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Maybe it was a teenager engaged in a Viking version of tagging a school desk. In any case, someone took out his knife, bent down and traced the outline of his foot on the deck of the Gokstad Ship. Today, 1,100 years later, researcher and storage manager Hanne Lovise Aannestad shows us a couple of deck planks that are among her favourite artefacts at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo... The Gokstad Ship was excavated in the late 1800s and is a permanent feature of the Viking Ship Museum at Bygdøy in Oslo. For about a decade, from 890...

COPENHAGEN, Denmark – Danish museum officials say that an archaeological dig last year has revealed 365 items from the Viking era, including 60 rare coins. Danish National Museum spokesman Jens Christian Moesgaard says the coins have a distinctive cross motif attributed to Norse King Harald Bluetooth, who is believed to have brought Christianity to Norway and Denmark. Sixteen-year-old Michael Stokbro Larsen found the coins and other items with a metal detector in a field in northern Denmark.

“Yeah, I don’t feel good about it,” said Dayton when asked about the Minnesota Vikings decision to release outspoken punter Chris Kluwe. “I’m not in a position to evaluate the relative punting abilities, but it seems to me the general manager said, right after the draft, they were going to have competition,” Dayton recalled. “Well, they bring the one guy in, he kicks for a weekend and that’s competition? “I just think sports officials ought to be honest about what the heck is going on, same way I think public officials should be honest about what’s going on, so that...

The Pro Football Hall of Fame is in the process of honoring each of its members by placing a plaque at each Hall of Famer's high school.The Hall of Fame's project made a stop at Superior (WI) High School on Wednesday to honor legendary Vikings Head Coach Bud Grant as well as fellow Hall of Fame members Alphonse "Tuffy" Leemans and Ernie Nevers.Grant is the most revered figure in Vikings lore. He was head coach of the Vikings for 18 seasons (1967-83, 1985) and in that time compiled a regular season record of 158-96-5 while guiding the Vikings to...

Minnesota Vikings punter Chris Kluwe, who has repeatedly spoken out in favor of same-sex marriage, says he now worries that his career with the team may be on the line. On Sunday, Kluwe said he is starting to sense that rumors surrounding whether or not he will be released from the team will soon become ‘distractions.’ ‘It’s a shame that in a league with players given multiple second chances after arrests, including felony arrests, that speaking out on human rights has a chance of getting you cut,’ Kluwe told NBC’s Pro Football Talk via text message.

hey, just wondering if any other freepers are into this show? its awesome, and wondering if you have any idea what will happ to ragnar's brother?

It’s been more than fifty years since Kirk Douglas and his production company produced what most people still consider the best Viking movie ever made, The Vikings. Within the limits of the information available at the time, they made a good faith effort to do the thing relatively authentically. We’ve learned much in the years since, especially due to advances in archaeology, and many reenactors around the world (of whom I am among the least) work hard to re-create authentic Viking Age life. Dozens of accurate replicas of Viking ships have been built and put to sea, to the wonder...

A rough, whitish block recovered from an Elizabethan shipwreck may be a sunstone, the fabled crystal believed by some to have helped Vikings and other medieval seafarers navigate the high seas, researchers say. In a paper published earlier this week, a Franco-British group argued that the Alderney Crystal—a chunk of Icelandic calcite found amid a 16th century wreck at the bottom of the English Channel—worked as a kind of solar compass, allowing sailors to determine the position of the sun even when it was hidden by heavy cloud, masked by fog, or below the horizon. That's because of a property...

<p>Officials working on the new Minnesota Vikings stadium said it might be difficult to meet certain employee-diversity goals.</p> <p>The stadium legislation signed by Gov. Mark Dayton this spring included goals from the state Legislature to have minority workers make up nearly a third of the labor force and for women to be 6 percent of the workforce.</p>

THIRTY YEARS AGO Margaret Thatcher turned Britain into the world’s leading centre of “thinking the unthinkable”. Today that distinction has passed to Sweden. The streets of Stockholm are awash with the blood of sacred cows. The think-tanks are brimful of new ideas. The erstwhile champion of the “third way” is now pursuing a far more interesting brand of politics. Sweden has reduced public spending as a proportion of GDP from 67% in 1993 to 49% today. It could soon have a smaller state than Britain. It has also cut the top marginal tax rate by 27 percentage points since 1983,...

