Norse Tradesman / Wikimedia Commons
Honey was expensive and beer ended up replacing the “drink of the gods”. We may have been mistaken — but the Vikings still loved mead.
A group of friends are sitting around a table, sharing stories and drinking mead. Men sport beards and women drink from drinking horns – but these aren’t Vikings, they’re modern-day hipsters.
The 21st century has seen a renaissance of mead, a fermented alcoholic drink made with water and honey. Over the last 20 years, hundreds of new meaderies have emerged all over the world.
These meaderies often use Viking-inspired images in their visual identity. Their products have names like Odin’s Mead or Viking Blod and logos include longships, axes, ravens and drinking horns. Some even have their own Viking-themed drinking rooms.
This is part of what can be called “Viking turn”the renewed interest in Vikings in popular culture over the last 20 years, which has made them the stars of a wave of films, television series, video games and memes.
From a noisy banquet dinner I did not film The Vikings, from 1958, which food and unrestrained drinking are a common element of popular culture’s hypermasculine Viking. This theme continues into the 21st century, from the History Channel series Vikings (2013-present) to games like Skyrim (2011) and Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla (2020).
But although modern media suggest that Vikings drank mead as often as water, history tells a slightly different version.
Some reports are fundamental to the association of Vikings with mead. The first is the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulfwhich survives in a single manuscript written in Old English and currently held in the British Library.
The story he tells takes place in southern Sweden and Denmark, at the beginning of the 6th century, so the culture and warrior lifestyle that Beowulf idealizes actually belong to a period considerably earlier than the Viking Age (usually dated from the end of the 8th century).
Much of Beowulf’s action takes place in mead halls – centers of power for lords like the Danish king Hrothgar, where the leader entertained his followers with banquets and drink, in exchange for their support and military service.
This relationship, based on the consumption of food and drink, but inextricably linked to honor and loyalty, constitutes the foundation of the heroic warrior society that the poet celebrates. Episodes in which mead is drunk are therefore frequent and emotionally charged.
A second prominent appearance of mead appears in Norse mythology. In the great hall of the god Odin, Valhöll, the Einherjar – the most heroic and honorable warriors fallen in battle – feast and drink. They consume the inexhaustible mead that flows from the teats of a goat called Heiðrún, who lives on the roof. It is worth noting that Norse mythology is, at times, quite strange.
Finally, another important myth reports the theft of the “poetry mead” by Odin. This substance was created by two dwarves from honey and the blood of a being called Kvasir, who they had murdered. THE Mead bestows wisdom and poetic talent on those who drink it.
These are striking and impressive episodes, which clearly demonstrate the symbolic and cultural significance of mead in mythology and stories about heroes of the Viking Age. But this is a far cry from proving that the drink was actually consumed on a large scale in England or Scandinavia.
As early as the 1970s, philologist Christine Fell observed that the Old English term honey (mead) and the compound words derived from it appear much more frequently in strongly emotive and poetic contexts, such as Beowulf, than in practical contexts, such as laws or letters.
This contrasts sharply with the usage pattern of other words for alcohol, such as for life (beer/ale), beor (most likely “cider”, albeit counter-intuitively) or win (wine), which are much more used in a functional and practical way. This led Fell to conclude that the concentration on mead in works such as Beowulf was a “nostalgic fiction”.
Mead would be, he concluded, a fundamental element of an imagined, idealized and backward-looking heroic world, rather than something habitually drunk on a daily basis.
In 2007, a doctoral student at the University of York demonstrated the same in Scandinavian sources: mjǫðr (“mead”) is much more common in the corpus of Edic and Skaldic poetry than in the sagas that report everyday life.
Likewise, both the word mjǫðr and words composed from it are used much less frequently in the practical and utilitarian contexts in which ǫl e munga (the Old Norse words for ale, that is, beer) abound.
The strong impression, both in England and Scandinavia, is that, at the time sources like Beowulf were written, from the 10th century onwards, the Abundant consumption of mead by a lord’s entourage was largely symbolic. It represented the contractual bonds of honor in an idealized warrior society.
It was more of a poetic image than a reflection of frequent practices in real life. The standard drink at banquets, let alone everyday household meals, it was most likely the beer (ale).
Honey shortages made mead expensive and difficult to obtain in northern Europe. Already in the Viking Age, exotic Mediterranean wine, mentioned as Odin’s drink in Grímnismál, may have begun to replace mead as the preferred choice of elites.
And what, then, about current “Viking-style” mead enthusiasts? The point is not, of course, that the Vikings or other early medieval people never drank mead – some clearly drankalthough perhaps not as frequently as is sometimes claimed – but rather that the drink functioned above all as a symbol of a heroic fantasy land, full of stories.
But that is, strictly speaking, exactly how many of today’s mead drinkers also use it.
