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.
The image released by Amazon shows the eponymous God of War standing next to a tree as he watches his son - who notably looks a bit younger than the video game version of 11-year-old Atreus we first met in 2018's God of War - take aim with his bow. Exactly what they're hunting is unclear, but we know that the developing relationship between father and son that was such a big part of the PS4 game is also going to be at the heart of the show.
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.
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.
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.
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.
