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Some 1,000 years ago, the Vikings set off on a voyage to Notre Dame Bay in modern-day Newfoundland, Canada, new evidence suggests. The journey would have taken the Vikings, also called the Norse, from L'Anse aux Meadows on the northern tip of the same island to a densely populated part of Newfoundland and may have led to the first contact between Europeans and the indigenous people of the New World.

NFL MVP Adrian Peterson says he has family members who are gay whom he loves and respects. But on gay marriage, the Minnesota Vikings running back says “that’s not something I believe in.” SNIP He was asked his thoughts on the Vikings cutting longtime punter Chris Kluwe, an outspoken advocate for gay rights and gay marriage.

Adrian Peterson told Bruce Murray and Amani Toomer on Sirius/XM NFL Radio Thursday that he has relatives who are gay but doesn't support gay marriage, NESN reported Monday. When asked about speculation that the Minnesota Vikings had released punter Chris Kluwe for being too open about his pro-gay marriage stance, the 28-year-old running back admitted he's against it.

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...