The electronic pulltab sales slated to help fund the Vikings stadium are nowhere near their projected target, even after the state lowered that target last month, a House committee learned Wednesday. (snip) The sale of electronic pulltabs, run by Minnesota charities, was supposed to generate $348 million in taxes to underwrite the state's share of the cost of a new Vikings stadium. But the electronic pulltab games, introduced in September, have pulled in just $4.2 million in gross receipts -- and $635,000 in net receipts after prizes were paid.

When the sleek, beautiful silhouette of Roskilde 6 appeared on the horizon, 1,000 years ago, it was very bad news. The ship was part of a fleet carrying an army of hungry, thirsty warriors, muscles toned by rowing and sailing across the North Sea; a war machine like nothing else in 11th-century Europe, its arrival meant disaster was imminent. Now the ship's timbers are slowly drying out in giant steel tanks at the Danish national museum's conservation centre at Brede outside Copenhagen... to be a star attraction at an exhibition in the British Museum. The largest Viking warship ever found,...

Here's a link to a page with a nice video from Nova, about Viking swords, for all you Viking history buffs out there... http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/ancient/secrets-viking-sword.html

The National Museum of Denmark regularly receives objects that appear to be stolen goods from the Viking Age. Shouldn't these objects be returned to their original owners? Ranvaik's golden chest was made in Ireland or Scotland toward the end of the eighth century and originates from a church or a monastery. "Ranvaik owns this shrine" the inscription on the bottom reads, as a strong indication that it later came to belong to a noble Viking lady named Ranvaik. Archaeologists believe that the shrine, which can be admired at the Danish National Museum, is stolen property from the Viking Age. "Viking...

U.S. anthropologists hypothesize that ancestors of aboriginal people in South and North America followed High Arctic route Two U.S. scientists have published a radical new theory about when, where and how humans migrated to the New World, arguing that the peopling of the Americas may have begun via Canada's High Arctic islands and the Northwest Passage -- much farther north and at least 10,000 years earlier than generally believed. The hypothesis -- described as "speculative" but "plausible" by the researchers themselves -- appears in the latest issue of the journal Current Biology, which features a special series of new studies...

IQALUIT, Nunavut (CP) - A mysterious skull discovered on the edge of the Arctic Circle has sparked interest in what creatures roamed Baffin Island in the distant past, and what life a warming climate may support in the future. Andrew Dialla, a resident of Pangnirtung, Nunavut, says he found the skull protruding from the frozen tundra during a walk near the shore with his daughter about a month ago. The horned skull is about the size of a man's fist. It resembles a baby caribou skull, except at that age, a caribou wouldn't have antlers, researchers and elders have pointed...

Leif Erikson Day, 2004 By the President of the United States of America A Proclamation More than 1,000 years ago, Leif Erikson led his crew on a journey across the Atlantic, becoming the first European known to have set foot on North American soil. Every October, we honor this courageous Viking explorer, his historic voyage, and the rich heritage of Nordic Americans. Immigrants from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden and their descendants have made great contributions to our Nation in the fields of business, politics, the arts, education, agriculture, and other areas. Nordic Americans have also made a significant...

Scientists from the University of Arizona, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Smithsonian Institution have used carbon-dating technology to determine the age of a controversial parchment that might be the first-ever map of North America. In a paper to be published in the July 2002 issue of the journal Radiocarbon, the scientists conclude that the so-called “Vinland Map” parchment dates to approximately 1434 A.D., or nearly 60 years before Christopher Columbus set foot in the West Indies. “Many scholars have agreed that if the Vinland Map is authentic, it is the first known cartographic representation of...

While digging in the ruins of a centuries-old building on Baffin Island (map), far above the Arctic Circle, a team led by Sutherland, adjunct professor of archaeology at Memorial University in Newfoundland and a research fellow at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, found some very intriguing whetstones. Wear grooves in the blade-sharpening tools bear traces of copper alloys such as bronze -- materials known to have been made by Viking metalsmiths but unknown among the Arctic's native inhabitants. Taken together with her earlier discoveries, Sutherland's new findings further strengthen the case for a Viking camp on Baffin Island. "While...

For the past 50 years—since the discovery of a thousand-year-old Viking way station in Newfoundland—archaeologists and amateur historians have combed North America's east coast searching for traces of Viking visitors. It has been a long, fruitless quest, littered with bizarre claims and embarrassing failures. But at a conference in Canada earlier this month, archaeologist Patricia Sutherland announced new evidence that points strongly to the discovery of the second Viking outpost ever discovered in the Americas.

1. kafli Óleifur hét herkonungur er kallaður var Óleifur hvíti. Hann var son Ingjalds konungs Helgasonar, Ólafssonar, Guðröðarsonar, Hálfdanarsonar hvítbeins Upplendingakonungs.

