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A group of friends sit around a table sharing stories and drinking mead. Men shave and women drink – but it’s not like that vikingsThey are modern day hipsters.
The 21st century has seen a revival of mead, a fermented alcoholic beverage made from water and honey. Over the past 20 years or so, hundreds of new forms of poverty have emerged around the world.
These meaderies often use Viking imagery in their branding. Their wares are said to be things like Odin’s Mead or Viking Blood and their logo includes longships, axes, ravens, and drinking horns. Some even have their own themed Viking drinking halls.
It is part of what might be called the “Viking turn”, a renewed pop culture vogue for Vikings over the past 20 years, which has made them the star of films, TV shows, video games, and memes.
Since the rowdy banquet scene in the 1958 film vikingsWild, drunken feasts have been a staple of Viking hyper-masculine pop culture.
This topic continues in the 21st century from the History Channel vikings From TV series (2013–present) to games such as Skyrim (2011) and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (2020).
But while modern media suggest that the Vikings drank mead as often as water, history tells a slightly different story.
Three stories are foundational to the Vikings’ association with mead. The first Anglo-Saxon poem is beowulfwhich survives in a single manuscript written in Old English and now British Library,
The story it tells is based in southern Sweden and Denmark in the early sixth century, so the warrior culture and lifestyle. beowulf Idealism actually dates back to a period well before the Viking Age (usually from the later 8th century onwards). It shares much of its essence with later Viking notions of the good life and so, for better or worse, they have been fused.
most of beowulfThe action takes place around the mead-hall – the center of power of kings such as the Danish king Hrothgar, where leaders entertained their followers with feasts and wine in return for their support and military service.
This relationship, based on the consumption of food and drink, but inextricably linked with honor and loyalty, forms the basis of the heroic warrior society that the poet celebrates. It is therefore not surprising that the contexts in which mead is drunk are consistently and markedly emotionally laden.
About the author
Simon Trafford is Lecturer in Medieval History at the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
This article was first published Conversation And it is republished under a Creative Commons license. read the original article,
Mead’s second high-profile appearance comes in Norse mythology. In Valhol, the great hall of the god Odin, the Einherjar – the most valiant and honored warriors ever killed in battle – feast and drink wine. They eat the endless grass that flows from the udders of a goat named Heiruen, who lives on the roof. Norse myth, it should be noted, is sometimes quite strange.
Finally, another important myth tells of the theft of the “mead of poetry” by Odin. This substance was created by two dwarfs from honey and the blood of a creature called Kvasir, which they had murdered. Mead bestows the gift of wisdom and poetic skills on those who drink it.
The entire myth is long and complex, but it culminates with Odin swallowing the grass and fleeing in the form of an eagle, but throwing some of it backwards when he is being pursued particularly fast.
These are fascinating and impactful episodes that clearly demonstrate the symbolic and cultural importance of mead in the mythology and stories of Viking Age heroes. But this is not evidence that it was actually consumed on a large scale in England or Scandinavia.
In the 1970s, linguist Christine Fell stated that the Old English medu, (mead), and compound words derived from it, appear more often in highly emotional and poetic contexts such as Beowulf than in practical contexts such as law or charter.
This contrasts strongly with the pattern of usage of other words for alcohol such as élu (ale), béor (counter intuitively perhaps “cider”) or vin (wine), which are used far more often in a functional and practical way. This led Fell to believe that concentration on mead was preferred beowulf There was a “nostalgic imagination”. He concluded that mead was a fundamental part of an idealized and backward-looking fictional heroic world rather than being traditionally drunk during everyday life.
In 2007, a PhD candidate at the University of York demonstrated the same thing in Scandinavian sources: mjúr (“mead”) is far more common in collections of Eddic and Skaldic poetry than in saga stories of everyday life. Equally, both the word mjðr and the compound words derived from it are used much less frequently in practical and purposeful contexts, with ël and mungát (the Old Norse word for ale) being abundant.
The strong belief in both England and Scandinavia is that, like the sources of the time beowulf Written from the 10th century onwards, the drinking of copious amounts of mead by a lord’s retainer was largely symbolic. It represented a contractual bond of honor in an ideal warrior society.
This was often more a poetic image than a reflection of real life practice. The standard drink at feasts, let alone typical everyday home meals, was far more likely to be ale.
Mead was once a highly prized beverage – perhaps the most desirable beverage before the Viking Age, as evidenced by its honored place in the halls of Valhall and Hrothgar. However, honey shortages made mead expensive and difficult to obtain in Northern Europe. By the Viking Age, exotic Mediterranean wines, mentioned as Odin’s drink in Grímnismál, may have begun to replace mead as the preferred choice of the aristocracy.
So what, then, for the modern mead-drinking Viking enthusiast? Of course, the point is not that the Vikings or any other early medieval The people never drank the mead – some apparently did, if not perhaps as much as is sometimes alleged – but rather it served more as a symbol of a fairytale-filled heroic Neverland. But it is arguably just as accurate that today’s mead-drinkers use it too.