Viking Studies

I don't know which documentaries you've watched, nor what you've learnt. I'm in no position to defend everyone who researches the Viking Age.

I'll give you some examples of what was talked about at a recent conference, entitled "Viking Masculinities", that should give you some ideas on what the department (and scholars from all across the world) actually do, aside from teaching and passing on brief nuggets of knowledge to BBC documentary-makers:

Migrations around the Irish Sea; maintaining masculine networks of identity and exchange in the Norse North Atlantic; weapons and their wielders on runestones; cross-gender name elements in Viking name practices. etc. etc.

There's plenty of work being published every single year that depends on the study of the Viking Age, it's not just a topic for armchair historians watching BBC Four.

What do you do with this kind of degree after graduation?>

I guess I ought to post here! Just finished my second year, really excited to start my third and final year in September.

With regards to the name of the course, "Viking Studies" is a little misleading. The course covers medieval history, archaeology and literature from 400AD to 1000AD (even up to 1500AD in one of the second year archaeology modules) - it's the Viking Age-specific modules that give the course its name. We (all five of us in my year) are going to propose that they change the name to something like "Norse and Anglo-Saxon studies", since that better represents the content of the course.
Because of this breadth of course content, you come away from the course with a huge range of skills - archaeological methods, working with primary and secondary historical sources, studying a huge range of medieval literatures, and gaining basic skills in Old English and Old Norse.

The lecturers who oversee the course are incredibly dedicated to the study of the Viking Age, and Nottingham is an important centre for Viking Age research, so you can expect a lot of care and consideration to have gone into this degree.

I've not been paid or bribed to say all of this, I genuinely believe this is a great course, and doesn't deserve the negative opinion it seems to have gathered among other students. It's not a 'mickey mouse' degree as someone in another thread suggested - if anything it's more intensive and challenging than the Single Honours English, History or Archaeology degrees.
OP, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask, PM me or whatever you like.

Hope you aren't mocking me there.
Seriously there are plenty of documentaries with that stuff, and not BBC ones, also you;ve got the internet and journals you can read.
It sounds just like a hobby that you can get a degree in, not something that is in any sense, useful, unless of course you want to work at a viking experience or museum.

You can say that of most degrees for goodness sake. Do these documentaries and journals come with exams and essays etc to show that you actually know your stuff and have learnt everything you should with a degree? No. Could they be used to support learning in the degree? Probably.

How is that? Please explain.

I guess I ought to post here! Just finished my second year, really excited to start my third and final year in September.

With regards to the name of the course, "Viking Studies" is a little misleading. The course covers medieval history, archaeology and literature from 400AD to 1000AD (even up to 1500AD in one of the second year archaeology modules) - it's the Viking Age-specific modules that give the course its name. We (all five of us in my year) are going to propose that they change the name to something like "Norse and Anglo-Saxon studies", since that better represents the content of the course.
Because of this breadth of course content, you come away from the course with a huge range of skills - archaeological methods, working with primary and secondary historical sources, studying a huge range of medieval literatures, and gaining basic skills in Old English and Old Norse.

The lecturers who oversee the course are incredibly dedicated to the study of the Viking Age, and Nottingham is an important centre for Viking Age research, so you can expect a lot of care and consideration to have gone into this degree.

I've not been paid or bribed to say all of this, I genuinely believe this is a great course, and doesn't deserve the negative opinion it seems to have gathered among other students. It's not a 'mickey mouse' degree as someone in another thread suggested - if anything it's more intensive and challenging than the Single Honours English, History or Archaeology degrees.

OP, if you have any other questions, feel free to ask, PM me or whatever you like.

I thought the OP was having a joke or something, but it sounds like a really interesting course. Think you're right about it needing a name change though

Thanks for demeaning my future aspiration btw. Felt good

Hope you aren't mocking me there.
Seriously there are plenty of documentaries with that stuff, and not BBC ones, also you;ve got the internet and journals you can read.
It sounds just like a hobby that you can get a degree in, not something that is in any sense, useful, unless of course you want to work at a viking experience or museum.

Pretty much every arts degree (and sciences to some extent) could be a hobby. The point is that people like it so much that they decide to take it beyond a hobby. Is that so hard to fathom? Do you think that everyone studying English Literature should have just taken engineering and read some books on the side? As much as you might enjoy it I can hardly see you breaking into Viking world research with only your own knowledge and no qualification.

Because of this breadth of course content, you come away from the course with a huge range of skills - archaeological methods, working with primary and secondary historical sources, studying a huge range of medieval literatures, and gaining basic skills in Old English and Old Norse.

That does seem narrow! I'm planning on doing ancient history, which is quite specialised and that'll still cover a whole lot more than viking studies o.0

But a lot of those courses are also useful to society, this hardly is, as i doubt there are many jobs that need/want this. Too many scrub courses at Uni = waste of funds anyway.