Vikings (53 page)

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Authors: Neil Oliver

BOOK: Vikings

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Hagia Sophia, Istanbul. The Orthodox Christian Church of St Sophia dedicated by Emperor Justinian in
AD
537 and converted to a mosque after the fall of Constantinople to Sultan Mehmet II in 1453.

‘Halfdan made these runes’ – graffito scratched into a marble balustrade inside Hagia Sophia, perhaps by a member of the Varangian Guard, the elite Viking bodyguard of the Byzantine emperors.

Evidence of a wealthy past. A hoard of silver coins and jewellery, together with an iron sword, from Birka, Sweden.

Viking silver coins found at Birka, Sweden.

Viking Dublin. Excavations reveal wooden walkways and other structural traces of the Irish capital’s Scandinavian roots.

The Alfred Jewel. Crafted from gold, cloisonné enamel and rock crystal, it is thought to be an ornate handle for a pointer used while reading aloud from sacred texts.

Alfred the Great, as depicted within an illuminated capital in a fourteenth-century manuscript.

Iron Age ‘wheel-house’ at Jarlshof, Shetland – part of the long story of human occupation of the site, lasting from at least the Bronze Age until the seventeenth century.

Thingvellir. The meeting place of Iceland’s Althing, or parliament, from around
AD
930 until the middle of the nineteenth century.

Into the west – the arrival in Greenland, in
AD
982, of Eirik the Red, father of Leif Eiriksson who, in turn, reached Newfoundland in North America around
AD
1000.

The Vinland Map. Claimed by many to be a fifteenth-century pen and ink
mappa mundi
, it shows Greenland as an island and records the Viking discovery of Vinland. Others have dismissed it as a twentieth-century fake.

Odin and his fellow Viking gods, from a twelfth-century manuscript.

Jelling burial mounds and church, southern Denmark.

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