Virtual Viking Longship Project

On Friday, October 18th, 2024, student researchers presented at the Carleton College Undergraduate Research and Internship Symposium. This is a large poster session with over 200 students presenting on their summer research and internship experiences. The students presented a poster, seen above, discussing their continuation of the Virtual Viking Longship project. Contributions included programming, subject…

On Friday, October 17th, 2025, student researcher Oliver Black-Johnston (’26) presented at the Carleton College Undergraduate Research and Internship Symposium. This is a large poster session with over 200 students presenting on their summer research and internship experiences. The poster, seen above, displayed his summer work developing the project’s goal, an educational virtual reality experience.

Excerpt of a post originally published on the Carleton College Humanities Center Blog 1/14/2025 Over the course of three weeks, I worked with Professor Austin Mason on his ongoing project to create a viking longship for virtual reality applications, including a minigame and interactive elements involving real artifacts. Since this work has been in progress…

Excerpt of post originally published on the Carleton College Humanities Center Blog 10/31/2024 This past summer I joined the Virtual Viking Longship Project, which is a collaborative initiative between Carleton College and Grinnell College, overseen by Austin Mason, David Neville, and Tim Arner. The project mainly focuses on creating an immersive virtual reality experience that can…

Excerpt of post originally published on the Carleton College Humanities Center Blog 10/31/2024 This past summer, I had the opportunity to work with a team of fellow students on the Virtual Viking Longship Project (VVLP), an interdisciplinary, collaborative project between Carleton College, Grinnell College, The Viking Museum Haithabu, and The Historical and Cultural Society of Clay…

Excerpt of post originally published on the Carleton College Humanities Center Blog 10/23/2024 This past summer, I worked with a team headed by Austin Mason of the Digital Arts & Humanities program on the Virtual Viking Longship Project—a collaboration between Grinnell College and Carleton College with the goal of recreating Viking Age artifacts and ships in…

The Use of Viking Axes: Fact vs. Fiction When one thinks of Vikings and Viking combat, what likely comes to mind (at least in the public consciousness) is the image of some yelling man holding a double sided axe, ready to charge into battle. However, the public conception of Vikings is sometimes pretty far removed…

Spears, like their sword counterparts, saw common use both in battle and in common, cultural context. They carried strong cultural connotations and, like swords, varied widely across the viking world in terms of typology (Petersen, 1919). Though one may assume that spears were considerably “lower” on the social ladder, due to their cheaper cost of…

Hnefatafl comes from the Tafl games family, which is a family of games from Northern Europe inspired by the Roman Game Ludus Latrunculorum. Hnefatafl is the medieval Scandinavian version, which broke off from tafl to minimize confusion. While we have a lack of written works about the topic from the time period, a general idea…

Glass has had its position in Europe for many centuries as shown by remains found in graves and building excavations. Focusing specifically in Northern Europe, the excavations of meadhalls, graves and ships has shown us shards of vessels and in rarer cases, an existence of glass  game pieces. Since board games had no financial or…

The Sword in Beowulf: 3 Representational Examples Swords play a crucial role in the story of Beowulf, not only as weapons of war, but also as symbols of status. Each of the swords named in the poem plays an important narrative function. However, how would these swords actually look? Through looking at ancient sources and…

Excerpt of post originally published on the Carleton College Humanities Center Blog 1/10/2024 This past summer, I embarked on a journey into the past, joining the Virtual Viking Longship Project, a collaborative initiative between Carleton College and Grinnell College, overseen by Austin Mason, David Neville, and Tim Arner. Among other objectives within the grant narrative,…

Excerpt of post originally published on the Carleton College Humanities Center Blog 9/29/2023 In the summer of 2023, Madeline Smith ‘24, alongside her coworkers, Lily Haas, Kritika Pandit, and Jack Ochoa-Andersen, worked with Austin Mason to develop a virtual reality Viking Longship experience in collaboration with Grinnell College, the Historical and Cultural Society of Clay…

Excerpt of post originally published on the Carleton College Humanities Center Blog 9/29/2023 During the summer, I had the chance to explore Virtual Reality (VR) development through the Virtual Viking Longship Project, supported by a Digital Humanities Advancement Grant. This collaboration between Carleton College and Grinnell College under the supervision of Austin Mason, David Neville,…