Viking Age art fascinates with its hammers, ravens, gripping beasts and ribbon animals, many in complex interlace designs and some in clever combinations. An overlapping sequence of styles is more or less recognizable, from Oseberg, Borre and Jellinge to Mammen, Ringerike and Urnes. Some representative examples are shown below (in "Viking Age Art Styles"), with a focus on examples from England. Additional coeval art styles occurred in neighbouring Baltic and Finnic cultures, some with Scandinavian influence and others far more distinctive such as the Finno-Ugric animal styles (in an area where paganism continued into the 13th century).

I grew up in Yorkshire, surrounded by Norse place names (including the main streets of my home town), and it was fun to find familiar words during the years we later lived in Norway. In Yorkshire, there was Jorvik at York; the battleground of Stamford Bridge (site of the battle in 1066, following the burning of Scarborough in September of that year); and the Gauber High Pasture "Viking Site" at Ribblehead (as a young teenager, I took part in the excavation led by Alan King - my parents owned one of the nearby Ribblehead railway cottages). Northumbrian copper alloy stycas found at the site date it to the 860s or later and even after Northumbria fell to the Vikings in 866, stycas continued to be found in circulation at sites like "A Riverine Site Near York" and Torksey (Lincolnshire).

In subsequent years (1987, 1995, 2015), there were visits to Lindisfarne, site of the first well-known Viking attack against England (in 793) and Iona, which was raided in 802. We saw a tower built to defend against such attacks in Ireland at Monisterboice (2008). I should not forget Dyflin (after the Irish Dubh Linn), visited again with the family in 2008, once ruled by Sygtrygg Silkbeard. More recently (2013) we stopped to see the famous cross at Gosforth, Cumbria, an evocative piece of Viking art and symbolism. In Iceland (1988), I visited Thingvellir and saw Ingólfsshofði (said to be where Ingólfur Arnarson originally landed in 874).

The form of the Viking ships was long an inspiration and in 2001 we visited the Viking Ship museum in Oslo to see them. We also visited Roskilde in Denmark, famous for its five Viking ships. In the Stavanger area where we lived, there were various Viking relics to be seen, such as the Klepp runestone, the Havrsfjord site of Harald Fairhair’s victory in the late 9th century, and the Talgje church runes. The streets in Stavanger gave me the meaning of some of the street names in Leeds. I was pleased to find I could read some of the runestones on my last visit to the Stavanger museum (2012).

On Orkney (2008) we saw the Brough of Birsay Viking longhouses and enjoyed the puffins. The runic graffiti in Orkahaugr (Maeshowe) was also very entertaining, in a magical burial mound ("tomb raider") context. According to the Orkneyinga Saga (Chapter 93): "On the thirteenth day of Christmas [this was 1153] they travelled on foot over to Firth. During a snowstorm they took shelter in Maeshowe and two of them (his men) went insane which slowed them down badly so that by the time they reached Firth it was night time."

In Venice (2004) we saw the weathered runic inscription on the Piraeus stone lion (plundered by the Venetians in 1687) and, in 2006, I visited the area of the Baltic-Volga waterways used by the Rus' for migration, trade and adventure.

There is even a connection between our time in Oman and Viking culture, given the appearance of islamic silver in Viking hoards and the use of dirhams and cowrie shells in their jewelry.

I visited L'Anse aux Meadows on August 29th 2014, an evocative place recording the Norse presence in North America about a thousand years ago.

In the summer of 2015, I finally got round to visiting the famous Viking Age crosses and "hogbacks" to be found in a number of North Yorkshire churches. We also climbed Roseberry Topping, once Othenesberg ("Odin's Hill"). The main 2015 "Viking quest" though was to the celebrated Urnes stave church in the headwaters of the mighty Sognfjord: http://lifeartearth.blogspot.com/2015/12/an-ancient-stave-church-in-fjords-and.html

Some years living in Malaysia and then the covid pandemic caused a pause in these journeys, but I picked up again in October 2021 with a visit to Denmark. The journey went from the Viking ships of Roskilde to the Ladby ship burial; from the Gorm and Bluetooth runestones and monuments at Jelling to one of the Bluetooth ring forts at Fyrkat; to the Lindholm Høje graves with their stone boat outlines then back to Jelling and the giant (350 m) ship outline with central mound there; and finally back via the Trelleborg ringfort to Copenhagen. The deepening of knowledge of the ships linked back to a visit to Sutton Hoo in September, the earliest known of the North Sea ship burials. The Harald Bluetooth associations are all the more resonant after reading Bengtsson's "The Long Ships" again.

In 2022, I found myself back in Iceland, visiting Þingvellir in the ice and snow, enjoying the northern lights and visiting some famed Viking Age objects in the National Museum of Iceland.

2023 saw visits to Miklagard (Istanbul) and the Eastern Settlement of Greenland, including Brattahlíð, Gardar, Dyrnaes and the Landnám homestead at Narsaq. This completed the experience of visiting the places reached by the westward-exploring Norse during the final third of a century at the end of the first Millennium.

In 2025, I have been exploring the Baltic, from Sweden to Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In Latvia, I saw the mighty Daugava River, an important component of the eastern routes to Kiev and on to Constantinople. The Daugava rises close to the sources of the Volga and the Dnieper and could be connected ("The Great Portage") to these routes south. This was the route of Orm's third voyage in Frans Bengtsson's "The Long Ships". Another route ("The High Road") followed the eastern branch of the Baltic Sea (Gulf of Finland), passing between Tallinn and Helsinki (of today) then following the Neva River into Lake Ladoga and on south down the Volkhov. The notorious Dnieper rapids were submerged when the Dnieper Hydroelectric Station was built at Zaporizhzhia in 1932.

In Vilnius, I saw the superb exhibition on "Kyivan Rus'. Origins" at the National Museum of Lithuania. The story is beautifully told in animations and astonishing artefacts from Ukraine, Lithuania, Poland, Latvia, Estonia, Sweden, and Norway. There are also some wonderful displays of Baltic artefacts in the Arsenal and Gediminas Castle Tower museums.

( http://lifeartearth.blogspot.com/2013/10/viking-art.html )