My firstborn is now in P4 and is doing a project on the Vikings. As a family we took the opportunity to visit the Vikings exhibition in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. While our youngest child put paid to my attempts to read most of the information, I managed to come away with a few nuggets about Vikings which were new to me.
The main one of these, which will no doubt come in useful at some point, is that the people we think of as Vikings were not considered that way in daily life – it was just when they were out trading or raiding that they were ‘on a Viking’. So, in their normal day to day life they were ordinary, community–minded, folk and it was only if times called for it that they would don their horned hats and become Vikings (before you tell me they didn’t wear horned hats, I managed to read that board too but I am trying to convey an image here…). When they returned from their ‘Viking’ they would return to their normal lives.