When Danish Vikings sailed across the North Sea and conquered England, they left their mark on the English language and place names. That’s common knowledge, at least to historians. What’s perhaps less known is that the influence cut both ways. Although England was under Danish rule in the Viking Age, the English were culturally and politically more sophisticated than their neighbours to the east. Historian Marie Bønløkke Spejlborg was one of the more than 300 Norse mythology researchers who attended the 15th International Saga Conference held recently in Aarhus, Denmark. She is currently writing her PhD thesis about how the...

Juhl Wind will provide 520,000 kilowatt-hours of renewable energy credits over the eight regular season home games, which is equal to conventionally produced coal-fired electricity that results in 507,570 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, Juhl Wind estimated. The credits offset the electricity used throughout the Metrodome, covering everything from the concession stands to the scoreboards and making the Vikings one of the only National Football League teams to play in a 100 percent green-powered facility during the entire 2012-2013 season, Corey Juhl said. To be clear: The Vikings are not using wind power to light up the Dome. Juhl Wind...

There’s no shortage of myths about the appearance of our notorious Viking ancestors. To find out more about these myths, ScienceNordic’s Danish partner site, videnskab.dk, asked its Facebook readers to list their favourite myths about what the Vikings looked like. We have picked out five myths from the resulting debate and asked researchers to help us confirm or bust these myths. Armed with this information, our graphic designer then took a shot at drawing some examples of our infamous forefathers, which you can see in our picture gallery...

“Ice cores from Summit show that melting events of this type occur about once every 150 years on average. With the last one happening in 1889, this event is right on time,” says Lora Koenig, a Goddard glaciologist and a member of the research team analyzing the satellite data. ----------------------------------- I covered this over the weekend when Bill McKibben started wailing about the albedo going off the charts. I thought it might be soot related. The PR below and quote above is from NASA Goddard. I had to laugh at the title of their press release, where they cite “Unprecedented...

"Idle time is the devil's play," said Dayton, describing the NFL's six-month offseason. "It means that young males who are heavily armored and heavily psyched as necessary to carry out their job are probably more susceptible to being in bars at 2 o'clock (in the morning) and having problems. It doesn't excuse it. It just says this probably comes with it."

A Houston Police Department spokesperson said Vikings star running back Adrian Peterson was arrested early Saturday morning for resisting arrest, according to CBS-affiliate KHOU. Peterson was arrested at 2:30 a.m. Saturday after being at a nightclub in downtown Houston, police say. Peterson, who is from Palestine, Texas, remains in a Houston jail on a $1,000 bond, according to information on the Houston Police Department website. Team spokesman Bob Hagan said Saturday that the Vikings “are aware of the situation and are gathering more information.” Check back with WCCO.com for more on this developing story.

Danish archaeologists believe they have found the remains of the fabled Viking town Sliasthorp by the Schlei bay in northern Germany, near the Danish border. According to texts from the 8th century, the town served as the centre of power for the first Scandinavian kings. But historians have doubted whether Sliasthorp even existed. This doubt is now starting to falter, as archaeologists from Aarhus University are making one amazing discovery after the other in the German soil. "This is huge. Wherever we dig, we find houses – we reckon there are around 200 of them,” says Andres Dobat, a lecturer...

From studying the present day population of the Orkneys, a small archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland, geneticists from University College, in London, have gained a deep insight into the earliest inhabitants of Europe. Of the medley of peoples who populated Britain, neither the Anglo-Saxons nor the Romans ever settled the distant Orkneys. The Romans called the islands' inhabitants picti, or painted people. The Celtic-speaking Picts dominated the islands until the arrival of the Vikings about A.D. 800. The islanders then spoke Norn until the 18th century when this ancient form of Norse was replaced by English, brought in...

The Minnesota Vikings' new $975 million stadium is expected to bring construction jobs to parts of Minneapolis hit hardest by poverty and unemployment. Elected officials, business owners and civic leaders who backed the stadium are hoping it will be a boon to the jobless, including the 22 percent of black workers who were counted as unemployed as recently as last year, Minnesota Public Radio reported Tuesday, June 12. That was nearly triple Minnesota's overall jobless rate.

Whoa, that was a close one. Leave it to some penny pinching Minnesotans to make a couple of billionaires sweat it out. If Zygi and Mark Wilf had known it was going to be this hard to get a new stadium built in Minneapolis, they might have gone looking for some other taxpayer-funded trough to guzzle at. They're going to get their new stadium, though, and what a place it should be. A billion-dollar palace downtown, smack on the same spot the Vikings play today, and loaded with the kind of amenities that make owning an NFL team so much...

