Viking Culture and Myth

Catalog description

This course requires students to develop a broad understanding of the Viking period by examining a wide variety of cultural artifacts (archaeological, literary and historical) and the perspectives of contemporaneous and subsequent historians writing about the Vikings. Students analyze historical accounts of the Viking period by members of the vanquished cultures, the myths of the Vikings themselves, the literary texts about these myths compiled 500 years later, as well as modern renditions of the Viking Age in film, literature and pop culture today. They learn to question the veracity and accuracy of these sources as well as the political and cultural motivations behind depictions of the Vikings. They then use the information from these sources to develop their own assessment of the Viking period and its treatment in primary and secondary sources.