingbane_presentation.html
They sell (and use) weapons and armor both for use and for LARPs.
They also deliver to museums, markets, movies and tv.
The guy actually lives in the same house as the armoury.
The Varangian Guard (Greek: Τάγμα των Βαράγγων, Tágma tōn Varángōn) was an elite unit of the Byzantine Army in 10th to the 14th centuries, whose members served as personal bodyguards of the Byzantine Emperors.
The guard was first formed under Emperor Basil II in 988, following the Christianization of Kievan Rus’ by Vladimir I of Kiev. Vladimir, who had recently usurped power in Kiev with an army of Varangian warriors, sent 6,000 men to Basil as part of a military assistance agreement.Basil’s distrust of the native Byzantine guardsmen, whose loyalties often shifted with fatal consequences, as well as the proven loyalty of the Varangians, many of whom served in Byzantium even before, led the Emperor to employ them as his personal guardsmen. Over the years, new recruits from Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Iceland kept a predominantly Norse cast to the organization until the late 11th century.
So many Scandinavians left to enlist in the guard that a medieval Swedish law from Västergötland stated that no one could inherit while staying in “Greece”—the then Scandinavian term for the Byzantine Empire. In the eleventh century, there were also two other European courts that recruited Scandinavians:Kievan Rus’ c. 980–1060 and London 1018–1066 (the Þingalið).
Composed primarily of Norsemen for the first 100 years, the guard began to see increased inclusion of Anglo-Saxons after the successful invasion of England by the Normans. By the time of the Emperor Alexios Komnenosin the late 11th century, the Byzantine Varangian Guard was largely recruited from Anglo-Saxons and “others who had suffered at the hands of the Vikings and their cousins theNormans”. The Anglo-Saxons and other Germanic peoples shared with the Vikings a tradition of faithful (to death if necessary) oath-bound service, and after the Norman conquest of England there were many fighting men who had lost their lands and former masters and looked for a living elsewhere.
The Varangian Guard not only provided security for the Byzantine Emperors, but participated in many wars involving Byzantium and often played a crucial role, since they were usually used at the critical moments of a battle. By the late 13th century Varangians were mostly ethnically assimilated by Byzantines, though the guard operated until at least mid-14th century and in 1400 there were still some people identifying themselves as “Varangians” in Constantinople.
(Source: warandgame.com)
Detailed description of arms and armour.
In Byzantium the members of the Varangian Guard were famous as men with red hair and beards, “as tall as date palms”; they were also said to drink too much. But the main symbol of the Varangians was the longhafted Danish axe with its crescent-shaped edge. This guardsman wears ringmail, a mail coif and splint limb armour, and apart from his axe is armed with a sword and a knife.
Archaeologists say 100-yard jetties found at the site of an ancient Viking village in Sweden suggest a coastal marketplace not previously imagined.
The jetties, five times longer than previously believed, show evidence of the Vikings’ extensive trade system, Olsson said.
“The remains of the port structures show that it was actually a port, not just small jetties jutting out onto the beach as previously thought,” he said.
ScienceDaily (May 27, 2008) — Although “Viking” literally means “pirate,” recent research has indicated that the Vikings were also traders to the fishmongers of Europe. Stereotypically, these Norsemen are usually pictured wearing a horned helmet but in a new study, Jørgen Dissing and colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, investigated what went under the helmet; the scientists were able to extract authentic DNA from ancient Viking skeletons, avoiding many of the problems of contamination faced by past researchers.
Analysis of the Viking DNA showed no evidence of contamination with extraneous DNA, and typing of the endogenous DNA gave reproducible results and showed that these individuals were just as diverse as contemporary humans.
ScienceDaily (Feb. 25, 2008) — Vivid colors, flowing silk ribbons, and glittering bits of mirrors - the Vikings dressed with considerably more panache than we previously thought. The men were especially vain, and the women dressed provocatively, but with the advent of Christianity, fashions changed, according to Swedish archeologist Annika Larsson.
