Browse Items (6 total)

PDF file of the Domestic Animals exhibit

Dogs are known from the Mesolithic period onwards in Scandinavia. They would have been used by the Vikings as guards, hunting animals, and even as pets. Dogs similar to the Norwegian Elkhound are known from the Mesolithic period, and remains of…

The goddess Freyja rode a wild boar called Hildisvíni and the god Freyr owned one called Gullinbursti. This is a nineteenth-century imaginative recreation of what Freyja might have looked like riding her boar.

Pigs were a source of meat in the…

An image of Auðumla the legendary cow that licked Odin's grandfather Buri from the ice and from whose udders milk flowed in streams. This milk nourished the giant Ymir, the first creature to be created in Norse mythology.

Sheep were an important source of milk, meat and wool. The cloth made from wool was even a form of currency in Iceland during the Viking Age. Wool was gathered by plucking the sheep or by collecting it after it had been shed naturally. They did not…

The Icelandic horse is a breed of horse from Iceland that developed from horses taken to Iceland by the original Viking settlers. It is small, often pony-sized, but very hardy.

Pagan Scandinavians ate horse meat as part of their religious…