The Viking Dragon Blog

Much of what we know about the Vikings today comes from epic poems, called sagas, most of which were written in Iceland from the 12th to the 15th centuries. The sagas focus heavily on the lives of ...

 Yule was one of the most important festivals in the old heathen calendar. As the days drew short and the nights grew long, there were celebrations as well as a tinge fear in the cold, crisp air. T...

In Scandinavia they don't call it Christmas (Christ-Mass), instead they still retain the old pagan name for the Yuletide celebrations which they call Jul (pronounced Yule). Yule was a pagan festiva...

In the beginning was the Yawning Void in which was neither heat nor cold, light nor darkness, until a spark arose and kindled, feeding on itself, into a vast world of flame.   At the far end of th...

The Norse god Frey was the son of Njord of the Vanir and the brother of Freya. Like Njord and Freya, he was beautiful and well-beloved, and men sacrificed to him at marriages. But the story of Frey...

So Atli and Gudrun were wed, and they rode away together to his country. But his dreams became dark and full of death-omens so that he feared his wife....

   In between their epic battles and their prodigious journeys, the Norse gods were fond of feasting. Once they invited themselves to the hall of a giant named Aegir who kept a good table. Aegir d...

 An earlier blog post, "The Quarrel of the Queens," described how the spell of forgetfulness lifted from Sigurd so that he remembered how he had loved, pledged troth to, and lain with the Valkyrie ...

Brynhild’s rage broke out and she swore that Gudrun would pay for stealing Sigurd. She added, truly enough, that Sigurd had had to be drugged into loving Gudrun, whereas he’d loved Brynhild first ...