The diary Vikings Life

Good Afternoon everybody! 

Today we will deal with the routine in the vikings´ life; men vs women.

Most Viking men were all-round handymen, but some had special skills. There were boat-builders, for example.

Most Viking men knew how to handle a boat, and most could fight if they had to protect the family or to support their chieftain.

Women were able to do different kind of things; baked bread, looked after the children, made the family's clothes and cooked the two meals a day most families ate. A well as on the farm, women milked the cows and made cheese.

Babies, to protect them from evil spirits and sickness, were given little Thor's-hammer charms.Girls often took the same name as their mother or grandmother, and a boy usually took his father's name too - so Eric, son of Karl, became Eric Karlsson. 

Viking children didn´t go to school because they helped their parents at work, andthey also learnViking history, religion and law from spoken stories and songs, not from books. It was common for a girl's father to choose her husband by the age of 15 or 16. That is one of the most hard thing to me... don´t you reckon? 

I have also read that it was really normal that a young Viking man might go off on a trading voyage, or become a raider. He always hoped to come home rich so he could buy a farm. Vikings met at markets.They usually traded by exchanging goods (a wolf skin for a pair of shoes, perhaps) but also used gold and silver coins. Traders valued coins by weight, and carried small folding scales to weigh a customer's coins.

Not everyone was free to come and go as he or she liked, I mean, some people were slaves. Slaves did the hardest, dirtiest jobs. People could be born slaves.The child of a slave mother and father was a slave too, but the child of a slave mother and a free father was free.

How interesant,hey? at least for me! 

Many slaves were people captured in a Viking raid. Viking traders sold slaves in markets, but slave-trading in England was stopped in 1102.

Now I will mention some of the plays and thingks vikings like to do to enjoy its free time.

Viking men enjoyed swimming, wrestling and horse racing. In winter, people skated on frozen rivers, and used skis over the snow. A favourite board game was hnefatafl ('king's table'). Players moved pieces around a board, like in draughts or chess. There were lots of versions of this game.

Most children's toys were home-made - whistles made from leg bones of geese, for instance. Children had wooden dolls, played football, and sailed model boats. Pig bones found at Viking sites might be toy 'hummers' - the bones were threaded on a twisted cord which you pulled to make a humming noise.

From bones, seeds and other food remains at Viking sites, we know they ate meat from farm animals, and from wild animals that they hunted, and collected foods such as berries and nuts. They cooked meat in a big stew-pot over the fire, or roasted it on an iron spit. Fish and meat were smoked or dried to preserve it. Viking bread was made from rye or barley flour. They used milk mostly to make cheese and butter.

At a feast, guests drank ale and mead (a strong drink made from honey). People drank out of wooden cups or drinking horns (made from cow-horns). Feasts were held to mark funerals and seasonal festivals, such as midwinter. Some feasts lasted over a week!

Jobs such as collecting wood for the fire, weaving cloth and baking bread took up a lot of time. Vikings did not have much furniture - perhaps a wooden table and benches for sitting on and sleeping on.

There were no bathrooms in Viking homes. Most people probably washed in a wooden bucket, or at the nearest stream. Instead of toilets, people used cess-pits - holes outside dug for toilet waste. The pit was usually screened by a fence. Slimy muddy cess-pits have been found by archaeologistsstudying the remains of the Viking town of Jorvik (modern York).