Online Resources

Online Resources

Pictures, Maps and Some Texts

It is vital for historians to be able to work with maps and pictures at all times. Track down all the Scandinavian place names and locate them on a map. While reading about specific places, for instance, Birka, collect as many pictures and drawings of the site as possible, including those of grave goods, runestones, landscape, etc. These things will help you not only to understand the material you read, but also to remember the sites themselves and many related details. Some museums and Scandinavian Research Projects have great sites from which you can donwnload pictures, and sometimes even research material (articles are generally in one of the Scandinavian languages, though).

Fröjel: a Viking Age Harbour on Gotland (Sweden) http://frojel.hgo.se/

In Object Gallery you can see many of the findings divided into groups (combs, beads, ceramics, etc). Apart from the description of the project by Professor Dan Carlson, who is responsible for the The Fröjel Discovery Programme, I suggest you click on Harbour & Trade and read his "brief account of harbours and trade during the Viking Age". In Paper and Reports you can read and download articles about the excavations in Fröjel (in Swedish, but summaries in English). You can also download and read the excavations reports on Excavations - all in Swedish, but there are plenty of pictures to be looked at.

The Runic Stones in Jelling (Jylland, Denmark) http://www.fortidensjelling.dk/

Some of you will remember these pictures which we saw in the supervisions. I suggest you print some of them and study the landscape, the stones, and the mounds.

The Birka Project (Lake Mälaren, Sweden) http://www.raa.se/birka_eng/eng_birkaprojektet.asp

Professor Björn Ambrosiani, responsible for the project, summarizes some of the results of the excavations. You will need to browse around the site for some good, if small, pictures.

Viking Heritage - Gotland University College (Sweden) http://viking.hgo.se/

S0me of you may have downloaded the two articles from this site (Viking Reading/Academic Articles). In General Information/Image Bank pictures are divided into four categories - sites, artefacts, runes and reconstructions. You can also see maps of Scandinavia, with present-day district divisions. In The Viking Age there is plenty of information and great pictures too.

Supervision 4 - Viking Raids - Scandinavian Perspective

During this supervision, I might have mentioned Carl Andersson's work. If you are interested, you can download the PDF files of his PhD thesis, 'Formation and Resolution of Ideological Contrast in the Early History of Scandinavia', University of Cambridge, 2000.

Electronic Journals

Some articles with which we have been working can be accessed from the computers connected to the university network, including college computers and/or your own computer connected to the college network. In the University Library, at the Reading Room Desk, you can ask for passwords to access journals from a computer not connected to the university network.

Some e-journals of interest available from the university network:

Alvíssmál can be accessed from anywhere. Also check the Tobias.lib site of the Universität Tübingen from which you can download unpublished seminars and conference papers (use the "Recherche" for searching the articles).

The University of Oslo publishes abstracts - and even some pdf files - of post-graduate thesis and master dissertations (most in Norwegian, but also in English). You can search by topic or type specific words on their own searh engine (søk).

For reviews, check The Medieval Review, which has a search engine to help you find books reviewed by key-words.

This database can only be accessed from a computer connected to the university network (no password access). It covers Scandinavian books and journals and is worth consulting while studying a specific subject because the search engine can look for particular words in the titles or in the text.