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Starvard University · Vikings and Sagas
Sail with the Northmen in their own stories: the monster haunted mead hall of Beowulf, the kings of Norway in Snorri Sturluson and his great chronicle, and the feuds and friendships of Njal Saga, and learn what the Vikings were really like.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
The Vikings were Scandinavian sailors who farmed, traded, explored, and sometimes raided their way across half the world. Their own stories, the sagas of Iceland, tell of a monster in a mead hall, kings of Norway, deadly feuds between best friends, and ships that reached America five hundred years before Columbus.
The Viking Age runs roughly from the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 to the Battle of Hastings in 1066. In those centuries, Norse sailors settled Iceland and Greenland, traded as far as Baghdad and Constantinople, served as guards to emperors, and left their language in place names from Dublin to York. Most Vikings, most of the time, were not raiders at all. They were farmers, fishers, craftspeople, and merchants who went to sea because the sea was their road.
This course reads the North through its own books. Beowulf is an Old English poem about Scandinavian heroes. The Heimskringla is Snorri Sturluson and his history of the Norwegian kings. Njal Saga is the greatest of the Icelandic sagas, a story of law, friendship, and feud. One honest warning belongs right at the start: the sagas were written down in Iceland in the 1200s, by Christians, centuries after the events they describe, so history and legend sail in the same boat. We will enjoy both and learn to tell them apart.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
The word Viking was probably first a job description, not a people. To go viking meant to sail off on an expedition, and the men and women who stayed home were simply Norse: Danes, Norwegians, and Swedes farming a hard northern land of fjords, forests, and short summers. The age named after them opens, in the usual telling, in 793, when Norse raiders stripped the wealthy monastery of Lindisfarne off the English coast, and closes in 1066, when a Norwegian king fell at Stamford Bridge and William of Normandy, himself of Viking descent, conquered England weeks later.
Hold the whole picture at once, because the sagas themselves do. The same families who raided also traded, carrying furs, walrus ivory, and falcons south and bringing back silver, wine, and silk. Norse merchants founded Dublin, ruled York, settled Normandy, and traveled the rivers of Russia to Constantinople, where they served as the emperor's personal guard and scratched runes into the stones of Hagia Sophia. Arabic coins dug up in Scandinavian soil prove trade reaching toward Baghdad. Farming, fishing, smithing, and storytelling filled most Viking lives, most of the time, as they fill most lives everywhere.
But honesty requires the darker half of the picture too. Raiding was real, monasteries were robbed and burned, and the Vikings ran a large trade in human beings. Captives taken in raids, called thralls, were worked on farms and sold in markets from Dublin to the east, and a Viking fortune could rest on slavery as surely as on silver. This course will not romanticize that away. The people in these stories are brave, funny, loyal, and sometimes cruel, and the wonder of the sagas is that their own tellers recorded all of it, pride and shame together.
Lesson 2
Beowulf is the great heroic poem of the early North, written in Old English yet set entirely among Danes and Geats, the peoples of modern Denmark and Sweden. It opens by remembering "the Spear-Danes glory through splendid achievements" and builds to Heorot, the shining mead hall of King Hrothgar, where warriors feast, the king gives gold rings to the loyal, and a poet sings of the making of the world. Then, night after night, the monster Grendel comes out of the marshes, drawn by the sound of joy, and drags sleeping men away to eat. For twelve winters the hall stands empty after dark.
The hero who answers is Beowulf, a young Geatish warrior of enormous strength who crosses the sea, refuses a sword for the first fight so the contest will be fair, and tears Grendel arm from its socket in a hand to hand struggle that shakes the hall. When Grendel mother comes for revenge, Beowulf dives alone into her burning lake and kills her in an underwater cave. Fifty years later, an old and kingly Beowulf faces his last monster, a fire dragon guarding a hoard, and kills it with the help of one loyal young follower, Wiglaf, while his other men hide in the woods. The dragon wounds him to death, and the poem ends with his funeral fire by the sea.
Notice the values the poem keeps praising: courage that acts when others despair, loyalty that stays when the fight turns hopeless, generosity from kings, and the hunger for a good name that outlasts death. Also notice its honest sadness. Beowulf wins every fight and still the world he saves is sliding toward loss. The poem was written down by a Christian poet looking back at pagan ancestors he admired and pitied, and that double vision, love and grief at once, is why readers still feel its power twelve centuries on.
Lesson 3
Our guide to the Norwegian kings is an Icelander: Snorri Sturluson, born in 1179, a wealthy chieftain, lawspeaker, poet, and the shrewdest politician of his generation in Iceland. Between his power struggles he wrote books, including the Heimskringla, whose name comes from its opening words about the circle of the world. It tells the story of Norway kings from misty beginnings, when the god Odin is presented as a human chieftain who migrated north, down through the Yngling line to Harald Fairhair, who first united Norway under one crown in the late 800s, and onward king by king to 1177.
