John Haywood

“Odin’s wisdom is embodied in Hávamál (‘The Sayings of the High One’), a collection of anonymous Viking Age gnomic verses supposed to have been composed by Odin and preserved in a single thirteenth century Icelandic manuscript. Hávamál is not concerned with metaphysical questions, only with the kind of pragmatic common-sense wisdom valued by practical people. Cultivate friendships, never take hospitality for granted and repay gifts with gifts. Do not make enemies unnecessarily or pick foolish fights. On campaign, keep your weapons close to hand. Do not drink too much mead or ale, it robs a man of his wits. If you do not know what you are talking about, keep quiet: it is better to listen. Exercise caution in business and always beware of treachery and double dealing. Always deal honestly yourself except with your enemies: deceive them if you can. The advice is sometimes contradictory: Hávamál berates the coward who thinks he will live forever if he avoids fighting while also declaring that it is better to be a live dog than a dead lion.”
― John Haywood, Northmen: The Viking Saga, 793-1241 AD

“Although they made it their own, the Vikings were not the first explorers of the North Atlantic. For at least two centuries before the beginning of the Viking Age, Irish monks had been setting out in their curachs in search of remote islands where they could contemplate the divine in perfect solitude, disturbed only by the cries of seabirds and the crashing of the waves on the shore. The monks developed a tradition of writing imrama, travel tales, the most famous of which is the Navigatio sancti Brendani abbatis (The Voyage of St Brendan the Abbot). The Navigatio recounts a voyage purported to have been made by St Brendan (d. c. 577) in search of the mythical Isles of the Blessed, which were believed to lie somewhere in the western ocean. The imrama certainly show a familiarity with the North Atlantic–the Navigatio, for example, describes what are probably icebergs, volcanoes and whales–but they also include so many fantastical and mythological elements that it is impossible to disentangle truth from invention. There is no evidence to support claims that are often made that St Brendan discovered America before the Vikings, but Irish monks certainly did reach the Faeroe Islands and Iceland before them. Ash from peat fires containing charred barley grains found in windblown sand deposits at Á Sondum on Sandoy in the southern Faeroes has been radiocarbon-dated to between the fourth and sixth centuries AD. Although no trace of buildings has yet been found, the ash probably came from domestic hearths and had been thrown out onto the sand to help control erosion, which was a common practice at the time. As peat was not used as a fuel in Scandinavia at this time but was widely used in Britain and Ireland, this evidence suggests that seafaring Irish monks had discovered the Faeroes not long after Ireland’s conversion to Christianity. No physical traces of an Irish presence in Iceland have been found in modern times, but early Viking settlers claimed that they found croziers and other ecclesiastical artefacts there. There are also two papar place-names (see here) associated with Irish monks, Papos and Papey, in the east of Iceland. The monks, all being celibate males, did not found any permanent self-sustaining communities in either place: they were always visitors rather than settlers.”
― John Haywood, Northmen: The Viking Saga, 793-1241 AD