Children in Viking-age Worlds: Attempts at Narrating Past Lives

The Scandinavian Viking Age maintains an enduring popularity, in popular culture and academic enquiry. It has also retained a tendency to showcase rather limited protagonists: adult male actors typically get the main share of attention. Children often become accessories in stories about adults, or adults-in-training. We challenge this one-sided and narrow story, first by accentuating existing research on Viking-age children, then by trying to fill the gaps by imagining how the world might have looked to children. Acknowledging that social divides created widely different childhood experiences we look to the writing of children’s literature for ways of seeing the world through the eyes of children. The main objective is to encourage attempts to populate the Viking world with more diverse social agents through storytelling and narration, accepting that children formed and acted in the world around them as agents and not just furniture in the lives of adults.