Snorri worked like a real historian, as far as his age allowed. Earlier writers had relied on sagas and memory; Snorri leaned hardest on the praise poems of the skalds, court poets who had sung of battles and voyages in the hearing of men who were there, and whose strict verse forms made the words hard to change in retelling. Where poems, genealogies, and older histories agreed, he trusted them; where the tale turned to miracles or monsters, his doubt often shows at the edges. The result reads like a novel, full of speeches, sea battles, and dry jokes, yet it remains our backbone source for three centuries of Norwegian history.
Read Snorri with the honesty he partly teaches. He wrote in the 1220s and 1230s about kings who had died two or three hundred years before, using sources that flattered those kings while they lived. His pagans are suspiciously eloquent, his battle numbers grow in the telling, and his own politics, he was murdered in 1241 on the orders of a Norwegian king, remind us that history writing was dangerous work. Even so, when you finish this chronicle you understand something no list of dates can give: how a scatter of rival chiefdoms slowly became a kingdom.
Lesson 4
Olaf Tryggvason had a life the sagas could not have invented better. A great grandson of Harald Fairhair, he was carried off as a small child, sold as a slave in the east, freed, and raised at the court of Novgorod, then spent years raiding in the Baltic and around England. Somewhere in those years, Snorri tells us, he accepted baptism, and in 995 he sailed home to claim the Norwegian crown with a new faith in his luggage and a missionary fire in his character. He took the kingdom quickly, and then set out to make it Christian, all of it, fast.
Snorri tells the campaign region by region, and the Heimskringla does not hide the methods. Olaf preached at assemblies and offered friendship and fine gifts to chieftains who accepted baptism. To districts that refused, he brought threats, hostages, destroyed temples, and in stubborn cases torture and death for priests of the old gods who would not yield. Modern readers should sit with that discomfort honestly: the conversion of Norway was partly persuasion and partly force, and the people who lost their ancestral faith at sword point did not experience it as progress. The old religion did not vanish at once; it went quiet, private, and underground for generations.
Olaf reigned only five years. In the year 1000 he sailed south with his magnificent flagship, the Long Serpent, and was ambushed at the Battle of Svolder by a coalition of Danes, Swedes, and Norwegian rivals. Outnumbered, he lashed his ships together, fought until his vessel was cleared deck by deck, and leaped into the sea rather than be taken. Yet his project outlived him. Snorri notes that this same Olaf sent Leif Erikson to carry Christianity to Greenland, and within a generation his sainted namesake Olaf Haraldsson would finish the work and give Norway its patron saint.
Lesson 5
Iceland was settled in the late 800s and early 900s, largely by Norwegians who, the tradition says, wanted land and chieftainships of their own and no king over them. By about 930 the settlers had filled the usable land, and they faced a problem every new society faces: whose rules settle a quarrel over sheep, boundaries, or a killing? Their answer was one of the most original governments of the Middle Ages. They founded the Althing, a national assembly meeting each summer at Thingvellir, a great rift valley plain where the whole country, in effect, came camping with its lawsuits, marriages, and news.
At the center of the Althing stood the Law Rock, where the lawspeaker, chosen for three year terms, recited the entire law code aloud from memory over his term, a third each summer, so that in a land with few books the law lived in every hearer mind. Iceland had no king, no army, and no officials to enforce verdicts. Courts declared the law, but carrying out a sentence, collecting a fine or executing an outlawry, fell to the winner of the case and his friends. It was a system built on reputation, alliance, and the threat of feud, and for three centuries it worked, more or less, which is astonishing.
The system finest hour came in the year 1000, when Christian and pagan parties at the Althing threatened to split the country into two legal communities. The lawspeaker, Thorgeir Thorkelsson, himself a pagan, lay under a cloak for a day and a night thinking, then announced one law and one faith for all: Iceland would become Christian, peacefully, by a vote, with a few quiet compromises for private practice. Njal Saga gives the principle its classic words in the mouth of Njal himself: "with law shall our land be built up and settled, and with lawlessness wasted and spoiled."
Lesson 6
Njal Saga, written down around 1280 about events between roughly 960 and 1020, is often called the greatest of all the Icelandic sagas, and its heart is a friendship. Njal Thorgeirsson is a small, beardless farmer of Bergthorshvoll, no fighter at all, but the wisest lawyer in Iceland, a man who can see the shape of events years ahead. His dearest friend Gunnar of Hlidarendi is everything Njal is not: tall, handsome, peerless with bow, sword, and bill, slow to anger and quick to laugh. Between them they hold a whole district in balance, Njal law and foresight answering Gunnar strength.