The Minnesota Senate has approved a financing plan for a new Vikings stadium. By a 36-30 vote the afternoon of Thursday, May 10, senators passed the bill to fund a new $975 million stadium. The bill now heads to Gov. Mark Dayton for his signature. Dayton has been a ardent support of the bill. The Senate vote came hours after the Minnesota House gave its support to the plan. The deal is a compromise bill after a conference committee ironed out differences between earlier versions. A key change was requiring the team to pay an additional $50 million than first...

The Minnesota House passed the conference committee version of the Vikings stadium bill early Thursday, May 10, leaving Senate approval as the last obstacle before the bill would head to Gov. Mark Dayton's desk. The bill passed 71-60 after about two hours of debate on the floor. The conference committee bill raises the amount the team would pay by $50 million. The team's contribution is now $477 million, up from $427 million. That drops the state's contribution from $398 million to $348 million. Minneapolis' contribution remains unchanged at $150 million.

Minneapolis, MN – The new stadium plan for the Minnesota Vikings has received approval from the state's House of Representatives. After passing by a margin of 73-58, the proposal will next move to the state Senate. "It's the first hurdle, a couple more to go, but we're really excited," said Vikings vice president Lester Bagley.

WHAT'S AT STAKE? Minnesota Vikings' lease at the Metrodome is up. Team says it won't sign a new one without a deal for a new stadium. Los Angeles waits in the wings. Team has been here more than 50 years. WHAT'S IN THE BILL? Public funding for $975 million stadium: $150 million from Minneapolis taxes and $398 million from taxes on revenues of new electronic charitable gambling. Read bill at http://bit.ly/Vikingsbill. WHAT'S THE PROCESS? Minnesota House will take up the bill Monday, May 7. If it passes, it will go to the Senate. Numerous amendments are expected to be offered,...

An 11th-hour Republican Vikings stadium plan that would have paid for the state’s share with general obligation bonds was declared dead late Thursday morning, and in its wake House GOP leaders pledged to hold a long-awaited floor vote next Monday on the stadium bill authored by Rep. Morrie Lanning and Sen. Julie Rosen. House leaders said they also hope to vote on their 2012 bonding bill Monday. GOP leaders said that serious questions about using general obligation bonds to pay for the state’s portion of a new stadium for the Minnesota Vikings have forced them to drop the plan, which...

ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) The big push at Minnesota's Capitol to pass a public subsidy for a new Vikings stadium stalled Tuesday, as the proposal got snared in the partisan politics that have defined state government under a Democratic governor and Republican legislative majorities. The prospect of impending House and Senate floor votes on the $975 million stadium plan appeared to dissolve after Republican legislative leaders unexpectedly debuted a brand-new financing plan that differs significantly from the proposal negotiated by Gov. Mark Dayton's administration, the Vikings and the city of Minneapolis. GOP leaders called for shrinking the proposed $400 million...

Their goal finally in sight, the Minnesota Vikings summoned star power Wednesday to put extra pressure on state lawmakers nearing decisive votes on public financing for a new pro football stadium. Running back Adrian Peterson, linebacker Chad Greenway and center John Sullivan lent aid to a franchise lobbying team of nine, which is counting heads for an expected House vote as soon as Thursday and guiding the bid for a nearly $1 billion stadium through its final Senate committees. In a barely 30-minute visit, the players chatted with legislators and posed for pictures with Democratic Gov. Mark Dayton. “It’s a...

Graves hint at contact with Romans Published: 8th November 2006 19:18 CET Archaeologists excavating ancient graves in western Sweden have found shards from ceramic vessels made in the Roman Empire, in a find that could challenge assumptions about contacts between people in Sweden and the Romans. The graves in Stenungsund, around 45 kilometres north of Gothenburg, have been dated to between the years 1 and 300 AD. The remains of burned bones from two people were found, along with the pieces of ceramic. "There are pieces from four or five vessels in each grave, and we have never previously found...

9 March 2007 Crystal amulet poses question on early Christianity An overlooked crystal amulet in the National Museum suggests new understandings about Christianity's origins in Denmark King Harold Bluetooth brought Christianity to Denmark roughly 1100 years ago. At least that's what he declared on the Jelling Stone located in Jutland: 'King Haraldr ordered this monument made in memory of Gormr, his father, and in memory of Thyrvé, his mother; that Haraldr who won for himself all of Denmark and Norway and made the Danes Christian.' A tiny crystal amulet in the National Museum's archives suggests something quite different though, that...

