FIVE THINGS YOU (PROBABLY) DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT...The Vikings

Ryan Lavelle, who is teaching our new History Extra Academy course, shares five surprising facts about the raiders, pirates and traders from medieval Scandinavia

- Ryan Lavelle

1 A Viking wedding involved a bed and eight people

The people of medieval Iceland are best known for their sagas-vivid stories written about their Viking ancestors. Yet they also possessed a lawcode, and these laws reveal a curious marriage custom that shines a light on gender relations in Icelandic society.

For a marriage to be legitimate, a groom had to be seen by six witnesses entering the same bed as his new wife, "without concealment". The idea that marriage was witnessed ensured that children from the union were seen as legitimate - an important matter for the descent of property and for family honour. After all, the keeping of mistresses was far from uncommon and the sexual mistreatment of female slaves so widespread it appears that it was barely worth recording in sagas.

All this is worth bearing in mind when considering the Viking cemetery in Birka, Sweden - in which a skeleton buried with an array of weapons turned out to be biologically female. Many Viking women enjoyed greater freedoms than their counterparts across Europe. But there were still limits to their power. Did the person buried at Birka express their identity like that of a male warrior because of such limits?

2 Vikings converted to Christianity earlier than we thought

In c965 AD, King Harald Bluetooth made a bold - and striking - claim. On a runestone erected at Jelling on the Jutland peninsula, the Danish monarch declared that he had "made all the Danes Christian". It was the earliest 'official' statement on Christianity made in Viking Scandinavia.