The feud that destroys them begins, as saga feuds do, embarrassingly small. The wives, Njal proud Bergthora and Gunnar beautiful, reckless Hallgerd, take offense over seating at a feast, and begin trading killings of servants and kinsmen, each murder answered by another, while Njal and Gunnar, refusing to quarrel, quietly pay compensation to each other after every death, passing the same purse of silver back and forth. It is a heartbreaking picture of friendship doing everything right against a machine of honor that grinds on regardless. When Gunnar is finally maneuvered into breaking a legal settlement, he is outlawed and ordered abroad for three years.
His departure gives the saga one of its most famous moments. Riding to the ship, Gunnar horse stumbles and he looks back at his farm on its green slope, the fields golden, and he decides he cannot leave. He knows the decision is likely death, and within the saga logic he is right: his enemies besiege his house, he defends it alone with his bow until they cut his bowstring, asks Hallgerd for two locks of her hair to restring it, and she, remembering an old slap, refuses. Gunnar dies as he foresaw. The law had answers for everything except wounded pride, and everyone in the story knows it.
Lesson 7
The saga second half belongs to Njal sons, proud, touchy men led by the brilliant and bitter Skarphedin, whose killings and insults raise the feud past any settlement. At the Althing, case follows case until tempers break, fighting erupts at the assembly itself, and though a huge compensation is raised for Njal, a final insult over a silk garment thrown onto the pile undoes everything. The enemies of the family, led by Flosi Thordarson, a decent man dragged by obligation into a dreadful duty, ride a hundred strong to Bergthorshvoll on an autumn night in the saga year of the burning.
What follows is the most famous scene in all saga literature. Unable to defeat Njal armed sons in open fight, the attackers set the house alight. Flosi, to his credit, offers safe passage to the women, the children, and old Njal himself. Njal refuses to leave his sons. He and his wife Bergthora, who will not be parted from him though offered freedom, lie down on their bed together with their little grandson between them, an ox hide drawn over them, and die in the smoke with a composure the saga renders quietly and without decoration. Skarphedin dies defiant in the burning timbers. One man escapes over a beam through the smoke: Kari Solmundarson, Njal son in law, who swears vengeance.
Kari keeps his oath across years and across the sea, hunting the burners from Iceland to Orkney and Wales, and the saga follows his terrible arithmetic of revenge. Yet the ending the Christian author finally gives us is not arithmetic. Kari makes a pilgrimage to Rome, receives absolution, and returns; Flosi too has walked to Rome and been absolved; and the two old enemies meet, and are reconciled, sealing it with a marriage between their families. After a hundred deaths the saga argues, in story rather than sermon, that vengeance can be honored and still laid down.
Lesson 8
The Viking westward road ran by stepping stones: from Norway to the Faeroes, then Iceland, then Greenland, each hop a few days sail through cold and fog. Greenland was settled about 985 by Erik the Red, a hot tempered Icelander outlawed for killings, who explored the fjords of the southwest coast during his exile and came home with a sales pitch. Snorri and the sagas agree on the trick: he named the icy country Greenland because, as the story goes, a good name would draw settlers. It worked. Two settlements grew up, farms, churches, and a bishop eventually, trading walrus ivory and falcons for timber and grain.
Around the year 1000, Erik son Leif crossed the last gap. Sailing from Greenland, he reached a coast of wild grapes, salmon, and self sown wheat fields, and Snorri records laconically that he "found Vinland the Good." Other sagas add detail: winter camps, timber cutting expeditions, Tyrkir the German foster father drunk on grapes, and meetings, first curious and then violent, with the land native peoples, whom the Norse called Skraelingjar, a name that tells us more about Norse attitudes than about the nations they met. The Greenlanders own saga tradition kept these voyages alive for centuries in story.
For a long time, scholars filed Vinland under legend. Then in the 1960s, excavators at L'Anse aux Meadows, on the northern tip of Newfoundland, uncovered the turf walls, iron working slag, and bronze pin of a Norse camp from exactly Leif generation, proof that Europeans reached America five centuries before Columbus and that the sagas, for all their embroidery, carried real geography in their memory. The Greenland settlements themselves faded out by the 1400s under a cooling climate and shifting trade. The Viking Age ended as it began, at sea, but its westernmost chapter turned out to be true.
Sources
This course is taught from three great books, all free to read in full at Project Gutenberg in classic English translations. One honest note before you dive in: these works were written down centuries after the events they describe, by Christians looking back at a pagan past, so enjoy them as a blend of history and legend.
Graduation
You have crossed the whole Viking world: the farms and the slave markets, the mead hall and the Law Rock, the kings of Norway and the burning at Bergthorshvoll, and the little ships that reached America half a millennium early. You now know why Iceland still treasures these books, and why the North still tells its own story best. Congratulations, and fair winds.
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