<p>In this essay I want to investigate how the Viking aristocratic warrior elite in Scandinavia used religious mythology for the construction of their identity. The essay also takes up the concept of honor, which was important for the warriors. Honor was central to all people during Viking age and for the warriors it was absolute. In the religious myths, the aristocratic warriors justify their position in society and legitimate their acts of war. Religion continues to have importance to the warrior elite even after the arrival of Christianity. The myths and the concept of honor made it impossible to question war and violence.</p>

This paper deals with rights of women and their social role during the Viking Age. The method is to compare things and written material. In the written material, three cases of rape have been identified. How each of these cases where looked upon differs; legally the punishment for rape was exile. Violence against wives implied their right to divorce, whereby they were entitled to take with them a great part of the family´s capital, namely their dowry and morning gift. A husband and wife did not inherit each other but a widow could inherit from her children if they died without offspring. Women buried in boat graves indicate that they had a function or were closely involved in the cult. From two graves, the Aska Grave and the Oseberg Grave, the findings can be interpreted as indicating a change in the social behaviour. I propose this was a way of breaking with the past and sabotaging the right to remember earlier cultural habits.

The Viking Age (800–1050 A.D.) is also called the “Silver Age”. Despite the fact that no silver mines were in use in Sweden at that time, most of the landowners for one reason or another had a lot of precious metal stored in their homes. Alone the Island of Gotland has found over 700 different hoards of which around 400 of these hoards have been excavated over the last 100 years. Archeologists are debating whether all this precious metal had been brought to the island by traders from the east, or if it came from the Viking raids in the west. Besides the coins, thousands of pieces of silver have been recorded. The intention of this essay is to attempt to clarify if it is possible to find differentiating factors between the hoards and to classify categories of these precious metal deposits. I indeed, such classifications and categorizations are achievable in the research findings in this paper.

When all available sources on the Viking world are combined, there is a strong sense that the Scandinavians of the late Iron Age (8th-11th centuries AD) recognised no clear distinctions between the profane and the sacred. The latter could manifest itself in different ways, in places, beings or objects, and it often aroused ambivalent feelings of both fear and awe. This thesis explores these entanglements and the notion of ambivalence in relation to a particular group of Viking-Age individuals involved in the practice of magic (e.g. seiðr). Chapters 1-3 form the background for the considerations on ritual specialists' lives, tools of trade and ways of burial. After a detailed review of Viking-Age funerary practices, focus shifts towards the corpus of so-called ‘deviant burials', which in recent years have often been interpreted as belonging to ritual specialists. Chapter 4 compares the written and archaeological evidence for the funerary treatment of ritual specialists. Particular attention is devoted to graves where the deceased are covered with stones, since in the written sources execution by stoning is often employed as a punishment for malevolent magic. Nonetheless, caution is suggested in labeling all of them as belonging to ritual specialists and the necessity of a more individual, contextual approach is proposed. Chapter 5 examines a specific group of Viking-Age artefacts that usually take the form of iron rods, which have recently been interpreted as magic staffs. These items are discussed in the light of Old Norse texts and comparative materials from other areas of the world. Ultimately, the thesis embraces the notion of ambiguity in Viking attitudes to the supernatural, viewing this not as an obstructive problem but as an active component of interpretation. This combines an appropriate caution in approaching a difficult aspect of past societies, with a sensible refusal to introduce more rigid definitions than those used by the Vikings themselves.

