Curated playlist
Viking Age populated places
- Wirral PeninsulaVikings settled the Wirral Peninsula, and their village names like Kirby and Greasby survive.
- GettlingeÖland's Gettlinge gravefield exists because one narrow ridge had enough soil.
- Gamla UppsalaA warrior buried at Gamla Uppsala carried a Frankish sword and Roman ivory game pieces.
- ValsgärdeValsgärde, sometimes spelled Vallsgärde, is a Swedish farm where the dead were buried in ships for more than 300 years. That is a long time for any family, or any dynasty, to keep returning to one patch of ground. Who were the people laid…
- VinlandTwo Icelandic sagas describe Vinland, and they contradict each other on basic facts.
- JomsborgA golden disc that surfaced in Sweden in 2014 names Jomsborg in Latin letters. Two historians call it a forgery.
- LundLund, a Swedish city, was Danish for nearly seven centuries. Archeologists date its founding to around 990.
- ReykjavíkIngólfr Arnarson threw his high seat pillars overboard to choose where Reykjavík would rise.
- OdenseIn 1086, peasants killed the king of Denmark inside a priory in Odense. Canute IV had taxed the town heavily.
- HedebyViking ships at Hedeby skipped the trip around Jutland by crossing less than 15 kilometres of land.
- JellingArchaeologists dug into a Viking burial mound in Jelling and found an empty chamber. The town marks Denmark's birth.
- L'Anse aux MeadowsL'Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland is the only undisputed Norse site in the Americas outside Greenland.
- RibeAround 860, Archbishop Ansgar asked a Danish king to build Scandinavia's first church in Ribe.
- MeolsWorkers in 1938 found what looked like a Viking boat in Meols, then buried it again.
- RoskildeIn 1370, the city of Roskilde owned 2,600 farms spread across the island of Zealand. That is the landholding of a great power, not of a country town. Today Roskilde has 53,354 residents and lies 30 km west of Copenhagen, close enough that…
- SerklandSerkland, the Norse name for the Islamic east, once meant only lands south of the Caspian Sea.
- DublinDublin is the capital and largest city of Ireland, and the 2022 census counted 1,263,219 people living in the city and its suburbs. Inside the boundary of the city council alone, the figure falls to 592,713. That gap tells you something…