Viking raiders stole this box. But the real surprise is what they did with it!
63 Degrees North4 Helmi 2021

Viking raiders stole this box. But the real surprise is what they did with it!

It’s no bigger than four decks of cards stacked one on top of the other — a tiny box raided from an Irish church. In Ireland, the box held the holy remains of a saint. What a mound of sand, some leftover nails and the box itself tell us about the Viking raiders who stole it — and what they did with it when they brought it back to Norway.

Our guests for this episode were Aina Heen-Pettersen, a PhD candidate at NTNU, and Griffin Murray, who is a lecturer in the Department of Archaeology at University College Cork.

The reliquary itself is at NTNU’s University Museum in Trondheim. You can see it virtually if you register to view the museum’s Online Collections and search for “shrine”.

A transcript of today’s show is available here.

Here are some of the academic articles on the reliquary research:

Heen-Pettersen, A. (2019). The Earliest Wave of Viking Activity? The Norwegian Evidence Revisited. European Journal of Archaeology, 22(4), 523-541. doi:10.1017/eaa.2019.19

Pettersen, Aina Margrethe Heen. (2018) Objects from a distant place: transformation and use of Insular mounts from Viking-Age burials in Trøndelag, Central Norway. Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History. vol. 21.

Pettersen, Aina Margrethe Heen; Murray, Griffin. (2018) An Insular Reliquary from Melhus: The Significance of Insular Ecclesiastical Material in Early Viking- Age Norway. Medieval Archaeology. vol. 62 (1).

Pettersen, Aina Margrethe Heen. (2014) Insular artefacts from Viking-Age burials from mid-Norway. A review of contact between Trøndelag and Britain and Ireland. Internet Archaeology. vol. 38.


And here are the books that are mentioned in the podcast:


Brunning, S. (2019). The Sword in Early Medieval Northern Europe: Experience, Identity, Representation. Boydell & Brewer. doi:10.1017/9781787444560

Etting, V. (2013) The Story of the Drinking Horn: Drinking Culture in Scandinavia During the Middle Ages

Volume 21 of Publications from the National Museum / Studies in archaeology & history: Publications from the National Museum, ISSN 0909-9506

Lowenthal, D. (2015). The Past is a Foreign Country — Revisited. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139024884

A transcript of today’s show is available here.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Jaksot(35)

The Alchemists: Turning wild water into white coal

The Alchemists: Turning wild water into white coal

The secrets behind how Norwegian scientists and engineers harnessed the country’s wild waterfalls by developing super efficient turbines — and how advances in turbine technology being developed now ma...

13 Huhti 202231min

The Detectives: Hunting toxic chemicals in the Arctic

The Detectives: Hunting toxic chemicals in the Arctic

Baby grey seals. Polar bears. Zooplankton on painkillers. How do toxic chemicals and substances end up in Arctic animals — and as it happens, native people, too? Our guests on today's show are Bjørn ...

30 Maalis 202223min

Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe and the $6 billion deal

Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe and the $6 billion deal

How the unlikely combination of WWII Germany, a modest English engineer who created a worker’s paradise, an ambitious industrialist prosecuted as a traitor and a hardworking PhD helped build modern No...

16 Maalis 202228min

Pirates, noblewomen and bicycling housewives

Pirates, noblewomen and bicycling housewives

Why does Norway always rank among the top countries on the planet when it comes to gender equality? It didn't happen by accident. Instead, it took powerful medieval noblewomen, 19th century farmers’ w...

2 Maalis 202232min

Old bones and modern germs

Old bones and modern germs

Trondheim, Norway’s first religious and national capital, has a rich history that has been revealed over decades of archaeological excavations. One question archaeologists are working on right now has...

16 Helmi 202225min

Darwin had Galapagos finches. Norway has… house sparrows?

Darwin had Galapagos finches. Norway has… house sparrows?

The different species of Galapagos finches, with their specially evolved beaks that allow them to eat specific foods, helped Charles Darwin understand that organisms can evolve over time to better sur...

26 Helmi 202125min

Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we'll make them!

Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we'll make them!

Not enough COVID-19 tests? No problem, we’ll make some! When the coronavirus first transformed from a weird respiratory disease centered in Wuhan, China to a global pandemic, no one was really prepare...

19 Helmi 202121min

The Longship that could help save the planet

The Longship that could help save the planet

Everyone knows there’s just too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — and we’re heating up the planet at an unprecedented pace. More than 20 years ago, Norwegians helped pioneer an approach to dea...

11 Helmi 202129min

Suosittua kategoriassa Tiede

rss-mita-tulisi-tietaa
rss-poliisin-mieli
utelias-mieli
tiedekulma-podcast
docemilia
rss-duodecim-lehti
rss-luontopodi-samuel-glassar-tutkii-luonnon-ihmeita
filocast-filosofian-perusteet
rss-tervetta-skeptisyytta