The ship burial of Oseberg, Vestfold, Norway, 834 AD. The story of Thordís began as a project on the Oseberg burial, where two ladies of high standing were buried in a ship that seems particularly constructed for women and crammed with objects that appear to have a religious significance. This happened in 834 AD, and the youngest woman was between 40 and 60 when she died. Seeing as the “Viking Age” (in the west) officially begun with the Lindisfarne raid in 793 AD, she must have been a young girl when this new era began. . We know so little of that era! We do know a lot about Vikings of the 10th, 11th and 12th century, people who had already been exposed to the outside world for centuries. What about the Norsemen who lived and who had not yet become Vikings during the late 8th or 9th century? We know hardly anything – but we do know that the centuries to come would bring about great changes and that the people who lived in Norse communities before that age really got started, were deeply Heathen and considered true barbarians by the surrounding world. They were closer to the Iron Age tribal communities known to ancient Romans than to later saga-characters from Iceland. (...) with this as a starting point I found myself suddenly in the forest marshlands and river lands of the 8th century Baltic countries, where Vikings from Sweden had just begun to dig their pirate claws into the territory that was to become known as Rus-land. And there I found the girl-child Thordís and one great story of survival and cunning in the terrifying world of the Viking Rus… . Her childhood in Rusiyah was supposed to cover one book only, but it grew in proportions as I began digging into life in Aldeigjuborg, the first Viking settlement in Russia, close to modern St. Petersburg. A slavers´ town, a pirate town – what might life have been like for a little girl growing up in a place like that? And the life of Thordís must of course involve a lot of other people - What could it have been like for a free-born young woman to be taken as a slave to these people? What could it have been like for a civilized and highly educated man to suddenly find himself the slave of barbarians? What might life have been like for their neighbors, and for their slaves? And last but not the least, what could life have been like for these early Rus-men who actually lived out their lives in exile, as lawless men and pirates? What could it have been like for those boys who actually grew up there? (Full text in image description)
Posted on: Mon, 06 Oct 2014 10:13:16 +0000
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