Résumé
It has long been clear that narrative played a central role in the Norse understanding and negotiation of reality, in poetic tales of gods, supernatural beings, and heroes. We see its legacies in the extraordinary richness of the medieval Icelandic saga traditions, but in the Viking Age this was expressed in other media of imagery, monumental commemoration, and funerary landscapes of power connected to the ancestral dead. This is also the purview of archaeology, my own field, and this lecture will explore the material traces of the Norse story-worlds, how the Viking-Age Scandinavians made tangible sense of their existence and stamped their mark upon it.
