Hungry Vikings: A History of the Food of Norse People

Lo, it is nearly 350 years that we and our fathers have inhabited this most lovely land, and never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race, nor was it thought that such an inroad from the sea could be made. Behold, the church of St. Cuthbert spattered with the blood of the priests of God, despoiled of all its ornaments; a place more venerable than all in Britain is given as a prey to pagan peoples

Alcuin, a senior adviser to Charlemagne – the most powerful man in Europe – was writing to the king of Northumbria to express his shock and horror at the attack

“...the woeful inroads of heathen men destroyed God’s church in Lindisfarne island by fierce robbery and slaughter’. Writing in the next century, the chronicler Symeon of Durham wrote: ‘They miserably ravaged and pillaged everything. They trod the holy things under their polluted feet, they dug down the altars, and plundered all the treasures of the church. Some of the brethren they slew, some they carried off with them in chains, the greater number they stripped naked, insulted, and cast out of doors, and some they drowned in the sea.”

Well pillaging and destroying it's a tough work that makes men hungry!

OK, besides the joking, who were the Vikings and what was their food like? Let's do some popular myth busting plus lets check some traditional Norse food of the time.

Whey Pickles, Lutefisk, Skyr dairy, hares and rabbits, stews, nuts and berries, game meat, ale and mead.

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Thom and The Delicious Legacy

Music by Motion Array

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