To commemorate Grimfrost's 10th anniversary, this is the seventh in the series of blog posts by acknowledged academics about their chosen Viking Age subject.
About the Author
Neil Price has held the Chair of Archaeology at Uppsala since 2014, having previously taught at Aberdeen, Stockholm, and Oslo universities. Educated at London UCL, York, and Uppsala, he is primarily a specialist in the Viking Age. His specific, current interests include Viking-Age mentality and world-view, what could called be the ‘Northern mind’; Scandinavian pre-Christian religion, ritual, and sorcery; Viking-Age mortuary behaviour and funerary drama; the Scandinavian experience in the East, including contacts with Islam and the Silk Roads; and the socio-cultural impact of natural disasters and climate change. He is also an acclaimed author.
The Viking Phenomenon – nine out of ten
It is now nine years since the launch of the Viking Phenomenon project at Uppsala University, with one year to go. Generously funded by the Swedish Research Council in late 2015, as part of their Distinguished Professorship programme, it commenced in January of the following year and will conclude at the end of 2025. Nine was also the sacred number of the Norse, occurring again and again in their spiritual practices and ancestral stories: Odin spends nine nights on Yggdrasil, and rides for nine nights to Hel; Frey waits nine nights for Gerd; Thor takes nine steps as he dies at the Ragnarök; the Uppsala blót is held for nine days every ninth year – on and on through the mythological cycle. In late 2024, in the ninth year of ten, it feels like an appropriate time to look back on the objectives of the project and consider what we’ve achieved.
The three massive burial mounds at Old Uppsala, Sweden
The last few decades have seen an exciting expansion in research on the Viking Age. Scholars have examined issues of state formation, the rise of royal power and a unified Church, and their manifestation in the development of towns and other central places. Warfare and fortification form integral components of these investigations, along with emerging networks of trade and exchange, and the handicrafts that fuelled them. Rural settlements, courtyard sites and assembly places have also been intensively studied. As a unifying matrix behind all these processes, the Norse mind has been subjected to scrutiny through studies of religion, ritual and magic, and by extension burial and the realm of mortuary behaviour. A significant trend has been for the study of the Viking diaspora, a term that marks a new perspective on the uncoordinated processes of migration and colonisation.
It would be easy to believe that there's not much left to know about the Vikings, but it seems that in fact the opposite is the case - we've only just begun to scratch the surface of their lives. Despite all this work, one arena of Viking activity remains substantially unexplored, and it concerns the very beginnings of this historical trajectory. Who really were the first Viking raiders, in a specific sense? Why did they do what they do? What kind of societies produced them, and why did they start to expand so violently into the world at precisely this time? Somewhere in the answers to those questions lie the very origins of the Viking phenomenon: to understand what made Scandinavia what it is today, we need to know how and why the Viking Age began - not as an artificial construction of historians, but as a real, tangible process of social and cultural change. This was the rationale behind the project.
In addition to myself, the core research group also includes Docent John Ljungkvist, who for many years has conducted excavations at Gamla Uppsala, and Docent Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, a specialist in Viking warfare and eastern encounters based at the Swedish History Museum. Over the past nine years we have been joined by a large team of international researchers, each making targeted contributions to their areas of expertise. The project has functioned as an umbrella programme that shelters several sub-strands of research, but the key focus of attention has been on the critical century from 750 to 850 and the decades either side, embracing the early Viking Age and its foundations.
Valsgärde
Valsgärde: Boat Grave Culture
At the heart of the project is one of Sweden's greatest archaeological treasures, the largest cemetery of ship burials ever found, the classic site of Valsgärde in Uppland. For more than 400 years, each generation interred its prominent people of both sexes here in magnificent boat graves and cremations, filled with objects and animals. Excavated by Uppsala University from the 1920s to the 1950s, together with the nearby sites of Gamla Uppsala, Vendel and Ultuna these burials tell the story of Sweden and its growth from one of its centres in the heart of the Mälar Valley. Because the cemetery was in use throughout the later Iron Age, it provides us with a superb lens through which to view the gradual social changes that led up to the Viking Age. The graves - more than eighty of them in all - were deliberate material statements, preserving the ideas and aspirations of the time in physical form. Although the boat burials have attracted most attention, interspersed among them are cremations and chamber graves, and it is only modern bias that sees one set of burials as being more important than another; we study them all. At Valsgärde we see an emerging kingdom creating itself, and signalling its identity through the relationship of the living to the dead – an example to stand for the many other comparable small polities throughout the North.
However, the very richness and complexity of the Valsgärde graves has meant that they have never been fully researched and published. The definitive analysis of the cemetery and the society behind the burials is one of our main priorities.
