Curated category
Viking Age populated places
- Wirral PeninsulaThe Wirral Peninsula sits in North West England, a roughly rectangular wedge of land about 15 miles long and 7 miles wide, pressed between three bodies of…
- GettlingeThe bedrock beneath Gettlinge dates to at least 600 million years ago. This layer consists primarily of Ordovician limestone that covers much of the island…
- Gamla UppsalaGamla Uppsala sits on the Fyris Wolds, a cultivated plain in Sweden, and for more than a thousand years it held together the sacred, the royal, and the legal…
- ValsgärdeThe farm of Valsgärde sits on the banks of the Fyris river, just three kilometres north of Gamla Uppsala. This location served as an ancient centre for…
- VinlandAdam of Bremen wrote Descriptio insularum Aquilonis around 1075. He described an island called Winland where grapevines grew by themselves.
- JomsborgJomsborg was a Viking stronghold on the southern shore of the Baltic Sea, and it may never have existed at all. Somewhere between the 960s and 1043, a…
- LundLund is a city in the province of Scania, southern Sweden, with a population of around 94,000 people in the city itself and more than 130,000 across the…
- ReykjavíkReykjavík sits at 64 degrees north, making it the world's northernmost capital of a sovereign state. That single fact contains a puzzle: how did a city at…
- OdenseOdense carries a name that translates, from Old Norse, as "Odin's sanctuary." Centuries before any church rose on the island of Funen, people gathered here…
- HedebyHedeby sat at what a visiting traveller called "a very large city at the very end of the world's ocean." That description came from Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, a…
- JellingJelling is a small railway town in Denmark, population just over four thousand, sitting 105 metres above sea level roughly ten kilometres northwest of Vejle.
- L'Anse aux MeadowsL'Anse aux Meadows sits on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland, and it holds a secret that rewrote the story of who first crossed the Atlantic.
- RibeRibe sits in the low-lying marshland of south-west Jutland, and it holds a distinction no other Danish town can claim: it is the oldest in the country.
- MeolsMeols sits on the north coast of the Wirral Peninsula, facing the Irish Sea, and beneath its quiet residential streets lies one of the most remarkable…
- RoskildeHarald Bluetooth founded Roskilde in the 980s on high ground above the harbor. He built a wooden church consecrated to the Holy Trinity and a royal residence…
- SerklandSerkland was the Old Norse word for a place that shaped the imagination of Viking-age Scandinavia. Carved into stone and woven through saga prose, the name…