During my recent placement at the Yorkshire Museum, I was tasked with researching and interpreting a number of objects from the Viking North exhibition, using both archival and creative techniques. Getting a greater insight into iconic objects like the Coppergate Helmet, the Bedale Hoard and the Ormside Bowl was really exciting, and their historical value is undeniable. A more unexpected joy, though, has been becoming familiar with less conspicuous objects, linked to everyday life in the Viking Age.  

Two examples in particular stand out: a wooden flute, found during excavations at Hungate in York, and a child’s ice skate, crafted from bone. These are objects made to be repeatedly used and enjoyed, not to display material wealth or martial power. They evoke moments of leisure and communal activity that tempered the hard graft of Viking life. They’re unassuming things, hard to identify without context, not painted in bright colours or adorned with precious metals. But they had personal meaning to their makers and users and survived to be found in the soil, tiny windows into a lost version of the city.  

Children are often forgotten in our conception of the Vikings, but they often had allocated roles in Viking society, contributing to the running of a household or even following their families on long campaigns. We think they were present in the retinue of the Great Army, which cut a swathe of conquest and pillaging across the Anglian kingdoms during the second half of the ninth century, living and playing among the rows of tents in the Army’s winter encampments. The ice skate, specially made to fit a child’s foot, suggests that children in the cities the Vikings later settled in more permanently, like York, found time for enjoyment, perhaps making use of frozen ponds or rivers during cold, damp northern winters.   

The wooden flute, meanwhile, conjures visions of a celebrated Viking character: the skald. Skalds were poets who composed verses, sometimes in honour of prominent kings or local leaders, and safeguarded the oral storytelling traditions of Scandinavian settlers. They sometimes sang these verses unaccompanied, but music like that produced by the flute would have helped to imbue their performances with atmosphere, engaging audiences sat around hearths or attending feasts. The flute in the museum’s collection could have belonged to a skald, but it also could have been made by a local craftsman and kept in a homestead on the Hungate site. Communal knowledge of music-making in the Viking Age would have allowed non-specialists to play wind instruments for their families and friends, even if they weren’t famed skalds.  

The wealth of information we can glean from even these modest objects about the Viking Age conveys their true significance within the Yorkshire Museum’s collection and in other archaeological collections in the UK. They help us to fill in details about everyday pursuits and overlooked people alongside the battles, kingships and heroic deeds featured in other sources like the Norse sagas, allowing for a more complete picture of Viking life to emerge, and that is a reason to treasure them.