Most of what turns up in these stories is real: the people, the places, the gods and the gear. This is a short guide to it.
People
Skald
A poet of the Viking age who composed intricate, densely ornamented verse to praise rulers, mark great deeds and keep memory alive. A skald’s craft was prized, and a skald’s words could outlast kings.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Völva
A seeress who practised seiðr and could see the threads of fate. Völur travelled from farm to farm and were both sought out and feared. The great poem Völuspá, the prophecy of the world’s beginning and end, is spoken by one.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Jarl
A Norse chieftain or earl, ranking below a king, who led men in war and held authority over land and followers.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Thrall
An enslaved person, the lowest rank of Norse society. Thralls were taken in raids and traded along the same routes as furs and silver.
Appears in Shifting Runes and Deep Profits
Finns
The Norse name for the peoples of the northern and eastern forests, often the Sámi but also Finnic peoples further east. The sagas credit them with deep knowledge of magic and the wild places.
Appears in Deep Profits
Khazars
A Turkic people whose khaganate ruled the lower Volga and the steppe between the Black Sea and the Caspian from the seventh to the tenth century, growing rich on the trade that passed through their lands.
Appears in Deep Profits
Skrælings
The name the Norse gave to the Indigenous peoples they met in Greenland and North America. The single word hid many nations, from the Dorset and Thule peoples of the far north to the ancestors of the Beothuk and Mi’kmaq.
Appears in Echoes of Vinland
Places
The Greenland settlements
Founded around 985 when Erik the Red led settlers from Iceland, the Eastern and Western Settlements clung to the fjords of southwest Greenland for more than four centuries before they were abandoned.
Appears in Shifting Runes · 64°N, 51°W
Staraya Ladoga and Novgorod
Trading towns on the Volkhov River in northwest Russia. Staraya Ladoga (the Norse Aldeigjuborg) was among the first Norse outposts in the east; Novgorod grew into the great gateway to the river-roads running south.
Appears in Deep Profits · 58–60°N, 31–32°E
Atil
Capital of the Khazars, on the lower Volga near the Caspian Sea. A great market for furs, silver and slaves, it was sacked in the 960s and its exact site is still debated.
Appears in Deep Profits · about 46°N, 48°E
Helluland, Markland and Vinland
The lands west of Greenland named in the Vinland sagas: the land of flat stones, the forest land and the wine land. They are usually identified with Baffin Island, Labrador and the shores of the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
Appears in Echoes of Vinland
L’Anse aux Meadows
A Norse site at the northern tip of Newfoundland, the only confirmed Norse settlement in North America. Tree-ring evidence shows wood was cut there in 1021.
Appears in Echoes of Vinland · 51.6°N, 55.5°W
Things
Knarr
A broad, deep-hulled cargo ship, the workhorse of Norse trade and settlement. Where the longship was built for raiding, the knarr carried families, livestock and goods across open sea.
Appears in Deep Profits
Seax
A single-edged knife or short blade, worn at the belt across the Germanic and Norse world, as much a tool as a weapon.
Appears in Deep Profits
Portage
Hauling a boat overland, often on log rollers, from one river to the next. The eastern river-roads could not be travelled without it, and the portages were where travellers were most exposed.
Appears in Deep Profits
Vellum
Calfskin prepared for writing. The Icelandic sagas survive because they were copied onto vellum, generations after the events they tell.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Runes and Ansuz
The Norse alphabet, made of straight strokes so it could be cut into wood and stone. By the Viking age it had been trimmed to sixteen letters, the Younger Futhark. Ansuz, the rune of the god, belongs to Odin, who hung on Yggdrasil to win the runes.
The rune lines on this site are real Old Norse, spelled the way a Viking-age carver would have spelled them. Each story opens with ᚼᛁᚱ᛬ᚼᛁᚠᛋᚴ᛬ᛋᛅᚴᛅ, hér hefsk saga, “here begins the saga,” and ends with ᚼᛁᚱ᛬ᛚᚢᚴᛦ᛬ᛋᚢᚴᚢ, hér lýkr sǫgu, “here ends the saga.” The other dividers spell ᛋᛅᚴᛅ, saga. The pair of dots between scenes, ᛬, is the mark carvers used to separate words.
Appears in Shifting Runes, and at the start and end of every story
The Unseen
Seiðr
Norse sorcery of seeing and shaping fate, practised above all by völur and linked to Freyja and Odin. It was powerful, and it was distrusted.
Appears in Deep Profits
Draugr
The restless dead of Norse tradition: corpses that will not stay in their mounds, swollen with unnatural strength and malice.
Appears in Shifting Runes
The Æsir and Midgard
The Æsir are the chief family of Norse gods, among them Odin and Thor. Midgard is the world of humankind, fenced off from the giants and the dark beyond.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Yggdrasil
The World Tree, an immense ash whose roots and branches bind the nine worlds together. Odin hung upon it for nine nights, wounded by his own spear, to win the runes.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Ymir
The first being, a giant born from the meeting of fire and ice in the void. The gods slew him and built the world from his body: earth from his flesh, sea from his blood, sky from his skull.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Jörmungandr and Ragnarök
Jörmungandr is the World Serpent, so vast it circles Midgard beneath the sea and bites its own tail. At Ragnarök, the foretold doom of the gods, it rises to fight Thor, and the world burns and drowns.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Skaði
A giantess who became a goddess of winter, mountains and the hunt, travelling on skis with her bow.
Appears in Shifting Runes
Some things aren’t in here. You’ll find those in the stories.
