Collaborations

Over the ten years of the Viking phenomenon, our team has collaborated with a number of external organisations – giving advice, contributing to new research, or consulting on exhibitions.

Gamla Uppsala. Image source: Upplands Museet Press.

We have advised on the new permanent Viking galleries of the National Museum of Denmark, the developing Museum of the Viking Age, due to open in Oslo, Norway in 2027, and the revamp of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde, Denmark. At Birka Museum on Björkö in Sweden’s Lake Mälaren, we advised on the long-term exhibition Buried at Birka, and also co-wrote the catalogue. Over many years we have also enjoyed a close relationship with Gamla Uppsala Museum, at some of the country’s most spectacular monuments from the late Iron Age. More recently, our researchers have been involved with the new programme of study and exhibition at Anundshög in Västmanland. Many thanks to all our colleagues for stimulating collaborations.

As the Viking Phenomenon project progressed, and then expanded into new agendas with the creation of the Center for the World in the Viking Age in 2024, we have developed an increasing collaboration with the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures (SISJAC), based at the University of East Anglia in the UK. This might seem far away from the Vikings, but SISJAC has long been focusing on the Silk Roads that the Norse themselves traveled, and particularly the idea that Scandinavia formed one of their western peripheries, balanced by Japan in the east. First in their Nara to Norwich project, and now in Japan and the Maritime Silk Roads (currently starting up), we look forward to working with them for many years to come.

The main drive of our work has of course been the Viking Phenomenon project, but occasionally our research has benefitted from side-projects and advisory roles in others' research programmes. The biggest of these has been Viking Dynasties , generously funded by KrogagerFonden as a collaboration between Uppsala University, Roskilde Museum and the National Museum of Denmark. Involving excavations and surveys at the royal centers of Gamla Uppsala and Lejre, the result is a major new study of power structures in the early Viking Age at the interface of archeology and text. We are also linked to the ERC project Body-Politics , directed by Marianne Hem Eriksen at Leicester and the National Museum of Denmark, which is producing bold new visions of gender and identity in the late Iron Age.

Since 2017, several of us on the project have advised UNESCO on matters relating to the nomination of Viking-Age sites for the World Heritage list. Properties with which we've been involved include the Archaeological Border Complex of Hedeby and the Danevirke in Germany, the Viking-Age Ring Fortresses in Denmark, and a number of tentative nominations either pending or in development .

Early in the project we were fortunate to work closely with Heather Pringle, one of National Geographic magazine's leading history and popular science journalists, together with photographers, mapmakers, graphic artists and other writers there. Over several years our work has featured in multiple NatGeo articles , specials , features , and online stories . Our thanks to Heather and her colleagues for a great collaboration!

In the formative years of European emigration to America, a great many Scandinavians settled across what is now the United States. Many of their descendants actively maintain their ancestral traditions, specific either to Norway, Sweden and Denmark or sometimes to smaller regions. There is a great interest in Nordic history, especially that of the Viking Age, and as part of our project outreach we have made several lecture tours and other visits to Scandinavian descendant organisations on the other side of the Atlantic. Our thanks to the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, the National Nordic Museum in Seattle, the Scandinavian American Cultural and Historical Foundation in Thousand Oaks, with their annual Nordic Spirit Symposium, the Swedish Genealogical Society of Colorado in Denver, and many more. Special thanks to Myrna Smith and her colleagues in the Twin Cities.

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