The Viking Age: New Perspectives on History and Culture

The Vikings evoke striking images of horned helmets, battle axes, and merciless coastal raids. Remembered for their shocking brutality and impressive naval prowess, these marauding pirates from the North have inspired poetry, fantasy novels, plays, symphonies, and even comic book heroes over the last 12 centuries. But do any of these enduring tropes reflect reality? Who were the Vikings really? What do we know about the period that bears their name?

Explore these questions and more in The Viking Age: New Perspectives on History and Culture, a 12-lecture course that corrects the record on a transformative period in world history. Professor and prolific Viking Age scholar Jennifer Paxton will be your expert guide. Together with Dr. Paxton, you will use archeological, textual, and literature evidence to unpack the scope and scale of Viking exploits in Europe. You’ll examine and investigate what it meant to be a Viking by analyzing burial sites, teeth, bones, and historical annals. You’ll get to know the Viking women who broke out of their ascribed gender roles and affected change in politics, through trade, and on the battlefield. You’ll investigate whether Vikings deserve their bloodthirsty reputation by exploring the ideas that underpinned war and violence in Scandinavia and across Europe at large. And you’ll look at how the Norse religion and Christianity alike informed politics, society, and everyday life across the Viking world.

Along the way, you’ll also:

• Evaluate the Vikings impressive global reach by zooming away from Sweden, Denmark, and Norway and towards the Viking outposts near and far;
• Follow raiders, traders, and settlers across sea and river routes;
• Study early raids in Estonia, trade settlements in Kyivan Rus, and the Varangian Guard in Constantinople;
• Track beaded, silver, and silk goods as they moved from the Islamic Caliphate and East Asia and into Viking households;
• Determine how Viking sailors navigated their way across choppy Atlantic Ocean waters to set up settlements—both permanent and temporary—in North America; and
• Reevaluate Viking exploits in England, Ireland, and France using archeological techniques like stable isotope and ancient DNA analysis.

And in doing all of this, you’ll challenge prevailing views of the Vikings and their world.