Vikings!
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What Was Life Like In A Viking Longhouse?
Feasting and communal dining were central to life in the Longhouses. The diet of the Vikings was heavily protein and fat-based.
Large amounts of fish were consumed, hardly a surprise given the Vikings’ status as a people who lived on the coast and spent much of their lives at sea. A lot of meat and dairy were also consumed, though porridge and bread were also popular foods for poorer Vikings.
The cereals for staple foodstuffs such as these would have been grown by enslaved people or ‘thralls’, which were numerous in Norse society. Slaves often lived in the Longhouse, generally in a chamber set aside quite nastily for them next to the stable.
The culture predominated within the Longhouse was similar to the Germanic societies that had conquered the Western Roman Empire between the third and fifth centuries AD.
The Vikings, for instance, spoke Old Norse, a North Germanic language out of which the modern-day tongues of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish eventually evolved.
This was the tongue in which the Norse people gave renditions of their great sagas and lore, which would have been related by poets and storytellers at banquets within the jarl’s Longhouse in an average Viking settlement.
These were oral poems and epics to begin with, which were passed down from generation to generation and were only eventually written down from the tenth century onwards.
Religion was not absent from the life of the Longhouse. The Vikings were polytheists, meaning they worshipped a pantheon of multiple gods similar to those the Greeks and Romans had worshipped centuries earlier before Christianity overtook paganism in southern and western Europe.
The Norse religious landscape consisted of dozens of gods and demi-gods, both male and female. The two most significant of these were Odin and Thor.
Odin was the father of the gods and was typically depicted as a one-eyed, older man wearing a cloak and holding a long staff. He had dominion over death and healing. In Norse mythology, he presided over an enormous celestial hall called Valhalla, to which great Viking warriors would be called forth in the afterlife.
As revered as Odin was, his son Thor, the Norse god of war, was even more esteemed. This was hardly surprising for a military people, and Thor is typically seen wielding his famed war-hammer known as Mjölnir.
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The Vikings, for instance, spoke Old Norse, a North Germanic language out of which the modern-day tongues of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish eventually evolved.
This was the tongue in which the Norse people gave renditions of their great sagas and lore, which would have been related by poets and storytellers at banquets within the jarl’s Longhouse in an average Viking settlement.
These were oral poems and epics to begin with, which were passed down from generation to generation and were only eventually written down from the tenth century onwards.
Frosty the Snowman in Old Norse:
Link to videoThis guy rocks. And, he's not full of shit, either, which unfortunately is pretty common among Scando pseudo-historians. He's also a cowboy. I dunno how that's relevant, but he is.
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The Vikings, for instance, spoke Old Norse, a North Germanic language out of which the modern-day tongues of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish eventually evolved.
This was the tongue in which the Norse people gave renditions of their great sagas and lore, which would have been related by poets and storytellers at banquets within the jarl’s Longhouse in an average Viking settlement.
These were oral poems and epics to begin with, which were passed down from generation to generation and were only eventually written down from the tenth century onwards.
Frosty the Snowman in Old Norse:
Link to videoThis guy rocks. And, he's not full of shit, either, which unfortunately is pretty common among Scando pseudo-historians. He's also a cowboy. I dunno how that's relevant, but he is.
The Vikings, for instance, spoke Old Norse, a North Germanic language out of which the modern-day tongues of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish eventually evolved.
Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, yes but definitely not Finnish. Completely different language family, Finno-Ugric language related to aboriginal languages in Siberia and Hungarian.
The author ought to have included Icelandic. It and Faroese are probably the closest living languages to Old Norse. I think Faroese is closest to Old Norse.
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The Vikings, for instance, spoke Old Norse, a North Germanic language out of which the modern-day tongues of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish eventually evolved.
Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, yes but definitely not Finnish. Completely different language family, Finno-Ugric language related to aboriginal languages in Siberia and Hungarian.
The author ought to have included Icelandic. It and Faroese are probably the closest living languages to Old Norse. I think Faroese is closest to Old Norse.
The Vikings, for instance, spoke Old Norse, a North Germanic language out of which the modern-day tongues of Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Finnish eventually evolved.
Norwegian, Danish and Swedish, yes but definitely not Finnish. Completely different language family, Finno-Ugric language related to aboriginal languages in Siberia and Hungarian.
The author ought to have included Icelandic. It and Faroese are probably the closest living languages to Old Norse. I think Faroese is closest to Old Norse.
That's a good call. Indeed it is.
