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One of our Icelandic sheep Oona enjoying a quiet evening in a very green paddock on The Viking Farm. Archaeology gives us a remarkably detailed picture of how Norse people used sheep. If you were building a farm in the Viking Age, sheep would have been one of the most useful animals you could keep. A sheep could turn grass and other forage that people couldn't eat into meat, milk, wool, hides, and even bone and horn that could be put to use. Sheep were relatively small, hardy

One of my round Viking inspired shields featuring our own Clan Rúnda logo. There are few objects more immediately recognizable as Viking than the round shield. Simple in shape, relatively light, and highly functional, the round shield was an important part of Viking Age warfare. Archaeological finds give us a surprisingly good idea of how many of these shields were constructed, while artwork from the period gives us glimpses of how they may have looked. I have spent a lot of

A wood bow loom made by Yarema shown with bone cards being used for tablet weaving. Long before looms became large pieces of furniture and weaving became something most people associated with mills and factories, a remarkably simple tool was being used to create some of the most intricate textiles of the Viking Age. That tool was the weaving tablet. Tablet weaving—sometimes called card weaving or bone weaving—is created using a series of small, usually square tablets with hol

Stoic, one of our favorite Icelandic rams. A gentle giant.... (except when he was kept away from his girls. Then he could ram a longhouse down in a couple minutes.) When most people hear the word Viking, they imagine ships, warriors, distant voyages, and raiding parties, but most people living in Scandinavia during the Viking Age were not sailing across the sea. They were farming. Their lives revolved around animals, fields, weather, harvests, food stores, and the long prepar

At Clan Rúnda, we often describe what we do as historically inspired rather than historically accurate. That distinction is intentional. It is not because we believe history is unimportant. Quite the opposite. We spend a great deal of time studying the past, looking at archaeological finds, reading the work of historians and researchers, examining surviving objects, and trying to understand the people who made and used them. The more we learn, the more aware we become of some