Alongside raiding and military ideology, among the key questions we have considered through deeper studies of Valsgärde is the nature of long-distance, international contacts and trade. These have long been recognised as a defining characteristic of the Viking Age, but to what extent were they built on earlier interactions? Clear evidence for links with the East, including as far away as the Asian Steppe and Tang China, can be found in the Vendel period graves but the nature of those connections has never been adequately explored. This is one key result of the project, in that the extent of Norse trading networks has now been confirmed and expanded, indicating that their arena of activity really did encompass the full span of Eurasia, including associations with its far eastern peripheries. Importantly, this relationship clearly predated the Viking Age, and we should see it as a phenomenon of the late Iron Age in general – expanding and developing over time. In this respect, the project has established a much deeper chronological foundation for what the Norse would achieve in the Viking Age.
As the project nears completion, so do the reports on the Valsgärde graves under the direction of John Ljungkvist. The first of the new volumes appeared in 2018 (Boat Grave 14), and the next volumes will see Boat Graves 5 and 13, alongside the cremations and chambers. We expect the final reports to be published by the end of 2026.
Red dot points out the find location.
Salme: The ´first vikings´?
As a crucial counterpart to this work on an old find, has been the exploration of a new one: the extraordinary remains of an armed Scandinavian expedition, at least 41 men buried in two boats on the Estonian seashore where they came to grief at the very start of the Viking Age. These excavations, undertaken at Salme on Saaremaa island in 2008 and 2010-12, arguably represent the most significant Viking discovery of the last hundred years. Crucially, it has been possible to identify the origin of the Salme raiders: strontium isotope analyses of their teeth show that they most likely came from Swedish Uppland, with a considerable probability that they actually were the people either from Valsgärde itself or from nearby centres. Current thinking dates the burials to around 750 or slightly earlier, in other words exactly at the critical time when the Vendel Period shades into the Viking Age.
The discoveries at Salme present us with an unprecedented opportunity to examine the specific culture behind the very first raids, and to do so from a Swedish perspective. Crucially, the Salme event, whatever it really was, occurred nearly half a century before the classic beginning of the Viking Age, the famous raid on the monastery at Lindisfarne in 793. This implies that the origins of raiding might well lie within the Baltic sphere, with a focus on the east, not looking westwards as the traditional models would have it. This is actually what we should expect, and is also supported by later written sources, hard though they are to interpret with confidence. Metaphorically speaking, the Salme men were some of the 'first Vikings' and provide a great opportunity to more deeply explore these issues. Combining Valsgärde and Salme, we have the unique opportunity to reveal their world at 'home' and 'away', in a project of a kind never before attempted.
The post-excavation analysis of the Salme burials was led by Dr Jüri Peets at Tallinn University, with his team coordinated by Dr Lembi Lõugas and Dr Heidi Luik. The work was part-funded by our project, and the first of two report volumes appeared in 2023, with the second to follow in 2025. One of the primary project outputs is thus the final publication not only of the Valsgärde cemetery excavations but also of the Salme boat burials.
The Viking Ship, an important feature in Viking economics
Viking Economics
Underpinning these early Scandinavian enterprises was what we have chosen to call 'Viking economics'. We mean this literally, as the economics of vikings, in the exact sense of that word, rather than referring to the general economic systems of Viking-Age Scandinavia. In contrast to the widespread exploration of the silver trade, a genuine study of raiding economics has never been undertaken - and yet they must, almost inevitably, have provided a prime motor for the developing social processes that embody our definition of the entire time period and which are so clearly reflected in places like Valsgärde.
Here we see the Vikings as actors in wider arenas, ones that involved all members of society. The people of the Viking Age were of course individuals, as varied and complicated as we are. Current research is suggesting that women played far more active roles in the Viking campaigns than has previously been supposed. Another neglected issue is the fundamental importance of slavery and slaving, not only to economics but to the very fabric of society; the unfree have been left out of our models for too long. A vital thing to understand is that activities that were once discussed separately were in fact part of the same process: raiding was slaving, and this in turn was trading, in a loop of social feedback powered by maritime violence and movement. Piracy is another key element in this complex picture, and a field of specialist study that has much to offer Viking scholars.
Under the direction of Charlotte Hedenstierna-Jonson, the Viking Economics strand has held meetings and workshops in Sweden, Denmark, Estonia, Iceland, Spain and Greece, with a final one on long-distance commerce to be held in Singapore in 2025. Dozens of scholars have been brought together at these gatherings, exchanging ideas and presenting new research, all of which has been communicated in publications.
