Hi Ea and
for your links!
Ah yes, the great museum at Roskilde. I've been there as a child with my family looking at the five ships from Skuldelev. I really should travel there again and see the museum as it is today.
Mind you: The
museum at Haithabu near Schleswig (which was a regular place of our school excoursions) just reopened a few feeks ago. I'll have a look at the new exhibition there this summer (with my own children now
).
Esk's interpretation of Húsdrápa sure sounds interesting, thanks for that too! But I'm always wondering how the harp or lyra was actually played in those days
.
(By the way: I was not really thinking about what King Alfred might have been entertained by (might be he was rather into listening to monks chanting christian hymns ?), but rather what the spoken language in that time really sounded like. Not beeing a linguistic scolar I'm at a loss there and therefore was intrigued by Benjamin Slades recital. But of course you pinpoint something equally interesting there
).
A glimpse of the grueseome way Anglo-Saxons and Norsemen treated each other may be in this piece from the BBC about a find in Dorset:
Weymouth ridgeway skeletons 'Scandinavian Vikings'