#scandinavian-and-early-european-folk

#scandinavian-and-early-european-folk

Swedes celebrate the day before on Holy Saturday, with Easter services in the Swedish church often taking place in the evening. This tradition reflects a broader cultural practice of marking holidays the evening before the main day.

The flagpole at the front of a house, just a three-minute drive from the handful of shops and restaurants, has become an advertisement for the exploits of Heimaey's most famous son.

Anki King's work suggests an intimate engagement with New Image painting, particularly the later work of Susan Rothenberg, but she took it in a direction that is recognizably hers.

CHARM is built around a large-scale survey of material connected to three major writing centres-Turku, Naantali, and Viipuri-in the 15th century. By comparing charters and book fragments together, the researchers aim to map how writing practices were adopted, modified, and localised, and what that meant for society and administration in a region that was then part of the Swedish realm.

We both live in maybe the most impractical place if you want to be a successful DJ, laughs Alice Marie Jektevik, one half of Article 3, a Sami female DJ collective. Jektevik, 36, and her collaborator, Petra Laiti, 30, reside in a rural village in the far north-east of Norway. But living in Sapmi the region across northern parts of Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia traditionally lived in by Sami people has proven to be central to their success, providing the inspiration for much of their work.

Excavations carried out in 2025 by the Arctic University Museum of Norway revealed that the artefacts came from a boat burial. The grave contained the skeleton of a woman placed inside a boat measuring about 5.5 metres in length. She had been buried together with a dog, suggesting the animal may have been an important companion in life.

At the outset of the Kalevala, Finland's national epic, a singer bemoans his separation from a beloved friend who grew up beside him. Today, the friends rarely meet "näillä raukoilla rajoilla, poloisilla Pohjan mailla" - lines which translator Keith Bosley renders "on these poor borders, the luckless lands of the North." The Kalevala, a poetic masterpiece of nearly 23,000 lines, first appeared in 1835. Now, nearly 200 years later, those "luckless lands of the North" are an increasingly tense border zone.

Instead, they practice something called "friluftsliv" - literally "free air life" - and in February, when winter feels endless, this practice becomes almost sacred. It's their secret weapon against the darkness, and after trying it myself during a particularly rough winter, I can tell you it works better than any supplement I've ever taken. The word itself sounds complicated, but friluftsliv is beautifully simple. It means spending time outdoors, regardless of weather conditions. Not despite the cold and darkness, but because of it.

A week's hiking in Jotunheimen national park (230 miles north of Oslo) last summer brought me tranquillity and peace. During four days of challenging hiking and wild camping through the area we saw hardly anyone else, having entire lush green valleys and still glacial lakes to ourselves. We were fortunate to have stunning weather throughout and, despite it being July, still had a reasonable amount of snow to traverse.

Following the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro by U.S. military forces on Saturday, January 3, President Donald J. Trump has revived his threats of annexing Greenland, currently a semi-autonomous region of Denmark. That same day, he was quoted in The Atlantic as saying "We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense." Then, on Sunday, he reiterated his stance to reporters aboard Air Force One.

A top Danish official said that a fundamental disagreement over Greenland remains with President Donald Trump after holding highly anticipated White House talks with Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The two sides, however, agreed to create a working group to discuss ways to work through differences as Trump continues to call for a U.S. takeover of the semiautonomous territory of NATO ally Denmark.

Warm lights shine from the houses that dot the wintry slopes of Mount Flyen and a cold wind blows as I stand in a swimming costume trying to talk myself into joining my friends in Bergen harbour. Stars are already appearing in the inky mid-afternoon sky. Life-changing moments are easy to spot in retrospect, but at the time they can feel so ordinary. I didn't know then that my wintry swim would lead to a year of adventures.

Having settled on where to ski in Norway, I found myself packing up the Kvikk Lunsj wafers and sweet brown brunost cheese sandwiches at the glassy Juvet Landscape Hotel, deep in the Sunnmøre Alps. Then the slow ascent, with skins on our splitboard skis, up to the peak at Mefjellet: torturous in some ways, looking at all that glinting Care Bear snow all the way up, but also a deliciously tantric act of meditation and delayed gratification.

A gold ring with a deep-blue, oval setting - decorated with fine spirals of filigree and tiny granulated beads - has been recovered from medieval deposits in Tønsberg, a historic town in southeastern Norway. The ring was found during an excavation in the modern town centre, where archaeologists have been investigating layers of urban life preserved beneath today's streets. The discovery was made within the protected archaeological area known as Tønsberg Medieval Town.

In the medieval world, strange signs in the sky were rarely ignored. In AD 536, when the sun seemed to lose its light and the climate turned harsh, that catastrophe may have been remembered in the terrifying Norse legend of Fimbulvetr. In our medieval past, the sky was thought to be tightly connected with the landscape. Historical sources show a deep sense of fear caused by celestial phenomena such as comets, meteors, bolides, and even the aurora borealis.

Early migration and Erik the Red The first humans settled in Greenland around 4,500 years ago. They came from the North American continent. In the 12th century, they were gradually displaced by Asian immigrants, the Thule people, who arrived on the island from Siberia via the Bering Strait. Their descendants are the Inuit, from whom most of the 56,000 Greenlanders today are descended.

"Cnut: The North Sea King" by Ryan Lavelle is a short and engaging biography of the most ambitious and successful Scandinavian leader of the Viking Age. Lavelle captures both the brutality and pragmatism that allowed Cnut to govern England effectively for almost two decades, despite being an outsider and a foreign conqueror. In 1066 and All That (1930), a parody book of English history,

Beyond the reach of medieval Christendom, Viking-age Scandinavia drew its ideas about gender less from scripture than from myth, law, and the practical demands of life in a raiding and trading world. Luke Daly explores how women could wield real authority-as estate managers, property holders, ritual figures, and, at times, political actors-within a society that was still hierarchical and often violent. Beyond the cathedrals and the long shadow cast by Rome lay societies whose moral and social assumptions were not governed by the cross.

You know the drill by now: large scale immersive exhibitions have gone from nowhere to ubiquity in London, with the last year alone bringing us big, tech-augmented, family-facing shows devoted to the likes of Tutankhamun, the Titanic, and the destruction of Pompeii.

This freak storm eventually became the catalyst for Norway's most infamous witch trials-some of the most intense in Europe. Known as the Finnmark witchcraft trials, the proceedings continued throughout the 17th century. By 1692, 111 women and 24 men had been prosecuted for practicing witchcraft; 91 of these individuals, the vast majority of them women, were sentenced to death-a figure that represents around one-third of those condemned for the crime of witchcraft in the entirety of Norway's history.