A Meal Fit for the Gods: Competitive Feasting During the Viking Age (2025)

Feasting in societies around the world has long served to develop and maintain social relationships. In Norse culture feasts were a way of life, reflecting and reinforcing identity by feeding the masses, cementing social bonds, fostering supernatural connections, and reinforcing political relationships among elites. A range of ethnohistoric, archaeological, and experiential sources can be used to showcase the intersection of food with politics, economics, gender, and spirituality among the Norse.