Birka Viking Settlement

Glancing at the schedule for this week, I knew that our visit to the Birka Viking site would be one of my highlights. The two hour boat ride across Lake Mälaren, charging across the water like Norse raiders of old, landed us on the small island that was home to the first city in Sweden.

When I hit the shore I knew I had one main goal: find the dragons. I recognized that Cressida Crowell’s seemingly fictional How to Train Your Dragon book series must certainly be based on this site. Her island of Berk, populated by Vikings and their pet dragons, was clearly using this historical locale as source material.

My excitement was soon tempered by the icy reality that there were, in fact, no dragons at Birka. There were several Vikings on the island--making bread, spinning wool, chopping wood, roasting boar, selling prepacked ice cream--but none training the flying beasts that I expected to see. The degree of my disappointment was only dwarfed by the amount of sheep caca that littered the path leading through the archaeological site.

Representation of the Naglfar

My visit was not without discovery, however. I was able to find evidence of giants. I have a passing knowledge of Norse mythology--Odin, Freyja, Valhalla. Thanks to the movies, I know all about Thor and his mighty hammer. And by the movies, I am of course referring to the 1987 classic, Adventures in Babysitting. But I had never known that Norse mythology included both gods and giants. Just like with the clash between the Greek gods and the titans, the Norse gods and giants will battle in the future conflict of Ragnarok. According to one of the Viking sagas, the shapeshifting god Loki will lead a boatload of giants into battle against the other gods. A display at Birka represented this ship, the Naglfar, and it also described each of the giants that should be onboard.

Here’s a couple of the stories about the giants that I found particularly interesting:

• Thrym was a clever thief who succeeded in stealing Thor’s hammer. He demanded to marry the goddess Freyja in exchange for the hammer. Instead, Thor disguised himself in a bridal dress and tricked Thrym into marrying him. Thor then succeeded in getting his hammer back.
• Gjalp attempted to drown Thor by urinating over him. She failed and is later killed when Thor breaks her back with a chair.

I also read about the Norse creation story, which centered around the figure of Ymir. He was created at the beginning of the world by the clash between frost and sparks. Ymir’s toes gave birth to new giants and his underarm sweat gave birth to man and woman. After my very recent experience smelling distilled scents associated with horses at the Fotografika museum, I am all too aware of the putrid nature of human sweat. I can only imagine how this connects to the everyday smells that Vikings of that time associated with each other.

On my way back to our boat, at the end of our visit, I was able to spot one familiar beast that made me think that perhaps this search for dragons wasn’t pure silliness.