Stop 1 · Ireland
Dublin
It was a Norse slave-trading port for two centuries. Excavations at Wood Quay in the 1970s uncovered the Viking town almost intact — and it was built over anyway.
Towns founded or taken over by Norse settlers
Between roughly 790 and 1000 AD, seafarers from Scandinavia founded, seized or dominated every one of today's stops.
The five stops
Stop 2 · Ireland
Waterford
Its name comes from Old Norse Veðrafjǫrðr, "ram fjord". The city celebrated its 1,100th anniversary in 2014.
Stop 3 · France
Rouen
Capital of Normandy — literally "land of the Northmen". Rollo's descendants ruled England, Sicily and Antioch within two centuries of settling here.
Stop 4 · Ukraine
Kyiv
The Norse called the river route to Constantinople the way "from the Varangians to the Greeks", and this was its great midpoint city.
Stop 5 · Russia
Veliky Novgorod
Its waterlogged soil preserved over a thousand birch-bark letters — shopping lists, love notes and schoolwork from ordinary medieval people.
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