Swedes find Viking-era Arab coinsThe Arab coins reveal where they were minted and the date Swedish archaeologists have discovered a rare hoard of Viking-age silver Arab coins near Stockholm's Arlanda airport. About 470 coins were found on 1 April at an early Iron Age burial site. They date from the 7th to 9th Century, when Viking traders travelled widely. There has been no similar find in that part of Sweden since the 1880s. Most of the coins were minted in Baghdad and Damascus, but some came from Persia and North Africa, said archaeologist Karin Beckman-Thoor. The team from the Swedish...

Viking treasure hoard yields astounding finds 06/24/2002 STOCKHOLM: Four years ago, a farmer digging in his fields in Sweden's Baltic island of Gotland came across a Viking coin. He called a friend from the local museum, and together they soon uncovered another 150 Viking relics. But the crops growing in the fields hindered their work and they gave up. The following summer, with crops that year infected by lice, they resumed their search - and on July 16, 1999, came across the biggest Viking-period treasure hoard so far discovered. It had been lying there for about 1,100 years. The Spillings...

&nbsp; &nbsp; Summer 2000 (8.2) Scandinavian Ancestry Tracing Roots to Azerbaijan by Thor Heyerdahl Above: Thor Heyerdahl with Peruvian children who still construct traditional boats made of reeds, the principle material that enabled early migrations on trans-oceanic voyages. Courtesy: Thor Heyerdahl. Archeologist and historian Thor Heyerdahl, 85, has visited Azerbaijan on several occasions during the past two decades. Each time, he garners more evidence to prove his tantalizing theory - that Scandinavian ancestry can be traced to the region now known as Azerbaijan. Heyerdahl first began forming this hypothesis after visiting Gobustan, an ancient cave dwelling found 30 miles ...

The Vikings are both famous and notorious for their liking of beer and mead and archaeologists have discussed for years whether Eric the Red (ca 950-1010) and his followers had to make do without the golden drink when they settled in Greenland around the year 1,000: The climate was mild when they landed, but was it warm enough for growing barley? Researchers from the National Museum in Copenhagen say the answer to the question is 'yes'. In a unique find, they uncovered tiny fragments of charred barley grains in a Viking midden on Greenland. The find is final proof that...

Our offspring and culture is the most successful feature of the History of Mankind. Ancient Rome and Greece have nothing on Scandinavia of today, nor what we did some centuries after Rome came down. No, I'm not a Racist - and I furthermore am more than a true friend of Italy and Greece. But I do not believe there's a point in denying the fact that Viking Culture has played a major role in shaping the World of today. Have a look at it. Britain, North America, Scandinavia, Germany, etc. in one way or another, all were formed by the...

Minneapolis, Minn. — Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak and labor groups say they have agreements with the Vikings that they hope will increase city support for a new stadium on the current Metrodome site. The agreements call for union labor to be used on any stadium, with unions committing to no work stoppages.

Dozens of decapitated skeletons have been unearthed in southern England believed to be those of 1,000-year-old Vikings, scientists said Friday. > "To find out that the young men executed were Vikings is a thrilling development," he added. >

A mysterious cache of dozens of humans skulls discovered earlier this year in Dorset, England belonged to Viking raiders. Anthropologists figured this out when they examined the teeth, and found that elaborate patterns had been filed into them. That's right — the Vikings filed their teeth, and probably put pigment into the designs to make them look even more badass. No other European groups were known to file their teeth at the time these Vikings were beheaded about a millennium ago, though it was a common practice in Africa and Paleoamerica. Were the filed teeth these Norsemen's attempt to make...

(CBS News) A gruesome mass grave found in southern England may be the final resting place of some of the most feared marauders of the 11th century. Archeologists say the remains may belong to Viking mercenaries, who were buried in a burial pit in what now is the English town of Dorset. Isotope testing on the men's teeth links their origin to Scandinavia. That's where the easy clues end.

“State [of Minnesota] not rushing to act on Vikings stadium,” fretted the January 13 headline of a column in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. New Jersey billionaire Zygi Wilf, owner of the Minnesota Vikings, is seeking about $700 million in taxpayers’ money to build his team a new stadium in the state. The $700 million would be roughly split between state and local taxpayers. Members of one proposed site for the stadium have been especially disgruntled by Wilf’s request to take their money for his business. A group in Ramsey County, which includes the state capital of St. Paul, has collected...