A 2nd Exhibition Review on British Museum's Vikings

choi

Katrin Bennhold, Vikings in London: Just Like Family. New York Times, Mar 29, 2014.
www.nytimes.com/2014/03/29/arts/ ... st-like-family.html

Quote:

Vikings "enslaved and conquered and built an empire, albeit briefly, that included large swaths of England and Scotland.

"Even by medieval standards, the Norsemen who arrived in their wooden warships to raid monasteries and massacre monks were so brutal that, beginning in the 990s, the English King Ethelred the Unready paid them huge sums simply to stay away. That strategy brought only temporary relief. The generous tributes encouraged more raids, and in 1013 all of England was conquered by the Danes for the first time. More Anglo-Saxon coins from that period have been found in Scandinavia than in England

"Most notable for its absence in the show is the familiar Viking helmet with horns or wings, which, it turns out, was invented in the 19th century * * * Like their headgear, the Vikings’ fearsome reputation has at times been embellished. They lost about as many battles as they won. One of the show’s most striking elements, on view for the first time, is a selection of skeletons and decapitated skulls from a mass grave discovered in Dorset, the southwestern English county, in 2009. Carbon dating suggests some 50 Vikings were executed there around the year 1000.

"Descendants of the original Vikings still roam various corners of northern Britain, particularly in Yorkshire and in Scotland, where 20 percent of the local DNA is Norwegian. In Shetland, a group of Scottish islands, 95 percent of all place names are derived from Norse, and the annual Up Helly Aa fire festival culminates in sending a burning galley into the sea, mimicking a Viking burial rite.

My comment:
(a) This is a review on the same exhibition that my previous posting (dated Mar 16, 2014 and titled The Vikings’ Route to Civilization; about an exhibition review of the same title from Wall Street Journal) explored. There is no need to read the rest of the NYTimes text. Feel free to view the three (3) photos of the NYTimes article (print and the online version share photos 1 and 2 you see online, but photo 3 online and four photos in print are unique).
(b) Dorset
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dorset
(a county; section 1 Toponymy)
(c) Æthelred the Unready
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Æthelred_the_Unready
(c 968-1016; king of England 978-1013, 1014-1016; section 3.4 St Brice's Day massacre of 1002; section 3.5 Invasion of 1013; section 4 Death and burial))