The splendor of the proto-vikings

The splendor of the proto-vikings: Ogaklev hillfort, Södermanland. This wall, three meters high, lays undisturbed for 500 000 days (which takes us back to approx. 500 AD).

It is becoming more and more obvious that there was a highly organized Swedish Game of Thrones society hundreds of years before the Christian people of Europe made a single margin note about the peculiar Scandinavians. When I was taught history in school, the iron age was just a long gloomy winter between the glory of the bronze age and the fame of the viking age. During the last decades, a totally different picture is emerging from the integrated archaelogical evidence: we see small, warring principalities which were probably heavily influenced by the Roman way of doing things.