30 - Fate in the Viking Age - Viking Worlds III

Viking Age Podcast

History, Society & Culture

4.9 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 16 March 2017

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode we talk about the role of fate in the minds of Viking Age Scandinavians.

We will talk about Ragnarok, Individual Destiny and the dictators of fate themselves, the Norns. Then we'll conclude the episode by talking about the relationship between Fate, honor and reputation.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome back to the Viking Age podcast. My name is Lee and this is episode 30,
0:09.2	Fate in the Viking Age. This is part three of our series on Viking Worlds.
0:17.1	Now, before we get started today, I would just like to remind everyone that we're currently
0:23.5	taking questions for our anniversary question-and-answer episode.
0:28.5	The show is turning one years old on April 12th, and we're going to celebrate with a special
0:35.1	question-and-answer format.
0:37.4	So, if you have anything you'd like to ask about the Vicarians, we're going to celebrate with a special question-and-answer format.
0:43.5	So, if you have anything you'd like to ask about the Viking Age, about history in general,
0:48.8	or, you know, just the meaning of life, please send them on in.
0:55.7	You can submit questions over email, on Twitter or Facebook, you can send me a telegraph, smoke signals work. You know, you get the idea. Links for all of these contact mechanisms, smoke signals
1:02.2	excluded. Live over on the website at Vikingagepodcast.com. With that out of the way, let's dive right
1:10.7	into the history. Last time out, we took a sweeping
1:15.4	bird's eye tour of Denmark at the dawn of the Viking Age. We talked about geography,
1:22.1	settlement patterns, and we did our best to understand, at least at a very general level, how the world of the Danes
1:31.0	was structured around the year 800. As I mentioned then, the intention of the last episode
1:37.9	was to give us a firm grounding in the physical reality of the Viking Age, and provide us with a mental model upon which we can
1:46.8	build as we explore how Danes in the Viking Age may have viewed themselves in the world around them.
1:54.6	Today, we are going to take a deep breath and dive right in by exploring a concept which appears to have been at the
2:03.8	center of the pagan Norse worldview, the concept of fate or destiny.
2:11.2	On the surface of it, this is not particularly surprising, in accounts of Viking Age Scandinavia, both popular and scholarly,
2:22.0	it is common to see the Nordic worldview described as fatalistic.
2:28.0	That is, one in which the future was preordained and unalterable by human action.
	...

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