Viking Line har bedrivit kryssningstrafik på norra Östersjön sedan 1959. Idag konkurrerar företaget om passagerarna med ett flertal andra rederier på Östersjön. Östersjörederierna står för cirka tio procent av den totala konferensmarknaden i Sverige och för rederierna utgör konferenskunderna en mycket lönsam kundgrupp både ekonomiskt och profilmässigt. Konferensbranschen är en väldigt personalintensiv verksamhet där det förekommer mycket kundkontakt. För denna bransch spelar intern marknadsföring en betydelsefull roll då personalens kundinställning och kompetens är av stor vikt för kundernas kvalitetsupplevelse. Då denna marknad är mättad och det råder stor konkurrens om kunderna är den interna marknadsföringen extra vikig. För att skapa god kundinställning och kompetens hos personalen är det viktigt att kommunikationen fungerar tillfredställande i hela företaget. Syftet för denna uppsats är att undersöka olika uppfattningar om hur den interna marknadsföringen fungerar och huruvida den leder till ökad tjänstekvalitet i ett tjänsteföretag. Uppsatsen baseras på en kvalitativ studie bestående av intervjuer med ledning, mellanchef och konferensvärdar på Viking Line. Intervjuresultaten analyseras utifrån valda teorier med hjälp av en Gap- analys. Detta för att se om uppfattningar och åsikter angående den interna marknadsföringen skiljer sig åt mellan ledning och personal inom Viking Line. Uppsatsens resultat påvisar att det finns skillnader i uppfattning om hur den interna marknadsföringen fungerar inom Viking Lines konferensverksamhet mellan ledning, mellanchef och personal. Resultatet visar också att intern marknadsföring leder till ökad tjänstekvalitet och att Viking Line genom att förbättra sin interna marknadsföring kan öka tjänstekvaliteten för sina konferenskunder.

The purpose of this paper was to identify the elements and the alloys that five objects found in Birka consist of and to examine whether there are any significant differences between the presumably imported and domestic objects. The material was analyzed using a scanning electron microscope (SEM) which was equipped with an energy dispersive X-ray spectrometer (EDS) in order to identify the elements that are present and the alloys that the objects are made of. Then the SEM results were compared with the results of previous analyzes that have been performed on finds from Birka in order to investigate how the objects differ in elemental composition and to find out if there are any significant differences between them. The results showed that the objects’ content of the elements analyzed varies as the copper alloys the objects are made of. Only a few objects are made of the same type of copper alloy. A sword chape included in the material and a bridle mount that was analyzed in 2006 are both made of lead bronze. Two oriental mounts included in the material and a sword chape which was analyzed in 2006 are all made of lead bronze in which zinc has been added. There are no significant differences in composition between the presumably imported and domestic objects, but overall lead seems to be a metal that was used more in the domestic production.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--McMaster University (Canada), 1991. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 54-02, Section: B, page: 0705.

Zugl.: Diss. / Includes bibliographical references.

<p>A cause des pillages et des ravages des Vikings dans plusieurs régions de la France et du fait qu’ils se sont installés finalement en Normandie d’une façon permanent, ils ont du laisser certaines traces dans la langue française, comme leurs descendants l’ont fait plus tard en Angleterre après l’invasion en 1066. Avant l’invasion de Guillaume le Conquérant, les peuples d’Angleterre parlaient des langues germaniques, mais aujourd'hui l’anglais consiste dans sa plus grande partie de mots romans. Il est évident que la langue scandinave n’a pas eu la même force d’impact sur la langue française que la langue française sur l’anglais, mais on peut s’attendre à retrouver quelques traces.</p><p>Dans ce mémoire, je vais examiner quel rôle a joué la langue scandinave et quelles en sont les traces visibles aujourd’hui. A-t elle eu un impact profond qui a laissé de grandes empreintes sur la langue française ou est-ce que cette période de présence scandinave est-elle passée imperceptiblement ? S’il y a des vestiges dans le français, quels sont-ils dans ce cas, et dans quelles régions, aussi bien géographiques que linguistiques, se trouvent-ils ?</p><p>Je me concentrerai d’abord sur l’influence qu’ont eu les Vikings et la langue scandinave en Normandie, puisque c’était là qu’ils sont restés le plus longtemps et, par conséquent, il doit être probable qu’il y a des traces évidentes les plus fréquents.</p>

University, Diss., 2003--Kiel.