Over the past nine years, members of our team have given over 130 presentations at international conferences, and held over 120 public lectures around the world. We also have an in-house seminar series at Uppsala University. In terms of publications, up to the end of 2024 the project has produced 17 books and edited volumes, and 112 peer-reviewed journal papers and book chapters. We also run a dedicated book series at Routledge, Archaeologies of the Viking World, showcasing the work of emerging scholars in the field; nine volumes have so far appeared with more in press. More than 40 articles have also been published in popular science outlets, and this public outreach has also included work with National Geographic, a touring exhibition of the Valsgärde finds across the United States, television documentaries, and podcasts.
Uppsala University in Sweden
New perspectives on the Viking Age
In summarising some of the project’s key conclusions, we can first observe that the artificial division of the Norse world into a ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Viking Age is a relic of the Cold War, and irrelevant to the realities of the time. The same individuals travelled long distances across a fluid diaspora from the eastern seaboard of North America far into Asia. It’s also clear that this was a long late Iron Age. Scandinavian links with Europe went back millennia, even in the East, as we see in that clear presence of exotic eastern imports prior to the Viking Age, including garnets from India and Sri Lanka, cowries from the Gulf, Byzantine cameos and more. Active trade and import connections, including with the overland and maritime Silk Roads, begin perhaps as far back as the 500s, with links ultimately to China, Silla Korea, and Nara Japan.
The question of origins is key here, not in the sense of an illusory 'smoking gun' that 'started it all', but looking instead to a deeper time perspective that blurs the artificial distinctions between the so-called Migration (c. 400-550) and Vendel periods (c. 550–750) and the Viking Age that followed. It is clear that there really was some kind of crisis in the fifth and sixth centuries, visible archaeologically as a steep decline in the numbers of settlements, cemeteries and other markers of human activity, variably measurable across Scandinavia. No one causal factor stands out, but instead a combination of (amongst others) economic disruption as the Roman Empire declined, discontinuities of production and trade, political instability and war at both local and regional scale, and not least the ecological impacts of the volcanic events of 536-541, the so-called ‘Dust Veil’.
In the slow process of recovery, we can discern a gradual transition to a different way of life, mindful always of the importance of regional response, and multivariate change. Looking at the North in the shadow of Western Roman decline, we see petty kingdoms and civil war, but also something more. There were certainly new, militarised elites with their sustaining hall culture, expansionist ambitions, and landscapes of legitimation – but also long-distance interactions, including but not restricted to commerce, promoted by multiple actors at varying scales. We see redefinitions of community, polity, state – and of the relations between them. And around it all, the ambiguous role of the law and its differential applications.
In seeking the origins of the Viking Phenomenon, then, rather than defining it by the outward movement of Scandinavians for a variety of purposes, it may be that this in fact represents only a new external projection of strategies and processes that had long been underway within the homelands. This is especially true of raiding, but long-distance trade also followed the same paths as it had done for centuries, but now the Scandinavians increasingly went to the sources themselves. This seems to have come together in the first half of the eighth century. In the west, we see the rising assertiveness of the Norwegian sea-kings, which sends them further afield to ensure the continued flow of wealth that will consolidate their control, in conjunction with more localised communal powers. In the south, the Danish state begins to consolidate early, interacting with Continental powers and founding an advanced network of economic centres such as Ribe and others on the southern Baltic rim. Raiding supports the landowners and their retinues, but also benefits increasing sectors of the population. In the east, the Svear, Götar and Gutar consolidate their dynastic power structures, offering new opportunities to both elites and collectives. Muscular commerce extends directly into the river systems of eastern Europe, founding markets like Ladoga, provoking conflict as at Salme, and leading to the emergence of the Rus’.
And coincident with all this, the importance of individual agency: people seeking personal improvement, landed wealth, better social prospects, political advancement, networked connections, or just adventure, a different life. Everyone was caught up in the same events and processes, for different reasons and with different agendas – some aware of all this, some not – across a vast world of encounters. As our project nears its conclusion, we still see the same map, though somewhat expanded, but perhaps a very different kind of Norse diaspora.
Learn more about the Viking Phenomenon project at our website:
https://www.uu.se/en/research/the-viking-phenomenon
Further reading:
Neil Price (2020). Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings. Basic Books, New York. For an example available here: https://grimfrost.com › products › the-children-of-ash-and-elm
About the images:
Featured image and fig. 4) : Viking Ship from "Age of Vikings: Fated, a Viking short film" on YouTube.
Picture of the author: Photo by Uppsala University
Fig. 1) Burial mounds at Old Uppsala from "Grimfrost Academy: Viking Religion" on YouTube.
Fig.2) Valsgärde burial site from "Grimfrost Academy: Viking Religion" on YouTube.
Fig. 3) Google Maps image with editing by Grimfrost showing Scandinavia and the Salme find location. Distance and travel path calculated by Grimfrost.
Fig. 5) Uppsala University in Sweden. Photo by David Naylor.
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